somewhat logical, but entirely in practice verb-noun command structure.

That’s supposed to be “impractical”, not “in practice”, for others reading along.

For example, the “proper” command to list a directory is: Get-ChildItem
The “proper” command to fetch a webpage is: Invoke-WebRequest https://example.com/

In these particular cases, they do have aliases defined, so you can use ls, dir and curl instead, but …yeah, that’s still generally what the command names are like.

It’s partially more verbose than C#, which is one of the most verbose programming languages out there. I genuinely feel like this kind of defeats the point of having a scripting language in the first place, when it isn’t succinct.
Like, you’re hardly going to use it interactively, because it is so verbose, so you won’t know the commands very well. Which means, if you go to write a script with Powershell, you’ll need to look up how to do everything just as much as with a full-fledged programming language. And I do typically prefer the better tooling of a full-fledged programming language…

Yeah, that’s the funniest thing to me. There’s an actual fruit that we could eat. Instead, we take the seed, roast it, grind it and soak it in boiling water. Then we drink the water.

You couldn’t disrespect the coffee plant more, if you tried.

I’ve been trying to basically build a library that helps you put together a distribution archive.
And my initial plan for the API looked something like this:

Distribution::new("my-program")
    .dir("assets")
    .file("favicon.png", |path| build_favicon(path));  // "|path| ..." is a lambda function that gets the target path passed in

So, it would allow you to define the file structure, and for the parts that actually need to be built, you’d provide a lambda function, which it would automatically run or not, depending on whether the inputs changed.

Right, inputs, what are those? I kind of need my user to tell me. So, I decided to implement the caching as a separate API, which you would call on your own when you get called by the lambda function.

Then I realized, I kind of don’t need the lambda function then. I could just construct file paths and then my user calls their build_favicon(...) function or similar on their own.

There is just one crucial problem with that. This is what the file API in the stdlib looks like:

PathBuf::new("my-program")
    .join("assets")
    .join("favicon.png");

I might not have built anything, really. 🫠

I just want to say that you’re probably worrying too much about it. Of course, there is lots of things one can do to improve security (which the others here are listing dutifully) and it is foolish to just assume that one’s computer is entirely secure, because as a user, you will always have the ability to bypass that.

But there’s a pretty firm consensus in the IT industry that Linux is more secure than Windows. And that the popular Linux distributions are more trustworthy organizations than Microsoft.

So, it’s good to inform yourself, but if you survived on Windows, you at least should not worry about the Linux side of things. It’s more than fine.

The thing is, producing another copy doesn’t cost you money. So, if you price it at $20 and 4 people buy it, when only one person would have bought it at $80, then you’ve made the same money.

They only decide to put the price as high as they do, because they hope to extract as much money as possible from the fools that buy on release. Then they later put it on sale in hopes of also collecting the money from those not willing to pay $80.
On some level, I assume they know how to make as much money as possible, but the same time, I do feel like the hype around Silksong would be a fraction of its size, if the game cost $80.

It says “global” in the meme, so presumably all of them…

Polandball would be another web comic like that. Although the characters are just circles with flags in them, so no idea how useful that is.

You technically didn’t ask for them, but presumably this goes hand-in-hand with reduce and reuse as first steps, which would have perhaps a more visible impact.

Reduce means to cut back on the amount of products we produce in the first place, particularly also the trash being used for packaging.
This would require:

• More craftsmanship. Instead of buying a new jeans when your pants have a hole, you’d sew them.
• More robust, repairable products. Don’t need to throw away the whole phone due to a broken screen when it doesn’t break in the first place or if you can get the screen replaced.
• More sharing. Not every household needs their own car or toolbox or whatever, if you can share them with your neighbors.
• There would be more shops that sell products unpackaged, where you bring your own containers to fill.

Reuse means to sell products in glass jars, metal boxes or similar, which can be washed out and filled anew.
This would require:

• Some container-deposit system, so that you can bring your emptied glass jars etc. back to the shops and the shop sends it back to the producer.
• In that vein, there would need to be a tax on non-reusable packaging to finance the recycling or safe deposition of it.
• Some products would probably be sold in larger quantities or not anymore, because they just aren’t sustainable, if you make them pay their environmental costs.

As for recycling, i.e. breaking the thing down and creating a new thing, it’s unlikely that we would ever reach 100% with it alone, at the very least because it’s more effort than reduce and reuse.
But to improve our rates, there is a whole load of products currently being sold in plastic, which could be sold in paper or wood, if glass jars or metal boxes don’t work there.

In a hypothetical world, where we could have 100% effective recycling without giving a toss about reduce and reuse, then I guess, we’d have a garbage disposal system which funnels right back into a massive 3D printer.

Just to note, I disagree entirely. Even in commercial development, it’s the core premise of agile development to ship features early and continuously integrate feedback. Granted, lots of companies claim to do agile without actually doing it, but it’s at least not a law of nature what you’re describing.

But with this not being commercial development either way, I really don’t feel like you can make any predictions. If the volunteer that implemented this sees your bug report, they could decide to drop everything else and fix that, because they get to pick their own priorities. They might have the solution in their head right away and it doesn’t take them long at all to implement. Or someone new to the project might decide this sounds like a good issue to get started with.

Mint’s desktop environment, Cinnamon, is technically based on GNOME Shell (i.e. a fork of it), but we’re not just talking “pretty heavily modified”. In many ways, it’s its own thing now and you can’t really assume things to work similarly.

Yeah, good luck with that definition. “Kid” is often used as the umbrella term for someone’s offspring, which includes babies and teenagers. Some slangs even use it to refer to just a guy, even if that guy is very much adult.
You’ll inevitably talk to plenty people that don’t have your specific textbook definition in mind for when a baby turns into a toddler preschooler kid.

Pretty sure the point is that she came up with the concept of pizza delivery services in a very roundabout way…

Make sure it isn’t phishing. But if it isn’t, then it would mean they still have your e-mail address stored somewhere. I could imagine that the mailing list subscription stores the e-mail address separately from the account info and they just fucked up deleting it. Might be worth trying to contact them.

In that vein, I guess, “The Sound of Silence” by Simon and Garfunkel also deserves a mention, even if it’s up for interpretation how depressing the lyrics by themselves are.

But the first line in the song is “Hello darkness, my old friend / I’ve come to talk with you again.” and there is a cover version by the metal band Disturbed, which has no shame to really lean into that sort of vibe.

And yeah, after having heard the Disturbed version, listening to the original certainly feels like there is a massive disconnect between how sad the song perhaps should be and how upbeat the original is.

If they’re saying “guest” I’d assume it’s a virtual machine. But yeah, is it VirtualBox or KVM or something else?

Personally, I would probably stream to PeerTube or a self-hosted Owncast and announce the streams on Mastodon for the visibility…

You probably missed it there, Guix’s syntax is the programming language Scheme. It’s most definitely Turing-complete.

It’s possible that there’s a more mature LSP server for Scheme, since it is a programming language used for other things, too…

You can uncheck this checkbox:

They had to throw out lots of customization options, because Google made a ton of changes to Android/AOSP and it wasn’t compatible anymore.

Like, LineageOS is still a more feature-rich and cleaner OS than what comes preinstalled on most phones. But yeah, even relatively simple stuff like setting a system font never got a real replacement.

No idea, if it is still easily possible to implement that. You can fake it by replacing the Roboto font file with a different font, but you get weird font issues in various apps then.

Yeah, our government occasionally discusses that idea again, but unfortunately nothing has been put into law yet. I would certainly prefer not having to carry around extra copper, just because companies want their .99 prices.