danielquinn

danielquinn, 6 months ago

It’s literally one line of code to check the user agent. It’s probably not much more than that to set a value like owns_deck=True in the session based on the user profile.

Honestly, I doubt it has anything to do with the complexity. More likely it’s laziness or maybe it just never occurred to them.

danielquinn, 6 months ago (edited 6 months ago)

I think you’re making the classic mistake of “all users are like me”. I personally liked pretty much all of her proposed changes and agree with her that Steam’s current offering is a mess of disjointed design elements. I find the layout noisy, complicated, and hard to navigate, while her proposals all felt intuitive.

danielquinn, 6 months ago

How the hell did we get to the point that saying “maybe you should stop indiscriminately bombing the hell out of civilians” was at all controversial?

danielquinn, 6 months ago

This. The simplest path toward a sustainable economy is doing away with the externalisation of costs on products that’re killing us.

I can’t agree with you on those plant-based burgers though. In no way do they taste the same. If you tax the shit out of cow meat though, it’s likely that someone will be able to develop a better alternative.

danielquinn, 6 months ago

Yup. I’ve had a few versions of both Beyond Meat and Impossible burgers. They’re both better than what came before, but critically, I didn’t like them. They certainly weren’t comparable to actual cow.

…and I’m cool with that. Mass farming cows is killing us, so we need to drastically reduce that industry down to boutique level so that a “real” burger costs 5-10× what it does now. I just hope that we can do better than the current candidates. My personal hope is that the lab grown meat will be a fitting replacement.

danielquinn, 6 months ago

False. Carbon taxes aren’t a corporate penalty so much as a market manipulation tool. What you describe is precisely the expected behaviour.

Carbon prices raise the cost of things that are killing us to reduce their appeal in the market. We can then apply that revenue to less lethal alternatives to drive down their costs as well, doubling the positive effect on the market.

danielquinn, 6 months ago

I’m totally going to steal this for my networking talk this week.

danielquinn, 6 months ago

Yeah, the whole “you build it, you own it” thing sounds great until you’re neck deep in it.

danielquinn, 6 months ago

Thanks for sharing! I love most of his videos that I’ve seen, but I’d somehow missed this one.

danielquinn, 6 months ago

I was both surprised and impressed with Kdenlive.

danielquinn, 6 months ago

Wagtail (Python/Django based) is pretty good. One of its big strengths is that since it’s Django based, it’s easy to extend.

danielquinn, 6 months ago

This is really disappointing. I had hoped for a lot more representation for the AGPL and GPL.

danielquinn, 6 months ago (edited 6 months ago)

I’ve never heard of sub volumes. What do they do for me? Why not just partition the disk or store everything on the one partition?

danielquinn, 6 months ago

I never understand the whole thing around “fast” terminals. How can a terminal be “slow”? Surely the terminal you’re using has no effect on the programs you’re calling, so what’s being measured here?

danielquinn, 6 months ago

It doesn’t have to be environmentally damaging. Years ago there was a group called “valve turners” who just closed emergency shut off valves all over the place.

danielquinn, 6 months ago

Isn’t most of what’s in there just filters downloaded from the internet? Python packages, browser cache, etc? Your system confirms you to redownloading everything all the time, no?

danielquinn, 6 months ago

It’s fine if all you need/want is a Linuxy shell to work with, but if you actually want a proper Linux computer, with a DE that doesn’t suck, mapable keyboard shortcuts, no spyware, working workspaces, tools that do what you want rather than what Microsoft wants for you, etc., you’re going to be miserable.

danielquinn, 6 months ago

I’m really disappointed with the NDP. Their abandonment of the socialist platform and their shite environmental record in BC and Alberta were a slap in the face for those who have fought for them over the years.

They’re still a better choice than the Liberals or Conservatives, but I don’t think they really understand what they’ve given up by sabotaging their base as they have.

danielquinn, 6 months ago

Not sure why it should be. You’re innocent until proven guilty.

danielquinn, 7 months ago

I don’t know where you’re getting this idea.

