Programming Leftovers
-
JavaScript has utterly ruined the web, so why does Brendan Eich get congratulated? Bonus: Gemini rising.
For some years now, the web has been getting fatter and fatter. You’d be hard pressed to find anyone who thinks it’s doing much more for the user than it did 20 years ago (except maybe for native media codecs instead of Adobe Flash). Overall, it’s turned into less of a decentralized and open domain for the free exchange of ideas and code and people’s web logs, and more into a corporate shithole of Google, Facebook, and Cloudflare.
In Richard Stallman’s “The JavaScript Trap” essay, he wrote that “web apps” are a danger to computer users because they encourage the use of non-Free software when the user doesn’t consider the problem. That they are applications, that they are written in ways that obscure how they work, that they are copyrighted and proprietary, and…even worse, they run on someone else’s computer, and they can stop you from using them at all after you need them, and spy on you.
I’ve never, personally, seen anything dumber than an office suite you have to be online to use, and apparently enough people agreed with me even if they won’t just switch to LibreOffice, that Microsoft backpeddled from their previous position that there would be no more desktop program, and announced new versions of the desktop Microsoft Office.
In fact, Microsoft’s office programs today are a huge regression over even their own products 20 or 30 years ago, when there was no annoying product activator and this web app nonsense that requires you to be online to edit a document, and then be “encouraged” to save them all to your OneDrive account where the government has access to everything. Also, Microsoft is the second largest advertising network on the internet after Google, and now they can parse anything you’re stupid enough to save on their cloud. (Plus, if you want to use MS Office 95 forever because reasons, Wine runs it just fine.)
-
Godot Engine - Release candidate: Godot 3.3.4 RC 1
While we're busy working on both the upcoming Godot 4.0 and 3.4 releases (with a dev snapshot for 3.4 beta 5 available now), we still cherry-pick important bug fixes to the 3.3 branch regularly for maintenance releases (see our release policy).
Godot 3.3.3 was released a month ago, and a handful of important fixes have been queued in the 3.3 branch since then. Most notably, users of the GDScript LSP in Visual Studio Code have been experiencing crashes in 3.3.3, which are fixed in this new Godot 3.3.4 RC 1.
Note: Version numbers can be confusing with three branches worked on in parallel - this release is 3.3.4, i.e. a maintenance update to the 3.3 branch. This is not the upcoming 3.4 feature release.
As there is no new feature and only bug fixes, this RC 1 should be as stable as 3.3.3-stable and can be used in production if you need one of the fixes it includes.
As usual, you can try it live with the online version of the Godot editor updated for this release.
-
An introduction to monitoring using the ELK Stack
If you need centralized, comprehensive monitoring, putting Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana together can be a useful combination.
-
Web::PageMeta - a mixed sync/async lazy Perl Moose HTTP-GET module | Jozef [blogs.perl.org]
Announcing here Web::PageMeta which is lazy build-ed HTTP-GET and web-scrape-data module able to work both in classic code and also to behave non-blocking in async code. More info on my blog or on CPAN or on GitHub.
-
The new MoarVM dispatch mechanism is here! | 6guts
Around 18 months ago, I set about working on the largest set of architectural changes that Raku runtime MoarVM has seen since its inception. The work was most directly triggered by the realization that we had no good way to fix a certain semantic bug in dispatch without either causing huge performance impacts across the board or increasingly complexity even further in optimizations that were already riding their luck. However, the need for something like this had been apparent for a while: a persistent struggle to optimize certain Raku language features, the pain of a bunch of performance mechanisms that were all solving the same kind of problem but each for a specific situation, and a sense that, with everything learned since I founded MoarVM, it was possible to do better.
The result is the development of a new generalized dispatch mechanism. An overview can be found in my Raku Conference talk about it (slides, video); in short, it gives us a far more uniform architecture for all kinds of dispatch, allowing us to deliver better performance on a range of language features that have thus far been glacial, as well as opening up opportunities for new optimizations.
Today, this work has been merged, along with the matching changes in NQP (the Raku subset we use for bootstrapping and to implement the compiler) and Rakudo (the full Raku compiler and standard library implementation). This means that it will ship in the October 2021 releases.
-
10 Very Stupid Linux Ideas
If you are reading this page then you are like all of us a Linux fan, also you are using the command line every day and absolutely love Linux. But even in love and marriage there are things that make you just a little bit annoyed. Here in this article we are going to show you some of the most stupid Linux commands that a person can find.
-
Infinite loop ssh (Using echo, sleep, ssh)
-
Infinite loop ssh
-
8 Useful and Interesting Bash Prompts
Many people don’t think of the command line prompt as a useful element, or even pay it much attention. However, a useful prompt can change the way you use the command line, and by extension, your system. This article shows you a number of useful and interesting Bash prompts with examples. Note that we begin with the prompts themselves, then offer some further instructions on how to work with them.
Here we offer a few Bash prompts, and not all will be serious. For example, our first entry on the list could bring a little joy to you when using the command line!
-
Mozilla Attack & Defense: Fixing a Security Bug by Changing a Function Signature
This post is aimed at people who are developers but who do not know C or low-level details about things like sign extension. In other words, if you’re a seasoned pro and you eat memory safety vulnerabilities for lunch, then this will all be familiar territory for you; our goal here is to dive deep into how integer overflows can happen in real code, and to break the topic down in detail for people who aren’t as familiar with this aspect of security.
-
diziet | Rust for the Polyglot Programmer
Rust is definitely in the news. I'm definitely on the bandwagon. (To me it feels like I've been wanting something like Rust for many years.) There're a huge number of intro tutorials, and of course there's the Rust Book.
A friend observed to me, though, that while there's a lot of "write your first simple Rust program" there's a dearth of material aimed at the programmer who already knows a dozen diverse languages, and is familiar with computer architecture, basic type theory, and so on. Or indeed, for the impatient and confident reader more generally. I thought I would have a go.
- Login or register to post comments
- Printer-friendly version
- 3277 reads
- PDF version
More in Tux Machines
- Highlights
- Front Page
- Latest Headlines
- Archive
- Recent comments
- All-Time Popular Stories
- Hot Topics
- New Members
digiKam 7.7.0 is releasedAfter three months of active maintenance and another bug triage, the digiKam team is proud to present version 7.7.0 of its open source digital photo manager. See below the list of most important features coming with this release. |
Dilution and Misuse of the "Linux" Brand
|
Samsung, Red Hat to Work on Linux Drivers for Future TechThe metaverse is expected to uproot system design as we know it, and Samsung is one of many hardware vendors re-imagining data center infrastructure in preparation for a parallel 3D world. Samsung is working on new memory technologies that provide faster bandwidth inside hardware for data to travel between CPUs, storage and other computing resources. The company also announced it was partnering with Red Hat to ensure these technologies have Linux compatibility. |
today's howtos
|
Recent comments
1 year 11 weeks ago
1 year 11 weeks ago
1 year 11 weeks ago
1 year 11 weeks ago
1 year 11 weeks ago
1 year 11 weeks ago
1 year 11 weeks ago
1 year 11 weeks ago
1 year 11 weeks ago
1 year 11 weeks ago