This is the best post I’ve seen this year.

I’m with you; I prefer date versioning for many things. Semver does work really well for things with exposed APIs; it’s a stretch to justify using them with user tools, and especially GUI tools. Semver is used to great effect in Go - which is how it should be use: mainly by the language’s module management system. Outside of that, it’s human readable, but like XML, its main value is to machines, and only secondarily to humans.

Calendar versioning is far more human-oriented, and so more useful for things without exposed APIs or module tooling.

@best_username_ever mentioned Semantic Versioning. It’s an actual spec. Not everyone follows it, and it doesn’t make sense for a lot of things, and far too many people are dogmatic about it. But it’s a good thing to read, and it’s not long.

A related, but not tightly coupled, spec is Changelog. Used together, and used correctly these two are nice for users.

I don’t know about this meme, but you know memes come in waves. It’s just the nature of memes.

That said, Germans - at least the Bavarians - have a special relationship with pizza second only to Americans. It’s kind of weird, because it’s so random. You don’t see this in, e.g., Southern France, and Italians seem almost ambivalent to it.

I think it’s because, despite the world wars, Germans generally have a fondness for American culture, the same way Americans generally have a fondness for Mexican culture. They have Germanized versions of American food, like we have Americanized versions of traditional Mexican food.

I don’t know who the French are fond of, besides themselves.

Insurance companies in the US often exhibit paradoxical behavior based entirely on statistics and ignoring individual case details.

Often a less expensive procedure will be denied until after a more expensive procedure is performed, guaranteeing that insurance has to pay for both, just because some significant percent of patients need the more expensive procedure either way.

Health insurance is utterly stupid, and mainly because it’s a for-profit, private enterprise in the US. Data goes in and a decision comes out, and the insurance companies really only care as long as the algorithm results in a net profit over time. Good outcomes for patients isn’t even a consideration.

So, they’re essentialy claiming they’ve found a way around Amdahl’s Law?

Bonus if it can edit .sc files, a-la the best spreadsheet editor, sc-im.

Beautifully summarized.

I think another factor will emerge: people are starting to realize that they’re paying $60 to rent a game. They don’t own it, and the game developer can shut it down at any time, and even if they don’t, it probably requires some online access for something, and the game stops working once the developer turns off those servers.

I don’t think we’ll see a revolt, but companies will be forced through competition to allow rental models with less or no up-front cost. I think people will simply become less willing to pay $60 for a rental. At this point, I don’t know what happens to development studios, because they need seed funding to get to market. I think it’s already happening; as a very casual gamer, most of what I hear from the industry is pure-play game studios shutting down, or being acquired by corporations like Sony or Microsoft, who have other revenue streams they can redirect into speculative game development.

Personally, I care about these factors for my desktops as well. CPU, GPU, memory, and (and this surprised me) SSD temps - how many fans do I need? At least three in a proper tower-style desktop. I feel like the Grinch: “all the noise, noise, noise, noise, noise!” And fans take power. Everything takes power.

So I’ve been running a micro-PC for a while: a Ryzen 7, integrated GPU, little 6x6x2 enclosure. It still has a fan in it, and I’ve got it in a space in my desk made for hiding computer devices and wires - I had to build a fan into that because it was getting warm in there and raising average temps on the computer.

My point is that these battery-optimized architectures are also pretty important for the desktop market, too. Gaming rigs with GPUs bigger than the entire rest of the motherboard notwithstanding, average desktop user would be fine with one of these micro computers. As long as you stay away from the hog software like Electron and Java applications, they’re perfectly capable; heck, even rustc burns through compilations pretty fast, and that’s not exactly an efficient compiler. And Go programs compile in no time on a Ryzen 7, or even 5. I suspect it’d even handle my mom and her Firefox with 200 tabs.

Hugo isn’t a server, per se. It’s basically just a template engine. It was originally focused on turning markdown into web pages, with some extra functionality around generating indexes and cross-references that are really what set it apart from just a simple rendering engine. And by now, much of its value is in the huge number of site templates built for Hugo. But what Hugo does is takes some metadata, whatever markdown content you have, and it generates a static web site. You still need a web server pointed at the generated content. You run Hugo on demand to regenerate the site whenever there’s new content (although, there is a “watch” mode, where it’ll watch for changes and regenerate the site in response). It’s a little fancier than that; it doesn’t regenerate content that hasn’t changed. You can have it create whatever output format you want - mine generates both HTML and gmi (Gemini) sites from the same markdown. But that’s it: at its core, it’s a static site template rendering engine.

It is absolutely suitable for creating a portfolio site. Many of the templates are indeed such. And it’s not hard to make your own templates, if you know the front-end technologies.

It depends on how you want to write. If you want to use a web interface, WriteFreely is decent. If you like your text editor, Hugo is fantastic.

:shrug:

It’s trivial to host yourself, and super light on resources. Personally, I don’t use it; for blogging I write markdown and rsync it over to the server where Hugo picks it up and turns it into a blog. Now that I think about it, I should probably go shut my WriteFreely down. I have a few pages on it, but I hate web app interfaces, so I didn’t put much content in it.

Good to know, thanks.

I tried all of the examples from her page about αcτµαlly pδrταblε εxεcµταblε. It looks like the page was written in 2020, so I’m assuming the binaries were compiled then, but that shouldn’t matter; I have Go binaries I built in 2021 that still run, and I have no doubt that it I could find an even older binary, they’d run too.

Sourcehut is for-profit. You pay them to host your data, to provide public access, to run mailng lists, to run CI build servers… you’re paying for the services. But the source code is OSS; you can download and run your own services, all or just a few. The “paying them to host the software for you” isn’t the issue, right? It’s not that someone is charging for hosting and maintenance (and, ultimately, salaries for the people working on the software), but whether or not the software is free, and whether you can self-host.

I like your point about finding repos. I think it’d behoove all of the bit players to band together to provide one big searchable repo list. Heck, even I, who hates github with a smoldering passion, have enough sense to go there first to search for software; that’s just the nature of a hegemony. The stumbling of the attempt to create a common VCS hosting API (ForgeFed) is lamentable, but getting adoption would have been a uphill battle even without the rumored in-fighting and drama.

But he was responding to someone who was unconfortable with putting all their eggs in one basket. That’s not what backups are for.

RAID is necessary because drives fail, and sometimes you can’t afford, or want, be offline until you can get around to sourcing & installing a new drive, and restoring from backup.

Huh. In was just playing around with some samples from her page, and can’t get them to run on either AMD64 or ARM. What’s worst is that on my AMD machine I have Wine installed, and trying to run it fires up Wine (where it does eventually execute). You’re supposed to also be able to sh it, and if I do that they just fail. On an ARM, they just fail. I was unable to get any of the samples from he page to run.

I haven’t tried compiling my own program, but if the download samples don’t run (for me), it doesn’t give me confidence in the solution.

It is not. But backups are also not RAID.

Backups are important, but we were talking about drive failures. Backups help when you screw up the data; RAID6 helps when drives go bad. If you don’t trust the hardware, RAID.

Backups only means you’re down until you restore; RAID5/6 means you stay up.