(#g6v4kxq) @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Yeah, that has nothing to do with fun. 😅

I was thinking back to CD players. Switching tracks took a moment, although I don’t know anymore how long exactly. IIRC, playing CDs on a computer was a bit slower than in a dedicated player.

Don’t worry, switching to the next OGG file on my disk is basically instant. 😅

(#g6v4kxq) @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org But stuff is still “mostly usable”, isn’t it? It’s not like it became impossible to write a letter because everything has gotten so slow.

That’s what I meant by “absolute” performance: A human being tolerates a system boot up time of 0.5-2 minutes, for example, so there’s an absolute/fixed duration that any task is allowed to take. Boot: 0.5-2 minutes. Opening Word: 1-10 seconds. Saving an image file: 1-10 seconds. Time until the next song starts to play when you click “next track”: 0-5 seconds. Stuff like that. As long as we don’t exceed those durations, people will be more or less happy.

Wasted potential? Ab-so-fucken-lutely.

(Maybe I’m repeating myself. I’m tired. Sorry. 😅)

(#c7kyxoa) @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Uhh, nice. Haven’t seen a sunset like that in a while, I think. 🤔

What the heck is going on here today, so many messages. 😂

(#sderf2q) @prologic@twtxt.net … what was that again? 🤔😅🤪

(#g6v4kxq) @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I guess it’s all about “absolute” performance. Everything is just fast enough for you to get stuff done – no matter the underlying machine. LibreOffice today on my modern machine takes the same time to start up as StarOffice (its ancestor) on my retro machine. And working with it feels the same, everything is just as fast (or slow).

Browsing the web today feels similar to 25 years ago. Even all this wobbling that my link above demonstrates already existed back then (in a way), but it was caused by images loading so slowly. Then, for a brief moment, some browser (I don’t remember which one) had this brilliant feature of trying to keep the current scrolling position stable while the page was still loading. That was great. 😃 This feature then got lost again, probably because it’s too hard to do with JavaScript changing the DOM all the time. So now we’re back to the way it was before.

Corporations should give devs the slowest and oldest machines that they have. 😏 Not only would this be more sustainable, it would also force them to optimize better.

Wayland wants to make every frame perfect. I wish web devs had the same goal. Instead, we’re stuck with this:

https://movq.de/v/112a927861/hiccupfx/

😂😭

(#haiwbdq) @prologic@twtxt.net Most of the things that cause my frustration are things that I can’t change or even avoid. There’s little benefit in complaining about it, I think. 🤔

I’m putting all efforts to switch to Wayland on hold for another 2 years, minimum.

As we all know, writing a Wayland compositor from scratch is next to impossible. Luckily, there’s the wlroots project which aims to build a base library for this task. Basically every compositor except for GNOME and KDE uses it. (This is good! The less fragmentation, the better.)

wlroots is still very volatile, lots of changes with every release. Downstream users (i.e., the projects that write the actual compositor) have to constantly “chase” changes in wlroots. dwl, my favorite compositor at the moment, has recently switched their main branch to target the wlroots git version instead of the latest release. My understanding is that they have to do this in order to keep up with wlroots (maybe I’m wrong).

Everything is volatile and a moving target.

Why does any of this matter for me? Because I have to eventually fork dwl or at least keep a patch set, and I don’t have the stamina to constantly fiddle with this stuff. I’m running my own X11 window manager, it’s highly specialized, and using just “some Wayland compositor out there” is a huge step backward that I’m not willing to take. I tried, it’s just painful and annoying with zero benefits.

So … it was fun experimenting with Wayland a bit, but I’m now back to waiting for things to settle down considerably.

(#lu7gjvq) @prologic@twtxt.net @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org It’s better this way. 😂 I don’t like all this negativity in tech. We tend to focus on bad aspects too much, imho. Then again, it’s really easy to focus on bad stuff, simply because there’s so much of it. 😂

Today is one of those days where I’m really grumpy and have typed out lots and lots of rants. Luckily, I all deleted them in the end instead of sending them. 😂

(#ndodcuq) @prologic@twtxt.net They all gave Crowdstrike root access to their machines. What could possibly go wrong? 🤷🤷🤷

(#bl7a36a) @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Oh, ok, somehow I thought this was not your thing. 😅 Maybe I was misled by you calling them “Acca Dacca”, which felt somewhat derogative. But I just found @mckinley@mckinley.cc’s twt gaapgna from a while ago – so this is just normal Aussie slang for AC/DC?! 🤯🥴

(#dk5cxea) @eldersnake@we.loveprivacy.club

I run it in a Work profile on my GrapheneOS phone that I can switch off at any time

Hmmmmmmm, I like that idea. If I could ban WhatsApp into a second profile and only switch it on every now and then, I would feel a little bit better about it.

