That is a very reductionist view of what people use the web for. And I am saying this as someone who’s personal site pretty much matches everything prescribed except comments (which I still have).

Btw, Medium, given as a positive example, is not in any way minimal and certainly not by metrics given in this article.

Interesting observation from reddit

Some Rust practitioners are weird.

You have all those great approaches about correctness, and then you see here and there developers trying random explicitly unsafe hacks depending on internals of data types, that not even C++ developers would try.

I mean, when was the last time when you randomly tried to nuke the internal length of an C++ std::vector to speed things up, using simultaneously dangerous means and a complex reasoning (but probably undocumented, and maybe incorrect) justifying that there actually was no risk in your opinion?

And on top of that do it in, not in some kind of insane computation kernel trying to grab the last bit of perf, but in merely an HTTP library?

Well at least I’m happy this particular missed optim has been fixed. One less reason to resort to insane unsafe hacks.

(On a sidenote, it is sometimes better to only modify a variable in memory if it doesn’t already has the good value, but this would be mostly for scaling concurrent accesses of the same cacheline on multiple CPU, so this does not really apply here – and also sometimes compilers fuck you up by using a cmov but then it is a completely different story :p )

By May 25, most corporates had just amended their Privacy Policy volumes and annoyed consumers were forced to clicked through to accept them without reading.

I don’t know why people find this so hard to understand, but the entire point of the GDPR is that you cannot comply with it simply by adding more terms to your Terms of Service for people to sign away their rights without reading. That’s not how it works.

In my opinion preoccupation with the nominal personal data, actually displaces real privacy. Who cares about privacy of their name and family name, or office held? Except to hide shady politicking and worse, majority of us are happy to consciously publicize it as much as possible. It’s wrong, impractical and disrespectful to assume the contrary.

There are dozens of situations when it’s actually socially undesirable to keep it private, yet it is zealously protected under the GDPR in exactly the same way as your shopping history or your family photos.

I do care about the privacy of my name and family name. Is my name public on the internet? Yes. If I wanted to make it not public, would I want to be able to do so? Yes. Simple as that, really.

Equally questionable are formal and bureaucratic prescriptions for better data protection — more documentation, privacy impact audits, formal training, etc.

Does anyone honestly believe that more paperwork will lead to more privacy? More security risks in handling of our data (say thousands of hand signed consents) are somewhat more likely, I’m afraid.

Why would formal training around data protection, auditing of privacy protection and documentation of efforts to comply with the GDPR lead to another other than more privacy?

Apart from the right to complain under the new rules and few marginal rights — which are primarily of interest to the corrupt and the criminal, like the right to be forgotten — the average data subject barely gained any new privacy through the GDPR.

Yeah okay, nothing interesting to read here. The right to be forgotten is certainly not ‘primarily of interest to the corrupt and the criminal’. What a great load of ‘if you have nothing to fear you have nothing to hide’ twaddle.

Didn’t systemd hard code 8.8.8.8 as well at some point?

It’s such a good thing that people are watching out for violations in free software.

5. Bring them in for a few days, see if they can set up the dev environment, assign them some bugs nobody else wants to fix, have them meet everyone.
6. Pay them.
7. Decide if you want to keep paying them.

This is, of course, the obvious way to select people for any field, not just programming. The problem is that if you won’t do 6 then few candidates will want to do 5 (they can’t leave their job to come in for a few days) and companies seem allergic to 7 (which is essential for 6).

As I read this I thought about my experiences with Diaspora and Mastodon. Pages like this one or this one (click “Get Started”, I couldn’t do a deep link because JavaScript) are, IMHO, a big part of the reason these services don’t take off. How can an average user be expected to choose from a basically random list of nodes? How can I, a reasonably “technical” person, even be expected to do so?

So then why not host my own node? First, I don’t have time and most people I know don’t either. If I was 15 again I totally would because I had nothing better to do. I also don’t want to play tech support for a good chunk of my social network, and providing a service to someone has a tendency to make them view you as the tech support.

Second, if I do that I’m now in charge of security for my data. As terrible as Twitter and Facebook are, they’re probably still a lot better at securing my data than I am (at the very least they probably patch their systems more often than I would). Even worse, if some non-technical person decides to bite the bullet and create a node for his/her friends, how secure do you think that’s going to be?

