Probably relevant that most GNU projects have a limit to how big a change you can make without signing a copyright waiver. My guess is that the logic here is “if its small enough that a human doesn’t need to sign a waiver, it can be produced by an LLM”

Komrade Desktop Environment

Well now I’m nervous! My first instinct though is that the vast majority of Emacs packages are plain elisp, and Emacs users have a habit of cracking open and tinkering with their packages, so any malicious code ought to be spotted quickly.

With the native compiled modules however, it could be another story…

Not sure I like their definition of declarative. I’d instead say that a config is “declarative” if the result of applying that configuration is independent of the current state of the system.

MacOS

I had a go at using guix as a package manager on top of an existing distro (first an immutable fedora, which went terribly, then OpenSUSE). Gave up for a few reasons:

• As mentioned in the article, guix pull is sloow.
• Packages were very out of date, even Emacs. If I understand correctly, 30.1 was only added last month, despite having been available since February. I get that this isn’t the longest wait, but for the piece of software you can expect most guix users to be running, it doesn’t bode well.
• The project I was interested in trying out (Gypsum) had a completely broken manifest. Seems like it worked on the dev’s machine though, which made me concerned about how well guix profiles actually isolate Dev environments. This was probably an error on the dev’s part, but I’d argue such errors should be hard to make by design.

All in all I love the idea of guix, but I think it needs a bigger community behind it. Of course I’m part of the problem by walking away, but 🤷

Just about to head out for 3 nights on Dartmoor to celebrate the recent ruling in favour of wild camping. Makes me sad to read articles like this.

I think these stories are particularly worth bearing in mind when people say that British livestock is raised on marginal land that couldn’t grow crops. Even if that were largely true, it doesn’t mean we should shove a sheep on every square inch of land that can’t be ploughed.

The problem isn’t the reward for becoming an MP, it’s the cost of campaigning. Candidates are expected to put up £10-30k of their own money to contest a seat. Some spend considerably more.

Personally, I don’t think paying MPs more will do much harm, but it won’t fix any of the problems with the quality of the politicians we get.

Seems like a pretty fun language with an unfortunate amount of 90s baggage.

However, I firmly believe that trying to de-parenthesise lisp is a distraction. The main reason being that s-expressions make the beloved code=data concept very obvious.

A suitable editor makes it really easy to ignore the parens (until they’re useful, e.g. for navigation). When reading, the structure of the code is inferred from indentation and line breaks. Just like C.

I think the article said CVLR would be battery powered to eliminate the need for overhead cables. I’m not saying I believe it is worse than e.g. and electric bus. But even the company producing it seems to struggle to articulate its advantages.

The reason I care is because I really want more trams in English towns/cities. But not if it’s a pared down version that gives the entire concept a bad image

That’s kind of my concern. I’m worried they’re cutting so many corners that the competitive edge over busses all but vanishes and, best case scenario, this ends up being a bizarre PR campaign for public transit.

Whilst this is very cool, I’m a little concerned about how the pros for “very light rail” basically amount to having better vibes than busses. Not that I even disagree with that premise, but I’d want something more concrete…

If you’re able to easily migrate issues etc to a new instance, then you don’t need to worry about a particular service providers getting shitty. At which point your main concern is temporary outages.

Perhaps this is more of a concern for some projects (e.g. anything that angers Nintendo’s lawyers). But for most, I imagine that the added complexity of distributed p2p hosting would outweigh the upsides.

Not saying it’s a bad idea, in fact I like it a lot, but I can see why it’s not a high priority for most OSS devs

The project’s official repo should probably exist in a single location so that there is an authoritative version. At that point p2p is only necessary if traffic for the source code is getting too expensive for the project.

Personally I think the source hut model is closest to the ideal set up for OSS projects. Though I use Codeberg for my personal stuff because I’m cheap and lazy

I think it means client-server basically. You can host a server in “the cloud” then access a frontend to it via your browser.

Might also mean it has features relevant to debugging/deploying cloud services.

Cloud is often a BS marketing word, but I’m sure there’s ways to make it justifiable in this case. (Not that any of us has to like these features. I for once can’t stand the idea of having my editor run inside a browser…)

Be aware there are basically two different things called Owncloud. There’s still the original php version, which is similar to nextcloud but worse (not open source, smaller plugin ecosystem I think)

On the other hand is owncloud “infinite scale” (or ocis). This is the thing entirely written in go. But as others have pointed out, it’s little more than a file server at this point.

IMO the self-hosting community is really missing a self-contained “all the DAVs” server (files, calendar, contacts). Baikal etc seem like a great start, but it would be great to have somewhere to get those parts pre-assembled. Until then, nextcloud works for me.

Are there any new features in particular you’re hoping for?

For me, those two are the only things I can remember thinking it would be nice to have. Q

I use magit in Emacs in a similar sort of way. Bringing up the magit status page instantly presents a list of hunks I can browse and stage. When committing, there is also an option to “instant fixup” into an existing commit, which you can select interactively from the commit log.

The big downside is that, for backwards compatibility, the default must still be unsafe code. Ideally this could be toggled with a compiler flag, rather than having to wrap most code in “safe” blocks (like rust, but backwards).

One potential upside that people don’t seem to be discussing is that the safe subset could also be the place to finally start cutting down the bloat of C++. We could encourage most developers to write exclusively in the safe subset, and aim to make that the “much smaller and cleaner language” trying to get out of C++.

Thanks, for computing some useful statistics! As much as I believe the implied hypothesis that working at Amazon is bad for one’s health, I think the guardian intentionally tried to present the largest number possible with no context.

Frankly, “Amazon warehouse employees 10x more likely to need an ambulance” is a more impactful headline anyway.