Well, to reference Julia Evans another time:

head and HEAD are specifically the third meaning of ‘branch’, i.e. the newest commit on a branch, but can also refer to a commit not on a branch, when in that detached head state.

And while I’m not enamored with these names either, I can’t think of a word that I like better for this meaning.

I feel like most of the layoffs and the flooded market happened in the US. Judging by the name, bleistift is from the EU…

I mean, so far, all of them require tons of humanly produced data.

Discriminative AI (deep learning et al) requires humans to label data for hours on end, per use-case.
And generative AI (LLMs et al) require just insane amounts of human works to copy from, albeit not necessarily limited to individual use-cases.

I guess, what I’m saying is that the ratio of how much labor humans (involuntarily) invested into AIs, compared to the labor these AIs actually perform, is likely a lot higher than 70%.

I have my repos on Codeberg and one of the ‘disadvantages’ is that, well, it’s a non-profit, so I genuinely don’t want to waste their resources.
They ask you to only host open-source repos there, meaning that using it for backups of shitty personal projects, even if I would throw in an open-source license, is just out of the question for me.

And that has weirdly been a blessing in disguise. Like, if it’s not useful for humanity to see, do I really care to keep it around forever?

And I’ve had three projects now where I felt an obligation to push them over the finish line of actually making them a useful open-source project. Which had me iron out some of the usability shortcuts I took, made me learn a good amount of code quality stuff and of course, just feels good to complete.

Yeah, and from what I understand, learning the language itself isn’t the hard part. It actually has rather few concepts. What’s difficult, is learning how to program a computer correctly without all the abstractions and safety measures that modern languages provide.

Even structured programming had to be added to COBOL in a later revision. That’s if/else, loops and similar.

You can find them here: https://discuss.kde.org/t/finalists-announcement/7862/3

If it helps, the Windows/Linux logic is basically:

• Ctrl key for triggering actions within an application.
• Alt key for navigating the UI of an application via the keyboard.
• Meta/Super/Windows key for triggering actions outside of applications (on the OS level).

Well, and Ctrl, Alt, Shift also serve for alternative characters when you’re typing. And some application or OS shortcuts wildly combine modifiers for more complex keybindings. And of course, some applications just didn’t get the note of how this generally works. I won’t claim, it really follows rules, but yeah, it’s not generally complete chaos either.

I think, what you’re describing used to be a thing, but there’s now a somewhat different, more granular way of rebinding keybindings:

However, it should be said that these will only apply within KDE applications. If you’re using third-party stuff, like Firefox, GIMP, VLC etc., they won’t apply.

If you really want to go hard on rebinding all kinds of keys for any application, you can also do things like these:

As cool as both of these are, and as much as I would still generally recommend picking KDE for these kind of customization possibilities, I wouldn’t recommend overdoing either. You won’t be able to use other PCs anymore…

Pictures are probably better than a thousand words here:

• https://kde.org
• https://www.gnome.org

Very weird example to me, with the LLM chatbot video. Like, yeah, interacting with an LLM can be interesting, but you’re not going to learn anything meaningful about it.

And when I jumped into the middle of the video, that looked pretty much exactly as I expected, too. The guy was tweaking the pre-query and then chatting with the chatbot to see how it turned out. So, they didn’t do/learn much coding either.

There is all that surrounding technology, which you are inevitably going to learn something about, but ultimately this is what I find so tiring about LLMs. I can learn something about the surrounding technology and tackle a topic which is meaningfully interesting at the same time. Unless I had a problem which a custom adaptation of an LLM could solve, why would I choose to play with it?

Yeah, it’s especially bad, when a library doesn’t provide type hints itself. It can be comically difficult to find out what the return type of a function is, because every if-else-branch might have a different return value, so you may need to read the function body in full to figure out what the type might be.

Add to that, that lots of the tooling around type hints isn’t as fleshed out / useful as it is in fully typed languages and I can definitely understand why someone might not immediately feel like it’s a valuable use of their time.

I imagine what they mean is e.g. that TypeScript can tell you something is a Date, but it doesn’t attempt to fix some of the confusing, quirky behaviour with that: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Date#interpretation_of_two-digit_years

So, yes, it’s generally better than JS, but it doesn’t actually make it good/attractive, if you’re used to the sanity of backend languages. It very much feels like lipstick on a pig.

Hmm, interesting. Here in Germany, power companies are partially privatized and I always thought, whomever came up with that nonsense took inspiration from the turbo-capitalism in the USA. Apparently not.

Do they need to be profitable, though, in your model? It mostly sounds like a traditional public service, where the government could just tell them to use the money for solar…

“Open-source” is not up for interpretation. The word was coined by this definition being made public: https://opensource.org/osd/

More profitable for fossil fuel companies, sure. And they will lobby to stay in business.

But no one needs fossil fuel companies. If you can sell 1 MWh power, that’s a fixed amount of income. If you have less costs to cover (what the graphic shows), then that’s more profit for you.

Alright, yeah, good point with the batteries. I’m hoping the batteries in electric cars will double up as storage for the grid (already happening today), but also that there’s just enough redundancy with other renewables.

Possible. But well, whether these regulations actually are bullshit or not, kind of doesn’t matter. A dumb solar panel won’t ever need to be regulated as much. If that’s what makes it cheaper, it still is cheaper.

I’m not quite sure, why it was left out of that graph, maybe they didn’t have matching data, but it is shown here (from the same source article):

So, what did you want me to do? Post the same graph, but black out the nuclear line, so no one can see it going upwards? I do find that data point interesting, too, but I would have posted this, even if it was just the solar dropping as it does.

As far as I understand the description at the top of the image, no, storage is not included. But if production costs are insanely low, that of course does leave plenty room for storage or redundancy. In particular, personally I believe the costs will continue on a logarithmic drop and we’re at the steep part of that, so even if it really is not the case today, I do expect solar production + storage to become cheaper in a not too distant future.

Also, as another graphic from the source article illustrates, battery costs are rapidly dropping, too: