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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: January 3rd, 2024

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  • QT is a cross platform UI development framework, its goal is to look native to the platform it operates on. This video by a linux maintainer from 2014 explains its benefits over GTK, its a fun video and I don’t think the issues have really changed.

    Most GTK advocates will argue QT is developed by Trolltech and isn’t GPL licensed so could go closed source! This argument seems to ignore open source projects use the Open Source releases of QT and if Trolltech did close source then the last open source would be maintained (much like GTK).

    Personally I would avoid Flutter on the grounds its a Google owned library and Google have the attention span of a toddler.

    Not helping that assessment is Google let go of the Fuschia team (which Flutter was being developed for) and seems to have let go a lot of Flutter developers.

    Personally I hate web frontends as local applications. They integrate poorly on the desktop and often the JS engine has weird memory leaks




  • It was a mixture of factors.

    Data was to be dumped into a S3 bucket (minio), this created an event and anouther team had built an orchestrator which would do a couple of things but eventually supply an endpoint a reference to a plain/txt file for analysis.

    For the Java devs they had to [modify the example camel docs.](https://camel.apache.org/manual/rest-dsl.html) and use the built in jackson library to convert the incoming object to a class. This used the default AWS S3 api to create a stream handle which fed into the OpenNLP docs. .

    The Python project first hit a wall in setting up Flask. They followed the instructions and it didn’t work from setup tools. The Java team had just created a new maven project from the Intelij but the same approach didn’t work for the Python team using pycharm. It lost them a couple days, I helped them overcome it.

    Then they hit a wall with Boto3, the team expected to stream data but Boto3 only supports downloading, there was also a complexity issue the AWS SDK in Java waa about 20 lines to setup and a single line to call, it was about 50 lines in Python. On the positive side I got to explain what all the config meant in S3.

    This caused the team anouther few days of delay because the team knew I used a 350MiB Samsung TV guide to test the robustness and had to go learn about Docker volume mounting and they thought they needed a stateful kubernetes service and I had to explain why that was wrong.

    Basically Python threw up a lot of additional complexity and the docs weren’t as helpful as they could have been.



  • You do, but considering the scales they process data I suspect Google would be better building Go tooling (or whatever the dominate internal language is).

    A few years back I was trying to teach some graduates the importance of looking at a programming language ecosystem and selecting it based on that.

    One of my comparison projects was Apache OpenNLP/Camel vs Flask/Spacy.

    Spacy is the go to for NLP, I expected it to be either quicker to develop, easier to use, better results or just less resources.

    I assigned Grads with Java experience Spacy and Python experience OpenNLP.

    The OpenNLP guys were done first, they raved about being able to stream data into the model and how much simplier it made life.

    When compared with the same corpus (Books, Team emails, corporate sharepoint, dev docs, etc…) OpenNLP would complete on 4GiB of RAM in less than a second on 0.5vCPU. Spacy needed 12GiB and was taking ~2 seconds with 2vCPU. They identified the same results…

    Me and a few others ended up spending a day reading the python and trying to optimise it, clearly the juniors had done something daft, they had not.

    It rather undermined my point.


  • My expectation is whatever the solution it needs to dockerise and be really easy to deploy via docker compose or Kubernetes so people can quickly and easily set up their own.

    The front end is effectively static files so I would probably choose Apache or Express (whichever gives me a smaller docker image)…

    For the backend I would choose Java for Spring Boot. An Alpine image with OpenJDK and the app is tiny. Spring has a library for every kind of interface making them trivial to implement but the main reason is hibernate.

    Hibernate (now Spring Data) was the first library for being able to switch out databases without having to change code (its all config). A lot of mastodon instances struggle with the resource requirements of elastic search so letting small instances use something like postgres would seem ideal.

    I have noticed Go/Rust still expect you to write or manage a lot of stuff Spring gives away for free. Python is ok if your backend is really tiny but there is a lot of boilerplate in how Python libraries work so complex projects get hard to manage and I assume interacting with the fediverse will add complexity.