The list of sources includes a bunch of notable progressive voices like Ricochet and Press Progress, while I couldn’t find a single right wing example (extreme or otherwise). Browsing the headlines on their front page, every last story I saw lacked any reference to hyperbole, and most of the stories took positions typically occupied by the Left.

danielquinn, 7 months ago

People shouted slogans and were charged… with what exactly?

danielquinn, 7 months ago

I still have every email I’ve ever received, going back now more than 20 years. My solution isn’t terribly fancy, but it gets the job done.

I have a Synology here at home running a mail server. You don’t need a Synology specifically, just a simple mail server with access to a lot of disk space. The server isn’t on the Open web or anything and doesn’t support SMTP. It’s just running IMAP to serve the local mail around the house.

I connect to it from Thunderbird on my various machines. I also use Thunderbird to connect to my actual mail servers to do my day-to-day mail stuff.

Every six months or so, I move old mail messages from my actual mail servers over to the archival one. Generally, I keep the mail on the archival server in folders; one per year, that keeps the loading time to a minimum. For example, come January 1st 2024, I’ll be moving mail from January 2023 - June 2023 to the /2023 folder on the archive.

Searching is done via Thunderbird just like you search any mail account, and on my desktop machine, I let Thunderbird keep copies of the mail locally for quick searching. On my laptop though, I ask it to not keep copies to save disk space.

danielquinn, 7 months ago (edited 7 months ago)

It’s actually not as crazy as you might think:

<span style="color:#323232;">$ du -sh .Maildir/
</span><span style="color:#323232;">13G	.Maildir/
</span>

That’s going back to 2000 1995, both sent & received. The first email I have in there is from a friend of mine offering to send me an MP3 she downloaded.

danielquinn, 7 months ago

In most cases, it’s everything. I’ve made mistakes over the years, screwing up a transfer or when migrating between servers, and I expect I probably lost some attachments here and there, but yeah, it’s everything.

danielquinn, 7 months ago (edited 7 months ago)

Wikipedia says it was 1991.

I think she would have gotten the file via hot… something, this little file sharing network that predates Napster.

Edit: It was probably Hotline, which was launched in '97, so there’s probably some corruption to the received email date somewhere. I wasn’t exactly tech savvy 25 years ago ;-)

danielquinn, 7 months ago (edited 7 months ago)

It’s an unpopular position, but I think you should vote for the party you believe will do the best job.

The problem with the “a vote for X is really a vote for Y” mentality is that Z then has no motivation to support your interests. More plainly, voting Democrat in the US may well keep Trump out, but Biden will have no reason to support a progressive agenda: he has your vote by default and he knows it.

The Democrats and other “centrist” parties lean on this tactic heavily because it means they never have to worry about doing anything difficult, like getting money out of politics, nationalising health care, or standing up to fossil fuel companies. It’s effectively how the Right captures the Left: just run a more extreme candidate on the Right.

The truth is that 3rd parties are incredibly powerful. Just look at UKIP here in the UK, or the NDP and Bloc Québéquois in Canada. They never win (nationally) but the major parties have to adopt their policies to keep voters from bleeding to these smaller parties. It’s why Canada is more progressive than the US, why every national project there has special exceptions for Québéc, and why the UK left the EU: none of these parties needed to “win” elections to accomplish their goals. Fear of losing votes to them was enough.

The Democrats could be more progressive. They could have run an actual socialist in the last election and won, but they opted for someone who wouldn’t really change anything. The only way they’ll ever run a change maker is if they think you and others like you might choose someone else.

danielquinn, 7 months ago

Why would the Democrats ever get rid of an electoral system that ensures that they only have to be “not Republican” to win?

danielquinn, 7 months ago

I like this idea, but it needs to be very broad, primarying key players that represent the old guard. If the people at the top don’t want a socialist to succeed, they’ll sabotage their campaigns.

An American example would be the way the Democrats undermined Sanders’ recent presidential run, or the way “the squad” is treated by the wider party.

A more damning example would be what the Labour party in the UK did to their own leader, Jeremy Corbyn: leaking lies to the press, disrupting funding for their own races, etc. The right wing of the UK’s “left” party basically sabotaged their own party’s campaign 'cause they couldn’t bear to let a socialist win. Now they have a new leader who (surprise surprise) supports nearly every Conservative policy.

danielquinn, 7 months ago

I don’t use the dock or a system tray really.

