otl

joined 2 years ago
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What’s in a name? in c/programmer_humor@programming.dev
[–] otl@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 1 year ago

of course!

White House: Future Software Should Be Memory Safe in c/programming@programming.dev
[–] otl@lemmy.sdf.org 5 points 1 year ago

I feel this is a bit of a moot point from the White House. Memory-safe languages have been around for decades. I feel like the amount of C/C++ out there isn't so much that people think having dangerous stuff around is good, but more that nobody really wants to pay to change it.

Does email (SMTP/POP3) count as a member of the fediverse? in c/fediverse@lemmy.world
[–] otl@lemmy.sdf.org 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Depends how you look at it! Here’s me accessing Mastodon and the fediverse via email: https://lemmy.world/post/11020167 I’ve written a a couple more prototypes to connect one to the other. If anyone is interested I could write up more about how it works or do a more public demo

RFC 9512: YAML Media Type in c/programming@programming.dev
[–] otl@lemmy.sdf.org 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Link to the YAML spec, for the (very) brave: https://yaml.org/spec/1.2.2/

Why We Can't Have Nice Software in c/programming@programming.dev
[–] otl@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 1 year ago

I honestly find it worrying that someone would think it's some sort of deeply ingrained human trait when it's clearly not culturally universal (eg. small hunter-gatherer tribes wouldn't exist otherwise) and not present through all of history.

I think "growth" is a strong signal for people to put faith and trust into something. And that these emotions have influenced our behaviour for a long time.

Why did the Roman empire keep expanding? What made them want more? I'm not a historian nor an anthropologist (far from either!). But this feels like "line go up" behaviour. What would it mean for those in power to communicate that some part of the empire was receding? Even if, overall, the empire was objectivetly huge relative to other organised groups?

One thing I think about is there could be eroding confidence and trust of those in power by colleagues and the general population. If people lose faith, the powerful lose power; they lose ability to influence behaviour. Growth is obsessed over because it's a means to capture influence over the means of production (and capture profit).

The line has to go up because the current economic system demands it has to go up

What about outside of economics? Even metrics on https://fedidb.org: shrinking numbers are coloured red. Growing numbers green. Green = good, red = bad.

Another thought. The other day I was at a cricket match. Grand final. Because the home team was losing, the stadium started to empty. It wasn't about enjoying the individual balls/plays. Supporters were not satisfied with coming second (an amazing achievement, much "profit"!), it needed to be more.

To stretch this shitty metaphor further, when the supporters (investors?) lost confidence in their ability to deliver more, they just abandoned the entire match (enterprise?) altogether!

Again: I'm not stating anything here as fact. I'm just absolutely dumbfounded as to why "line go up" is, as you say, such an obsession. I hear you when you say that it's a consequence of how the modern economy works. That makes sense. I guess I wonder what would happen if we snapped our fingers and we could start again. I wonder what the economy system would look like. Would we still be obsessed with growth?

How to liven up retrospectives when they've gotten uneventful / unhelpful? in c/ask_experienced_devs@programming.dev
[–] otl@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Thanks for helping me reframe my thoughts.

Haha don't worry it's for framing my thoughts too! ;)

To that end, I'd want topics to be problems or shout outs. Something like "how do we test credit cards" might be a sign of "our documentation isn't great and it slows me down" but it's talked about as a discreet item.

Devil's advocate: what are those good practices? What constitutes improvement? One way to focus discussion is to try and pick some specific team values/objectives. Let's go with the example about Jira.

Similarly "I haven't seen Jira used this way before" isn't a problem; maybe the underlying issue is "I don't understand how we use Jira" or "what we're doing causes a lot of paperwork"

The statement "I haven't seen Jira used this way before" is not ideal starting point for discussion - agreed! But with a value in mind I think we can work with it. Let's say, for argument's sake, the goal is stronger shared understanding of project management.

You mentioned other team members asked "what's the problem you're hoping to solve?". I think that's a very pragmatic, specific question (I'm a software engineer, too, I get it!) but it's not really in the service of the goal of the discussion: a stronger understanding of project management.

So how can discussion help with that? What about a Q&A session? The interactive, conversational exchange is a natural way for people to learn (I hear ChatGPT is pretty popular!), and it's likely others will learn a bunch of stuff too about why things are done the way they are.

Another technique is to use the free-flowing discussion format for what its best at: exploration of ideas, not necessarily solving problems. Solving problems usually takes code, data, testing, experimentation... things that require time at the keyboard.

Taking the credit card example:

Something like "how do we test credit cards" might be a sign of "our documentation isn't great and it slows me down" but it's talked about as a discreet item.

