Alt account of @Badabinski

Just a sweaty nerd interested in software, home automation, emotional issues, and polite discourse about all of the above.

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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2024

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  • I also 100% agree with you. My work has a developer productivity team that tries to make sure we have access to good tools, and those folks have been all over AI like flies on shit lately. I’ve started to feel a bit like a crazy Luddite because I do not feel like Copilot increases my productivity. I’m spending like 90% of my time reading docs, debugging and exploring fucked up edge cases, or staring off into space while contemplating if I’m about to introduce some godawful race condition between two disparate systems running in kubernetes or something. Senior developers usually do shit that would take hours to properly summarize for a language model.

    And yeah, if I have to write a shitload boilerplate then I’m writing bad code and probably need to add or fix abstraction. Worst case, there’s always vim macros or a quick shell oneliner to generate that shit. The barrier to progress is useful because it warns me that I’m being a dummy. I don’t want to get rid of that when the only benefit is that I get to context switch between code review mode and system synthesis mode.




  • The unit is AQI (short for Air Quality Index). In the USA, AQI is the maximum value of a function run against measurements made over time for (any or all of) PM2.5, PM10, O3, SO2, and NOx. AQI is widely used, but the specific definition of air quality varies regionally. If some country or city has terrible levels of something other than what I mentioned earlier, it wouldn’t make sense to use the same scale that the USA uses.

    It’s useful for us asthmatics because shit in the air is shit in the air. If I were especially sensitive to a particular chemical then I might need to dive into a specific AQI for just that chemical, or look at the actual metrics used to compute the AQI and adjust my air filtering needs accordingly.

    EDIT: This is, quite frankly, a shit explanation. The Wikipedia article I linked has a great breakdown of how the AQI is calculated in various countries. I’d definitely recommend checking it out if you’re curious.



  • Badabinski@kbin.earthtomemes@lemmy.worldIF IT'S THE LAST THING I DO!
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    3 months ago

    I’m just some idiot on the internet, but please, put a disclaimer of some sort on this. Polymer fume fever is shitty for people and absolutely hideously lethal for birds. I dunno what the LC50 is for birds, but anecdotally, a bird anywhere in the same building has a nonzero chance of dying. Birds in the same room will die. God knows what all those horrible fluorinated fumes will do to people over the long term, but they make you really sick in the short term.

    Trolling can be funny, but not when it’s encouraging people to do actively hazardous stuff.



  • The issue is that browsers don’t release much memory back to the system when it’s needed. I wish they’d work more like the Linux kernel’s VFS caching later, but they don’t (and might not be able to. For example, I do don’t think the Linux kernel has good APIs for such a use case).


  • Badabinski@kbin.earthto196@lemmy.blahaj.zonefirefox rule
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    3 months ago

    The issue is that browsers don’t release much memory back to the system when it’s needed. I wish they’d work more like the Linux kernel’s VFS caching later, but they don’t (and might not be able to. For example, I do don’t think the Linux kernel has good APIs for such a use case).


  • The problem is that the extra RAM used by a browser is held on an exclusive basis and so is not nicely reclaimable by the kernel. I love that Linux caches the shit out of files in RAM, it’s great. It’s also great that it can release that memory when I launch a chundering dumpster fire application that eats all of my RAM. If a browser had been holding that memory, then the godawful Linux OOM killer would have launched, halted all threads on the system, walked the entire process tree, and SIGKILLed something (probably not a browser tab) before letting everyone else resume.

    With the way memory is currently managed, a bloated browser is a liability. Cached state needs to be stored in something like a mmaped file so that the kernel can flush pages out of memory if someone else comes along with a malloc. Alternatively, there needs to be communication between a browser and a userspace OOM daemon. If the system started hitting a soft limit, then the browser could start unloading background shit more aggressively.

    Free memory is wasted memory, but so is memory that can’t be used for anything else when it’s needed.





  • As others have said, email is a great way to get the point across without getting into nerd shit. I just say something like this: “You know how you can have an email account with Microsoft and can send messages to an email account at Google? Lemmy is that, but instead of sending and receiving emails, you’re looking at, voting on, and leaving comments on posts like you would on Reddit.”

    I have had a 100% success rate with this analogy when the person I’m talking to knows what Reddit is. If they don’t know, then I don’t really bother explaining it since it’s likely outside of their interests. I’m not out proselytizing for the Fediverse, but it comes up on occasion (especially when I share a links to shitposts).


  • Ditto for tar and unrar, although I deal with .7z so infrequently that I have to look at the manual every time I use it.

    find’s fucked up argument handling really becomes a problem for me when I want to use it in a complex pipeline or when using the -exec flag. I’ve spent far less time debugging in those situations since switching to fd. I won’t yuck the yum of folks who are comfortable and like find, but I feel that we probably have more approachable alternatives for new users.


  • find is also just a fucking mess in terms of UX. The fact that the ordering of positional and optional arguments are so strongly tied to each other has always driven me fucking bonkers. Nowadays, I install fd everywhere I can and tell people to switch to it and never look back. locate is nice and all, but I always forget to update the db and I don’t want it populating in the background.

    tar doesn’t bug me as much, provided you use unix or GNU style options. tar xvf foo.tar is just icky and less readable than tar -xvf foo.tar. I will happily concede that it’s not very ergonomic though. I used to rely on things like dtrx (short for Do The Right eXtraction) because it was such a pain to remember the options for tar/unrar/unzip/7z.