• Each app is opened on its own workspace and it’s always the same workspace. Slack on 1, Thunderbird on 2, Tilix on 3, IDE on 4, Firefox on 5, etc.
• Each workspace gets its own key mapping: Ctrl+F1 for 1, Ctrl+F5 for 5, etc. so switching is quick and easy with no mouse needed.
• To open a new program I just hit Win followed by the first 2 or 3 letters of the name and Enter.

I use the following extensions:

• Burn My Windows
• Pure Perfection
• Clipboard indicator (for clip history)
• System Monitor (to keep an eye on resource use)

danielquinn, 7 months ago

I use this chart when teaching Linux. I think it does a great job of showing Linux’s “bazaar” vs. Windows’ “cathedral”.

danielquinn, 7 months ago

Related: a website that lets you listen to radio stations all over the world just by spinning a globe around.

danielquinn, 7 months ago

This one worked for me.

danielquinn, 7 months ago

As far as I’ve seen, they don’t provide any advantage over a string with spaces, which doesn’t work well either when you’ve got values with spaces:

<span style="color:#323232;">not_what_you_think=( "a b" "c" "d" )
</span><span style="color:#323232;">for sneaky in ${not_what_you_think[@]}; do
</span><span style="color:#323232;">  echo "This is sneaky: ${sneaky}"
</span><span style="color:#323232;">done
</span>

<span style="color:#323232;">This is sneaky: a
</span><span style="color:#323232;">This is sneaky: b
</span><span style="color:#323232;">This is sneaky: c
</span><span style="color:#323232;">This is sneaky: d
</span>

danielquinn, 7 months ago

Aaaaah! Thank you kind stranger. It never would have occurred to me to quote an array!

danielquinn, 7 months ago

Yup, that looks like exactly what was done in Alpine:

<span style="color:#323232;">$ docker run --rm -it alpine ls -l /usr/bin/[[
</span><span style="color:#323232;">lrwxrwxrwx    1 root     root            12 Sep 28 11:18 /usr/bin/[[ -> /bin/busybox
</span>

So while the Ash itself doesn’t support the [[ extension, this work-around produces the same effect. Nifty.

danielquinn, 7 months ago

Huh. So the link is unnecessary and Ash supports [[ out of the box? Good to know, thanks!

danielquinn, 7 months ago

Immigrants don’t all become citizens. Many stay for a few years and move on, many more will acquire indefinite leave to remain and never go the extra mile for citizenship. Of those that become citizens (after years of living in Canada) and gain the right to vote, many tend to vote Conservative as they’re coming from more culturally conservative countries.

danielquinn, 7 months ago

Hear that kids? They made a vow. That’s like a double plus pinky swear. It’s definitely ok.

danielquinn, 7 months ago

Ni No Kuni II. It’s a fun RPG that’s easy to put down and come back to when you have time. The combat is fun too, though the voice overs are a bit distracting.

danielquinn, 7 months ago

To be fair, we were never “in this together”. We liked to say that a lot, but as with everything else under capitalism, the poor got fucked.

danielquinn, 8 months ago

I just watched every one of your videos. It’s an absolute crime that you have so few views.

danielquinn, 8 months ago

One red flag from that podcast:

When asked how they might deal with abuse of the service to distribute illegal files, he suggested that you could compare uploaded files to hashes of known files. This doesn’t make sense in a system where the server has no knowledge of the unencrypted file, since the same file encrypted with two different passwords will result in two different hashes.

danielquinn, 8 months ago

Sure, but then you’re trusting the client. I can always encrypt x and send along the hash for y.

danielquinn, 8 months ago

cough npm,yarn,grunt,esbuild,webpack,parcel,rollup,lasso,rollup,etc.,etc.cough

I’m not saying that Python’s packaging ecosystem isn’t complicated, but to paint JavaScript as anything other than nightmare fuel just isn’t right.

danielquinn, 8 months ago

Please post pictures!

danielquinn, 8 months ago

Very likely. If I write this thing, I’ll provide both options.