Further, what are the odds that I, or whoever is maintaining the node, basically gets bored of it one day and kills the whole thing? Pretty damn high (maybe I and all my friends are assholes, though, so whatever).

Anyway, this post really spoke to me because I’ve been trying to escape Evil companies for awhile now and “federated” just doesn’t seem to be the answer. I now believe that centralized is here to stay, but that we should start looking at the organizations that control the data instead of the technology. For example, if Facebook were an open non-profit with a charter that legally prevented certain kinds of data “sharing” and “harvesting” maybe I wouldn’t have any problem with it.

Interesting analysis!

Does the Github search API take forks into account? Assuming it doesn’t, this would skew the results towards popular packages with lots of forks. Whether this detracts from your conclusions is debatable. You could argue that a newcomer is more likely to look at popular packages.

OK but the tag line is asinine. As a regular user of a Linux distribution it is actually impossible for me to take the time to do a full analysis on every package I install to get work done.

SOME level of trust has to be there or else the whole idea of a Linux distro can’t work.

It’s always a compromise. For a single function, a touchscreen is never as good as a dedicated hardware control. The touchscreen’s advantage is in its ability to represent different controls at different times. A lot of modern high tech devices combine physical controls with touchscreens in an attempt to balance functionality (doing one thing well) with flexibility (doing different things at different times). At one end of the scale, you have smartphones, where the need for versatility makes for heavy use of a touchscreen with only a few dedicated switches (volume, power, maybe camera). At the other end of the scale, in something like a car, functionality trumps flexibility, meaning at least the most important controls should have dedicated hardware.

In a slight reversal from a few years ago, when touchscreens were limited to high-end products, touchscreens can now be used to cut costs, either by replacing more costly dedicated controls, or by allowing a basic touchscreen terminal to be mass-produced then adapted for different products by running different software.

It’s not so well known outside the francophone world, but French non-profit organisation framasoft host a wide range of free (libre) alternatives to various online services. They have an ongoing campaign to de-google-ify the internet: https://degooglisons-internet.org/.

Have you ever needed to publish an article in twitter?

I find that the combination of points 2 (evolving) & 3 (old enough to have established body of literature) is actually rather a bad thing, as there is an enormous amount of outdated literature. Some of it will teach you to write old-school code that will not be welcome in a modern C++ codebase. The rest of it will devote 80% to writing elaborate constructs to implement features which are now part of the language.

One problem with std::optional, at least at the moment, while it’s relatively new, is that std is opinionated, so you often won’t find library functions that work with a std::optional-based codebase.

For example, parsing an integer from a string is a classic example of a function which might not succeed. So it would make sense to use std::optional to store the result. However, the standard library provides int stoi(const std::string& str, std::size_t* pos = 0, int base = 10) and friends, which signal failure by throwing exceptions.

So, in theory, std::optional provides an alternative way to handle failure, somewhat like some haskell or rust code might, making the possibility of failure explicit in the type, and thus forcing you to explicitly handle it or pass it on. However, (unless a library exists which I’m not aware of?) you may need to reimplement large parts of the standard library to make them fit.

I wonder how this can get out of its current catch 22 situation where the main thing that makes it interesting is the easy access to a wide range of packages in a central repository, but having a wide range of packages available depends on having a wide range of people interested.

At the moment, their crates.io equivalent, cppget.org, has only 24 packages (mostly build2 itself and a few example packages), and it’s not clear if there’s any infrastructure for users to submit their own packages. They also face the additional issue that unlike cargo, build2 has come much later in the life of C++, so it probably needs a strategy to make existing, widely used, libraries available in the repository.

Yes, it can be used with a local repository, but at least for open source dependencies, the nice thing about cargo is that you tell it you want to depend on foo >= 1.0 and it does everything else for you. This experience is also very important for people who just want to try it out for the first time.

Output should be simple to parse and compose

No JSON, please.

Yes, every tool should have a custom format that needs a badly cobbled together parser (in awk or whatever) that will break once the format is changed slighly or the output accidentally contains a space. No, jq doesn’t exist, can’t be fitted into Unix pipelines and we will be stuck with sed and awk until the end of times, occasionally trying to solve the worst failures with find -print0 and xargs -0.