• 0 Posts
  • 12 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: June 15th, 2023
  • psycotica0@lemmy.catoProgramming@programming.dev•How do you contribute to OSS?
    25·
    2 months ago

    Some tips:

    • Unless the code is very small, or your feature is very big, try to put blinders on, and focus only on the code you absolutely need to to get your feature built. Use search tools to comb through the code to find the relevant methods while reading as little surrounding code as possible, tweak those methods to be different, and call that a first draft. If the maintainer wants the code refactored or differently arranged, they can help with that as part of the review process
    • Being unable to build sucks, it really does. But if the software is released for your platform, it means someone out there is able to build it. And these days that someone is often an automated build tool that runs per release. See if you can figure out how this tool works. What build steps it uses, what environment it runs in, etc. If you can’t figure that out, try contacting the person who releases the builds
    • If the software is in apt (if you’re on a Debian-based system), you can use apt build-dep, apt source, and debuild to try and recreate the native apt build process. These tools will give you the source that built the system package, and its dependencies, and allow you to build a deb yourself out of it. Test the build to make sure it’s working as-is. If it is, and if the software’s dependencies haven’t changed too much, you can even use apt to fetch the old version that’s in the repos, update the code to reflect the upstream release, and then test the build there to see if it still builds. If so, now you have something you can start working off.
    • If you aren’t on an apt system, but do have a package manager, I assume there’s an equivalent to the workflow mentioned above
    • If your change is subtle enough that you think it’s pretty low-risk, you could just edit the code even though you can’t build it. This might be sufficient for bug-fixes where you just need to check something is greater than zero, or features where you pass a true instead of a false in certain conditions or something. You should probably mention this in your PR / MR / Patch so the reviewer knows to test building it before merging.
    • This one is a bit wild, but let’s say you’re on a Mac or Windows machine, and the build instructions only work for Linux. You can just run a virtual machine that’s got Ubuntu or something running on it, and use it as your build environment. These days you can probably be in a simpler situation with Docker or something more lightweight, but as a worst-case scenario, a full virtual machine is there for you if you need it
    • And finally, if the tool isn’t a crazy popular or busy tool, it’s possible the maintainer or other people in the community are more approachable than you think. If they are looking for contributions, then getting a willing contributor’s build environment setup is a benefit to the project. Improving their build docs helps not just you, but potential future contributors as well. A project will usually be more helpful towards someone who says “I’m trying to build this feature, but I’m running into trouble” compared to someone saying “why doesn’t your tool do X”. You may need to be a bit patient, they’re probably doing this on volunteer hours, but they might be happy to help you get your stuff sorted out

    Good luck out there, and try not to be discouraged!

  • psycotica0@lemmy.catoMusic@lemmy.world•What are the bands that didn't get international recognition but still are absolute legends where you're from?English
    5·
    3 months ago

    Canada (or at least Ontario): The Barenaked Ladies.

    I recently learned Americans consider them a One Hit Wonder for “One Week”, but I could probably name like 9 hits just based off the radio, I never bought any of their albums or anything.

    1. If I had a million dollars
    2. Lovers in a dangerous time
    3. Pinch me
    4. Old apartment
    5. Call and answer
    6. Brian Wilson (only a live version for some reason)
    7. Jane
    8. It’s all been done
    9. Falling for the first time

    Oh wow, it was actually nine! I swear I didn’t go back and edit that, and also that I didn’t look up a list online. There may even be others I forgot. That was just from me trying to remember songs or music videos of theirs!

  • psycotica0@lemmy.catoScience Memes@mander.xyz•shrimp colour dramaEnglish
    8·
    3 months ago

    To be fair, we don’t see like reverse engineered printing. Printing is reverse engineered seeing. If we saw like this post is claiming shrimp see, and blue was blue and green was green and yellow was yellow, we wouldn’t be able to print by mixing three colours. We’d need one pigment per photoreceptor, same as we do now.

  • psycotica0@lemmy.catoScience Memes@mander.xyz•It's trueEnglish
    2·
    4 months ago

    Small extra rant:

    minor spoilers

    And just to be clear, ten thousand years is a long time. Ancient Egypt was, like 5 - 6 thousand years ago. So almost double that. The last ice age was about 12 thousand years ago. 10 thousand years ago was, like, the invention of farming as a concept. No culture on Earth has history that far back.

    So to be making references to today’s pop culture that far in the future just feels nuts. I mean, sure, it’s the same one guy. And I know he’s not supposed to feel like God. But still, when humans as a species first planted seeds in the ground you heard a song, and now today you’re going to casually bring it up to a room full of babies? Whatever.

