Python is the only programming language that has forced me to question what the difference is between an egg and a wheel.

The two apps are identical and built from the same codebase anyway. K-9 is just a branding asset swap.

I’ve seen conflicting info from Thunderbird devs on how long they actually intend to keep both branding packages active. I’ve heard no longer than a year. I’ve heard only as long as it takes to get Thunderbird out of beta. I’ve heard they have some sort of agreement with FDroid that obligates them to keep it listed for some minimum duration of time (???). I’ve most recently heard indefinitely, because their build script is just a toggle now and it costs them nothing. Which one do I believe? I have no idea. I doubt K-9 will be kept around in perpetuity, though.

Aww… That Marnie cover is one-of-a-kind.

Pity. It’s far and away the nicest one I’ve seen.

I love cats. Other peoples’ cats.

I will never own my own cat because I don’t want to accept the burden of responsibility that responsible pet ownership demands.

Art supplies were historically not cheap. If you wanted to do this for a living, you were probably needing to aim for selling your art to the rich upper class. That implicitly meant catering to their fickle tastes and working on commission. You didn’t make art for you and find your audience later, you made art for the customers you had or you starved.

And to put it bluntly, realism wasn’t the fashionable hotness for most of human history. The more “crude” styles you may think of as objectively inferior to and less technically impressive as realism were in fact the styles in demand at their respective times. Fashion existed in ancient and medeival times just like it does today, and those styles were the fashion.

The idea of the independent eccentric artist who lives secluded in their ideas cave producing masterpieces for no one in particular leaving the world in awe at their genius every time they come out with something to show is a very modern concept. If any artist wanted to make a realism painting in an era where it was not popular, they’d be doing it purely for themselves at their own expense. So virtually no one did. Or if they did, their works largely didn’t survive.

Beams? Of course not.

Beans? Absolutely.

It’s “I am working” not “I be working”.

From how it’s used and understood, it’s a lot closer to, “I am in a situation where I find myself working from time to time”. “I am working” suggests you’re doing it right now, “I be working” does not. This example is a unique, condensed way to convey a very specific idea that your idea of “proper English” cannot convey without a boatload of extra words.

If that’s still bothersome to you, well, I guess have fun kicking that proverbial land-crawling fish back into the sea if that’s where you get your jollies. IMO some prescriptivism is okay to get people on the same page, but the moment you use it as a cudgel to beat people who are very clearly already being understood, you’re being a prude.

I’ve heard this one phrased: “Newbs deserve a helping hand. Noobs deserve a kicking.”

What else would your mom call you when she’s pissed off?

I don’t think the existence of large instances is in itself strictly antithetical to decentralization. The network effect makes them inevitable.

The power in the fediverse is everyone has a standard toolset to interact with the entire fediverse. Most people won’t, and that’s okay. The important thing is that, should larger communities become too oppresive as they gentrify, replacing them is a cheap decision, as you and everyone like-minded with you can squad up and leave at any time and lose nothing as the standard tooling of the platform facilitates that migration. You have mobility in the fediverse, and that permits choice to those who seek it.

This will stop being true once the larger instances start augmenting their experiences with proprietary nonsense. Features that only work there, that you can invest into and become dependant on, that you’d have to give up if you leave.

The day that happens will be the day that chunk of the Fediverse dies. Or, well, it won’t die, it will probably flourish and do very well. But it won’t be the Fediverse anymore. It will just be another knee-high-fence-gated community, that happens to run on Fediverse tech.

For anyone who was using K-9 wondering why Thunderbird looks no different, it’s because they aren’t different.

They build both apps from the exact same codebase. Only difference between the two are the default color scheme, the branding icons, and the text strings of the application’s name. It’s literally just a choice of which brand skin you prefer.

Which, honestly, kinda cool. A virtually zero-cost way to keep a few K-9 stans happy.

If adblockers would allow ads that adhere to the acceptable ads criteria, the world would be a better place. Less paywals, less ads and maybe some companies would pay their employees a little bit more.

I disagree. The system may have began in earnest goodwill, but financial incentive inevitably erodes goodwill. ABP becomes incentivized to adapt its definition of “acceptable” based on potential revenues they stand to gain from increasingly persuasive advertisers. Your vision of a better world under this system is at best temporary.

The alternative model, simply paying for goods and services directly, is a far more robust solution.

It’s also part of what makes FOSS niche.

I recognize three kinds of comments that have different purposes.

The first kind are doc block comments. These are the ones that appear above functions, classes, class properties, methods. They usually have a distinct syntax with tags, like:

/*
 * A one-line description of this function's job.
 *
 * Extra details that get more specific about how to use this function correctly, if needed.
 *
 * @param {Type} param1
 * @param {Type} param2
 * returns {Type}
 */
function aFunctionThatDoesAThing(param1, param2) {
    // ...
}

The primary thing this is used for is automatic documentation generators. You run a program that scans your codebase, looks for these special comments, and automatically builds a set of documentation that you could, say, publish directly to a website. IDEs can also use them for tooltip popups. Generally, you want to write these like the reader won’t have the actual code to read. Because they might not!

