sxan
@sxan@midwest.social
🅸 🅰🅼 🆃🅷🅴 🅻🅰🆆. 𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍 𝖋𝖊𝖆𝖙𝖍𝖊𝖗𝖘𝖙𝖔𝖓𝖊𝖍𝖆𝖚𝖌𝖍
- Comment on Kitty Terminal 0.40.0 introduces the Text Sizing Protocol: "multiple font sizes ... in a backwards compatible, opt-in way" 2 weeks ago:
I was just curious about the first part! We live in a world of Federation, and bridges are becoming more common. I honestly wanted to know if someone had hooked up a bridge between some Lemmy instance and Reddit.
There are some bridge bots cross-posting pictures (SFW, you pervs), with a message suggesting you contact the Reddit author and suggest they “take ownership” of the cross-post bot for that Reddit account. I didn’t know if this was one of those.
The detailed response is because I don’t waste time on Reddit, and so can afford to write essays.
- Comment on Kitty Terminal 0.40.0 introduces the Text Sizing Protocol: "multiple font sizes ... in a backwards compatible, opt-in way" 2 weeks ago:
Ok, I’ll admit, I’m fascinated that you replied to me on Lemmy, but posted a link to a Reddit post. Are we communicating through a bridge, or do you just have so much time you can afford to be on multiple forum-style social media sites?
Luckily, Reddit isn’t yet blocking the VPN exit node I’ve been using for the past week, but with any given node there’s a 50/50 chance I can’t see Reddit because they block VPNs pretty aggressively.
But, back to the content of your message. You’re absolutely right: there is a trend of terminals slowly becoming graphics servers. I admit that whichever terminal I’m using in a quarter (I bop around a little bit, once every 4-6 months), I’ll stick with it longer if it:
- It supports ligatures
- It plays nice with tmux
- It supports Unicode character combining
- It supports some kind of graphics rendering, like sixel
- It is not unreasonably memory intensive
There’s also a trend for terminals to include multiplexing, duplicating what tmux does, but tabs and navigation are wasted memory and code. Multiplexing in the terminal is, IMHO, the wrong approach; it doesn’t protect my session if the terminal crashes, or the WM crashes, or the GUI session crashes; and it doesn’t allow me to log out and back in, maybe to change WMs; and it doesn’t allow me to connect and continue from another computer. But, ultimately, I’m going to be using tmux for all of my remote servers and computers anyway, through ssh; why have a completely separate modality and mental model for the local terminal? So, for me, it’s just cruft in the terminal - extra code paths to contain bugs, extra memory use
Ligatures really improve things, though, and with sixel and character combining, you’re really starting to veer into “display manager” space, as you say. Sixel -or Kitti’s protocol, or whatever that other one is - reduce the number of times I have to exit the terminal and reach for a GUI tool. But as you say, it’s just blurring the boundaries.
Still, this feature is a step beyond. Ligatures and combining characters still kept things in a grid. Ligatures in particular just replaced 2 characters with a single-width, different glyph. Sixel graphics are graphics - we leave the realm of text behind, at that point. Multi-height, multi-width characters cross a boundary.
It’ll be useful, though. This is why I’m torn. I’d love to see terminal markdown renderers be able to show proper super and subscript characters, and this would allow that. I only wonder whether the added complexity will be worth the little bit of extra eye-candy.
- Comment on Kitty Terminal 0.40.0 introduces the Text Sizing Protocol: "multiple font sizes ... in a backwards compatible, opt-in way" 2 weeks ago:
Golly, do I have mixed feelings about this. Both as a developer of TUI programs - in which determining the width of a widget is already a complex operation (same as in GUIs) - but also as a user who is already occasionally frustrated by double-width Unicode characters in terminals, which frequently don’t handle navigating such text well or correctly. I can only imagine the chaos this will introduce into text selection, text editors, and readline.
OTOH, very cool. Unicode combining characters have great, mostly unrealized, potential, in no small part to consequential sizing issues.
OTOOH, the world of computing is now a little more complex. Is the added complexity necessary, or just feature creep?
- Comment on You'll need a RTX 2060 Super at minimum for Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater 3 weeks ago:
2 opponents have acquisition, one looks like they’re firing, there’s a third ready for a snap shot, and they all have AKs.
Player is… reloading a handgun.
I know it’s a video game, but my suspension of disbelief has limits. This isn’t sci-fi; there are no magic shields or SuperArmor; so player only survives if
- the opponents have Storm Trooper levels of aim capability
- Player is wearing level… hell, I don’t even know what body armor is effective against 7.62x39 at - what - no more than 7 meters here. And it’s going to hurt like hell in any case
- the opponents are all out of ammo
I mean, utter, blinding incompetence aside, player 1 is dead. Even with a massive plot shield, it would be hard to swallow.
Maybe they stole some armor cloth from the John Wick universe; that stuff is sci-fi level good.
- Comment on Managing windows and focusing specific apps on Linux? 4 weeks ago:
You’re using the wrong window manager. You can do what you want with xdotool and a lot of scripting, but there are better window managers designed around controlling every aspect of windows with bindings and commands. Herbstluftwm is a good one, bspwm is another. i3 is less scripting focused, but is still fairly controllable with the CLI tool.