(I don’t really trust Android, though, and I suspect that apps can still install background services that are always active. Pure speculation and paranoid on my part, but still.)

(#smnew7a) @mckinley@twtxt.net Hmmmmm, yeah, sounds like jabber is not the right thing for us then.

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com To be honest, I don’t like Matrix that much myself. We don’t use any of the fancy crypto features and all that, no federation either. And clients like “FluffyChat” look and feel pretty much like any other chat client. It’s a rather simple setup. Problem is just that it’s not WhatsApp and people want WhatsApp, nothing else. 🫤 (Hence I have little hope that Signal would be a big success.)

(#ttjvaya) @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org

Anyone who reads the CrowdStrike self-description and then buys the product has really earned a major fault.

The nasty thing is: Sysadmins don’t decide this, do they? The management does. And they don’t have to clean up this bloody fucking mess.

All the fellow sysadmins who were hit by this have my sympathies. 😂

(#ttjvaya) @prologic@twtxt.net Everything’s on fire. We’re going to be complaining for a couple of days, then we’ll continue as usual, repeating the same mistakes. Nothing to see, carry on. 🫤🥴

(I’m just glad it didn’t affect us at work.)

(#c2afqsq) @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org

Then there comes in feature creep.

This is driving me nuts. Everybody thinks that “development has to be kept alive!” When people see a project without commits in the last 2 years, they think it’s dead and not worth using. Bah, why? Software can be “done”. If no bugs are known, then there’s no need to change anything.

All these ideas are old. I’ve heard about much of this from meillo some 15 years ago and he didn’t come up with it, either.

It’s all super unpopular. Why? Many of my projects see a burst of commits in the beginning and then mostly just maintenance – and that’s great. It saves me from so much trouble and work. For example, my X11 wallpaper setter was written in 2017, I’m using it daily all the time, it just works, boom, done.

A project isn’t dead if it doesn’t see commits anymore – it’s dead if nobody maintains it anymore.

(#smnew7a) @mckinley@twtxt.net Last time I tried jabber was probably 10 years ago. How’s group chat these days? Is it comparable to “modern” chat systems, does it feel the same?

I guess it’s irrelevant which platform I’m going to propose as an alternative to WhatsApp. It’s the same old problem: Almost all their contacts are on WhatsApp, so that’s what they want to use, end of story.

(#bl7a36a) @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org You had me in the first half, I thought you were going to their concert. 😅 That would have surprised me.

I had some pleasant experiences with public transportation lately, but that wasn’t Deutsche Bahn.

Would a bike or an ebike be an alternative for you? 🤔

(#22exukq) @prologic@twtxt.net @bender@twtxt.net It’s a twtxt feed that anyone can post to via Gopher: gopher://g.nixers.net/1/%7eanon/

Do we think this is a problem? 🤔 If so, you should be able to contact the admin in #nixers on libera.chat.

(#c2afqsq) @prologic@twtxt.net Kind of, yeah. (I wish they wouldn’t focus so much on “elitism”.)

Regarding complexity budget, slow software, all that:

Very few people do take pride in building simple, elegant, high-quality systems, do they? Why is that? Why are huge shiny things with tons of features more attractive? 🤔

I never explicitly thought about this, to be honest. It was only at the back of my head. And I never tried to teach our younger “students” at work: “Hey, it’s a great achievement to build something simple and elegant. That’s something to be proud of!”

Worse, simple software is often described as “boring”. Yes, in a way, it is boring, because your brain doesn’t have to get into overdrive to understand it. But that’s exactly the point. And it’s hard to achieve that! Simple software isn’t just “fewer lines of code”, you have to be pretty clever to solve a problem in a simple and elegant way. So it’s something to be proud of.

Could this be an intuitive, emotional way to get more people on board the “simple software”-train? 🤔

(#z4ivbfq) @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Yeah, you’re right. The quality aspect is lacking, too. Sigh. 😅

Focus on quality, focus on “doing it right”, make that your primary goal. And everything else shall fall into place.

If it only were that simple. 🫤😅

(#smnew7a) @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Yeah, it’s hard(er) with family members. I shouldn’t have started that Matrix stuff – before that, they had an easier time accepting that I don’t use WhatsApp. Now it’s more like “why don’t you switch?”

“Joy of missing out”, eh? :D