Dan Mack

I use two workstations. One has been alpine edge and the other has been arch. In both environments I keep them as my “front end” for development and never my development environment (except for the display server:window manager editor and the Linux distribution userland. Obviously alpine with its MUSL libc will flush out gnulibc only incompatibilities but barring one grub related upgrade footgun I have had only one outage in about 5 years of continuous use upgrades. Only depending on sway, emacs and podman to do builds works for me

Question for the X hivemind: I'm seriously considering switching my main machine from Pop!_OS (a reskinned Ubuntu) to Arch, probably CachyOS. The reason is I'm attracted to the rolling-release concept. Getting really tired of waiting 6 months for my development tools to upgrade after they ship. I understand the downside: Arch doesn't protect me from upstream breakage. The plan to deal with that is to install snapper so I can revert to an earlier, working version of my system if things go badly awry. If you think there are any reasons this is a really bad plan, tell me now.

@pmarca this made me think of how Hiro Protagonist was known in Snow Crash :-)

Ooh.

@_Felipe Compared to other macro and or pre-processor approaches, I think zig’s comptime is closer to optimal IMHO of course

I want Zig to gain mainstream adoption so we collectively learn how complex this gets if used extensively ASAP.

Same here. Gitlab-CE at home. Many companies run on-premise versions of it as well. It’s never been easier to host your own repository server which you can keep private and access it remotely using tailscale if you wish. There is also gitea, forgejo and cgit. Some cool kids have already moved to codeberg if you want a hosted service.

@abdimoalim_ I use GitLab. Because I'm allergic to Microsoft ownership, and this just turned out to be an intelligent policy.

In case nobody was aware, GitLab existed for a while and literally nobody uses it because it's complete garbage, even though everyone wants to migrate from GitHub.

@ibuildthecloud Have you tried using zig? Its tool chain can target Linux, MacOS and Windows pretty well under the right constraints

Trying to develop anything non-windows native on windows is such a frustrating and complicated process.

@CardilloSamuel I used mine to make a cocktail once

throwback to when i went to antartica, found a ~6000 years old icecube floating around a glacier, brought it back with me and drinked it still haven't made me able to become a resident evil actor.

#ubuntu 26.04 server on hyper-V with 12GB memory allocated runs out of memory about 10 minutes while idle. Not sure why yet.

@ibuildthecloud @googlemaps Google calendar spam/phishing/emails are also quite common nowadays

You gotta be kidding me. Google Maps has an open redirect URL? I just got this phishing link. What the heck. @googlemaps do you not treat this as a major security issue?

Zig's async model is one of the most elegant designs I've ever seen. Most languages bake async right into the runtime. JS has an event loop. Go has a built-in scheduler. Zig splits it out. The new I/O model is a pluggable. It allows you to express async primitives, like an async function, and then pick the execution model. So e.g. if you want multi-threaded, you just plug it in. Or you want an event loop, you can plug that in too. Async primitives are just values (Futures) and the execution model is pluggable (Io). So good!

@davepl1968 somewhat related ... I notice that when my Prius reacts to unexpected surfaces when breaking, the car feels like it speeds up. I suspect it has something to do with the parasitic recharge disengaging resulting in a short positive acceleration but I am not sure.

How ABS (Anti-Lock Brakes) work and why you care. Video in the comments!

@dhh 💯 Vasquez’s brutal burn of Hudson (Bill Paxton’s character ), she’s the ultimate badass. Ferro’s quote “Five by five, we’re in the pipe”. “Game over man”. My favorite of the Aliens for sure.

Aliens is the greatest action sci-fi of all time, and Weaver was the perfect bad-ass heroine without being an insufferable do-it-all, know-it-all girlboss figurine. The 1980s really got almost everything right.

@valigo I would not install 3rd party packager on MacOS anymore. At least not on an account with my appleID. I create a separate user account on my Mac that doesn’t have sudo/admin access. The supply chain is a minefield right now.

Wait, so you can't install xcode without having an apple account? And people are bitching about Windows requiring Microsoft account, but not about this? Are Apple users just all cucks? What is going on? Or am I being stupid? On a side note, what's the meta of installing software on macs now? Do people still use homebrew? I remember it sucked 8 years ago.

@mjackson @lilienblum Ack. It’s been feasible to build near dependency free projects in zig now with the help of AI. I do it using the latest master branch spot releases. And when you want something like an SQLite or a raylib, you can just embed the full c implementation into your code base.