Use the conversational format to its advantage. Respond to the question with another question: "why do you ask how we test credit cards?" From there they might reply with something about documentation, or maybe the tests aren't clear, or they're not run often enough. Maybe they want ways to run credit card tests on their own workstation as unit tests? From there we identify a whole bunch of ways to improve the code/project/workflow/better align with best practices.

Anyway, I'm not a manager :) I'm just thinking out loud so next time I start speaking to a team to join maybe I understand the dynamics a bit more.

How to liven up retrospectives when they've gotten uneventful / unhelpful? in c/ask_experienced_devs@programming.dev
[–] otl@lemmy.sdf.org 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Hm. Interesting. This is something that gets me too...

Taking a step back: what are you hoping to achieve with the retrospective?

I find that the items people are bringing up aren't really important or could just be a question in Slack.

What criteria would make something important? Conversely: what makes something minor?

Once we nail these it might be easier to focus the discussion.

Why We Can't Have Nice Software in c/programming@programming.dev
[–] otl@lemmy.sdf.org 5 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Growth might be impossible, but a steady and "boring" amount of profit should still be possible selling plain-ole-dishwashers. Yet ... for some reason, we don't see that.

God yes this bothers and fascinates me.

Instead companies throw everything into growth and we get the retarded bluetooth enabled dishwasher problem everywhere, and I'd like toknow more about why.

I think it's alluded to in the article:

They found a way to make consumers spend more money on dishwashing. The line goes up, for one more year. But it's not enough. It has to go up every year.

Digging deeper: why must the line go up? Pesonally I see it as a deeply emotional, human thing.

When you read those annual financial reports from big companies, they will do anything to make sure things look rosy. Bullshit terms like "negative growth" are used because "loss" or "shrink" sound bad. So what if it sounds bad?

Confidence. Trust. It's emotional. These are deep in our psyche. It's how governments get elected, contracts are won, and investments are made. It's what makes us human. If that line goes down... will it go back up? What's going to happen? Alarm bells! Uncertaintly. Anxiety. People abandon you. Money, power, influence fades. You could find yourself replaced by the up-and-coming who "show promise".

Our social emotional species has hundreds of thousands of years (millions?) of years of this stuff hardwired into us. Trust let us cooperate beyond our own individual or family interests. Would we be human otherwise? (I found the article Behavioural Modernity interesting).

Why We Can't Have Nice Software in c/programming@programming.dev
[–] otl@lemmy.sdf.org 4 points 1 year ago

Not sure it’s capitalism per se. Perhaps rampant waste. Criticism of capitalism could include monopoly formation; massive tech companies buy small ones (obtain more capital = more control over production = more profit).

There’s despair over everyone, big & small, resolving the same recreated problems. Kelley doesn’t talk about breaking Microsoft up (i.e. redistributing their capital). He implies he’d be ok for Microsoft to maintain its market position if it just fixed some damn bugs.

How I reduced the size of my very first published docker image by 40% - A lesson in dockerizing shell scripts in c/programming@programming.dev
[–] otl@lemmy.sdf.org 22 points 1 year ago

The art of turning a 500-line text file into a 50MB tarball. Welcome to the future :(

Article suggests that 1 million ML specialists will be needed in 2027. What do you think of that? in c/programming@programming.dev
[–] otl@lemmy.sdf.org 3 points 1 year ago

Here’s the article’s source: https://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Future_of_Jobs_2023.pdf

That report’s data is a survey they sent out to companies. Quantising “so… what do you think is gonna happen?” seems… shonky?

Federation is broken again - in a slightly different, more subtle way this time in c/sdfpubnix@lemmy.sdf.org
[–] otl@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 1 year ago

Hm. Some views from other Lemmy instances...

Seems... OK...? Apart from lemmy.world (but that's running a previous release of Lemmy).

PS from Mastodon (hachyderm.io): https://hachyderm.io/@ExtremeDullard@lemmy.sdf.org/111866487723645951

No replies or anything because nobody subscribed to mechkeyboards from hachyderm.io. I just subscribed, though :)

36
Simple Made Easy - Rich Hickey (2011) (www.infoq.com)
 

One of my favourite talks on programming. Just wanted to share for others who haven't seen this before.

38
My struggle from a UNIX background in the modern "cloud" world (www.srcbeat.com)
1
Anyone subscribe to Crikey? (lemmy.sdf.org)
submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by otl@lemmy.sdf.org to c/australia@aussie.zone
0 comments fedilink
 

https://www.crikey.com.au How is it?

Last year I gifted a news junky friend a year subscription to the New York Times. That was cool but they are more interested in Australian stories. Normally they browse the ABC and BBC apps.

