• 12 Posts
  • 195 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • I think Mastodon is heavily “following” based. I mean you need to find people to follow. I think you can even follow hashtags, which is pretty neat. So lookup if your favorite content creators may have a Mastodon account and follow them. And make sure to enable or disable the “world” view and not just looking at your own feed, if you don’t have much yet. Just some random thoughts. If you are already familiar with this, then apology.

    As for the Matrix collaboration, I didn’t think about this working between Lemmy and Matrix. But it make sense. Because there is also some sort of “bridge” setup you can do between Matrix to Discord. I’m not much familiar with that, just read about it.

    All of this is neat. But its biggest strength is also its biggest weakness: Being not centralized. It’s kinda like on Linux (and I don’t mean the distributions only). I just wish the entire Fediverse would already cooperate. The lack of a centralized place that has all instances and technologies that are based on Fediverse (Mastodon, Lemmy, video platforms and so on) is a huge missed oppurnity.

    Even Instagram, a technology not even based on Mastodon or Fediverse, can cooperate with Mastodon. I never used Instagram, so not sure how this looks in reality. But I thought its worth mentioning here.


  • “Dualbooting” is a nice analogy, haha. No, I switched completely over from the previous main ones: No Reddit and no Twitter. But I still use dedicated forums for specific topics/software, such as a Romhacking (retro game modding) community or RetroArch forum. Unfortunately not everyone is on Lemmy (or Mastodon, but I stopped using Mastodon too). So for me it is Lemmy/Beehaw and a few standalone forums.

    Wait I also started using Discord from time to time, but dislike this as a main application. There is an alternative called “Matrix”, which is similar to what Lemmy and Mastodon are respective to their technology. But its not that widespread, so stopped using it too. Maybe will comeback to it. I know there is BlueSky, which is a main competitor to Mastodon. Just didn’t have enough interested into it yet, as there is Mastodon already.

    • Reddit <> Lemmy and Kbin
    • Twitter <> Mastodon
    • Discord <> Matrix

    (I’m sorry if I’m the 100th person to ask this on here…)

    Fine with me, as I didn’t saw any of the 99th person asking this before.


  • But there is context to it:

    The report on Product Security Bad Practices warns software manufacturers about developing “new product lines for use in **service of critical infrastructure or [national critical functions] **NCFs in a memory-unsafe language (eg, C or C++) where there are readily available alternative memory-safe languages that could be used is dangerous and significantly elevates risk to national security, national economic security, and national public health and safety.”

    It’s for new products that are very important to critical infrastructure and need to be safe as possible. The article writer seem not to be aware of this context:

    Take Rust in Linux, for example. Even with support from Linux’s creator, Linus Torvalds, Rust is moving into Linux at a snail’s pace.

    Because Linux is the biggest software in the entire world and they do lot of stuff their own way. Rust is integrated slowly for future new projects. It makes sense to move in snail pace. The government doesn’t suggest the Linux project to stop using C entirely. The government “recommends” to start new projects in memory safe languages, if it is a critical software. That makes sense to me.

    You see, people who’ve spent years and sometimes decades mastering C don’t want to master the very different Rust. They don’t see the point.

    No, totally wrong. C programmers in Linux do not NEED to learn or master Rust. They just need to cooperate. The problem is, that some C programmers refuse to cooperate with Rust. They just want Rust to disappear. That has nothing to do with mastering the language. They refuse to make changes to their C code, so it can cooperate with Rust code via bindings.

    After all, they can write memory-safe code in C, so why can’t you?

    Nonsense argument, and false too. If that was the case, why do we have memory safe languages? Clearly people make mistake, old and new. Besides Linux is not the only software in the world.

    Converting existing large codebases to memory-safe languages can be an enormous undertaking.

    Nobody says old code should be rewritten in Rust. Neither the government, nor the Rust programmers in Linux suggest that. It’s not about rewriting code in memory-safe languages, its about new projects.

