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Joined 2 months ago
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Cake day: March 30th, 2025

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  • In general I disagree, often you can’t read it it’s satire, trolling or someone being serious, there are weird people and also bots on the internet.

    However this piece was pretty clear satire, if you read far enough (probably I would have stopped in the middle and downvoted this crap if it was not marked).

    The “ChatGPT showed me a new sorting algorithm” part really does make it pretty obvious to anyone with dev background that this is not serious.


  • we do cross platform stuff and I’m 99% of the time working on Linux, now I have to do some .NET core C# coding, was frustrated first with the language support on Linux - until I tried Rider. If I’ll have to do more C# going forward I’ll consider asking my employer to buy me a Rider license. The alternative would probably be me booting to Windows for that project (which I absolutely hate doing and only rarely have to)


  • I think about Reddit-style platforms being the centralized bulletin boards and forums of these days, and Lemmy is closest we have to a DIY kind of thing which is controlled by the community.

    Back in the day only a sufficiently tech savvy person could set up and run a forum software. Now everyone can do it, and with the Fediverse it’s all nicely interconnected, interoperable and truly free and open.

    In general the Fediverse is the best shot we got right now to get back to the non-corporate Internet of my childhood and youth, I really hope it will succeed. And succeeding does not mean that it must grow and outcompete the commercial offerings, I think success is if enough motivated and interesting people join and participate. Quality > quantity.


  • I did that for 3 years. Funny how it seems to be a universal experience. Confirms to me how it’s pretty much the same, regardless of project, funding or scientific area.

    For me it was a bit heartbreaking to see, because I loved the idea of writing software for research. But the reality was that academia simply does not have the right structures to support serious and sustainable software development and until that changes, it feels more like a thankless “bullshit job”.

    You simply can’t run software development in such a opportunistic and chaotic way like scientists do their research and write papers.


  • Nice! That also needs some reasonably good management to see your skills and talents.

    Can totally see why you might not like roles “above”. There’s always some point where you stop solving the kind of problems you find interesting and have more bullshit to fight than it would be worth.

    Like my team lead wisely said, “never become a team lead”, and I’m absolutely not interested, seeing all the crap he has to out up with, manage and firefight (I’m happy he does it while I can stay pretty relaxed and keep doing all the fun stuff).



  • My last job was: PowerPoint presentation and poster designer, educator, communicator and mind reader.

    Tried to be software developer in science, turns out that I had to spend much more time promoting whatever little coding I do to interested parties, and creating software based on guesses what they could need and what the right thing probably should be.

    It was a mess, for many reasons.

    Now I’m an actual software architect and engineer.

    As a metaphor, somewhere between apprentice dark magician (when sprinkling in some fancy things not many others would be able to do), gardener (need to clean up a lot of weeds, tidy up and revitalize the decomposing codebase, trim some rotten code branches) and strategist (when conceptually working on the mid and long-term planning and high level goals).





  • That sucks, but you can put some isolation tape on LEDs.

    But I wish something horrible to those who thought it’s a great idea to make every goddamn electronic device make beeping noises.

    My water boiler, fan, washing machine. In my childhood I don’t remember everything beeping at every interaction. It makes me furious and you often cannot fully disable it.

    Once I tried to solder the beeper out but my soldering iron was probably not suitable so I failed :(


  • A truly free society maximizes relative freedom for as many as possible, not absolute freedom for some at the cost of freedom of others.

    And yes, this is exactly the line drawn by the paradox of tolerance.

    The difference between left and right wing, non - economically, is still about distribution of power. But not only monetary power, but also the power granted by the positive and negative freedoms we have in a social system. Only that in our societies, freedom and wealth are heavily entangled, and increasingly so.



  • How is that useful to OP who asked for something “without terminals”? Unless that was a joke.

    Because I’ve been using Arch Linux for 15 years and live in the terminal, but even though I like the idea of NixOS, it’s not only scary because it is alien and I have neither motivation nor enough free time to learn a parallel world and gain non-transferable skills for a niche solution. And that with being interested in what NixOS is doing.

    I would say it is horrible advice to a novice, unless you want to scare people away from learning terminals and configs and managing an operating system without GUI tools.


  • Yep 100% agree, and it’s not just the US. I don’t want to even say that this is necessarily some kind of capitalist-fascist conscious conspiracy (in the early stages), but in a capitalist society there always is the push to strip the state to the minimum, lower taxes, privatize infrastructure and well, stripping education to the minimum needed to produce workers that perform just well enough for “the market” so they are not too qualified and do not have to be paid too much and are quickly and cheaply available.

    Instead of focusing on developing well rounded human beings, education is reduced to a factory of cheap labor. With that comes the intellectual decline. German public schooling is facing a growing crisis as well and soon will get to the abysmal level of what one hears about the US.

    Well and if you do that for a generation or two, society is too dumb to vote in their own interests or see through bullshit (which requires a certain foundation with respect to natural and social sciences). And NOW you have opened the door to the really bad actors who abuse the shit out of the weakened society. Which is the point where we are now.

    And here we go, we got political from an initially non political discussion… Well, I guess there is some truth to the saying that everything is political, and right now it looks like most of the big problems have the same political cause.



  • Well I mostly never used any kind of social media for political things until very recently. Just read news on the respective newspaper websites. Maybe that did the trick.

    And just wow. Yeah well, some people are just always trying to pick up a useless tribal fight or stir up some drama, or just mess with others i.e. troll…

    That’s why good mods are worth their weight in gold.

    Just check a sub like /r/askhistorians, they might sometimes appear harsh but they managed to keep that place true to its vision and purpose (accepting only high quality responses by people who know what they are talking about). But sure, that is rather the exception.


  • Compared to say the Meta networks, reddit always felt to me like a platform where I can still control what I see. The feed is only filled by stuff I actively chose to subscribe to.

    Sure it is a part of the problem - it’s the reason I joined Lemmy. And I wonder how long it will take to become the same kind of wasteland of trash. Not sure that the “smaller community and less viral incentives” approach will be enough to keep it more civil than the “offers” by the commercial attention economy.

    Just as a reminder, before the internet was privatized, people were on self hosted forums. Some were good places and some were toxic shit holes. Really depends more on the moderation and community than anything else if you ask me.

    That said, surely I am distrusting any platform owned by some oligarch to have policy in the interest of the user base.


  • Okay wow, thanks for the clarification. That is indeed weird. Yeah, then I guess I agree, it’s really … Just not very healthy behavior.

    Okay I mean for some people maybe this whole Internet thing, becomes too much an end in itself, maybe they are missing something in life and trying to get it that way.

    If you are employed, have family and/or friends and a hobby or two, how do you even have the time to mod dozens of subs and stuff like that?

    So if they are doing it while being nice, one can actually say they could need some empathy. If they are not being nice, well, for such cases it might explain why the other things in life might be lacking.