here we go again

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • I use Arch for all my computers, including my "critical" systems. I only do full upgrades when I know I have the time to troubleshoot something broken, but rarely need to do so.

    More than this, I actually use Arch as the OS for thousands of computers for my work that end up in customer hands, who expect stability. I'm not sure at what point it stops being Arch, though - I pin the package repositories to internal mirrors with fixed package distributions from specific dates to control the software that goes to them, so it's not really rolling release anymore I guess - I control the releases and when updates go out.

    Arch is what you make of it. My Arch project desktop pc is constantly shifting and breaking and needing attention as I continually improve it and play with things. My Arch laptop that runs my life and work and is the most important computer I own is a paragon of stability and perfect functioning.



  • Cops are well aware standing in front of a car gives them a free pass killing someone

    This “technique” has been demonstrated enough that frankly, I think that any rational person would conclude that in any situation where a cop walks in front of your car, you’re better off just gunning it before the cop has a chance to extrajudicially execute you first. If they walk in front of your car, it’s clear they’re just itching to murder you. The threat has been made, you should fear for your life. It’s you or them.




  • I've made a point to learn and understand commonly "mocked" languages. The reasons they're ridiculed for are often very tightly related to the reasons why they're powerful in unique ways.

    It's hard to defend some parts of PHP, but it doesn't deserve the hatred it gets. Its standard library is a self-contradictory mess, yes. But it's backwards-compatible with previous language versions to a fairly remarkable degree. This backwards-compatability might seem strange now, but not that long ago, this guarantee meant it could evolve very rapidly as a language and ecosystem without risking losing users to a continual barrage of updates necessary to keep atop of, lest your application fail. I think this is the reason it overtook PERL as the first major "server-side" dynamic website language of choice.

    It has that goofy dollar sign variable syntax, yes. I personally think a special syntax for variable access vs function calls is one of the reasons coding beginners found it slightly easier to use - you didn't need to keep so much track of name collisions and stuff. $thing is always a piece of data, a noun. thing is always a keyword or function, a verb. You can thing($thing), it's OK, they're different. You're verbing a noun.

    It could grow fast and be picked up quick, so it's no wonder to me it persists, ever-improving, in the midst of all these extremely popular, extremely modern languages in use today. Wikipedia, Facebook, WordPress, Slack, Etsy, indeed even kbin, the piece of Fediverse software I'm writing this on now.