• 190 Posts
  • 9 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 29th, 2023

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  • The whole idea to check the donations came from stumbling upon this post which discussed costs per user.

    Things should be put into perspective. The cost per user is actually the fixed monthly cost of operating an instance divided by the average number of active users.

    In the discussion you linked to, there’s a post on how Lemmy.ml costs $80/month + domain name to serve ~2.4k users. If we went through opex/users metric, needlessly expensive setups with low participation would be a justification to ask for more donations.

    Regardless, this is a good reminder that anyone can self-host their own Lemmy instance. Some Lemmy self-host posts go as far as to claim a Lemmy instance can be run on a $5/month virtual private server from the likes of scaleway.



  • C++ can be written to be safe. I don’t think WH is the right authority to issue this warning. Naming C++ rather than going after specific features is unfair.

    I suspect that the white house just received a report from some people in the industry stating that faulty software is vulnerable to attacks from bad actors, and from that basis they just went the simplistic path of arguing that 1) lots of software is written in C++, 2) that software has bugs, therefore if we don’t use C++ then we won’t have bugs.

    As a branch of government, their role is not to evaluate technical merits of proposals but to hear what their representatives have to say.


  • Walter Bright has fairly odious political opinions;

    I fail to see the relevance of what personal opinions and beliefs he may or may not have. You’re making it sound like the goal is not to improve a language ir fix issues, but to take something away from a person just because you disagree with their political opinions. That’s hardly good use of anyone’s time, and sounds terribly petty behavior.

    I wish I had that much free time to be able to waste it being so vindictive about such trifling issues.

    Which languages have you invested/migrated to, only to find that “political stunts” had a “negative impact” on your planned development?

    I don’t waste my time with meaningless irrelevant stuff. Either a tech stack serves it’s purpose, or it doesn’t. I don’t have enough free time to waste it trying to cancel others.



  • We are not in the middle ages any longer, we need operate like an engineering discipline.

    I’m not sure you realize how “engineering disciplines” operate as crafts.

    Some engineering fields might be bounded by tons of regulations and standards and specifications, but that does not remove the craftsmanship from the problem domain. At most, those surface design requirements and convert them into hard design constraints, but that does not get rid of the need to go beyond those and leave our mark in terms of subjective definitions and measures of quality.

    Also, these comments on “operate like an engineering discipline” are mostly sourced from a cargo cult mentality, where mindlessly mimicking the surface-level aspects of the things they try to emulate is perceived as being key to achieve their perceived qualities. However, software is not bound by most, if any, of the requirements that other engineering fields must adhere to. It makes no sense to presume that a solution that rose from a very specific set of constraints applied to a very specific set of problems will also be adequate for an entirely different problem subjected to entirely different constraints.