Kurdistan will unfortunately get obliterated by Turkey now.

They have the entire city now, which never previously happened at the peak of the war

Russia only occupies the small region of its naval base. Iran does not really occupy any part, although they do seem to have great influence on the government.

Contrary to whats being thrown around, Russia’s support hasnt shrank much. The major change was Hezbollah, which had to retreat from its positions in Syria to support the front against israel.

Syrian here. It was never exactly wrapped up. The government had strong momentum supported by its allies, but upon reaching the last stretch of rebel stronghold, they mysteriously stopped back around 2017-ish. What seems to have happened is Russia making a deal with Turkey and agreeing to stop.

Those remaining rebels have now launched a new offensive against the samw government army, but it is weaker than ever and severely lacking of ally support.

I wish we had a nice tagging system (and I don’t think they should be hashtags) that was also in common use.

I want to be able to search any post related a certain topic, and sometimes, these may not always be in that topic’s community, because topics can overlap. For example, I might want to read posts about Ukraine war, but those might be in world news, US news, or combat footage communities. Could be a community about Ukraine in general, or Ukraine war specifically.

I also may not want to get it from a single Ukraine community. Maybe by finding posts with the “Ukraine war” tag, I’ll see several communities and join the one I want. But there needs to be a way to group them somehow.

Such a tag system may be useful for combined topics. For example, I may want to look for posts about music software. They might not be common in the music community, or software communities. But I could filter by both tags and find what I want.

If you’re using something like tor, and rotate on every single search, then that would be ideal.

I assume you’re not using tor. That means all your searches can still be linked to you via the network source (ip address, etc.). Google can also use your search patterns to fingerprint you.

It may be one of the better solutions, but there are certainly privacy implications

As someone who is not deep into type theory or functional programming, can you please explain why you mean by “ergonomic overloading”?

My understanding is that ocaml mitigates the need for type classes through its more advanced module system. So far I have been enjoying the use of OCaml modules, so I’m curious what exactly I’m missing out on, if any.

Thanks for taking the time to talk with me btw!

What are your thoughts on this comparison? https://github.com/sidkshatriya/me/blob/master/007-My-Thoughts-on-OCaml-vs-Haskell-Rust-2023.md

Tell us more about unison

I know double semicolons are a thing, but I’ve never had to use them. I forget what they’re for, but yeah it’s supposed to be an escape hatch for something that shouldn’t be happening iirc.

The curried snd uncurried functions… Maybe you are confusing with SML, because everything in ocaml is curried by default. Though admittedly the standard library could be more complete, but I personally am happy to use third party dependencies for less common things.

Its best to use a protocol that doesn’t allow unencrypted messages

This is an implementation thing and not a protocol thing. What protocol doesn’t allow unencrypted messages? I am sure signal’s protocol would still allow it, it’s just that the implementation doesn’t.

And same for XMPP. Just go with the implementation that doesn’t.

Sad I had to scroll to the end to see this.

Ocaml is brilliant and has the nicest type features. It’s almost like Haskell but more approachable imo.

Maybe because I’m not from an English speaking culture that I don’t see the far right stuff

People prefer centralization, and it makes sense. The Fediverse resolves most of the issues with decentralization, but so does centralization, which came way sooner, and arguably did it better.

Also, people seem to forget that Facebook was pretty cool back then. It had superior features, and was not the buggy mess it is today.

Unless you pay from the exchange’s wallet

I have read that it is faster, though I have not tested it myself. Personally, my initial reason to use it was just to try something new and explore the unix world. My reason for staying is that it is a very simple init system that is pleasant to work with. It made me understand what an init system is and use it a lot more.

Systemd is good if you just want something invisible and you do not want to mess too much with an init system unless you have to. Everything integrates with it

OpenRC is nicer if you want to write your own init scripts. It is very well documented also.

For #2,

For gaming, if you use steam, you may not face more than the following:

• game does not work with no well known way to resolve. You can find this out by checking protonDB
• game does not work because it needs to enable some options. Very easy to fix, and you can find the options on proton db for each game.
• does not work because you didn’t setup steam right. You often need to enable proton, which in short is steam’s emulator or windows
• does not work because your gpu drivers did not install. This depends on distro and they should all have a guide on how to do it, but usually it is just a matter of installing something.

For programming, you will love your life because everything programming is way easier on Linux.

For #1, I’ve made the realization that most distros are lightweight skins or addons on top of another distro. Most of the time, if you start with the base distro, all you have to do is install some apps, change some configurations, and suddenly you have that other distro. It is much easier than doing a reinstallation.

If you filter out all of these distros that only do a little on top of an existing, you’re left with a quite small number actually. I’d bet it’s less than 10 that are not super niche. Fedora, Arch, debian, gentoo, nixos are the big ones. There’s some niche ones, like void Linux and Alpine.

So I’d say if you try all of those, you don’t need to try any more 😁