Been in a bunch of situations where the best available software is 0.x and hella buggy. (Which I discovered after building the software and its dozen dependencies from source because of course no one had packaged it.) But I’m not mad, I’m just “oh well, the situation will improve in the future, I hope”.

You may have heard of “rewrite it in Rust”, now get ready to rewrite it in COBOL

My own small problem I have with Codeberg is that while they allow private repositories for open source projects that are not in a presentable state yet, I, um, have a lot of projects that fit the description. Being an ADHD scatterbrain and all. I keep blowing dust off of years old projects and then they keep languishing.

GitHub doesn’t care, put up as many private repos you want.

Some people might say “well, why not make the crappy repos public, then” - well I could, but it’s not good for my mental state.

However, I now run a private Forgejo instance so I have a good alternative for GitHub in that regard. (I also don’t get dependabot spam along the lines of “this barely working hack from 10 years ago has had critical updates to its dependencies!”)

I have a fucking awesome gaming laptop. It has like 2 hours of battery life tops. (the very highly operative word being “tops”) Just today I was anxious about pulling it out of my backpack due to the fact it’s being spingtime and literally all of the winter walkway gravel is in the wind. I’m a Nikon fangirl and I very much hesitated to uncap my lens.

GNU EMACS is RIGHT THERE in WINDOWS
You can INSTALL IT
(Well you can’t install it, you kinda just dump it in Program Files)
PEOPLE have been EXTENDING it for DECADES SAFELY
WHAT are you WAITING FOR

I actually first thought that was weird and wasteful. Then I remembered that, uh, Commodore 64 often uses a similar thing. Basically, a lot of assembly and compiled languages just put the machine code into the BASIC memory, preceded by a stub BASIC program that’s basically just “10 SYS addr” with that address pointing just past the end of the stub program itself. BASIC’s LOAD command handles it just fine because program files don’t have any header information besides load address. BASIC handles the loaded program just normally because the program has the end token, so as long as you don’t modify the BASIC program, it’ll be fine.

Real joke: Being advertised as .com file, actually compiles to .exe format (which is funnier because by later DOS versions a lot of the .com files that came with DOS were actually .exe files)

VS Code is probably the editor that’s easiest to exit. If I ran it on the computer I first ran Emacs on, it’d exit immediately, because VS Code requires a modern version of Windows and that computer had Windows 3.11. If I ran it on the first computer I ran Linux on, it’d also exit immediately because the machine would run out of memory. (…it was a 486DX, I don’t remember how much memory it had, but VS Code doesn’t run well if your memory is measured in megabytes)

I forgot where I read it, but someone said in the 1990s Sun’s marketing was going on about “Year of Java”, but ultimately nobody could tell what year the Year of Java actually was, because it just kinda happened. And given that in the 1990s the big push was for Java applets, which was a bit of a misadventure, you could argue that the Java breakthrough was ultimately something the marketing didn’t focus on (full blown desktop apps, backend Web code). Sometimes in a way that the marketing didn’t approve of (J2ME was kinda popular, but know what dwarfs it? Android. And that’s not JVM and that makes Java marketing sad.)

So don’t worry about the Year of the Linux Desktop. You won’t even notice it. It’ll happen.

I’ll look through the door.

Or, set up a webcam to see when the light is on.

If this isn’t allowed somehow, I’ll tell the building management to consider rewiring this absolutely cursed light switch situation ASAP because it’s gotten so bad that it’s being used as a brainteaser by the recruiting department

Reminds me of an old joke about how everything in KDE has a k and it’s very annoyink and irrtitatink bekause they have less laks user interface kuidelines than GNOME. (I haven’t checked, they’ve probably vastly improved since then)

Back in the day, I got the weird idea that it’d be handy to grab information from the XMMS music player as it was running. So I made an extension that basically dumped the information about the player state as text to a named pipe. A few people wrote scripts for their IRC clients and whatnot to tell others what they were listening.

(Back then, none of the GUI music players really had any kind of RPC capability. Nowadays, you can probably do this stuff easily with D-Bus or whatever.)

One time, late at night, I was just listening to music in bed with headphones, controlling XMMS via infrared remote controller (LIRC). A random cool track came up. I had no idea what it was actually called. I went “wouldn’t it be cool if I could hit a remote button and it’d say what song is currently playing?” …so I got up, got back to the computer, and wrote a script that reads the pipe, takes the artist and song title, and feeds it to Festival TTS, then added that to LIRC configuration.

Yeah I wouldn’t date an RStudio user. Real men do their R coding in Jupyter.

I’m a girl. I’m not interested in Haskell, that’s too frigging endofunctiorific. Erlang! That’s what all the cool guys are doing.

(Imagines a timeline where absolutely everything is still written in PHP)

Oh hell no

Well it’s an art film. The purpose of art is to evoke emotions, to inspire dialogue. Yours is one possible interpretation. Ultimately, who’s to say it’s not valid?

One day I was thinking of Andy Warhol’s film “Empire”, which is basically one continuous 8 hour shot of the Empire State Building.

I thought it’d be cool to make a similar art film about your average programmer’s work day. 8 hour shot of a programmer staring at the screen intensely, drinking coffee, scrolling through the code, and occasionally muttering “why the fuck doesn’t this work?”

Someone remarked that in film photography, every 10 years, Kodak used to get the brilliant idea that 35mm film is just too complicated for Your Average Consumer, and invented a new “easy to load” cartridge based film format. 126 Instamatic in the 1960s, 110 Pocket Instamatic in the 1970s, Disc Film in the 1980s and the APS in the 1990s. …Meanwhile, Your Average Consumer didn’t give much damn, and while these formats saw some use, most people preferred 35mm.

Same goes with image formats. Apple and Google and Microsoft try to make “better” file formats happen, and I’m sure they have their advantages, but people will stick with JPEG, thanks.

Yeah, I took one course where we used MongoDB. I was like “still unconvinced, but I’ll keep this in mind if I run into situations not covered by PostgreSQL.” …I’ve not run into situations not covered by PostgreSQL. Everything will be covered by PostgreSQL.

Aaagh! Getting some random old person flashbacks.

Kids. I r-remember a day… You won’t believe this… I got a 404 error page… It was otherwise a normal 404 page with a normal message on it, but it had a giant ad on it… like “while you’re here, how about you buy this stuff”… It was hell… You’ve got no idea how lucky you kids are with uBlock…