    But it just so happens that it’s a reference that’s relevant to us the reader in my personal nostalgia? My eyes rolled so hard I fell straight out of the narrative…

  • psycotica0@lemmy.catoScience Memes@mander.xyz•It's trueEnglish
    2·
    4 months ago

    I read it a while ago, let’s see if I remember…

    Hopefully I’ve hidden this behind a spoiler tag properly, but if not, please don’t read this unless you’ve read the books!

    hopefully spoiler tag

    I liked the mystery of what truly happened, and I liked the alternative memory around the time in the first house. Seeing that alternative and opposite version of events was neat, and then having that actually be even more impactful when it become clear what’s going on was great. The bits with True Ortis being actually really emotional at the end were good. I was onboard up until that.

    I was quite happy until we all confront John at the end, because this is where it’s going to coming together. There’s a few things I remember disliking here. The first thing, and most trivial, is that John says a few things here that feel like very now memes, and that took me way out of the tone the chapters otherwise were in. I think one was a “hi blank I’m dad” line or something. I get it, he’s not very Godly, and later it seems like he’s even alive during our present day. But I still feel like that format is a bit tired already, and this is ten thousand years from now. I think the other was a reference to a song that was all the rage in, like, 2005 or something. Which again, I don’t feel like even the youth of today would pull that reference, so John is I guess exactly my age. And ten thousand years from now is quoting a thing that no one else in the room would get; that’s meaningless to the person he’s talking to, but also his other lyctors. I dunno, it just felt like John was talking to me, the reader, and it felt very cheap. So that kinda put me in a mood already.

    The second thing that bothered me is the revelations at that point are all a bunch of things all the lyctors think are big news, but that our protagonist, and thus we, don’t know anything about. Like being a kid at a family reunion and listening to the adults talk, they’re having their minds blown talking about schemes and plans and shit that we don’t know anything about. I’m not saying the answers had to be handed to me necessarily, but it just felt like all the meat was coming fully out of left field, and there’s no way any of the things I’ve learned so far this book could possibly have lead me to these discoveries. Isn’t this, like, a mystery book? You don’t want to find out at the end that the murder was actually committed by Richard the repairman we didn’t introduce to you, but anyway let me tell you how this guy you’ve never heard of did the thing you’ve been wondering about.

    Which leads me into the third and biggest thing I didn’t like, which was that throughout the entire climax of the story, our protagonist is passive bordering on insignificant. Gideon wakes up and fights her way to the exposition room, Harrow (our protagonist up until this) is obviously gone. So that’s a bit weird, but we love Gideon so it’s okay. So what does our protagonist do? They hide behind a door and listen to the grown ups talk at each other. Just spilling answers and tying up ends, and having revelations. And our protagonist isn’t even in the room, they’re not talking to her. They’re just chatting amongst themselves, unaware we’re even listening, while they wrap everything up for us. Then even when our protagonist does enter the room, she still just stands there while people talk around her and about her, but she does nothing.

    And then finally Mercy puts her plan into action, John responds, Augustine responds, River, etc. But here’s the thing; this plan is, like, a hundred years old or whatever. The plan was hatched before either of our protagonists were born, and doesn’t involve them at all. Nothing we’re been party to in either book has anything to do with Mercy’s plan, John’s response, Augustine, etc. None of it. It happens around Gideon, but if Gideon and Harrow had never gone to the first house, and none of these books had happened, the plan would have gone exactly the same way. Mercy would have taken her shot. John would have survived. Augustine would have taken his shot. Ianthe changed history by saving John, but Gideon watched that part while being trapped a long way away behind glass, and neither John nor Ianthe knew or cared we were even there. And Ianthe is close to us, but is not our protagonist. So basically nothing in either this book nor the first mattered at all to the big climax. Gideon was just confused, ineffectual, and out of the way for all of it. So that was kind of a let down.

    The closest thing we had to being involved in the climax was that Gideon has John’s eyes. Mercy seems to say something that makes it seem like she was pretty sure anyway, so she was probably going to do her plan that she started before Gideon was conceived in either case, but it did give her confidence. But she even says something like “damn, if only I’d looked at the body’s eyes earlier” or something, making it clear that if she’d done that one thing, even Gideon’s eyes at the end wouldn’t have been a surprise or relevant.

    So that was the biggest sin, in my opinion. But one more thing that annoyed me while I was annoyed anyway, was the stack of twists. Mercy kills God, holy shit! Nevermind, no she didn’t. He’s back. They’re talking. Now Mercy is dead. John wants Augustine to pledge to him. He seems like he might. Now Augustine tries to kill God. Oh, he seems like he’s going to do it. Nope, that didn’t happen either. Augustine is dead. In the end none of their long plan mattered in the slightest, and if they’d been killed by a beast a hundred years ago we’d be in nearly the same place. But the whiplash of attempts and failure back to back to back was just tiring when all my suspension of disbelief had already been spent by the last three issues. I was just like “please let someone kill God so we can move on”

    So at this point I just felt like: given this outcome, what was the point of any of this? There was a plan constructed long before our protagonist was born that did not involve her at all. And we had various struggles. But then the culmination of this plan we didn’t know about has arrived, and it has nothing to do with us or our struggles we’ve just spent hours and hours reading about. And on top of that the plan doesn’t even work or accomplish much of anything. So this big long plan that we didn’t know about and doesn’t involve us also didn’t change the status quo from where it would have been had it not been hatched and executed.