1
git-send-email.io - Learn to use email with Git (git-send-email.io)
submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by otl@lemmy.sdf.org to c/git@programming.dev
0 comments fedilink
 

With Github so popular now, not everyone is aware of the workflows that git provides out-of-the-box for collaboration. Thought this may pique some people's curiosity :)

45
Rejected automation? (www.srcbeat.com)
 

Let’s share stories where your automation efforts have been rejected and you can’t quite understand why! Here’s mine.

1
[Praise] Small app size! (lemmy.sdf.org)
 

I’m in Indonesia at the moment and my internet connections are poor. So having an app that weighs just 20MB is fantastic!

That’s all I really wanted to say. Congrats to the devs on the progress so far!

13
What next for a hobbyist documentarian? (lemmy.sdf.org)
 

TL;DR Seeking any advice on making documentaries about things around me!

I've done a couple of short videos as a hobby between jobs. I'm a programmer by trade. It was really fun to make these in particular:

But these take time that I don't really have any more; I've got a girlfriend and we don't want to spend all that time on the road! I tried to shoot a couple of 90-second news packages for a local news website but it was really hard. I hate politics and I hate that breaking news cycle.

Off the top of my head, here are some things that I think would be fun to shoot and edit:

  • Documenting local organised events. Not just the highlights; from setting up and packing down again, mishaps along the way.
  • From bin to...? Where our rubbish goes
  • Cancelled buses: why bus drivers are so hard to find

I feel embarassed to speak to people about these things. The word "imposter" comes to mind. I don't have any political agenda and I don't care about getting clicks via outrage. It's about discovering how things work - how things really are - and sharing that discovery.

Alternatively I thought about shooting footage and uploading it "raw" to YouTube and/or editorial footage stock sites. From there I could pass it on to local news publications.

Keen to hear any advice on what I could do next. Any YouTube channels which cover this kind of thing in a similar tone?

207
Deleting >4000 junk communities by @LMAO (lemmy.sdf.org)
 

I recently wrote a command-line utility lemmyverse to find communities indexed by Lemmy Explorer. A quick count shows almost 14%(!) of all communities indexed by lemmyverse are junk communities created by a single user @LMAO (reported here):

% lemmyverse . | wc -l
  30376
% lemmyverse enoweiooe | wc -l
   4206

Here's a python script, using no external dependencies, which uses Lemmy's HTTP API to delete all communities that @LMAO moderates:

#!/usr/bin/env python

import json
import urllib.parse
import urllib.request

baseurl = "https://lemmy.world"
username = "admin"
password = "password"

def login(user, passwd):
	url = baseurl+"/api/v3/user/login"
	body = urllib.parse.urlencode({
		"username_or_email": user,
		"password": passwd,
	})
	resp = urllib.request.urlopen(url, body.encode())
	j = json.load(resp)
	return j["jwt"]

def get_user(name):
	query = urllib.parse.urlencode({"username": name})
	resp = urllib.request.urlopen(baseurl+"/api/v3/user?"+query)
	return json.load(resp)

def delete_community(token, id):
	url = baseurl+"/api/v3/community/delete"
	params = {
		"auth": token,
		"community_id": id,
	}
	body = urllib.parse.urlencode(params)
	urllib.request.urlopen(url, body.encode())

token = login(username, password)
user = get_user("LMAO")
for community in user["moderates"]:
	id = community["community"]["id"]
	try:
		delete_community(token, id)
	except Exception as err:
		print("delete community id %d: %s" % (id, err))

Change username and password on lines 8 and 9 to suit.

Hope that helps! :) Thanks for the work you all put in to running this popular instance.

10
research!rsc: Coroutines for Go (research.swtch.com)
 

Go tech lead Russ Cox:

This post is about why we need a coroutine package for Go, and what it would look like.

With a post like this it usually means there will almost certainly be a new standard library package. But even more interestingly:

If we are to add coroutines to Go, we should aim to do it without language changes. That means the definition of coroutines should be possible to implement and understand in terms of ordinary Go code. Later, I will argue for an optimized implementation provided directly by the runtime, but that implementation should be indistinguishable from the pure Go definition.

8
research!rsc: Storing Data in Control Flow (research.swtch.com)
 

Go project tech lead Russ Cox talks about a technique to make programs clearer using concurrency.

62
Advice for Operating a Public-Facing API (jcs.org)
 

An OpenBSD developer and the one-man-band behind Pushover gives some advice after 10 years of running a public HTTP API. It's interesting as big companies are happy to publish articles about all the fancy stuff they developed to run some API, but you don't always hear from a sole developer running a service for such a long time.

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