  • I agree Grian shenanigans are fantastic.

    I am currently working my way through Mumbo’s S6 and the best episodes so far have Iskall and Grian in them.

    The thing I have noticed it Mumbo isn’t really pressuring himself on a build. He has just kept focus on the storage system because he is finding it fun.

    I thought Grian was at his best with the barge, his episodes had a flow where he would resource, stock the bardge, do a “small” build/project and then shenanigans.

    I am not sure that flow is sustainable but he was clearly having fun.

    At the moment it just seems he is increasingly beating himself up on being a builder and needing to build the most epic base ever.


  • SpaceX are on track to launch 130 times this year. The industry competitors launch 6-12 times per year.

    I suspect the higher incident rate is related, since you will need to manufacture, roll out, etc… much more often.

    The article also talks about most the incidents being in booster recovery. Only 2 Space competitors do that,

    Blue Origins sub orbital booster always returned to launch site and at best managed monthly launch. This rocket hasn’t launched in more than a year.

    Rocket Lab perform ocean recovery but only launched 11 times last year and only recovered the booster twice.

    So its hard to really compare


  • I have listened and as the seasons go on I get increasingly worried about him. He is increasingly showing signs of burn out so clearly his flow isn’t working for him.

    Listen to season 7 as he talks about the back of the mansion. He is feeling self pressure to complete the back and he is getting fustrated at himself.

    Its the same with the Ally, you can hear how excited he is at the start and as the season progresses anything to do with the ally he talks about like an unpleasant chore.

    With the stones other hermits try to intervene to help him, his reaction there really doesn’t seem a bit. It sounded a lot like the panic caused by burn out.

    He clearly loves being on the SMP and his shenanigans and ideas are fantastic and clearly a lot of fun for him. I want him to stick around and think unless he learns how to break up work so he can find joy in all his builds he will loose that joy











  • stevecrox@kbin.runtoToday I Learned@lemmy.world...
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    4 months ago

    I wouldn’t get massively excited.

    Python is a scripting language, its shines when you want to write a stand alone file which takes an input and performs a task. Scripting languages are great to learn as a first language and so python is wonderful for non developers.

    The issue you hit is the build management solutions for Python are kind of broken and these help support and encourage good development practice so a lot of Python projects end up a collection of scripts rather than a mature project. You can have good projects but…

    In raw benchmarks Java has 90% of the performance of C/C++, but in reality Java is more performant because developers get bogged down in memory management on C/C++ and they get more time to optomise in Java as a result. I’m not sure where Rust will come out to be honest.

    Python benchmarks at 50% the performance of Java, in reality I’ve found code ends up slightly worse because Python is procedural, library support and streaming is poorly supported.

    Take library support, Spring really rose to prominese because of ‘hibernate’ which was a way to abstract talking to different databases through objects, you could switch from PostgreSQL to Oracle through config. Spring data has dumbed this down so I define a plain old Java object and Spring will generate everything I need.

    Python expects you to hand craft SQL statements and every database extends SQL slightly differently, so i need to write SQL for every operation and manage/own it. So the win in being able to quickly read/write to a database (since you don’t have to learn anything about Spring) is quickly ruined because of the all the boilerplate and error handling you now have to write.


  • stevecrox@kbin.runtoToday I Learned@lemmy.world...
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    4 months ago

    Every programming languages has communities built around them.

    Its becoming clear Rust solves a lot of C/C++ type problems and the embedded communities are definitely shifting over.

    Apache is the primary community for Java, a quick look at their project list shows it’s entirely web servers, data engineering and clustered projects for distributed computing.

    Personally if you asked me to solve this problem I would use Spring Boot with various Spring libraries for talking to the caddy, user control, etc… Looking at the project, its exactly what they have done



  • If you click the link and follow it through 3 redirects you’ll get to Stamets post.

    Basically risa is listed as having “no rules” but the community admin is/was trying to moderate things to keep it “fun”.

