@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Yeah, that has nothing to do with fun. 😅

I was thinking back to CD players. Switching tracks took a moment, although I don’t know anymore how long exactly. IIRC, playing CDs on a computer was a bit slower than in a dedicated player.

Don’t worry, switching to the next OGG file on my disk is basically instant. 😅

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org But stuff is still “mostly usable”, isn’t it? It’s not like it became impossible to write a letter because everything has gotten so slow.

That’s what I meant by “absolute” performance: A human being tolerates a system boot up time of 0.5-2 minutes, for example, so there’s an absolute/fixed duration that any task is allowed to take. Boot: 0.5-2 minutes. Opening Word: 1-10 seconds. Saving an image file: 1-10 seconds. Time until the next song starts to play when you click “next track”: 0-5 seconds. Stuff like that. As long as we don’t exceed those durations, people will be more or less happy.

Wasted potential? Ab-so-fucken-lutely.

(Maybe I’m repeating myself. I’m tired. Sorry. 😅)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Uhh, nice. Haven’t seen a sunset like that in a while, I think. 🤔

What the heck is going on here today, so many messages. 😂

@prologic@twtxt.net … what was that again? 🤔😅🤪

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I guess it’s all about “absolute” performance. Everything is just fast enough for you to get stuff done – no matter the underlying machine. LibreOffice today on my modern machine takes the same time to start up as StarOffice (its ancestor) on my retro machine. And working with it feels the same, everything is just as fast (or slow).

Browsing the web today feels similar to 25 years ago. Even all this wobbling that my link above demonstrates already existed back then (in a way), but it was caused by images loading so slowly. Then, for a brief moment, some browser (I don’t remember which one) had this brilliant feature of trying to keep the current scrolling position stable while the page was still loading. That was great. 😃 This feature then got lost again, probably because it’s too hard to do with JavaScript changing the DOM all the time. So now we’re back to the way it was before.

Corporations should give devs the slowest and oldest machines that they have. 😏 Not only would this be more sustainable, it would also force them to optimize better.

Wayland wants to make every frame perfect. I wish web devs had the same goal. Instead, we’re stuck with this:

https://movq.de/v/112a927861/hiccupfx/

😂😭

@prologic@twtxt.net Most of the things that cause my frustration are things that I can’t change or even avoid. There’s little benefit in complaining about it, I think. 🤔

I’m putting all efforts to switch to Wayland on hold for another 2 years, minimum.

As we all know, writing a Wayland compositor from scratch is next to impossible. Luckily, there’s the wlroots project which aims to build a base library for this task. Basically every compositor except for GNOME and KDE uses it. (This is good! The less fragmentation, the better.)

wlroots is still very volatile, lots of changes with every release. Downstream users (i.e., the projects that write the actual compositor) have to constantly “chase” changes in wlroots. dwl, my favorite compositor at the moment, has recently switched their main branch to target the wlroots git version instead of the latest release. My understanding is that they have to do this in order to keep up with wlroots (maybe I’m wrong).

Everything is volatile and a moving target.

Why does any of this matter for me? Because I have to eventually fork dwl or at least keep a patch set, and I don’t have the stamina to constantly fiddle with this stuff. I’m running my own X11 window manager, it’s highly specialized, and using just “some Wayland compositor out there” is a huge step backward that I’m not willing to take. I tried, it’s just painful and annoying with zero benefits.

So … it was fun experimenting with Wayland a bit, but I’m now back to waiting for things to settle down considerably.

@prologic@twtxt.net @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org It’s better this way. 😂 I don’t like all this negativity in tech. We tend to focus on bad aspects too much, imho. Then again, it’s really easy to focus on bad stuff, simply because there’s so much of it. 😂

Today is one of those days where I’m really grumpy and have typed out lots and lots of rants. Luckily, I all deleted them in the end instead of sending them. 😂

@prologic@twtxt.net They all gave Crowdstrike root access to their machines. What could possibly go wrong? 🤷🤷🤷

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Oh, ok, somehow I thought this was not your thing. 😅 Maybe I was misled by you calling them “Acca Dacca”, which felt somewhat derogative. But I just found @mckinley@mckinley.cc’s twt gaapgna from a while ago – so this is just normal Aussie slang for AC/DC?! 🤯🥴

@eldersnake@we.loveprivacy.club

I run it in a Work profile on my GrapheneOS phone that I can switch off at any time

Hmmmmmmm, I like that idea. If I could ban WhatsApp into a second profile and only switch it on every now and then, I would feel a little bit better about it.

(I don’t really trust Android, though, and I suspect that apps can still install background services that are always active. Pure speculation and paranoid on my part, but still.)

@mckinley@twtxt.net Hmmmmm, yeah, sounds like jabber is not the right thing for us then.

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com To be honest, I don’t like Matrix that much myself. We don’t use any of the fancy crypto features and all that, no federation either. And clients like “FluffyChat” look and feel pretty much like any other chat client. It’s a rather simple setup. Problem is just that it’s not WhatsApp and people want WhatsApp, nothing else. 🫤 (Hence I have little hope that Signal would be a big success.)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org

Anyone who reads the CrowdStrike self-description and then buys the product has really earned a major fault.

