• 6 Posts
  • 108 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Other way around, actually; C was one of several languages proposed to model UNIX without having to write assembly on every line, and has steadily increased in abstraction. Today, C is specified relative to a high-level abstract machine and doesn’t really resemble any modern processing units’ capabilities.

    Incidentally, coming to understand this is precisely what the OP meme is about.
















  • Sarcasm needs to be humorous; you’re merely rattling off insults. Anyway, it’s pretty uncommon that somebody literally “can’t contribute code;” anybody who can learn how to use a computer and post juvenile horseshit to Lemmy can learn how to write code. I’m a former professional musician; writing code is my backup career, taking less practice and effort than playing the piano. I encourage you to try putting in some effort; for the same time it takes to write around 500 comments/month on Lemmy, you could probably build a program that automates or simplifies some portion of your life.

    And seriously, by doubling down on the idea that being Neanderthal is bad or deficient, you’re spouting some nasty rhetoric. It doesn’t matter whether you’re serious or not; eventually, you’ll forget that you were being ironic. “Those who play with the devil’s toys will be brought by degrees to wield his sword” and all that.


  • As a hardware hacker, I’ve experienced Apple’s anti-FLOSS behavior. I was there when Apple was trying to discourage iPodLinux. In contrast, when we wanted to upstream support for the Didj, LeapFrog gave us documentation and their kernel hackers joined our IRC channel. It’s the same reason that people prefer ATI/AMD to nVidia, literally anybody to Broadcom, etc.

    Your “entire fucking point” is obvious from the top-level comment you replied to; you’ve taken offense to somebody pointing out that writing FLOSS on Apple hardware is oxymoronic. And it’s a bad point, given that such a FLOSS hacker is going to use Homebrew or Nix in order to get a decent userland that hasn’t been nerfed repeatedly by an owner with a GPLv3 allergy and a fetish for controlling filesystem layouts. Darwin is a weird exception, not one of the easy-to-handle BSDs.

    Also, what, are you not anti-Apple? Do you really think that a fashion company is going to reward you for being fake-angry on Lemmy?


  • At their most general, they are “data processors.” In common parlance, they’re often called “algorithms,” although some folks insist that that is reserved for programs with trivial control flow. For disambiguation and comparison:

    • A service is an API surface and a contract promising that the surface has certain behaviors; data processing may be part of how the API is implemented. In practice, a service is e.g. an HTTPS endpoint and an OpenAPI specification.
    • A capability is a copyable token which simultaneously authorizes its holder to perform an action and designates the holder as having the authority to perform that action. This won’t be part of your normal curriculum and training; see this post for an introduction, or this story for motivation.
    • A controller is a modulator for a (distributed) system. Typically a controller is anything which is actuated by a control loop, although sometimes a controller can sit outside of the system. Common examples include MVC patterns, k8s components, and video-game controllers.