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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 26th, 2023

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  • I use interactive rebases to clean up the history of messy branches so they can be reviewed commit by commit, with each commit representing one logical unit or type of change.

    Mind you, getting those wrong is a quick way to making commits disappear into nothingness. Still useful if you’re careful. (Or you can just create a second temporary branch you can fall back onto of you need up your first once.)


  • And also ells, rods, cubits, paces, furlongs, oxgangs, lots, batmans… all with subtly different regional definitions (with regions sometimes as small as one village).

    People used loosely defined measurements based on things like their own body parts or how much land they guessed their ox could plow on an average day. Things like mathematical convenience or precision were not all that important; being able to measure (or estimate) without tools was.



  • I have to disagree on one point – that iOS home screens somehow look more orderly because they’re full of icons arranged in a strict top-left-to-bottom-right fashion. It doesn’t look any less cluttered than an overly full Windows desktop.

    I found desktops that limit themselves to core functionality and maybe a nice wallpaper to be better looking and more usable since the days of Windows 95 and that hasn’t changed since.

    That “strict grid of icons” look certainly is uniform across iDevices and that’s what appeals to Apple but I never found it to be particularly attractive.



  • I’m the spirit of fairness I will nitpick you.

    Firstly, porting apps over between Android devices works seamlessly only if those apps come from the Play Store. Android has no provisions for auto-transferring e.g. F-Droid and its apps. So it’s no wonder you can’t transfer your iOS apps (which might not even have Android versions). But it is true that auto-transfers of Play Store apps between different Android spins is seamless.

    Secondly, whether and how easily you can modify or replace your Android is dependent on the phone’s manufacturer. A Pixel is a very different beast from an Xperia in that regard. Still, Google do provide AOSP and are very mod-friendly on their own devices. Apple very much aren’t.





  • On the one hand I like the basic idea, on the other hand I think that some fundamental problems aren’t fully solved yet. There big use case are passkeys and direct password manager integration – neither mesh well with the idea of software that isn’t allowed to talk to most of the system.

    I’m certain that this will be resolved at some point but for now I don’t think Flatpak and its brethren are quite there yet.



  • CUDA was there first and has established itself as the standard for GPGPU (“general purpose GPU” aka calculating non-graphics stuff on a graphics card). There are many software packages out there that only support CUDA, especially in the lucrative high-performance computing market.

    Most software vendors have no intention of supporting more than one API since CUDA works and the market isn’t competitive enough for someone to need to distinguish themselves though better API support.

    Thus Nvidia have a lock on a market that regularly needs to buy expensive high-margin hardware and they don’t want to share. So they made up a rule that nobody else is allowed to write out use something that makes CUDA software work with non-Nvidia GPUs.

    That’s anticompetitive but it remains to be seen if it’s anticompetitive enough for the EU to step in.


  • They could’ve sold Windows 2000 as Windows NT 5 and Windows Me as Windows 2000; that would’ve kept the “NT X” versioning scheme for the professional line and the year-based scheme for the consumer line.

    But the versioning scheme for the NT line is all kinds of weird in general. Windows 7 is NT 6.1. Windows 8 is NT 6.2. So we’ve established that the product name is independent of the version now. That means that Windows 10 is NT… 10.0. Windows 11 is also NT 10.0.

    Okay.