Tootfinder

#Gentoo has not been accepted to participate in #Google #SummerOfCode this year. Apparently, they prefer to give away their money on awful "#AI" (#LLM) projects that waste megawatts of energy to propel #enshittification of Internet, rather than the old good Gentoo that they keep exploiting and that wastes energy primarily on doing hobby stuff, that make Internet a better place.
#GSoC

Good morning #Fediverse
How are we all doing on this great Wednesday so far? Let's talk about our plans for the day and what we all hope to accomplish.
For me, it's just the usual work stuff but with no meetings today, so that makes the day better in most cases.
The wife and I will be playing Fortnite with friends tonight and maybe even try and catch up on some…

Good morning #Fediverse
How are we all doing on this great Wednesday so far? Let's talk about our plans for the day and what we all hope to accomplish.
For me, it's just the usual work stuff but with no meetings today, so that makes the day better in most cases.
The wife and I will be playing Fortnite with friends tonight and maybe even try and catch up on some…

#RustLang is the perfect language for the "move fast, break things" era. No, I'm not implying it encourages you to break stuff. All I'm saying is that all these modern languages are specifically designed for that mindset. They optimize for corporate greed — nicely dressed as "valuing developer's time".
Developers aren't supposed to slow down and think things over. They should finish feature after feature, project after project, profit after profit. When things break, that's bad for profit. However, putting an effort to prevent things from breaking is not cost-effective.
People love to point out memory safety problems with C. However, there are two other important problems affecting C libraries — ABI and API stability. An uncontrolled ABI breakage means that existing programs suddenly breaks. An uncontrolled API breakage means that programs don't build anymore. Combine both and you're in a tight fit.
There are reasonably good solutions to both these problems. However, they require conscious effort, they require thinking — and that is costly. There are also cheap workarounds. If you link libraries statically, you don't need to worry about their ABI changes. If you vendor dependencies, you don't even need to worry about API changes. That's much cheaper for the company — though in reality, it just moves the burden down the line, to distribution developers and users, who end up fighting old, broken or even vulnerable vendored dependencies.
The problem with Rust and #Cargo is that it embraces these hacks into glorified 20M executables. Everything is linked statically, everything is vendored. You can move fast without actually breaking things — at least for the significant majority of users. To the minority, you always have the usual excuse — "we're sorry, we're just volunteers, we can't spend more energy on this, and you should get newer hardware anyway". Not that doing things better wouldn't benefit all users.
#Gentoo

Since it's Easter, let's talk of Gregorian calendar. The calendar was introduced by pope Gregory XIII in 1582, replacing the earlier Julian calendar. It seems like quite a progressive move from such a conservative establishment as the catholic church. However, we should consider two facts.
Firstly, the primary motivation for the calendar reform were… issues with computing Easter date. So it wasn't really about doing something for the sake of science, but rather using science for theological purposes. Would the church undergo a calendar reform if not Easter? In fact, wouldn't it even explicitly oppose any civil reform attempt?
Secondly, the religious character of the change meant conflict with other churches. Perhaps the catholic church was in the best position to enforce a calendar reform throughout much of Europe. Nevertheless, the adoption took a few centuries. Notably, Great Britain resisted until 1752, and Moscow until 1918. And the orthodox church still uses Julian calendar internally.
I'm not claiming that civil rulers were in any better position to introduce a calendar reform. In fact, I don't even know if they would have any motivation to do so. Nevertheless (yep, I love that word), I find it hard to consider the calendar reform as a progressive move — rather as something good that was made for the wrong reasons.

It feels like #enshittification is an inevitable result of browsers gaining popularity.
Back in the old days, when I was still doing some WebDev, #Microsoft had a monopoly with its #InternetExplorer. It really sucked because they didn't care about web standards. For me, it meant testing my website under #Mozilla, #Opera (back when it used the Presto engine) and then adding awful hacks to make it work under IE (Safari was practically nonexistent in Poland). But the remaining browsers had their small foothold.
Then came #Google with its #Chrome, and we were really enthusiastic about it. Little did I know what was to come later. After all, it was a reasonably portable browser, with an open source engine, that followed standards. On top of that, it had a good chance of ending Microsoft's monopoly — and that was great news, because it meant that one day we wouldn't have to worry about compatibility with IE.
So there came a time when Chrome took over a major share of the browser market. Microsoft replaced IE with Edge. Eventually all the main browsers were using WebKit, Blink or a related engine which made life easier for WebDevs. Mozilla's small market share diminished even further.
Then things went to shit. Google showed its true colors, and abused its monopolist position in every possible way. Standards compliance ended up meaning very little, when the monopolist controls the standards. Being open source helps but there's only as much that volunteers can do when dealing with a corporate giant.
One positive aspect of this is that as GAFAM keeps shooting at their feet, Firefox started gaining popularity again. And it's a much better browser than it used to be back in the day. And what happens next?
Of course, as soon as Mozilla notices they're gaining market share, they're starting their own enshittification. Instead of embracing the users who appreciate what Firefox is right now, they are being greedy and trying to lure more people with buzzwords. This isn't going to end well.