Link to the YAML spec, for the (very) brave: https://yaml.org/spec/1.2.2/

Growth might be impossible, but a steady and “boring” amount of profit should still be possible selling plain-ole-dishwashers. Yet … for some reason, we don’t see that.

God yes this bothers and fascinates me.

Instead companies throw everything into growth and we get the retarded bluetooth enabled dishwasher problem everywhere, and I’d like toknow more about why.

I think it’s alluded to in the article:

They found a way to make consumers spend more money on dishwashing. The line goes up, for one more year. But it’s not enough. It has to go up every year.

Digging deeper: why must the line go up? Pesonally I see it as a deeply emotional, human thing.

When you read those annual financial reports from big companies, they will do anything to make sure things look rosy. Bullshit terms like “negative growth” are used because “loss” or “shrink” sound bad. So what if it sounds bad?

Confidence. Trust. It’s emotional. These are deep in our psyche. It’s how governments get elected, contracts are won, and investments are made. It’s what makes us human. If that line goes down… will it go back up? What’s going to happen? Alarm bells! Uncertaintly. Anxiety. People abandon you. Money, power, influence fades. You could find yourself replaced by the up-and-coming who “show promise”.

Our social emotional species has hundreds of thousands of years (millions?) of years of this stuff hardwired into us. Trust let us cooperate beyond our own individual or family interests. Would we be human otherwise? (I found the article Behavioural Modernity interesting).

AM radio paywall? Where?

I suppose there’s positive, then there’s “totally changed how I work”. It’s a big call. Maybe a real-world example would make it sound more believable: “before ChatGPT, I would have to sift through stacks of outdated VB6 documentation on $task. This took up most of the day. Yesterday I used a LLM to get a basic implementation of $task then I tidied it up and installed it within an hour.”

For me it’s the bloody “video essay” format. Hyper narrated, spoken straight to the camera. Waste of traffic, waste of storage, waste of attention. People think the argument carries more weight, or is just more persuasive, when someone is speaking at you with some vaguely related visual in the background. But really a written piece could be pulled apart so much more quickly.

Unfortunately OpenAI’s Whisper doesn’t do written transcriptions fast enough on my workstation yet for me to use it full time.

I use it for my very basic static site generator: https://www.olowe.co/2021/01/site-build.html

I’m not so surprised anymore. I’m self-taught using open-source software projects for guidance. But not everyone learns like that. For example in the commercial software dev world, having patches easy to apply with minimum tooling isn’t usually a priority (for better or worse).

This is actually a little story I had half written down; your comment prompted me to finish it. Thanks! https://www.srcbeat.com/2023/11/git-email/

MacPorts is so boring and underrated.

Sorry my comment was really snarky - I apologise. Long day! I’ll do better in the future :)

There has been criticism of this listicle format. Critics claim they are clickbait and machinated recycling of information/ideas. Listicles seem to exist to just get more ad impressions over entertaining and informing the reader.

The original article on the original site feels a bit like that. Loads of ads, with just one link to the actual nixos website, mid-sentence, towards the bottom of the article (where the majority of readers never get to).

Of all the articles to copy and paste without attribution, you chose this one…?

Devil’s advocate: what about the posts and comments I’ve made via Lemmy? They could be presented as files (like email). I could read, write and remove them. I could edit my comments with Microsoft Word or ed. I could run some machine learning processing on all my comments in a Docker container using just a bind mount like you mentioned. I could back them up to Backblaze B2 or a USB drive with the same tools.

But I can’t. They’re in a PostgreSQL database (which I can’t query), accessible via a HTTP API. I’ve actually written a Lemmy API client, then used that to make a read-only file system interface to Lemmy (https://pkg.go.dev/olowe.co/lemmy). Using that file system I’ve written an app to access Lemmy from a weird text editing environment I use (developed at least 30 years before Lemmy was even written!): https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/1035382

More ideas if you’re interested at https://upspin.io

They even have a term for this — local-first software — and point to apps like Obsidian as proof that it can work.

This touches on something that I’ve been struggling to put into words. I feel like some of the ideas that led to the separation of files and applications to manipulate them have been forgotten.

There’s also a common misunderstanding that files only exist in blocks on physical devices. But files are more of an interface to data than an actual “thing”. I want to present my files - wherever they may be - to all sorts of different applications which let me interact with them in different ways.

Only some self-hosted software grants us this portability.

I won’t speak for the OP, but yes it is a fair question about the automatic red-flag. There are characteristics of software described as cloud-native that are considered undesirable by some.

These could range from things as high level as an objection to how projects are funded, down to things like distaste for code complexity required to support opaque HTTP APIs over standardised protocols.

Ah yes good point. Fingers crossed.

Looks like that will happen later. From Mozilla’s original article:

Following a period of testing, these packages will become available on the beta, esr, and release branches of Firefox.

CNCF projects themselves are indeed FOSS, but “the cloud” as it is most commonly interacted with, by tech workers, are enormous collections of closed-source systems run by Amazon, Google or Microsoft (all under antitrust investigation either now or in the past).

I’m still super confused by this user’s posts lol. I get that (some? most?) of it is satire… but then why all social media engagement farming hashtag nonsense? Or is this all part of the satire…?

Good to see development effort going towards actual Firefox and not those random Mozilla products that I can’t keep track of

For me, mpv writes a bunch of debugging info to stderr when playing something. Have you seen this output? Can you try running it from the command-line (if you haven’t already)?

A listicle? What is this, 2008? Get with the times. Give us a TikTok video with recycled ideas.