The nasty thing is: Sysadmins don’t decide this, do they? The management does. And they don’t have to clean up this bloody fucking mess.

All the fellow sysadmins who were hit by this have my sympathies. 😂

@prologic@twtxt.net Everything’s on fire. We’re going to be complaining for a couple of days, then we’ll continue as usual, repeating the same mistakes. Nothing to see, carry on. 🫤🥴

(I’m just glad it didn’t affect us at work.)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org

Then there comes in feature creep.

This is driving me nuts. Everybody thinks that “development has to be kept alive!” When people see a project without commits in the last 2 years, they think it’s dead and not worth using. Bah, why? Software can be “done”. If no bugs are known, then there’s no need to change anything.

All these ideas are old. I’ve heard about much of this from meillo some 15 years ago and he didn’t come up with it, either.

It’s all super unpopular. Why? Many of my projects see a burst of commits in the beginning and then mostly just maintenance – and that’s great. It saves me from so much trouble and work. For example, my X11 wallpaper setter was written in 2017, I’m using it daily all the time, it just works, boom, done.

A project isn’t dead if it doesn’t see commits anymore – it’s dead if nobody maintains it anymore.

@mckinley@twtxt.net Last time I tried jabber was probably 10 years ago. How’s group chat these days? Is it comparable to “modern” chat systems, does it feel the same?

I guess it’s irrelevant which platform I’m going to propose as an alternative to WhatsApp. It’s the same old problem: Almost all their contacts are on WhatsApp, so that’s what they want to use, end of story.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org You had me in the first half, I thought you were going to their concert. 😅 That would have surprised me.

I had some pleasant experiences with public transportation lately, but that wasn’t Deutsche Bahn.

Would a bike or an ebike be an alternative for you? 🤔

@prologic@twtxt.net @bender@twtxt.net It’s a twtxt feed that anyone can post to via Gopher: gopher://g.nixers.net/1/%7eanon/

Do we think this is a problem? 🤔 If so, you should be able to contact the admin in #nixers on libera.chat.

@prologic@twtxt.net Kind of, yeah. (I wish they wouldn’t focus so much on “elitism”.)

Regarding complexity budget, slow software, all that:

Very few people do take pride in building simple, elegant, high-quality systems, do they? Why is that? Why are huge shiny things with tons of features more attractive? 🤔

I never explicitly thought about this, to be honest. It was only at the back of my head. And I never tried to teach our younger “students” at work: “Hey, it’s a great achievement to build something simple and elegant. That’s something to be proud of!”

Worse, simple software is often described as “boring”. Yes, in a way, it is boring, because your brain doesn’t have to get into overdrive to understand it. But that’s exactly the point. And it’s hard to achieve that! Simple software isn’t just “fewer lines of code”, you have to be pretty clever to solve a problem in a simple and elegant way. So it’s something to be proud of.

Could this be an intuitive, emotional way to get more people on board the “simple software”-train? 🤔

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Yeah, you’re right. The quality aspect is lacking, too. Sigh. 😅

Focus on quality, focus on “doing it right”, make that your primary goal. And everything else shall fall into place.

If it only were that simple. 🫤😅

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Yeah, it’s hard(er) with family members. I shouldn’t have started that Matrix stuff – before that, they had an easier time accepting that I don’t use WhatsApp. Now it’s more like “why don’t you switch?”

“Joy of missing out”, eh? :D

@prologic@twtxt.net I’ll look into it. 🤔 The good thing is that I think some people already use Signal. We’ll see.

If WhatsApp was just a messenger, I probably wouldn’t be so reluctant to join. But it’s an app that insists on running on a smartphone. It has access to so much metadata … Fuck this shit. 🫤

The “Matrix Experiment”, i.e. running a Matrix server for our family, has failed completely and miserably. People don’t accept it. They attribute unrelated things to it, like “I can’t send messages to you, I don’t reach you! It doesn’t work!” Yes, you do, I get those messages, I just don’t reply quickly enough because I’m at work or simply doing something else.

I’ll probably shut it down.

Nobody cares about privacy. The reasons I bring up in discussions are “too nerdy”. They put all their stuff to Google or Apple, so why would messaging be any different? (We’re not even using all those Matrix crypto stuff … That would be insane.)

It’s a lost cause. I’m frustrated.

Will I give in and use WhatsApp instead? Not sure yet.

@prologic@twtxt.net I’m not smart/educated enough to come up with a formal spec. 🤔

It’s somewhat telling that the HTMX blogpost also (mostly) only talks about feelings, not hard facts.