    Either this article is a misrepresentation or misunderstanding. Or I misunderstand the article or government. I don’t know anymore…








  • There is an issue, though: Intel disabled AVX-512 for its Core 12th, 13th, and 14th Generations of Core processors, leaving owners of these CPUs without them. On the other hand, AMD’s Ryzen 9000-series CPUs feature a fully-enabled AVX-512 FPU so the owners of these processors can take advantage of the FFmpeg achievement.

    Intel can’t stop the L.

    As for the claims and benchmarking, we need to see how much it actually improves. Because the 94x performance boost is compared to baseline when no AVX or SIMD is used (if I understand the blog post correctly). So I wonder how much the handwritten AVX-512 assembler code improves over an AVX-512 code written in C (or Rust maybe?). The exact hardware used to benchmark this is not disclosed either, unfortunately.


  • Edit: My bad English. I tried to rephrase this reply.

    But the blog post is 2 years old and not part of the application. Since then new users started using the app. Most people don’t read blog posts, if nothing big changes. Was there never a popup message, in example after a regular update, to inform about upcoming huge changes? So that people do not get surprised. The app description should have this information very clear and prominently on the top. No current user should be in a position that the app changes like this.





  • it depends. Its not like every user and question requires a new account. There was a time where these companies had a Reddit group instead Discord. Its the same effort to create an account one time, but then it can be reused. Also there is this login with existing accounts (like Google or other methods), as a secondary option.

    If we are speaking about a dedicated forum, that’s another thing. But since I gave up Reddit and because Fediverse is small, I started back creating accounts for forums. But only if really want to be part of it. But yes, agreed this is not convenient and Discord has a plus point here. Also Discord is integrated in other services as well (I think on game consoles, not sure).

    I see its pros and cons and why its successful. Also there is no better alternative for what it does. I’m just critical about the negative impact of it. I’m so glad that StackOverflow is not close like Discord.


  • Also for people its often an embarrassment to ask certain questions, because they think its a stupid question. In a forum, everyone can see it and comeback years later (which is a good thing btw, but for some embarrassing). A chat is forgets much quicker and better.

    I think asking niche questions in a forum is very helpful too, otherwise you will only find common questions. Actually the niche questions answered and maybe corrected over time is very useful in forums. Because in a chat often niche questions requires the right person to be in the right group at the right time.



  • Linus Torvalds has been sold out to big tech companies like Google and Microsoft.

    Starts with such a banger…

    He himself is a billionaire and no longer writes any code.

    Is he though? Even if he is, didn’t he deserve it more than any other billionaire. Linux is FOSS after all and changed the world and IT dramatically. The money from Linux isn’t in his hand, but in the hands of Linux Foundation as far as I know. Linus didn’t make much money from Linux. Otherwise where is the evidence for this claim? I’m not against any evidence, I’m just against spreading false information. Also he does a lot still and maintains the project with lot of other people.

    Many people, including myself, are very unhappy with his decisions, like the removal of several Russian developers from kernel maintainership status.

    Ah, its about that. So anything else is not the real reason, its about the politics. I don’t know if this is justified or not, as I don’t know much about this situation.

    Reading further its also the person is unhappy that C++ is not in the Kernel (but Rust got). I’m glad that people take matters in their own hand and fork if they are unhappy (regardless of any reason), but what is the point of this fork other than just being a fork? I wish that person or group good luck.


  • I don’t think that there is such company trying to destroy FOSS. To me its more likely that people get annoyed that companies use Open Source without paying any money to the developers who maintain it. And there are lot of places trying to integrate a way to pay for Open Source software. And I’m all for it! But it needs to be confronted upfront, maybe part of the license if that is what they want. Not like a patent troll does with after usage.

    I understand why its annoying, but why licensing it this way then? It was part of the contract letting them use without requiring any payment. Also developers are not responsible for any damage the code does, as they weren’t paid at all. They are not responsible to do any work.

    If this goes on, then many companies might start abandoning Open Source. Because if people start shaming them and asking to pay for something they never signed up, it could harm the FOSS world. There will be people who are not happy with the low payment and want more, because others get more too. Then fake devs jump in to steal Open Source (forking and rebranding) to just shame companies and require payment too.