Beej Jorgensen

Most of my code and some non-code is under ~/src, but I have repos scattered all around for other things.

My parents are in their 80s and this crap will push them to Linux.

I don’t know the details behind it, but it sure takes its sweet time figuring it out. I’ve let it sit 20 minutes before giving up.

Yeah. Under a second to the launcher, and (just timed it) 6 seconds to load and run my existing world.

I haven’t measured it, but I can tell I’m noticably slower on standard editors than Vim.

When I had to match against misspells I found Levenshtein distance to be most useful.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levenshtein_distance?wprov=sfla1

Really? Mine launches in a few seconds. Maybe I haven’t explored enough. 😁

I started using one of the userspace oom killers a while ago and have been much happier. Instead of the system becoming unresponsive, suddenly Slack just dies. It’s great.

I played quite a bit of solo mineclone2/voxelibre. Really good stuff with a surprisingly short wishlist on my part.

It’s silly, but one of my favorite things is that it fires up the launcher in under a second. Reminds me of when software wasn’t bloated halfway to hell. 😁

Was that sadometer correctly calibrated to NIST specifications?

On the last system I put together I used xfs because I was thinking ext4 development was waning. TBH I can’t really tell the difference in my regular usage.

Word on the street is that xfs sometimes corrupts files, but I’m not sure if that’s true anymore.

Maybe on the next system I’ll be back to ext4.

I’m a teacher at university and I run Arch, BTW. 😁

I definitely use them a lot, but I think “very” is too strong a word. It’s pretty easy to get confident, contradictory information from them. They’re a good place to start and brainstorm, but all the information has to be verified either by running and testing the code, or by finding a human source.

I hate to do this, but AI chatbots are typically pretty good at giving examples for things like this and you can learn from it.

The one thing that would drive my parents over the edge is ads in Windows. They already use Firefox and Libreoffice.

Unix has been my favorite dev platform since I first used it 30 years ago. I’m typing this on a Mac, which also does just fine. But I’m happiest on my Linux box. Even WSL was OK, but the bloat of Windows overpowers the hardware. My Linux daily driver is a 9-year-old laptop that couldn’t handle Windows any longer.

Since I moved my stuff off Google Drive, Libreoffice has been super useful. Great work.

Related: Internet Archive hosts zillions of abandoned games. Publishers are currently trying to sue it out of existence. They accept donations.

The double-edged sword of isolation.

On the one hand, poor communication between apps and waste of storage.

On the other, relative safety from malicious applications, or from otherwise-safe applications built on top of a thousand libraries none of which have been audited by the dev.

I don’t know how it’s going to go down, but I suspect something will come along to address these issues and snatch the market away from Flatpak.

Use the right tool for the job, I say.

I made a decent chunk of change with capitalism. I have a modest house and am well positioned for a middle-class retirement.

Now I work for the government in a field for which I find the capitalist options wanting.

I give away my programming guides for free online with no ads, but sell paper copies of the books for profit.

Could I make more money by charging for the online versions? Sure. But some things are worth more than money.

The quest for money doesn’t ruin everything, but it sure ruins a lot of things.

Bell Labs of yore would be my dream company to work for.