Yes, CMake is crazy. And ugly. And inconvenient

How many years has it been since you last used CMake?

CMake suffers from some of the same perception issues as C++. A lot of the criticism usually boils down to the designers prioritizing backwards compatibility, a thing even critics would agree is a good thing. As an example, the OP shows a CMake and Meson snippet. The CMake one is 3 lines, the Meson one is 2. The extra line in the CMake sample is a version declaration for backwards compatibility, but the rest are identical.

If you look past your preconceived notions, you'll find that CMake is a good build system and very easy to use. It's also one of the few that fully supports C++20 modules today.

It's by no means a silver bullet, and the generator-based design isn't always the best choice, but its undoubtedly the best choice for the vast majority of C or C++ projects.

Aren't these the people that made a weird furry VN with dinosaurs that had something to do with Harry Potter rule34 fanfic featuring underage characters?

Good == you like it.

I don't like Kate personally. I use (and am addicted to) Sublime Text, but for an open source/free alternative I recommend Gram, or LiteXL. There's also one called Lapce that I thought was interesting, but I haven't looked into it in many years so idk if it's good yet.

For something more sublime-like, there's Cuda Text, but it's written in Pascal, an old/dying language, so it's at higher risk of abandonment because of a lack of contributors.

So basically, this guy is wrong.

I've had this (controversial) theory for a while that I've yet to see proven wrong. Before AI, it's basically been known that most programmers "age out" of the craft, because it's really difficult to keep up with it forever, and most people in middle of the bell curve simply can't do it. Big tech used to get sued for ageism all the time, because they would do shit like only promote or hire young people (which is illegal).

The aging millennials of today were the young rockstar ninja programmers of the past 2~3 decades, but now most of them are getting too old to keep up. That's why you see AI psychosis hitting the older coders harder than anyone else, since it provides a convenient way to not face the realities of aging. It's easier to think you can still be a rockstar by "pivoting" to AI, than it is to admit that you don't have the energy or motivation to keep your skills sharp. Tim Sweeney (and to a certain extent John Carmack) come to mind as high profile examples of this.

A pre-AI version of this is pivoting to management. That's what pretty much everyone does, and it's common to find people like that who haven't written a line of code themselves in years. But I guess becoming an AI cheerleader is easier to do, and the number of open management roles certainly isn't big enough for everyone.

Don't use AI. Don't do it. People telling you "it's great for learning" are full of shit and going off of gut feeling, not experience. These LLMs have only been around for a few years, and have only gotten semi competent at generating code for even less time. There is no data or evidence that it helps people learn programming, and plenty of evidence that they do the opposite.

So avoid it. Pick a simple project, and see how far you can get. You will probably fail, but that's the point! You'll most likely find something interesting or tough to focus on in the middle of it, and you'll learn a whole lot about whatever that is, and it'll stick with you long after you've abandoned that project.

My advice is to start very small, and avoid anything GUI related. Write like a bare bones terminal only blackjack game, then add a high score table, persist those high scores to disk, etc. If you fail even at step one, that's fine! Just try something else, like tictactoe, Simon says, or a non-game like an app for converting between Fahrenheit and Celsius.

Ask for help on a programming forum somewhere with real people.

Honestly fuck capitalism for taking us down this road.

Capitalism has nothing to do with this. It's corruption, incompetent politicians, and a lazy populace who would rather bitch online than go out and vote (something I'm definitely guilty of, but am actively working to change)

The direction things are going are to concentrate wealth and power into the hands of a very small group of assholes. There is no economic or political system that can fix the problems those assholes have been exploiting to pull this off. The only thing that can prevent that is an informed and energized population of voters.

Like, we all want to see Trump, Musk, Zuckerberg, etc in prison. It feels like they're untouchable, but literally all it would take to do that is to spend a few minutes filling out a ballot to get rid of the career politicians who have been in office too long (and thus are more likely to be corrupt). Even local elections matter.

I see you're deep into AI psychosis, so you're brain isn't working at its full capacity.

Slop means “high volume, low effort garbage,”

and

Slop is a measure of quantity (and to a certain extent, effort), not of quality

Are saying the same thing. Your last paragraph is also incoherent, so I won't even go into that.

Turn off the AI waifu. It isn't real.

Also the guy yelling slop has some weird shit going on with his thumb

This is tiring. Any AI generated thing is slop. Slop is a measure of quantity (and to a certain extent, effort), not of quality. Why? Because quality is subjective, and thus a useless point of comparison. You might think those AI generated studio ghibli rip offs are ugly/disgusting, but my mom thinks they're "cute".

So stop with this tiring "NoT eVeYtHiNg Ai Is SlOp" cope. The question people like this really want to ask is "will you still think I'm cool if I use AI???", and that's also subjective, and thus pointless. I personally will never think anyone who uses generative AI is cool, especially when they reveal how pathetically desperate for approval they are by making posts like this.

That never seems to work with wine

Wine has nothing to do with double clicking. You can set up your desktop environment to do this if you want. Wine requires environments to run apps (aka wine prefixes), and the way I do it is I reuse one environment as much as I can.

Nowadays, I just reuse the wine prefixes Heroic creates, since it usually installs a good chunk of dependencies. Lazy, but it works and saves disk space.

HN is "professional" 4Chan. If you ever spent any time on both sites it's obvious that there's a ton of overlap in the userbase. The only difference is moderation.

So going there for anything but focused technology discussions is a bad time. Now that that era is dead, there's no reason to visit unless you want a safe space where you can be a discrete racist/bigot and/or a flamboyant billionaire bootlicker.

Yes. I still have the muscle memory of typing 'H' then enter on my phone browser whenever I'm bored, but lately I've been catching myself before hitting enter. I need to find another site that starts with H to take priority in my autocomplete.

I also stopped using this site long ago, and only rarely check back in, although that's due to all the obnoxious Redditisms rather than AI. There ain't no "expert tech discussions" happening here.

At this point I feel like a hermit, since there's no social media I regularly use. It's honestly pretty great, and I feel like I'm better at focusing on my work and enjoying real life in general.