@mgorny@social.treehouse.systems2026-04-17 08:08:06
Kinda related to #Gentoo, so cool" or "they stopped using it, so sad". And I'm like, "why should we care?"
Do they donate money to Gentoo? They don't. And if they did, it would probably come with obligations making this not worth it.
Do they contribute back? Rarely, and if they do, they are unreliable. They benefit more than we do. They just want to dump the packages they need, quickly duct taped together, so that we would maintain them going forward. Their employees rarely reveal that they're paid to do this, and if they do, it's not so they'd be held to higher standards, but to emphasize their importance: "you must placate us."
Well, sometimes they hire Gentoo developers. It's nice that these developers get some gratification for their work, especially if they're able to continue contributing on work time. But in the end, company priorities win. We are either left with loads of new packages with no maintainer and unclear significance, or a Google employee who appeared every once in a while to dump a bunch of ChromeOS patches and never bothered handling the fallout.
So, sorry, but I'd rather care for volunteers who want to make Gentoo better, than companies who see some profit incentive in it.
PS. I'm probably focusing too much on the negative aspects, and we likely had some positive interactions that are far less known and usually don't meet with such fanfare.
#FreeSoftware
@cdarwin@c.im2026-03-15 22:08:42
Folks — My name is Harry Dunn, and if you chip in $5 to help send me to Congress, I’ll subpoena Donald Trump when I get there.
Please forgive me for my bluntness, but I’m DISGUSTED with Donald Trump’s disregard for the Constitution.
The 𝗢𝗡𝗟𝗬 𝗪𝗔𝗬 to fight back against Trump is to elect Democrats who aren’t afraid to call him out on his BS!
We 𝗠𝗨𝗦𝗧 take back the House in the Midterm Elections so we can use the full weight of Congressional oversight to hold him accountable.…
@ErikJonker@mastodon.social2026-03-16 13:28:31
@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io2026-02-15 23:27:26
Back in the 90s we had a great term for stuff like “building AI satellite factories on the Moon” and “we’ll just envelop the solar system with a Dyson Sphere”.
It’s pretty technical and I forgive you if you’ve never heard of it, the term is “investment scam”.
@tiotasram@kolektiva.social2026-04-16 12:22:07
Just went through a code file and replaced "target" with "recipient" in a bunch of docs and variable names, because I had had two senses of "target" and because I want to encourage less-combat-focused thinking among potential devs (which at the moment and for the foreseeable future is just me). Zero changes to code functionality (unless I messed up) and took maybe 30 minutes. Got me thinking about the goal of software development and who would view that time as "wasted".
From a short-sighted "measure user-facing functionality" standpoint there was basically zero progress made. From a "cultivating-code-understanding-entities" perspective, there are both immediate and long-term gains. I got a chance to review the entire file at a high level which improves my understanding of things even if no changes had been made. The changes increase clarity of a lot of documentation, as well as variable naming clarity in code which deals with both senses of "target" which now has clear separation between variables that refer to targets and recipients. If there are any other devs in the future, this will help them a lot. Even if not, by increasing my own development efficacy, the expected values for project-gets-shipped and overall-project-impact just went up. I've also helped myself not introduce the same ambiguity in all my future projects, because I'll remember this time investment, and I've bent the ideological flavor of the protect towards neutral/beneficial interactions between "initiators and recipients" instead of hostile interactions between "initiators and targets".
Overall, well worth the time investment if we consider all the subtler benefits, and not just a very crude measure of user-facing behavior. (Secretly, this is also a post about LLMs.)
#programming
@grahamperrin@bsd.cafe2026-03-16 18:58:50
@…
@lw may be unaware that I'm a former committer; I rarely mention this.
From an archived edition of one of my profiles:
https://tinyurl.com/grahamperrin-freshbs…
@sauer_lauwarm@mastodon.social2026-01-17 08:02:54
@krone@frawas.de2026-01-17 14:26:12
Polizei ermittelt - „Herztod“ von Starwinzer wird zum Kriminalfall #News #Nachrichten
@grahamperrin@bsd.cafe2026-01-17 08:44:58
@… regardless of quarterly or latest for the FreeBSD-ports repo, you can try superior drm-latest-kmod if graphics are a problem with drm-kmod.
<https://www.freshports.org/graphics/…
@grahamperrin@bsd.cafe2026-01-17 04:49:33
@… the need to build from ports should be exceptional.
Is your FreeBSD version something other than 1500068?
https://www.freshports.org/graphics/drm-la