[-] Lodra@programming.dev 73 points 4 days ago

Etsy hasn’t been good for years. But I haven’t found an alternative yet. Anybody know what we should use instead?

[-] Lodra@programming.dev 7 points 6 days ago

I only have anecdotal info for based on some reading I did last year. As far as I recall, the program and software are new. So they’re slowly building up features for more complicated tax scenarios an in turn, slowly making it accessible to more of the population.

It’s just a matter of time before this is widely available. I read the post title as “we succeeded in this first year’s test and plan to continue the program”.

[-] Lodra@programming.dev 26 points 2 months ago

Proton is obviously promoting their own product: proton pass. I tried it and found that it needs a little more development time. Just a little polishing.

In the meantime, Bitwarden is fantastic. I also hear good things about onepass. Don’t use chrome’s password manager.

[-] Lodra@programming.dev 34 points 2 months ago

I spent several weeks thinking about this exact idea.

Federation is cool. You could set up each instance to only federate with instances for nearby towns and cities. Maybe a “2 district” radius. Users would only see content for their local communities. Local news stays local. Local government could officially participate if they wish. People you talk to are actually neighbors you might see in person. Larger regions like counties, states, provinces, or even countries, could also have dedicated instances and federate similarly. I think this is the big appeal and it sounds awesome!

There are a few problems 🙂

First is a little bit of confusion with posting. Let’s say that I see a post about a cool new restaurant in my town. I share it with a friend who lives a few towns away and that’s outside the “federation radius”. I can’t share the post with that friend very easily. Maybe the tools could be enhanced to make this viable?

Second is a matter of privacy. How do you know that new accounts belong to people associated with the geographic location of each instance? If you don’t validate, the system will certainly be abused. If you do validate, then users need to supply some real info! Home address, ID, etc. that’s a big deal for users and instance admins.

Third. What happens if you move? Do you have to abandon your old account and start over? Again, the system itself can be developed further to solve this. But that’ll take time and money.

Next is the operating costs. You would need to build thousands of instances to build this system up. And each one would have to be tied to a geographic region. You need new features to handle signups this way. You have the simple cost of running these servers. You probably need a lot of staff to manage it all. This is an expensive platform for one party to run. Alternatively…

It doesn’t have to be one party running this entire system. That’s the point of the Fediverse, right? The operational costs go way down if anyone can run their own instance. But how do you enforce the rules of federating with instances for geographically nearby locations? I don’t see a reasonable way to solve this one.

I could probably keep listing issues. But these are the big ones IMO. If you solve these, the system is viable and could be amazing.

[-] Lodra@programming.dev 37 points 3 months ago

This is regulated. And there are penalties for violating those regulations. But it’s just not enough. Even a class action lawsuit won’t help the victims. Most of that money goes to lawyers.

Honestly, I don’t expect any of it to change until the penalties are so severe that major companies go under. Aka a corporate death penalty (which the US used to have). But even then, good software security is extremely hard. Almost everyone screws up something.

10
ECE and the .au domain (programming.dev)

I just stumbled on this new community. Having a young child, I figured I should join and learn! I also noticed that the Lemmy instance has a .au domain. I’m sure the theories and ideas will apply globally; but what about information regarding law, school systems, etc? Is this community intended for Australian info? Or is it acceptable that I ask questions specific to the US?

[-] Lodra@programming.dev 24 points 3 months ago

Head nod regarding the ranked choice voting

[-] Lodra@programming.dev 113 points 4 months ago

The CEO now seeks help from Phutar Afrayughum, a psychic and extrasensory perception specialist who allegedly helped Google increase their marketshare in the messaging app market, and was also involved in developing the Material Design framework.

Seems like a legit article :shrug:

[-] Lodra@programming.dev 50 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

With chromium being poisoned last year and Mozilla trying to diversify away from Firefox, I’m starting to wonder what browser I should be using in the near future. So I’d really like to hear some opinions on arc browser!

EDIT: Aaand it’s chromium

[-] Lodra@programming.dev 45 points 5 months ago

While I love the spirit of this idea, it gets complicated fast. Worlds adrift is a great example. The game’s server was created using some closed source libraries with a paid license. So when the owning company (Bossa Studios?) went under, they were unable to open source it.

A law like this would effectively kill all licensed software that isn’t a full product. I do agree though; we need a solution

9

I made some changes to disk partitions. Now I'm seeing an issue with mounts. It's not a big problem but it's definitely confusing me.

