• 2 Posts
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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: January 3rd, 2024

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  • I’d actually argue Python stops people learning how to solve problems.

    I love teaching juniors and have done so for 10 years but I’ve noticed in the last 4-5 years since Python became the popular choice at universities Graduates aren’t learning anything about Static Types, Memory Management, Object Oriented Programming, Data Encapsulation, Composition, Service Oriented Architecture, etc…

    I used to expect most graduates to have a mixed grounding in those concepts and would find excuses for them to work on a small UI projects. I would do this as it gets them used to solving a small problem and UI’s give instant feedback. As Python became dominate university teaching language the graduates aren’t spending their time learning Typescript, Angular, HTML, etc… but instead getting overwhelmed by the concept of types.

    Those concepts I want them to learn were created to help make solving problems easier and each has their strengths and weaknesses but most graduates are coming through only knowing how to lay out a small amount of procedural logic using Python and really struggling to move beyond that.





  • See its the opposite in Linux land.

    AMD open sourced their drivers so everything just works, while Nvidia drivers have to be built against your system and Nvidia refused to supply proper desktop drivers for years (EGLStreams vs GBM).

    The downside of AMD’s approach is it has to trickle down which depending on what distribution you use can take weeks to a year and it normally takes a couple iterations to get everything working nicely. Which basically expect the 6800 XT to work brilliantly but the 7300 to be flakey for a bit.

    My favourite bit is I owned a few Athlon 5300 APU and 5 years after they were released AMD were still adding performance improvements to them.


  • stevecrox@kbin.runtoRust@programming.devMeta: How can we grow this community?
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    9 months ago

    I believe this post would be better if it was rewritten in Rust it would allow more efficent. memory usage compared to; the dynamically typed English language which doesn’t have the borrower checker. while allows you to detect when resources are no longer used unlike English’s poorly performing ‘grammar checking’ tools

    But seriously there has to be content to engage with and people who respond to the content. I’ve noticed this community has someone posting really high quality updates but the community appears to be that person.

    Posting blogs, or asking questions, etc… would be a good way to engage.


  • It does but for the 90’s/00’s a computer typically meant Windows.

    The ops staff would all be ‘Microsoft Certified Engineers’, the project managers had heard of Microsoft FuD about open source and every graduate would have been taught programming via Visual Studio.

    Then you have regulatory hurdles, for example in 2010 I was working on an ‘embedded’ platform on a first generation Intel Atom platform. Due to power constraints I suggested we use Linux. It worked brilliantly.

    Government regulations required anti virus from an approved list and an OS that had been accredited by a specific body.

    The only accredited OS’s were Windows and the approved Anti Viruses only supported Windows. Which is how I got to spend 3 months learning how to cut XP embedded down to nothing.



  • It isn’t a good move.

    A domain name can cost as little as £10, similarly most email services cost ~£5-£15 per person per month. Its normally pretty easy to link a domain to an email provider and doesn’t cost anything other than time.

    If a company can’t be bothered to implement the most basic online branding people will make their assumptions and some will filter your company out because of it. With the cost to implement so low (e.g. £160 per year), even the loss/gain of a single customer would justify it.


  • Wine attempts to translate Windows calls into Linux, its developed by Codeweavers whose focus is/was application compatibility.

    Valve took Wine and modify it to best support games, the result is called Proton. For example:

    Someone built a library to convert DirectX 9-11 calls and turn them into Vulkan ones, it was written in C++ and is called DxVK.

    Wine has strict rules on only C code and their directx library handles odd behaviour from old CAD applications.

    Valve doesn’t care about that, they care that the Wine DirectX library is slow and buggy and DxVK isn’t. So they pull out Wines and use DxVK.

    There are lots of smaller changes, these are ‘Proton Fixes’, sometimes Proton Fixes are passed on to Wine. Sometimes they can’t but discussion happens and a Wine fix is developed.





  • No, don’t use Sid. No one should run it on a system they expect to work.

    Debian has 3 phases stable, testing & unstable.

    Debian Unstable is the initial gate for pulling in new code, applications need to not break everything in that environment before they can be moved to testing. A freeze is periodically applied to testing and RC/Major bugs are identified/fixed and Stable is released

    Sid is the naughty child in Toy Story who destroys things. Debian uses Toy Story characters to name things and so Unstable got the nickname Sid.

    If you have newly released hardware you might need an updated kernel. This can be found via backports.

    Similarly Mesa covers the graphics drivers, you can pull the latest from backports, again you only need to do this if your graphics card is too new.

    As someone who runs Debian Stable with KDE, it works great for gaming