From the bug report:

[…] will require moving some config & data files from ~/.phoenix to probably $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/phoenix and […]

According to Wikipedia, the browser was already renamed to “Firefox” when that bug report was opened, but still wild to see that even back then, they already had some technical debt for the name of that directory.

Unfortunate that they did not go straight from ~/.phoenix to $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/mozilla, but hard to say, if that was as obvious of a choice back then…

I find it so tricky, too. With the maintainers that I see struggling, it’s rarely a lack of contributions that fucks them up, but rather a lack of maintainers. And they can’t easily onboard other maintainers, because:

1. there’s hardly anyone willing to invest enough time into your project to be a particularly helpful maintainer.
2. everyone’s just strangers on the internet, who may or may not want to ship malware as part of your project.

Like, I even have a friend who’s excited for a project that I’m building, but so far, they’re purely cheerleading (which is appreciated), because they do have projects of their own that they find fun, and in particular also a life outside of programming.
I do not currently struggle with maintainership (because I haven’t announced my projects anywhere publicly 🤪), but yeah, it just feels like it’s asking for a lot, if I were to try to get that friend on board. In particular also, because not many aspects of maintainership are fun.

I am still wondering whether vibe coding will really get folks excited about programming. It is a way to create stuff, so I can see folks getting excited about vibe coding by itself. But making the jump from there to programming seems like it would be frustrating, since you would need to start over with small projects to have any chance at learning the basics.

And yeah, for now I do not believe that vibe coding will displace programming, because natural language is in many ways just a worse way to formulate logic.
It’s like going through a translator to talk to someone in another language. It works for simple instructions and to some degree, you can have the translator explain a more general concept, like how to get to a specific place, without you needing provide every detail, but:

• You can only guess what instructions the translator actually provides.
• If the result isn’t as expected, e.g. the person doesn’t show up at the described place, then it is nigh impossible to find out which part of the instructions were wrong. Both because you don’t understand the instructions, but because you might not know the way either.
• And it is just a less efficient way to communicate than when you know the other person’s language.

I just tried it on Android Firefox, and well, it does work, but you can definitely tell that it wasn’t built for Android Firefox.

It doesn’t show up in the URL bar and rather just in the extension menu. In there, it still gets hidden when no RSS feed is available. It copies to the clipboard as expected. And when there’s multiple feeds, it opens a separate page to show the dropdown in a very small font. Definitely usable enough, since you’re not going to interact with it all the time, but I wouldn’t give it the same glowing review…

Hmm, I didn’t do anything to make it work. Maybe try a hard refresh (Ctrl+F5).

If it is just Lemmy which doesn’t work for you, then here’s the URL for Top Twelve Hour sorting: https://lemmy.ml/feeds/all.xml?sort=TopTwelveHour

I’m currently prototyping a macro to help reduce boilerplate, as part of a more general library. And I’m doing some wild shit, like defining the fields of a data type from the parameter list of a function.

But then, yeah, what I’m now stuck on is that my generated code references a data type under one name, but it’s actually got a different name in the public API. All the wild shit was smooth sailing, but a technicality now fucks me over. 🫠

As a more lightweight solution for broken bookmarks, there’s this extension for Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bookmarks-organizer/

I mean, sure, I do understand what’s happening on a logical level. I’m just so baffled, because this whole internet thingamabob was architected by the military.
It was intentionally built, so that parts of it could fail without disrupting the rest. When a corporation fucks up, it was supposed to take down the servers of that corporation, not also a good chunk of the rest.

But unfortunately, this internet thingamabob is merely the closest approximation we have for the “perfect market” that economics theory calls for, so it still doesn’t actually self-regulate like that whole theory would love to believe.
In fact, it is so much worse, because now monopolization happens across the whole planet. Particularly also because we don’t have a functioning “world government” that could enforce competition at that level via laws.

So, the network leads to companies monopolizing on top of it and then monopolies necessitate that the respective companies do as poor of a job as possible, because this reduces costs and increases profits. As a result, major parts of this military-grade internet now falter every few weeks.

Oh man, these global outages are really getting out of hand. A few days after the recent AWS and Azure outages, I suddenly noticed that I couldn’t reach certain webpages anymore. And I genuinely didn’t even bother trying to debug, because I just assumed that it’s another global outage.

