[–] 1 point 4 days ago

Make is fine unless you want to build on Windows. Then you kind of need something else.

I agree, you kind of need something else instead of Windows if you want to build software.

It is the very slow process creation infrastructure that kills Make as a tool on Windows.

s/Make as a tool on //

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  • [–] 1 point 4 days ago*

    Give me a Make that

    • properly handles filenames with arbitrary names (Make today breaks if filenames contain whitespace)
    • uses space-based indentation level (Make today depends on the invisible difference between U+0008 TAB versus other whitespace, and refuses to process any other indentation)

    Give me that, and... well, I'd probably still stick to current-day Make, because those improvements would cause my Makefiles to be backward incompatible. Make is just reliably available on pretty much any arbitrary system, unlike any candidate replacement.

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  • [–] 6 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

    Now I definitely know you haven’t seen a real professional codebase.

    Extremely wrong. So much for your assumptions.

    Professional git repos are full of one sentence commit messages with little to no explanation of what’s in the change set.

    Yes, humans can communicate poorly, of course. But people letting the LLMs do it do not understand what is in the change, and the LLM certainly doesn't. There's no one at all to ask because no one understands what was changed or why.

    I'll take “sometimes lazy but they wrote it and their understanding of it can be interrogated”, all week.

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  • [–] 9 points 5 days ago* (3 children)

    Working professionals are, if at all competent to be committing code to a professional code base, entirely capable of writing their own commit messages.

    If they can't write the commit message, they can't sufficiently explain in writing the commit they just made to anyone. So, they should not be working professionally on a code base.

    If they are capable of writing the commit message with their own understanding in their own words, but they choose not to communicate their understanding in the commit message? Also disqualifying, they should not be working professionally on a code base. Human communication is essential to this work.

    That this is a controversial position, is a clear sign of the Slopocalypse.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

    But that has the same effect like DB_HOST="${DB_HOST:-localhost} (use the string if not set), which is more readable.

    I disagree that the duplicate reference would be more readable. Instead, the reader needs (if they care about the meaning of the code) to double-check whether the two duplicate names are exactly the same, or whether they are subtly different. At which point the reader needs to wonder why the code isn't written using the form without the repeated name. So, that's not a readability improvement.

    Related to that: Code with duplicate references in a single expression or statement leaves open the likelihood that one or more of them will contain a typo or an easily-overlooked difference, leading to bugs. DRY is a good principle to avoid that.

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    Despite billions of dollars that firms around the globe have invested in AI over the past few years, major returns remain to be seen: 90% of executives say AI efforts have yet to translate to productivity gains at their companies, according to an Atlanta Federal Reserve working paper. And an Ernst & Young survey published last month found that 36% of senior AI executives at companies with at least $1bn in annual revenue reported an AI incident that led to issues including data loss, financial damage, brand damage or operational disruptions.

    Firms from Microsoft to McKinsey are limiting usage for employees, as the flood of new tools and rapacious consumption weighs on bottom lines. Others, such as Palantir, Booz Allen Hamilton and Nvidia, are restricting employee use over growing concerns about the security of their organizations’ data with AI companies, Reuters reported.

    “We initially treated AI like a traditional technology rollout: deploy the tools, provide training, drive adoption,” Kathleen Hogan, Microsoft’s chief strategy and transformation officer, said in a recent blogpost about the company’s AI adoption journey. “We learned that access and usage do not equal transformation.”

    [–] 8 points 3 weeks ago

    In the workplaces where I've been pressured to use LLMs for coding, this would not faze them. Management would just say “See, waiting for reviews is taking longer, we can't afford it any more. No reviews, just productivity.”

    Plummeting quality of the result is no barrier to a boss that just wants higher numbers to please their boss.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

    It may depend where the project is and what you want to bring with you.

    If you're asking solely about the Git repository: you need to find exactly which commit is the latest one you want to bring, and specify that commit identifier (the hash of that commit) as the “starting point” when you create a new branch.

    git branch […] []

    https://git-scm.com/docs/git-branch

    So, clone the repository locally however you need to do that. Then, in your local repository, modify what the branches point to:

    e.g. If you determined the latest commit you want to bring, has commit identifier “deadbeefbad1dea”, you can create the branch named “before-the-slop”:

    git branch before-the-slop deadbeefbad1dea

    Now the new branch “before-the-slop” has all the commits up to that, and no further. That's what you'll base your fork on.

    git branch before-the-slop

    git rev-parse HEAD # → deadbeefbad1dea

    Then rename the old “main” or whatever branch, to something like “sloppified-project-main” that gets it out of the way; rename your “before-the-slop” branch to “main”; and set “main” as the default branch in your repository.

    git branch --move main sloppified-project-main

    git branch --move before-the-slop main

    git config set --local init.defaultBranch main

    Some time later, when you've confirmed your repository is how you like it, delete the “sloppified-project-main” branch:

    git branch --delete sloppified-project-main

    and breathe easy.

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    @mgorny@treehouse.systems:

    After seeing yet another dozen packages lose keywords on Gentoo because of a single key dependency switching to uv-build, I would like to plea on behalf of Gentoo users: please don’t use uv-build as a build backend.

    Just to be clear, this is not about uv itself or any other Astral tools; these are good tools with a nice and responsive upstream. The uv-build backend is one thing we have to disagree on. I’m not saying it’s bad; I’m saying that its benefits don’t outweigh the drawbacks.

     

    Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle said that while the nonprofit organization has always functioned as a library, this new designation makes it easier to work with the other federal depository libraries. That, he said, is a service to everyone.

    “ I think there is a great deal of excitement to have an organization such as the Internet Archive, which has physical collections of materials, but is really known mostly for being accessible as part of the internet,” Kahle said. “And helping integrate these materials into things like Wikipedia, so that the whole internet ecosystem gets stronger as digital learners get closer access into the government materials.”

     

    The Sapienza computer scientists say Wi-Fi signals offer superior surveillance potential compared to cameras because they're not affected by light conditions, can penetrate walls and other obstacles, and they're more privacy-preserving than visual images.

    […] The Rome-based researchers who proposed WhoFi claim their technique makes accurate matches on the public NTU-Fi dataset up to 95.5 percent of the time when the deep neural network uses the transformer encoding architecture.

     

    Now I have this blood pressure monitor device that doesn't work without a logged in app and is a paperweight. I'm lucky I never invested into their ecosystem of health products. Lesson is no matter how popular a brand is, there is no guarantee they will be around. I've lost all my health data and there is no way to get it back.

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