@lilienblum Just my personal opinion, but I think ecosystem matters a lot less in the age of AI. It’s easier than ever to make your own tools.

Holy crap Zig is lovely 🥰 Why is everyone talking about Rust?!

@geerlingguy @HackingLZ Just host your own gitlab/gitea/cgit etc IMHO. Easy peasy especially with tailscale these days.

Microsoft / GitHub injecting ads into CoPilot generated PRs: welcome to the future! notes.zachmanson.com/copilot-edited… (yes, this was a confirmed "feature" from someone on the CoPilot team; apparently they are disabling it after backlash)

@thiojoe don't forget DDR memory training ...

Anyone else think it's weird that computers take even multiple seconds to boot up? I feel like they should take milliseconds

@ibuildthecloud I feel the same way. An iPad Pro can cost > $2000 but what you really want is the $499 Neo because it's basically an iOS device that you can open a terminal on :-)

Wait I've never paid attention to iPads. Why is this not just macos? It's like Mac OS, but you can't run a terminal. If you could put Brew on this and launch VMs this would be the perfect device for me.

Apple should add a developer sandbox to MacOS. Doing modern development using pip, nix, brew, etc puts devs at increased risk to supply chain attacks risking their appleID related data and devices. The only safe alternative seems to set up new devices with a local only account.

@BuckLeahy @BuzzPatterson If you ever jumped out of C-141s in Panama I might have been watching a time or two 😀

@BuzzPatterson Love this story! And my only experience with C-141s was jumping out of them.

Another cool flying story from days of yore. When I was a young aircraft commander in C-141s, my crew and I were fragged to fly from Charleston AFB, SC, to Frankfurt, Germany, crew rest, and continue down to a highly classified American military base in the Middle East. Passengers and cargo to remain confidential. On our final descent into our destination on a very hot day, we had an engine fail. No biggie, we have 3 more. We ran our checklists and landed successfully. After deplaning our “passengers,” I got on the horn via HF radios (super long range) to chat with Military Airlift Command HQ. I said, “Hey, we’re here. We lost an engine on arrival but no other issues. Since it’s an international incident thing, I think we can get out of here fine on 3. We’re totally empty.” We were scheduled to return to Germany. The MAC controller dude on the other end asked, “Do you have a copilot?” I looked at my two copilots quizzically, and said, “Yeah, I have two.” And laughed. “I’m an instructor pilot and I have a flight examiner engineer on our crew,” I appealed. They said no. “You’re spending the night until we can fly a maintenance team in and replace your engine.” So, we had to spend the night, in tents, in the desert. The other American military folks stationed there were fantastic! They adopted us, fed us, and invited us to their bar underground. Most of the base itself was underground. We signed the walls of the bar, had a fun night and eventually went to sleep. On our way to the tents, we stopped to look at the sky. It was huge with brilliant stars. Apparently, we were the first aircrew in forever that was forced to layover there. We were aliens. The next morning, our jet was fixed and we planned to fly back to Europe to return our maintenance guys and fly back to the states. Before we departed, the base commander asked if we could do a fly by on our way “out of town.” He said there’d be a fire truck spraying water at the runway end and said to me, “get as close as you can to the water.” I said, “hell, I’ll hit it.” We took off and did a sweeping turn to pick up speed and come back around. I lined up on the runway, at 350 knots and 50 feet above the ground. We hit the water. Promises made, promises kept. This picture surreptitiously made its way back to my base and wing commander. He admonished me and laughed. “Don’t do it again.” I happened to be his executive officer. 🤣😎 “Buzz” didn’t become my call sign that day but it was definitely reconfirmed!

@rachpradhan @jedisct1 I’ve been starting projects lately the same way. Use zig, limit dependencies, if there are dependencies like SQLite, just use the amalgamation and use it embedded, use zig’s excellent cross platform targeting capabilities to build and test across all common platforms.

I built a package manager that installs software 10-500x faster than Homebrew. It's 1.2 MB. Written in Zig. Zero dependencies. It's called nanobrew, and here's how it works.

@mitchellh @markimbriaco An Apple person started Ubiquity so you kinda can get one now. But I should read the article first to see if they aren’t in the list of banned routers 😀

@markimbriaco If Apple would just get back into the AirPort Express game…

The FCC basically just outlawed all consumer routers.