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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Do not declare your undying love for someone. It puts way too much pressure on, and unless they’re in exactly the same mental place it’s unlikely to go anywhere.

    Instead, just ask them if they’d like to go on a date. That obviously communicates that you’re interested in them, and gives a good starting point to build a connection.



  • You can update your version of Fedora through the updater software as well but it’s a very clear separate process that is initiated manually.

    Distro version updates bring major updates to key packages - the one you’d notice most would be to Gnome, the desktop environment. There will be other things too that get only bugfix and security updates during the life of that version, and then after a while that version will lose support and you won’t get any updates at all (https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/releases/lifecycle/).

    Updating is very safe and reliable. I’ve had my Fedora install at work for 3 years, updating periodically and it’s working extremely well.





  • One more note on learning Rust: what Rust does is front-load the pain. If you write something in another low-level “direct control of memory” language you can often get something going much more easily than Rust because you don’t have to “fight the borrow checker” - it’ll just let you do what you want. In Rust, you need to learn how all the ownership stuff works and what types to use to keep the compiler happy.

    But then as your project grows, or does a more unusual thing, or is just handed over to someone who didn’t know the original design idea, Rust begins to shine more and more. Your C/C++/whatever program might start randomly crashing because there’s a case where your pointer arithmetic doesn’t work, or it has a security hole because it’s possible to make a buffer overrun. But in Rust, the compiler has already made you prove that none of that is possible in your program.

    So you pay a cost at the start (both at the start of learning, and at the start of getting your program going) but then over time Rust gives you a good return on that investment.


  • Context: I am an embedded software engineer. I write a lot of low level code that runs on microprocessors or in OS kernels, as well as networking applications and other things. I write a lot of C, I write some Rust, I write Elixir if I possibly can, I write a lot of Python (I hate C++ with a passion).

    I don’t think you want Rust. Python is unbeatable on “idea to deployment” speed. Python’s downsides:

    • Painful packaging/distribution if you want to get a load of people who don’t have Python installed to run your thing (e.g the GUI program we currently maintain for talking to our hardware)
    • Performance under some circumstances. There are some things that are not quick in Python. They’re not always the things you expect because Python actually drops down to C modules for a lot of the number crunching that you might do. E.g. for ML you are basically using Python to plug a load of bits of fast C code together

    Rust is good when you need at least one of:

    • High speed
    • Control over use of memory
    • Low level systems programming (drivers etc.)
    • Can’t cope with a Garbage Collector
    • Compiling to a microcontroller

    If you’re doing one of those and so have become expert in Rust, then it is actually excellent for a lot of other things. E.g. you might build your data processor in it, and then distribution is easy because it’s just a single binary.

    One option you might look at is Go. You get a lot of performance, you get good parallelism if you need it, it’s designed to be easy to learn, and it also compiles programs to a single binary for easy distribution.







  • I think we need to separate the system from the product. With Reddit they’re the same, with a single owner. With Lemmy/ActivityPub, just like with email, there’s an underlying system that nobody owns. It’s an ecosystem of pieces created by lots of different people.

    It is a good thing that people are building products on top of that. Some of them are FOSS and some of them not. As long as no-one gets too much control of the underlying system then that’s great! Users retain choice and can choose FOSS apps if they want, or they can choose something like Sync.

    I agree it would be sad if the only apps were paid, but I think a mix is a sign of a healthy ecosystem.