Zach DeC👌🆗 @zachdecook@librem.one

How do people feel about 'programming ligatures'? I have some thoughts.

(see Fira Code for examples: https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode)

"This could be an existential threat for non-Safari WebKit browsers. Nobody is going to be interested in using a browser that doesn't support Google websites. Google's expressly-stated goal is to block embedded browser frameworks and non-supported browsers from signing into Google accounts."

https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/2020-November/031604.html

It shouldn’t be a surprise that Facebook has joined Section 230’s critics: it literally has the most to gain from decimating the law. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/dont-blame-section-230-big-techs-failures-blame-big-tech

The argument against the word "master" is based on the unproven assumption that the term is loaded with racist connotations, and the mandate for change is based on the fact that the possibility of the assumption's truth is nonzero and that the side-effects of the change are small.

If that were true, I would be on board with it. However, it's plainly clear that the impact of git upstream switching the default branch name to "main" is going to be huge. Many scripts with the "master" hard-coded are going to break, scripts written on the valid assumption that the name "master" was an intrinsic, unchanging property of git.

Every programmer who works with repositories before and after the change are going to constantly mis-remember which is which, and we'll have to guess at the default when working with new or unfamiliar repositories.

This event is going to establish a new epoch in git. We should take that seriously.

Which means we have to confront the fact that the assumption (that inherent racism is present in the word "master" and is causing harm to those who have suffered under racism) may not actually be true. The claims do not hold up well under scrutiny. And, as far as I can tell, the cause is championed disproportionately by white people.

The moralized nature of the question puts an external pressure on decision makers on the git project, which is normally not present for other patches. They have to consider, if they review these changes negatively, will it affect their personal reputation? Their careers? If there's even a slight chance of this, is it better not to argue the matter at all, and rubber-stamp the patches? I don't think this change is being developed under the right conditions.

On the left, we have a tendency to rubber-stamp social causes with a lesser degree of scrutiny. I think that this is a testament to how much we value empathy and solidarity, but I don't think it's a healthy way to approach our problems. Software breakage has a social cost, too.

Funkwhale is looking for new maintainers https://blog.funkwhale.audio/~/Announcements/funkwhale-is-looking-for-new-maintainers/

@sir
I had it when some minor update caused #fishShell to interminably hang (all because my home directory was network mounted).
My general tech advise to average people: Never update anything that already works.

Looking at you, literally every meme systems programming lang

Looking at you with extreme prejudice, every meme shell 😠

If your project aims to become a fixture in the computational substrate of infrastructure on top of which everything else runs

I will have pretty high standards for your work

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e = 65537

@sir
Well, I'm late to the party, but already have some (original, never-before-seen) content:
gemini://gemini.zachdecook.com/capsule/2020-11-01-action-jones.gemini
Action Jones (The Story of a Lost Piece of Cultural History)

How a (formerly) online webseries captured my imagination, and the grief of its loss to the world.

✓ MIME database for gmnisrv

Regex routes and reverse proxying are the main remaining features before it's 1.0 ready I think

@omgubuntu
> [some twitter followers] asked why I’m troubled by a core system component using hundreds of megabytes of memory to ... do nothing.

Well, they are using twitter... proprietary software users don't always have the best judgement.

Does the Snap Store Use Too Much Memory?

https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2020/10/gnome-software-uses-lots-of-memory

@sir back when i didn't know any better my team jumped through all sorts of cloud hoops to get a repeating workload to run once an hour. it did work, but one of the senior people from a diff project was like "not sure why this isn't just a cron job"