In the evening, I did look into it and noticed that my router was at fault (presumably DNS got bugged by a recent update). That was just wild to me, that I genuinely deemed it more likely that several major webpages went offline together than that my home setup is fucky.

Ah, I thought that “they” referred to ad corporations…

Auto-clicking ads to fuck up metrics is already a thing: https://adnauseam.io/

recreational coding

Well, good news, it actually is fun to dick around in the Nix configuration and see those changes manifest on your system.

The purpose is similar, i.e. configuring a system, but I’d say Ansible works best, if you need to make a few small changes from an existing distro, whereas NixOS rather takes the approach of controlling everything about the operating system.

And in many ways, controlling everything is actually simpler.

As the other person said, the bit about Arch is just the preamble.
But you can use Nix Home-Manager on Arch (or other distros), if you’re so inclined, which will give you that reproducibility for the stuff in your home-directory.

In some ways, this is like backing up and restoring your dotfiles, but it allows you to template those dotfiles and depending on the program, it offers simple ways to populate the dotfile templates. For example, KDE applications don’t generally offer very legible dotfiles and so configuring e.g. a panel via dotfiles is kind of a pain. To help with this, there’s Nix Plasma-Manager.

Pretty sure that knowing COBOL isn’t the hard part. It has relatively few language concepts.

This lack of language concepts just makes it difficult to reason about it, so that’s what you’re getting a paycheck for. Well, and possibly also because it might take months to have a new dev figure out your legacy codebase, so it’s cheaper to keep the current dev by paying them competitive prices.

Oh man, a few years ago, we had a military dude as conductor in our wind band. And I was always one of his favorites, I’m guessing because I have broad shoulders and a deep voice – prime military recruit material.

…except that I’m vegan. So, one day he sits next to me during lunch and asks me why I’m vegan. I do the usual dance of avoiding the topic, but he does not want to let it go. So, I tell him that I think killing animals is wrong. He walked out of that conversation like a hurt gazelle.

Like, fuck me, dude, if you’re gonna do the whole military tough guy spiel, but cannot take a kid disagreeing with you, then maybe you’re not as tough after all.

That argument annoys me so much. Each vegetable does cover all amino acids, they just don’t have them in the exact relations that our body needs. But if a vegetable has only 50% of one amino acid compared to the distribution that our body needs, then you can abso-fucking-lutely just eat double of that vegetable. Or as you say mix-and-match.

A typical Western diet includes far more protein than the body needs for maintaining itself either way.

Ah yeah, there’s various technologies that I don’t mention too loudly. For example, all things considered, I’m probably an above-average Python dev, but I never enjoyed writing it, so when I get asked about it, I always answer that I’m not too confident with it.

Which, in my defense, isn’t even really a lie. My specialty is large-scale projects, which is something where Python with its loose typing just does not give you confidence…

Hmm, I don’t add extra water when I cook spinach. I just wash it, fill up my pot with it, throw in salt and a splash of oil, then the kid on top.

After a few minutes, I’ve got a couple spoonfuls of tasty goodness.

…I did just notice the typo, but I also threw myself away laughing, so I’m keeping it.

Yeah, I agree that there could probably be a way to “close” Activities, which doesn’t do the session management, so explicitly just throws the windows onto another Activity (or maybe prompts you when there’s still windows on that Activity), without having to outright delete that Activity.

Deleting an Activity is relatively disruptive, since you may have files linked to it or nicely setup wallpapers and such. And there are a number of places where Activities show up, where it can be annoying to have Activities showing up that you’re not currently using.

I can imagine them being open to that suggestion, if you articulate it well.
From what I saw, they did make a lot of changes to remove the start/stop functionality, but most of it was session handling code. So, it might not be too additional much trouble to add a way to close Activities instead.

As a wise Nate Graham once said: The most reliable way to find out whether people use a feature (and how they use it) is to remove it. The second-most reliable way is to announce its removal.
Well, you did miss the announcement, so it probably felt a bit rude to you, but yeah, you should still consider this the start of a conversation. They’re not hellbent on removing this feature.