[alex@rog-g15dk dev]$ sudo mount /home-temp
mount: /home-temp: can't find in /etc/fstab.
[alex@rog-g15dk dev]$ cat /etc/fstab
New                                         Partition    /home-temp   defaults            0 0 # /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# Use 'blkid' to print the universally unique identifier for a device; this may
# be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name devices that works even if
# disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).
#
#                      
UUID=5E74-A00E                              /efi         vfat         noatime             0 2 
UUID=53a2c9bc-31dd-4e52-902f-633867253481   /            ext4         noatime             0 1 
tmpfs                                       /tmp         tmpfs        noatime,mode=1777   0 0 
/dev/nvme0n1p2                              /home        ext4         noatime             0 2 
/dev/nvme0n1p3                              /steam       ext4         noatime             0 2

Can anyone explain what 'mount -a' is trying to mount?

Here's the context on the changes I made. My desktop used to run windows. I recently installed linux as well (dual boot). A bit later I destroyed the windows partitions. This left the beginning 2/3 of the disk unused.

Today I decided to reclaim that disk space. I created 2 new partitions, copied some data to them, updated fstab accordingly, rebooted, and grew the steam partition to 700GiB. That process had a couple of small bumps, including a partition that was mounted to '/home-temp'. I destroyed that partition before using it all.

So this error is definitely caused by me. That's fine. I'm just trying to understand what's going on and how to clean up the little mess.

94
submitted 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) by Lodra@programming.dev to c/linux@lemmy.ml

I'm ditching Windows in favor of Linux on my personal desktop. And so I'm looking for advice on which distro I should start with.

About Me

I use Linux professionally all the time but mostly to build ci/cd pipelines and for software development/operations. I've never been a Linux admin nor have I ever chosen the distro I use. I'm generally comfortable using Linux and digging into configs/issues as needed.

Planned Usage

I use this machine for typical home usage: Firefox, a notes app (currently Notesnook), maybe office style tools like word and excel. I also use this for gaming: Steam, Discord, etc. Lastly and least important, I use this for a small amount of dev work: VSCode, various languages, possibly running containers.

What I'm Looking For

I'd like an OS that's highly configurable but ships with good default settings and requires very little effort to start using. I don't want it to ship with loads of applications; I want to choose and install all of the higher level tools. Shipping with a configured desktop is perfectly fine but not required. Ideally, I can have all of this while still keeping the maintenance low. I think that means a stable OS, a good package manager, stable/automatic updates, etc.

Last bit. Open source is rather important to me. I prefer free and free.

Anyone have good suggestions??

Edit

I'm aware of tools like Distro Chooser. They've recommended Arch Linux and Endeavor OS to me so far. But I'm not ready to trust them yet. I'm looking for human input.

Edit 2: Hardware Info

I'm running on an ASUS ROG Strix GA15DK. It's just over 2 years old. The hardware was shiny but not top-tier at the time. It’s not new at this point but also not old by Linux standards.

  • AMD Ryzen 7 5800X Processor
  • NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070
  • 16GB DDR4 3200 MHz RAM

Edit 3

It's official. I installed EndeavourOS! I got it to work without any issues. Yup, first try. It definitely didn't take me ~10 tries :D

Thanks for all the input all! Wonderful crowd here!!!

[-] Lodra@programming.dev 25 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Yes, unity costs money to develop and a fee is reasonable. But I think the are a few risks with this model.

How do they track installations? Metrics from steam and other platforms? Connecting to a license server at install time? Or maybe at runtime? I don't know the answers but they all seem to have implications for users regarding privacy and/or offline gaming.

It's also a variable fee to game developers. A single user can install a game on multiple devices despite buying the game once. Similarly, a game can be installed repeatedly over time. This is a financial risk to game development companies. I could see them mitigating this risk in several ways. First, they can pass the fee to the end user. So every install costs the user $0.20. Secondly, they can limit the number of installs per user. You want to install more than 5 times ever? Buy the game again! Thirdly, they could simply shut down the download service after a certain amount of time, making new installations impossible. None of this is good for a gamers.

And what happens to games made by companies that shut down entirely? Today, games remain available through steam, etc. But with this new pricing model, Unity based games will continue to cost money over time. Who pays the bill after the company is gone? This reminds me of Worlds Adrift, a game that used a licensed library. When the developer company shutdown, they were unable to release their server source code because the third party couldn't can't send bills to the open source community. Thus, the servers were destroyed and running the client today (still vailable via steam!) just gives the user an error message about license issues or something. Users paid for a game that they are now unable to use.

