I believe, the problem is mainly white bread, which is what people typically have in mind for feeding ducks.

As opposed to wholegrain, it only retains the endosperm, which is mostly just carbohydrates without many nutrients:

I think, the lack of fiber is also particularly problematic. At least, I’ve heard that it gives them diarrhea, which probably means their guts don’t have time to extract the few remaining nutrients.

Yeah, and for consumer software, the companies developing the software don’t have to pay for the RAM, so unless it becomes a widespread reason to switch away from their software, they do not have to care at all.

I would argue that a substantial reason for their popularity is also just that devs have fun when developing them.

With most other genres, you’ve seen the story a gazillion times, you’ve done each quest a thousand times etc… It just gets boring to test the game and it becomes really difficult to gauge whether it still is fun to someone who isn’t tired of it.

Meanwhile with roguelikes, the random generation means that each run is fresh and interesting. And if you’re not having fun on your trillionth run, that’s a real indicator that something needs to be added or improved.

I find that it’s mainly frustrating to those learning German at an advanced level, since using a wrong article immediately exposes you as a non-native speaker. Because yeah, as the others said, it hardly ever happens that native speakers use a wrong article…

The description in the ticket isn’t too bad:

allows users to make a window disappear and keep only its title bar visible.

It really just hides the window contents. In effect, it is similar to minimizing a window, except that it doesn’t spring into your panel and rather stays in place as just the window title bar without the contents.

It is a niche feature, if you couldn’t tell. But it isn’t some KDE specialty feature; various other desktops and window managers also support it. I think, it was more popular in the early days of graphical user interfaces, when we were still working out, how we want to do panels and such.

And conversely, I do think it makes more sense as a feature on big screens like you can have today, where your panel might be quite a bit away.
Don’t think, window shading will make a big comeback just yet, but yeah, probably enough existing users that use it, so that it would be cool to support that workflow.

There’s a store in the next town, which has only organic foods. Rather expensive to shop there, but I still go there more often than I need to, just because everyone’s friendly and relaxed.

Yeah, if I ever catch a calm hour in the store, I’ll actually look through the aisles and check out products I wouldn’t normally buy. If the store is busy, I grab the usual and flee as quickly as possible.

I thought about creating something like that and the major problem that I see is that lots of meme templates do have copyright and the font that’s typically used for memes, Impact, isn’t free either. Well, and it isn’t done by merely developing a software and offering it for download. You would need to host the meme templates or some editor webpage, which is a whole 'nother skillset.

If we say that users bring their own meme template, and it can be a free font that looks similar to Impact, and it’s not to be hosted as a webpage, then it would be quite doable.
You would “just” need to call the ImageMagick library with the right parameters. Still not trivial, but the path to get there is fairly straightforward. I could imagine that something like that already exists as an open-source project…

It’s mostly about ease of use. You don’t really want to spend more than a few minutes on a silly meme. As such, having a database with meme templates, the right kind of font and easy text placement, can make the difference, whether you’ll bother creating a meme or not…

Ah, thanks, I hadn’t read that far. It says this:

A 1941 Commerce Department survey found no significant expansion of retail sales due to the change.

With this as source: https://www.nytimes.com/1941/05/21/archives/thanksgiving-goes-back-to-old-date-in-42-president-says-change-did.html

Damn, what a concept. If people buy extra in this time period, it is 100% crap that they don’t need. Otherwise, they would be buying it, no matter when it gets stocked. So, the way to combat an economic crisis is to produce more garbage. Incredible.

Yeah, we just have two ear canals. Stereo is basically all your brain will get.

I find it so tricky, too. With the maintainers that I see struggling, it’s rarely a lack of contributions that fucks them up, but rather a lack of maintainers. And they can’t easily onboard other maintainers, because:

1. there’s hardly anyone willing to invest enough time into your project to be a particularly helpful maintainer.
2. everyone’s just strangers on the internet, who may or may not want to ship malware as part of your project.

Like, I even have a friend who’s excited for a project that I’m building, but so far, they’re purely cheerleading (which is appreciated), because they do have projects of their own that they find fun, and in particular also a life outside of programming.
I do not currently struggle with maintainership (because I haven’t announced my projects anywhere publicly 🤪), but yeah, it just feels like it’s asking for a lot, if I were to try to get that friend on board. In particular also, because not many aspects of maintainership are fun.

Yesterday, I had a leaflet in my mailbox, with information about a cat missing.
Two weeks ago, someone hung up a sheet of paper in the nearest street with their cat missing. As did someone two months ago.
I think we’re now up to five or six cats missing this year in total.

I have no idea, in what range people search for their cats, but since this is basically my only exposure to them, it feels like more cats go missing than exist in the first place. 🫠

I mean, sure, I do understand what’s happening on a logical level. I’m just so baffled, because this whole internet thingamabob was architected by the military.
It was intentionally built, so that parts of it could fail without disrupting the rest. When a corporation fucks up, it was supposed to take down the servers of that corporation, not also a good chunk of the rest.

But unfortunately, this internet thingamabob is merely the closest approximation we have for the “perfect market” that economics theory calls for, so it still doesn’t actually self-regulate like that whole theory would love to believe.
In fact, it is so much worse, because now monopolization happens across the whole planet. Particularly also because we don’t have a functioning “world government” that could enforce competition at that level via laws.

So, the network leads to companies monopolizing on top of it and then monopolies necessitate that the respective companies do as poor of a job as possible, because this reduces costs and increases profits. As a result, major parts of this military-grade internet now falter every few weeks.

Oh man, these global outages are really getting out of hand. A few days after the recent AWS and Azure outages, I suddenly noticed that I couldn’t reach certain webpages anymore. And I genuinely didn’t even bother trying to debug, because I just assumed that it’s another global outage.

In the evening, I did look into it and noticed that my router was at fault (presumably DNS got bugged by a recent update). That was just wild to me, that I genuinely deemed it more likely that several major webpages went offline together than that my home setup is fucky.

Eh, the responses are a bit more varied, ranging from “we have very low confidence, because it did not correctly predict several things” to “it’s the best unifying theory we have, by quite a bit”.

In my opinion, worth a read for folks interested in string theory…

recreational coding

Well, good news, it actually is fun to dick around in the Nix configuration and see those changes manifest on your system.

The purpose is similar, i.e. configuring a system, but I’d say Ansible works best, if you need to make a few small changes from an existing distro, whereas NixOS rather takes the approach of controlling everything about the operating system.

And in many ways, controlling everything is actually simpler.

As the other person said, the bit about Arch is just the preamble.
But you can use Nix Home-Manager on Arch (or other distros), if you’re so inclined, which will give you that reproducibility for the stuff in your home-directory.

In some ways, this is like backing up and restoring your dotfiles, but it allows you to template those dotfiles and depending on the program, it offers simple ways to populate the dotfile templates. For example, KDE applications don’t generally offer very legible dotfiles and so configuring e.g. a panel via dotfiles is kind of a pain. To help with this, there’s Nix Plasma-Manager.