I would vote for docker as well. The last time I had to inherit a system that ran on virtual machines, it was quite a pain to figure out how the software was installed, what was where in the file system, and where all the configuration was coming from. Replicating that setup took months of preparation.

By contrast, with Docker, all your setup is documented. The commands that were used to install our software into the virtual machines and were long gone are present right there in the Docker file. And building the code? An even bigger win for Docker. In the VM project, the build environment for the C++ portion of our codebase was configured by about a dozen environment variables, none of which were documented. If it were built in Docker, all the necessary environment variables would have been right there in the build environment. Not to mention the build commands themselves would be there too, whereas with VMs, we would often have developers build locally and then copy it into the VM, which was terrible for reproducibility and onboarding new developers.

That said, this all comes down to execution - a well-managed VM system can easily be much better than a poorly managed Docker system. But in general, I feel that Docker tends to be easier to work with than a VM. While Docker is far from flawless, there are a lot more things that can make life harder with VMs, at least from my experience.

Interesting! Sorry, I don’t know why I thought you were using swipe keyboards, it must have been stuck in my memory from reading other comments. I definitely agree that pressing the buttons was a little annoying, but manufacturers could probably make softer buttons if they were willing to put the money into developing them.

Anyway, I really miss the phone I had from about 2008-2010. It had two sliders that moved in orthogonal directions. One of the slide directions revealed a standard 12-button phone pad, while the other had a 4-row keyboard. And yet, I’m pretty sure it was under 1.5cm, so not too large. It was definitely easier to keep in my pocket than current phones!

If it weren’t for reading Lemmy/RSS feeds and a camera, I’d probably be going back to dumb phones for my next one…

But what’s the error rate? I could type at 200 words per minute (even on a phone!!) if I didn’t care about how many typos I was making. And swiping keyboards get confused incredibly easily. The error rates are especially bad when you’re writing words that only use a single row of keys - on QWERTY keyboards for example, try writing something like “type”, and you could get that, or you might get something else, like wipe/write/ripe. Other groups could include things like tip/top, pit/pot, wit/wire and the selected word will be wrong almost as frequently as it’s right. And autocorrect systems can’t really correct for things like when you mean to press enter and hit the backspace key instead. Plus, their suggestions are generally just very stupid. So while buttons take longer to press on physical keyboards, the reduced error rate makes typing speed about the same in my experience.

Plus, with physical buttons, you get tactile feedback, so you can tell when your fingers are slightly off and adjust them, whereas on a flat surface, you have no idea whether you pressed the correct button or not. You have to stare straight at the screen to make sure every press is correct, which is exhausting and bad for your eyesight. I feel a lot more eyestrain from simply typing on phones, whereas with physical buttons, I didn’t even have to look at the screen, and I could look at something else around me while typing. And don’t get me started on how many calls I’ve missed because I accidentally hit the hang-up button, or couldn’t find the accept call button - not a problem when you have physical buttons!

Regarding screen real estate, all you need is a slide-out keyboard. They work great!

There are a few downsides to physical keyboards, but in my experience, they’re far superior to non-keyboard devices. But what can you do - in the 21st century, practicality never matters, it’s just all about aesthetics and nothing else…

Don’t worry everyone, I’m here to help:

Mail

Garbage

Outlook

Hot Garbage

Outlook (new)

Shit-tier garbage

Glad to be of service! Until next time…

There is no way to make a network request faster than a function call.

Apologies in advance if this it too pedantic, but this isn’t necessarily true. If you’re talking about an operation call that takes ~seconds to run, then the network overhead is negligible. And if you need specialized hardware for it, then it definitely could be delegate it out to a separate machine over the network. Examples could include requiring a GPU, more RAM, or even a faster CPU if your main application is running on more power-efficient CPUs.

I’m not saying that this is true in every case - they are definitely niche cases. But I definitely wouldn’t say that network requests are never faster than local function calls.

Honey, check it out you got me mesmerized

With your black hair and fat-ass thighs

I only wish I could find someone someday who will think of such romantic things to say to me…

HO-TEL MO-TEL HOLLIDAY INN!!!

Same here. Sure, KDE and Gnome may have great Wayland support by now, but what about other DEs? The situation in XFCE seems to be pretty grim:

It is not clear yet which Xfce release will target a complete Xfce Wayland transition (or if such a transition will happen at all).

MATE seems to have piecemeal support. No idea what the status of LXDE/LXQT are. And there are plenty of other window managers that don’t have the manpower to support wayland either.

The deprecation of X is going to leave a lot of dead software in its wake.

I think this is a misrepresentation. What more can Linux really do to get companies like this on board? It already has pretty much all anyone would need to support the platform: GUI toolkits, graphics drivers, etc. As far as I can see, Linux provides all the same functionality that other platforms do to support this, and considering that plenty of other companies support Linux just fine (Zoom, Steam, WPS office, etc.), in my opinion, it’s unfair to point fingers and say Linux is bad because other actors pointedly ignore it.

Wow, these new TLDs are terrible! ICANN has really lost it this time!

Today we have chatbots. Yesterday we had search engines and stack overflow. Before that we had books. And before that? Well what do you know… software programming is a relatively novel field. It’s almost as if nobody has perfected how it should be learned.

The most valuable knowledge comes from experience. I copied plenty of code around during my learning days as well, and I still do it today. The most important part however is trying to understand the code you’re working with. If you can understand it, know when it fails, test it in the right way, etc., then sure, you could probably learn to code from chatbots. They provide the information, and you’re at liberty to do what you want with it. If you just copy it and forget, you’ll be a bad programmer. But it’s not like you couldn’t do that before either with the other sources that were available - there were plenty of bad programmers before we had these tools available too.

That said, there is a risk that these chatbots do not provide any useful context around the code that they produce. When you learned from a book or stack overflow, you were reading from a reasonably authoritative source that could explain the code that was produced. But the authority behind the code from chatbots is probably much weaker than what we have from stack overflow, which in turn was probably also weaker than what we have from books. Does it have an effect or learning? I have no clue. But I still think you can learn from chatbots if you use the output that they provide in the right way. (Disclaimer: I have never used one of them and have no experience with them.)

Basically, yeah. Dennis Ritchie wrote the C compiler because he knew exactly what her wanted to use it for and the kinds of code that he wanted to write. Then he went on to write the book that everyone used to learn the language.

This is true of probably every language, library, framework, etc. The original designer writes it because he knows what he wants to do with it and does so. Then everyone else follows. People then add more features and provide demonstrations of how to use them, and others copy them. It is extremely hard to just look at an API and use that to figure out exactly which calls should be made and in what order. Everyone just reads from the examples and adapts them as needed.

Yes. It’s my way of voting with my wallet. I already have a few nice headphones and I’m not replacing them just because phone manufacturers are cheap and lazy.

Besides, I hate batteries. They always die at the most inconvenient time. And USB-c just for audio is way overkill.