@prologic@twtxt.net How about “now”? 😅

Personally, I’ve been doing this for a long time now. Minimal(-ish), slow pace, no pressure. Works quite well for me. The idea isn’t very popular, though. 🥴

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Awww, nice birdie. Lovely pic. 😊

We desperately need to start a Slow Software movement. High quality, intentionally designed, low defect software done at a quarter of the pace for the same price. Because we’ve been destroying the mental health of developers for the last quarter century, and what do we have to show for it but a giant mess?

https://dice.camp/@uncanny_kate/112724979643603832

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org

Maybe your softwares are just perfect and there are simply no bug reports and contributions required. :-)

Haha. 😂 I guess my software is just way too irrelevant. 😅 Or maybe not. I just don’t know. I should add some telemetry. 😏

I just also see the issue with smaller mail servers being blocked by the large ones. This also happened to me I believe. My mails just never made it to the people. Or they were ignored, I cannot tell.

To be honest, when I send private email, like insurance stuff or to the bank or similar, I always get a reply. The recipients are German mail servers, usually run by those institutions or individuals. Sometimes it’s MS Outlook or Telekom. In other words, it’s not Google. Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm …

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Is that an actual lake? And a fish? It looks so small. I always wonder how fish end up there. 🤔

@prologic@twtxt.net Well … 😆

@prologic@twtxt.net

Should sit down and see what the contributions have been for some of my projects before and after the migration away from Github? 🤔

I might do that for my projects. 🤔

Maybe it’s a discovery problem too?

Yeah, well, apart from my own blog and rarely Mastodon, I don’t really talk about my projects anymore. I used to mention them on forums and reddit and the likes. Forums were really good for that. But I mean, forums are dying out as well, so where do you “promote” your projects? 🤔 On Mastodon, it usually gets drowned in the noise.

I sure hope not, that kind of defeats the point of an ecosystem that is suppose to encourage distributed software development and distributed forms of collaboration. Right? 🤔

It does, yes. Question is, do people actually care about distributed development anymore? (Did they ever?)

@prologic@twtxt.net No, just a minor injury, as far as I know.

This sums up the Matrix experience: https://cathode.church/@apothecary/112742706806370926

@prologic@twtxt.net

I would never ask anyone to send me patches via Email.

That’s not even what I’m doing, but I just realized that my bugs.html page isn’t really clear about that. It implies that patches are meant to be sent via email and I’m fine if that happens – but I don’t insist on people doing that. You might as well send me a link to your fork on GitHub or your own server or whatever.

I should clarify that. 🤔

@prologic@twtxt.net Huh, okay, that’s surprising to me. I had thought that Gitea would be easy enough for people to use. I mean, it even has the “Sign in with GitHub” button. 🤔 And it’s not like Gitea is some arcane/archaic tool like Bugzilla, which is just horrible to use.

So … what’s stopping people?

I’m not sure what else we can do? I’m nNOT moving back to Github, ever.

Same. There are alternatives like https://codeberg.org/ now, but does that really help? GitHub was also a small and independent platform once. Are we supposed to “forge hop” (as in “distro hop”) all the time, migrate from the most non-shitty hoster to the next? That can’t be the solution.

@prologic@twtxt.net Someone shot at Trump: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd1d31jeyzlo

I don’t run a bug tracker, instead all my projects link to this page:

https://uninformativ.de/bugs.html

It basically says, when you find a bug, please send me an email.

Now I’ve read this:

https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/programming/EmailVsForgesUnfortunate

I hadn’t thought about this before. That’s a quite valid reason. 🫤 Sadly, it applies to any truly independent self-hosted service. That OAuth thingy (“Sign in with GitHub”) might be the only compromise …

(I rarely get any feedback on my projects, btw. jenny might be an exception, because we’re talking about it here sometimes. Overall, the number of bug reports has dropped significantly since I moved away from GitHub.)

Jesus christ, America. 🫤

Trying to learn this on double bass now:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCcf7GeBq-M

Too bad my electric double bass will never sound as majestic as an acoustic one.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Oh, absolutely. Doing crazy stuff is fun every now and then, but there’s no need to be masochistic. 😆

@prologic@twtxt.net What’s the offending commit according to your bisect?

Speaking of programming languages, I’m so glad that I’ve spent so much time doing C and a little bit of Assembler over the years. It’s the perfect foundation for my recently acquired retrocomputing hobby. 😅 You can target basically any platform with C – DOS, OS/2, Windows NT, UNIX, … Had I gone all-in on Java (as University and employers nudged me to in the mid-2000’s), I probably wouldn’t have this skill set now. 🤔

@prologic@twtxt.net Yeah, I’ve seen this for a while now. 🤔

@prologic@twtxt.net Rust just isn’t the best tool for every job, even though that’s what the “cult” around it wants to make you believe.

I’m surprised that the article doesn’t talk about the ecosystem and the large number of dependencies that you usually pull in. 🤔 Maybe the author is already used to that.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org

Yeah, we’re quite lucky with this very, very wet summer this year.

… unless you’re living in one of those areas with severe weather: https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/unwetter-sturm-hagel-100.html 😅😱

We had some lovely 15°C this morning, too. Now at 20°C. Let’s hope it stays that way for a while.