namingthingsiseasy

joined 2 years ago

You're right! But I see this as a perversion of education. Education should not be a job training programme. It should teach you how to think and learn. It should be a place where you "learn how to learn" to put it more accurately.

So if you learn how to use LibreOffice in schools, you should be able to adapt when you arrive in the workplace and use MS Office instead - especially if you are still young.

And in my opinion, having experience with two office suites makes you more productive in the end anyway. I think it helps teach you how to translate capabilities from one product to another and makes you more knowledgeable about how each of them works. At least that's what happens to me in my experience when I learn two analogous pieces of software.

[–] namingthingsiseasy@programming.dev 39 points 1 week ago (2 children)

There may still be lawsuits, however. There are still many ways that he could lose a lot of what he gained.

[–] namingthingsiseasy@programming.dev 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

I prefer eating fresh food, which means that I usually have to go to the store roughly every other day. If I buy more than a couple days of food, it just means more crap in the fridge and more spoilage.

And if my food did last longer than a few days without spoiling, then I'd really start to question what it was made of....

Editing to add that this is easily possible because I have several stores within a short walk or ride on the transit, as it was also pointed out in a sibling comment.

I've never had the chance to use a functional language in my work, but I have tried to use principles like these.

Once I had a particularly badly written Python codebase. It had all kinds of duplicated logic and data all over the place. I was asked to add an algorithm to it. So I just found the point where my algorithm had to go, figured out what input data I needed and what output data I had to return, and then wrote all the algorithm's logic in one clean, side effect-free module. All the complicated processing and logic was performed internally without side effects, and it did not have to interact at all with the larger codebase as a whole. It made understanding what I had to do much easier and relieved the burden of having to know what was going on outside.

These are the things functional languages teach you to do: to define boundaries, and do sane things inside those boundaries. Everything else that's going on outside is someone else's problem.

I'm not saying that functional programming is the only way you can learn something like this, but what made it click for me is understanding how Haskell provides the IO monad, but recommends that you keep that functionality at as high of a level as possible while keeping the lower level internals pure and functional.

[–] namingthingsiseasy@programming.dev 15 points 1 week ago (2 children)

In my opinion, it's most important for kids to learn to use these tools above all. Schools need to take the charge on using products like these instead of corporate offerings. Once that takes place, I think (hope) the floodgates will open and that we'll finally start breaking free of the shackles of these kinds of corporate software.

[–] namingthingsiseasy@programming.dev 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Sad to see that Ecosia and Qwant don't seem to work without Javascript. I'll stick with DDG, and may consider using Mojeek more in the future. The fact that DDG doesn't have its own index does bother me a bit.

[–] namingthingsiseasy@programming.dev -1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Don't forget that the EU Commission funded a report to document the impact of file sharing and then buried it when they found out that it was actually beneficial to the creators. So if you want to engage in file sharing, you're actually helping them.

Do what you will with that information. If you really want to boycott, then boycott the content altogether. If you can't hold back, then download them, but you're helping them out anyway by doing that.

The best thing you can do is support your local art scene and find better alternatives.

[–] namingthingsiseasy@programming.dev 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

If you ever feel useless, don't forget that both true and false have manpages in Linux.

They even have --help and --version flags in case you need them.

[–] namingthingsiseasy@programming.dev 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

This has always been the whole point behind the Trojan Horse that is systemd. Now that Poettering/Red Hat control the entire userspace across virtually all distros, he/they can use it as a vehicle to force all of them to adopt whatever bullshit he thinks of next.

This is what the Linux ecosystem gave away when they tossed their simple init system to adopt the admittedly convenient solution that is systemd. But in reality, the best solution was always to drop init, and instead replace it with an alternative that was still simple to replace if the need should arise. But now that everyone is stuck on systemd, they're all at the mercy of Poettering's Next Stupid Idea.

Convenience comes at a price. systemd is the Google Chrome of Linux userspace. Get out while you can.