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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 24th, 2023

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  • Why? I’ve worked in two companies where IT allows Linux as an option and people are constantly having issues (including me). And these are highly technical people. Two people who are not stupid managed to break their laptops by uninstalling Python 2 which Gnome depended on.

    Yes that’s technically a UX issue, but there are plenty of good old bugs too, e.g. if you remove a VPN connection that a WiFi network autoconnects to then that WiFi network will entirely stop working with no error messages to speak of. Took me a long time to figure that out. Or how about the fact that 4k only works at 30fps over HDMI, but it works fine over DisplayPort or Thunderbolt3. The hardware fully supports it and it works for other people with the same OS and laptop. I never figured that out.

    That’s just a taster… I almost never have issues like that on Windows or Mac.

    Windows may cost more than “free” but the additional support costs for Linux are very far from free too.

    Maybe something like Chromebooks makes sense if everything is in the cloud.







  • asking the maintainers to lock down APIs which the C devs purposefully leave malleable, in part, to avoid binary blob drivers being feasible.

    No, they were asking them to define the semantics of the filesystem APIs. Those semantics are not encoded in the C API but the Rust devs wanted to encode them in the Rust API to avoid making mistakes.

    The C devs didn’t want to, not because of concerns about binary drivers, but because the semantics are already broken. Apparently different filesystem drivers assume different semantics for the same functions and it’s a whole mess. They don’t want to face up to this and certainly don’t want anyone pointing it out, so clearly it must be the Rust devs’ fault for wanting APIs to have consistent semantics.

    The rest of your comment is nonsense.


  • PDF writing isn’t too bad IMO, since you don’t need to understand the whole spec. I’ve written a PDF writer for maps from scratch and it was fairly easy and not too much code.

    PDF reading though… Yeah I’m happy to leave that to people with more time and use their libraries.

    A modern format would be nice, but I don’t think it would be anywhere near nice enough to give up how universal PDF is.



  • Totally depends what you end up working on as a programmer. If it’s web apps, you’ll be totally fine. All you need is basic arithmetic. Writing a game engine? You’ll need to know some basic to moderate matrix maths…

    If you’re doing formal verification using unbounded model checking… good fucking luck.

    On average I would say most programming tasks need very little maths. If you can add and multiply you’ll be fine. Definitely sounds like you’ll be ok.