    Cool…that was… fulfilling…

  • psycotica0@lemmy.catoScience Memes@mander.xyz•It's trueEnglish
    3·
    4 months ago

    I loved the first one. I liked 7/8th of the second one. It was a tricky puzzle, trying to figure out what is real and what isn’t, and what’s truly going on. But I trusted the author because of how much I liked the first one.

    Then the ending of the book was terrible and made me angry at the entire second book as a result.

    But I read the third anyway, just in case. I didn’t much care for it. It was okay enough to keep reading. But it was very different in tone from the first two, for plot reasons. I dunno, maybe 6 out of 10?

    I know I have to read the 4th for sunk cost reasons, but I’m not excited about it…

  • psycotica0@lemmy.catoTechnology@beehaw.org•"AI" Is Not a Problem and Is a Good Thing, but Is Being Abused by the Actual Problem
    7·
    1 year ago

    I have two criticisms of this view.

    The first is the distinction between “replacing humans” and “making humans more productive”. I feel like there’s a misunderstanding on why companies hire people. I don’t hire 15 people to do one job because 15 is a magic number of people I have to hit. I hire 15 people because 14 people weren’t keeping up and it was worth more to my business to hire another expensive human to get more work done. So if suddenly 5 people could do the work of 15, because people became 3x more efficient, I’d probably fire 10 people. I no longer need them, because these 5 get the job done. I made the humans more effective, but given that humans are a replacement for humans, I now don’t need as many of those because I’ve replaced them with superhumans instead.

    If I’m lucky as a company I could possibly keep the same number of people and do 3x as much business overall, but this assumes all parts of my business, or at least the core part, increases at the same time. If my accounting department becomes 3x as efficient but I still have the same amount of work for them to do because accounting isn’t the purpose of my business, then I’m probably going to let go some accountants because they’re all sitting around idle most of the time.

    It used to be that a gang of 20 people would dig up a hold in the road, but now it’s one dude with an excavator.

    The second thing is the assumption that AI art is being evaluated as art. We have this notion in our culture that artists all produce only the best novels and screenplays, and all art hangs in a gallery and people look at it and think about what the artist could have meant by this expression, etc. But that’s virtually no one in the grand scheme of things. The fact that most people know the names of a handful of “the most famous artists of all time”, and it’s like 30 people on the whole earth and some of them are dead should mean something.

    Most writers write stuff like the text on an ad in a fishing magazine. Or fully internal corporate documents that are only seen by employees of that one company. Most visual artists draw icons for apps that never launch. Or the swoopy background for an article. Or did the book jacket for a book that sells 8 copies at a local tradeshow. If there’s a commercial for chips, someone had to write it, someone had to direct it, someone had to storyboard it. And no one put it in a museum and pondered its expression of the human experience. Some people make their whole living on those terrible stock photographs of a diverse set of people all laughing and putting their hands into the middle to show they’re a team.

    Even if every artist with a name that anyone knows is unaffected by this, that can still represent a massive loss of work for basically all creative professionals.

    You touched on some of these things but I think glossed over them too much. AI art may not replace “Art”, but virtually no one makes money from “Art”, and so it doesn’t have to replace it for people to have no job left.

  • psycotica0@lemmy.catoGaming@beehaw.org•What games would you recommend for someone that only recently got into gaming?
    2·
    1 year ago

    Agreed.

    But, to be clear without giving spoilers, by “simulation game in space” it means getting in a ship and flying from planet to planet, while dealing with things like gravity and momentum. In my opinion just the right amount of challenge that it starts hard but doable, but is possible to get good at in the late game. So that was lots of fun.

    Also, while I will not reveal plot here, I feel given feedback from some of my friends that didn’t like it the way I did, that maybe setting some tone expectations may help. The gameplay experience is mostly about exploring the planets, learning stuff, observing things, and making connections in you, the player. There’s archeological evidence out there in space, and it’s your job to figure out the history. It’s not boring, though! It feels more like a giant puzzle. But you should go in with an exploration mindset and if a particular path doesn’t work out, maybe it’s not time yet. Just try exploring something else!

    One of my friends was too “goal oriented” and just kept hammering a given path over and over and it made them frustrated, which is a shame.

    Also, while the DLC is also good, I waited until after the main game to play it, and I’m glad I did. I don’t know how it works to have the DLC running at the same time as the main game, but they’re two pretty independent stories / investigations and I wouldn’t want to get accidentally caught up in one while trying to piece together the other. I feel like that would be pretty confusing.

    To any followup posters, remember no spoilers!