The second kind is standalone comments. They take up one or more lines all to themselves. I look at these like warning signs. When there’s something about the upcoming chunk of code that doesn’t tell the whole story obviously by itself. Perhaps something like:

/* The following code is written in a weird way on purpose.
I tried doing <obvious way>, but it causes a weird bug.
Please do not refactor it, it will break. */

Sometimes it’s tempting to use a standalone comment to explain what dense, hard-to-read code is doing. But ideally, you’d want to shunt it off to a function named what it does instead, with a descriptive doc comment if you can’t cram it all into a short name. Alternatively, rewrite the code to be less confusing. If you literally need the chunk of code to be in its confusing form, because a less confusing way doesn’t exist or doesn’t work, then this kind of comment explaining why is warranted.

The last kind are inline comments. More or less the same use case as above, the only difference being they appear on the same line as code, usually at the very end of the line:

dozen = 12 + 1; // one extra for the baker!

In my opinion, these comments have the least reason to exist. Needing one tends to be a signal of a code smell, where the real answer is just rewriting the code to be clearer. They’re also a bit harder to spot, being shoved at the ends of lines. Especially true if you don’t enforce maximum line length rules in your codebase. But that’s mostly personal preference.

There’s technically a fourth kind of comment: commented-out code. Where you select a chunk of code and convert it to a comment to “soft-delete” it, just in case you may want it later. I highly recommend against this. This is what version control software like Git is for. If you need it again, just roll back to it. Don’t leave it to rot in your codebase taking up space in your editor and being an eyesore.

why is there no replacement for x11 forwarding over ssh??

There kind of is. The project you’re looking for is waypipe.

Knowing how these things tend to go, I predict you’ll try to use it for your use case and it just won’t work for whatever stupid reason. But I successfully used it to tunnel an app from my Debian machine at home to a Windows machine under WSL.

As a fanart hoarder, the number of great artists I know of who seem to exclusively post their work on Twitter, a completely unsearchable platform that lossy compresses anything you upload to it and makes it a pain in the dick to get highest quality downloads, as opposed to a browsable upload platform like deviantArt, Pixiv, or Tumblr, infuriates me.

I think I know why a lot of them do it, too. To them, their work is intentionally ephemeral. They want to draw a thing, release it to the world, be admired for a day, and let it fade away into the aether. They don’t want a browseable archive of their past work. Art they draw is disposable. Twitter is the best platform for this, as everything on Twitter is naturally consumed this way. That, and its audience is way larger than any of the other platforms I mentioned, so they get more eyes on their work.

Yeah, an archive exists on Twitter, but unless you want to scroll scroll scroll through every single tweet they’ve ever made in reverse chronological order, you’re never going to find what you’re looking for without some kind of external indexing tool. All of this before Elon bought it and further enshittified it within an inch of its life. You can’t even browse posts without being logged in anymore.

Fellow tattooless here. Uh, neither?

I simply don’t see the appeal of putting on something I can’t easily take off if I wanted to, for its own sake. Yeah, tattoos aren’t permanent, a removal process exists. But they cost money and require an appointment to be rid of, on top of the investment of time, money, and pain to buy in. The barrier to entry and the barrier to exit are both too high for my liking.

Ideally you get a tattoo and enjoy it for life. I can’t commit to that kind of decision. Not for a funny body picture. If I need a memento to cherish memory of a thing or event I’ll get a tchotchke or something.

I have no complaints about others’ tattoos. They’re more often than not incredible works of art.

There are exactly three kinds of manpages:

1. Way too detailed
2. Not nearly detailed enough
3. There is no manpage

I will take 1 any day over 2 or 3. Sometimes I even need 1, so I’m grateful for them.

But holy goddamn is it awful when I just want to use a command for aguably its most common use case and the flag or option for that is lost in a crowd of 30 other switches or buried under some modal subcommand. grep helps if you already know the switch, which isn’t always.

You could argue commands like this don’t have “arguably most common usecases”, so manpages should be completely neutral on singling out examples. But I think the existence of tl;dr is the counterargument.

Tangent complaint: I thought the Unix philosophy was “do one thing, and do it well”? Why then do so many of these shell commands have a billion options? Mostly /s but sometimes it’s flustering.

Acid rain is real. So is quicksand. Either of them being common and severe hazards experienced across the entire US (and maybe elsewhere, I don’t know what the rest of you were taught in gradeschool), not really.

Real acid rain causes mass ecological damage through relatively subtle increases in acidity over several exposures. The way we learned about it in school, whether they meant to or not, came across like concentrated hydrochloric acid was going to rain from the skies and melt human flesh on contact.

Don’t forget how to put yourself out if you spontaneously combust, and acid rain.