[-] Lodra@programming.dev 38 points 10 months ago

Pineapple + bacon pizza is delicious. My favorite actually. If you like spicy, add some jalapeño or similar peppers.

1

cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/1562654

FYI to all the VS Code peeps out there that malicious extensions can gain access to secrets stored by other VS Code extensions as well as the tokens used by VS Code for Microsoft/Github.

I really don’t understand how Microsoft’s official stance on this is that this is working as intended…

If you weren’t already, be very careful about which extensions you are installing.

[-] Lodra@programming.dev 41 points 11 months ago

Precedented

1

Here's an upcoming feature for those wanting to use multiple profiles in VSCode but don't enjoying micro managing settings across many different profiles. And good news: This feature is currently being developed!

The feature request is Extend from the Default Profile. The idea is to allow users to organize settings into various layers. Global settings in the default profile. Maybe python specific settings in a python profile. And then golang specific settings in a golang profile. Or however else you want to organize things! This will be a huge help when working with many different workspaces and languages which all need little adjustments.

This idea actually dates back all the way to November, 2016! While it has nearly 600 votes, nobody implemented the feature. Thankfully, the new feature (again, issue 156144 was requested about a year ago and was actually a part of the Iteration Plan for June 2023. Unfortunately, it wasn't completed in time (that's ok! Thanks devs!) and was pushed to the July 2023 iteration. Hopefully, we'll have this feature released soon.

If you're as excited as I am for this one, then vote for the feature with a thumbs up.

Yes, it's already in development but votes can make this feature a priority. You can also vote for specific implementation details too!

1
  • Accessibility improvements - Accessible View for better screen reader support, Copilot audio cues.
  • Better editor group and tab resizing - Set min tab size, avoid unnecessary editor group resizing.
  • Skip subwords when expanding selection - Control whether to use camel case for selection.
  • Terminal image support - Display images directly in the integrated terminal.
  • Python extensions for mypy and debugpy - For Python type checking and debugging in VS Code.
  • Remote connections to WSL - Connect to WSL instances on remote machines using Tunnels.
  • Preview: GitHub Copilot create workspace/notebook - Quickly scaffold projects and notebooks.
  • New C# in VS Code documentation - Learn about C# development with the C# Dev Kit extension.
1
Hidden Gems: VSNotes by Patrick Lee (marketplace.visualstudio.com)

This is the first of a (hopefully) recurring series where we showcase extensions that are likely unknown to most users. Starting with patricklee.vsnotes!

Marketplace Description

VSNotes is a simple tool that takes care of the creation and management of plain text notes and harnesses the power of VS Code via the Command Palette.

Why I like it

VSNotes seems to be built for frequent note taking. E.g. Taking daily meeting notes and keeping them organized. There are quite a few alternative extensions like dendron.dendron that do this quite well but are much more complicated. I like VSNotes for its simplicity. It's easy to use.

More importantly, I don't want to create a large number of notes. I just want to manage a few organized files and have them accessible at all times. Here's a screenshot from my work laptop.

No date stamps. No tags. No subdirectories. Nice and simple. Having these notes embedded in VS Code gives me the expected benefits like markdown syntax and preview. But my favorite part is the Activity Bar icon (far right in my screenshot). These notes aren't stored in my active workspace. They can be but I choose to store these notes in ~/notes instead. This means that the files within that directory are globally available regardless of which workspace is active. If you work with many different repositories and workspaces, this is fantastic!

A few use cases

  • Basic notes that are always open... duh. So you don't have to send yourself messages in Slack
  • Commands.md: Some bash magic. Some kubectl favorites. Some fancy git commands. All copy/paste-able into the embedded terminal
  • Diagram.d2: I manually set the file extension. Now I can preview terrastruct.d2 diagrams conveniently!

My Configuration

{
  "vsnotes.defaultNotePath": "~/notes",
  "vsnotes.defaultNoteTitle": "{title}.{ext}",
  "vsnotes.noteTitleConvertSpaces": "-",
}
1

First and foremost everyone, welcome to our new little community!

I've watching the subscriber count climb slowly over the last ~36 hours from 0 to the current 64 subscribers. Exciting stuff! And impressive too, given that we don't have any content yet 🙂

So I'd like to hear from the crowd. What content do you want to see here? Maybe some periodic posts like monthly patch notes? Reply with your ideas!

2
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by Lodra@programming.dev to c/vscode@programming.dev
view more: next ›

Lodra

joined 1 year ago
MODERATOR OF