James_K · HackerLangs

I dislike when people use the term “power” to describe making code slightly shorter to type. Operator overloading is not in any meaningful sense more powerful than a language which lacks it.

James_K

vor 7 Tagendiscuss

I think the better conclusion here is that most programming languages don't deserve Wikipedia articles. You wouldn't want one for every brand of screwdriver or kitchen appliance. Programming languages are likewise, just tools. An article restating the information on Odin's website is a net negative to anyone who reads it, as they'd be better served by visiting the website directly. A bad article should be deleted.

James_K

vor 7 Tagendiscuss

Suppose you wanted to make a Wikipedia article on a certain brand CNC milling machine, would that be useful? Not really. The only thing ever written about it is its own manual, and it doesn't feature notably with the exception of being used by some companies for manufacturing. Programming languages are the same thing. It seems rather entitled to demand Wikipedia articles for random brands of tools that don't have anything particularly significant about them.

And beyond that, it's perfectly useless. A Wikipedia article restating the information on Odin's website is a net negative information wise. You've got duplicate content for no good reason. The point of Wikipedia is to take a topic about which much has been written, and distill that into a smaller and more information dense summary. A person who finds the Odin language on Wikipedia would always be better served looking at the website instead, and thus the article is actively harmful to their understanding of the topic.

James_K

vor 7 Tagendiscuss

Sad that we don't see more high praise of simple things. Not exciting enough, I guess.

James_K

vor 8 Tagendiscuss

Letting users pick their own passwords has always been a mistake. If passwords are needed, the system should choose them.

James_K

vor 8 Tagendiscuss

This could have all been solved if they added a setting for bread, pizza, or cake.

James_K

vor 13 Tagendiscuss

I've always doubted this stuff because I have some memories of things that happened when I was 2.

James_K

vor 20 Tagendiscuss

[dead]

James_K

letzten Monatdiscuss

I will never stop singing the praises of plain HTML. It's accessible, it's portable, it's simple, but for some reason we need horrid JavaScript nonsense to operate.

James_K

vor 2 Monatendiscuss

POLAND MENTION!!!!!

James_K

vor 2 Monatendiscuss

Meditation from first principles.

James_K

vor 3 Monatendiscuss

I feel that Postel's law probably holds up the worst out of these. While being liberal with the data you accept can seem good for the functioning of your own application, the broader social effect is negative. It promotes misconceptions about the standard into informal standards of their own to which new apps may be forced to conform. Ultimately being strict with the input data allowed can turn out better in the long run, not to mention be more secure.

James_K

vor 3 Monatendiscuss

But it's not “lots of people,” it's everyone. Everyone has a picture of their face on their phone. And the information is encrypted because phones use disk encryption by default. “Someone can get a photo of your face and passport if they have full unencrypted access to your phone's hard drive” is like saying “someone could turn off your alarm and make you late for work if they break into your house.” There are simply bigger concerns in that situation.

James_K

vor 3 Monatendiscuss

The “hack” in question is pointing out that the app forgets to delete images of the user's face and ID (stored). A lot of people have pictures of their face already on the phone, and often their ID as well so this is hardly a security flaw in any real sense.

James_K

vor 4 Monatendiscuss

She could have accepted the Email, then printed the documents off and said it was faxed. I highly doubt anyone checks.

James_K

vor 4 Monatendiscuss

Working for an organisation which systematically abuses and degrades disabled people is not a morally neural act. If you're life is difficult then that's sad, but not an excuse to exact that difficulty 100 fold on other people.

James_K

vor 4 Monatendiscuss

I'm almost certain this is from the UK, and here we have a government that is absolutely obsessed by the concept of benefits fraud. Every real analysis has shown that virtually none exists, but it is a good excuse to tighten up the government budget by trimming some fat (disabled people).

James_K

vor 4 Monatendiscuss

That is not a problem with Wayland because specifying this is not a within the purview of Wayland. People like you don't seem to understand that Wayland is specification, and not an implementation like X11.

James_K

vor 4 Monatendiscuss

I think you've got it backwards. Applications like OBS do not typically register default global keybindings to avoid clobbering, you have to do it manually in their settings menu. The only difference with a generic interface is that the dialogue opened from the setting menu would be from the WM instead of OBS.

James_K

vor 4 Monatendiscuss

Or you could write portable software that doesn't rely on reading global input. OBS you give as an example, and it is a good one. They could simply register a D-Bus handler and provide a second binary that sends messages to the running instance. The software is more general in this way as it allows full programmatic control. A Sway user, for instance, could add

  bindsym $mod+r exec obs-control toggle-recording

to their configuration. What's more, they can do this in response to other system events. A user might wish to change the recording configuration of OBS in response to an application opening, and it now becomes possible to write a script which opens the application and applies the change.

If your disdain for desktop isolation is so great, you needn't even use D-Bus. Registering a simple UNIX socket that accepts commands would work equally well in this case.

What's really desired here is a standard way for programs to expose user-facing commands to the system, which is clearly not within the scope of the specification for a display server. The problem with X11 is that it has for a long time exposed too much unrelated functionality like this to the user, and so many apps have become reliant on this and developers have neglected the creation of portable ways to achieve these objectives. A new specification for display servers that excludes this harmful behaviour is a clear long-term positive.

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