    Stamets and others were upset at the contradiction and through there own posts generated alot of noise to get it resolved the startrek.website admin got sick of the drama.

    To be honest the site admin should require mods to accurately explain their actions “Doesn’t inspire Jahamora” isn’t a great reason and reading stamets examples I think you could build rules fairly easily.

    But I won’t be going to Ten Forward, reading the post was exhausting.


  • Immutable distributions won’t solve the problem.

    You have 3 types of testing unit (descrete part of code), integration (how a software piece works with others) and system testing (e.g. the software running in its environment). Modern software development has build chains to simplify testing all 3 levels.

    Debian’s change freeze effectively puts a known state of software through system testing. The downside its effecitvely ‘free play’ testing of the software so it requires a big pool of users and a lot of time to be effective. This means software in debian can use releases up to 3 years old.

    Something like Fedora relies on the test packs built into the open source software, the issue here is testing in open source world is really variable in quality. So somethinng like Fedora can pull down broken code that passes its tests and compiles.

    The immutable concept is about testing a core set of utilities so you can run the containers of software on top. You haven’t stopped the code in the containers being released with bugs or breaking changes you’ve just given yourself a means to back out of it. It’s a band aid to the actual problem.

    The solution is to look at core parts of the software stack and look to improve the test infrastructure, phoronix manages to run the latest Kernel’s on various types of hardware for benchmarking, why hasn’t the Linux foundation set up a computing hall to compile and run system level testing for staged changes?

    Similarly website’s are largely developed with all 3 levels of testing, using things like Jest/Mocha/etc… for Unit/Integration testing and Robots/Cypress/Selenium/Storybook/etc… for system testing. While GTK and KDE apps all have unit/integration tests where are the system level test frameworks?

    All this is kinda boring while ‘containers!’ is exciting new technology


  • You seem to be intentionally missing the point, but to reiterate…

    You shower before entering a pool to wash the dirt from your body off (your cleaning yourself).

    The more of your body covered the less effective that shower is.

    Ideally everyone would be naked in the shower, but there are probably outfits which increasingly render the shower less and less effective (e.g. speedos are better than shorts, etc .).

    It would not surprise me if a Burkina covered so much that the cleaning shower is rendered pointless


  • The shower before a pool is to ensure people aren’t entering the pool coated in dirt (e.g. sweat, hair, dead skin, etc…).

    The chemicals in a pool are designed to bind to that dirt and kill any bacteria introduced.

    There is a limit to the chemicals you can add to a pool (before it hurts humans) and once the amount has activated you need to drain the pool and refill it.

    Swimming pools hold crazy amounts of water which is also really expensive to heat up, so pools want to do that as little as possible.

    Clothing interfers with cleaning your body, so people entering near fully clothed (e.g. like a Burkina) will likely introduce more dirt into the pool.

    That translates into increased costs for swimming pools or pools which maintain the old schedule and just operate unsafely.

    This is all based on owning a hot tub and learning how to maintain it.

    Hopefully this also explains why it doesn’t matter people enter the sea fully clothed




  • stevecrox@kbin.runtoFediverse@lemmy.worldWhat's going on with kbin.social?
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    5 months ago

    The developer behind KBin seems to have issues delegating/accepting contributors.

    If you look at the pull requests, most have been unreviewed for months and he tends to regularly push his branches once complete and just merge them in.

    That behaviour drove the MBin fork, where 4-5 people were really keen to contribute but were frustrated.

    To some extent that would be ok, its his project and if he doesn’t want to encourage contributions that is his decision but…

    KBin.social has gotten to the size where it really should have multiple admins (or a paid full time person). Which it doesn’t have.

    The developer has also told us he has gone through a divorce, moved into his own place, gotten a full time job and now had surgery.

    Thats a lot for any normal person and he is going through that while trying to wear 2 hats (dev & ops) each of which would consume most of your free time.

    Personally I moved to kbin.run which is run by one of the MBin devs