- Comment on Lonely Mountain: Snow Riders has a new release date and it's next week 2 months ago:
Looks fun! I hope someday we have holodecks where you can ski a mountain with a never-ending run, with no crowds of people to navigate, and no snow-boarders.
Not trying to dis snow-boarders – they’re fine; I just think everyone is better off when alpine skiers and snow boarders are segregated. Ideal conditions are different for each group, anyway.
- Comment on Honda says the Acura RSX will be the first original EV with the Asimo operating system 2 months ago:
Yeah, me too.
Here’s Honda’s speil about it. Light on technical details.
One thing I took away from reading it, though, is they’re doing the usual “disguising monitoring and collecting information about everything you do as some sort of desirable benefit.”
“We track your peeing habits to conveniently show you where rest stops are!” They don’t say the “and sell it to third parties” part out loud.
- Comment on Show a wallpaper as a background for every window? 2 months ago:
It’s been a long while since I’ve used any WM that allowed overlapping widows, but AFAIK picom can be configured this way. I have some desktops with tabbed layouts, which I think with like overlapping windows, but it’s always the background when the windows are faded. I’m pretty sure I’d have set out up that way, since the other way it dumb.
- Comment on Qt || ^Qt 2 months ago:
I’m not; I’m saying that, IME, the average Qt app is far more likely to also depend on one or more KDE components than the average GTK app is to pull I’m Gnome dependencies. I know there are Qt applications that don’t depend on KDE; it just seems that they’re relatively few in comparison to Gnome-less GTK applications
- Comment on Qt || ^Qt 2 months ago:
I agree. If I used a DE, it’d be KDE.
I wouldn’t force a tiling window manager on anyone. I think that’s the end of a journey of discovery about how mice are great tools for some jobs, but making them the core interface tool and building UIs around them was a great evil. When you realize keyboards are still the best interface, and eventually arrive at TWMs, that’s good. But TWMs are kind of nasty for folks raised in a world where most systems they encounter are Windows or Macs.
- Submitted 2 months ago to linux@sh.itjust.works | 7 comments
- Comment on Why some book fans are leaving Amazon-owned Goodreads in wake of the U.S. election 3 months ago:
Have you tried Bookwyrm? It’s also available self-hosted, if you want to ignore or limit the social media part.
Someone else said, Openreads is a good, entirely local, app, with CSV in/export, and written in Flutter so you should be able to run it on your desktop, too.
Or, if you read e-books and don’t want the social media part, use Calibre. My only issue is that it doesn’t sync all of the information my Kobo obviously tracks, like read times and star-rating.
- Comment on US judge says Google must open Android phones to rival app stores 5 months ago:
It’s worse than that. Apple charges application developers just to put their apps on the app store. This is a big contributor as to why there are so few OSS iOS projects: I’m happy to share, for free, the app I wrote for myself, but I’m not going to pay someone money to do it.
- Comment on US judge says Google must open Android phones to rival app stores 5 months ago:
Oooo! Oooo! Do Apple next!
- Comment on Deadlock cheaters are being turned into frogs as players get chance to vote on their fate 5 months ago:
This is an anticheat system I can get behind.
- Comment on Determining the efficacy of a restart from a bash script (Debian) 6 months ago:
On an average Debian server reboot-required is really only ever triggered by kernel upgrades and those happen more often than you want but also not very often.
Cries in Arch
- Comment on Spotify blokis Esperantan podkaston 6 months ago:
Kial?
Manke de klarigo ne eblas scii la veran kialon de la forviŝo, sed eblas suspekti, ke iuj algoritmoj de Spotify trovis la elsendon suspektinda, eble pro la nekomprenebla lingvo, la internacia aŭskultantaro aŭ alia specifa eco, kiu igas ĝin malsama ol neesperantaj elsendoj.
Ili nun transiris al alia servo. Dumtempe, mibkredas ke Usone Persone troviĝas al
- Comment on Jon Stewart's first episode back on The Daily Show 1 year ago:
Yes. You’re right. It’s pretty close, though, and “genocide” is handier than a drawn-out, nuanced description for which there isn’t a convenient term. Abusing the word “genocide” is little worse than using the extremely broad and easily downplayed “human rights abuses.” The latter is as equally appropriate to US police treatment of minorities as to China’s treatment of the Uyghurs, but you’d agree they’re vastly different in scale and scope, right?
- Comment on Key & Peele in "Planning a Heist" - One of my favorite sketches from the show. What are yours? 1 year ago:
Al Quaida is good, but Airplane Turbulance makes me laugh so hard I cry.
- Comment on ‘Blade Runner’ Star Rutger Hauer Took Exception to His Character Roy Batty Being Labeled a Villain 1 year ago:
Yes.
But, Tyrell Corp is pretty villianous.
- Comment on ‘Our Flag Means Death’ Canceled After Two Seasons at Max 1 year ago:
I will never again lament that a show didn’t find closure before cancelation.
We were really liking Ragnarok (Netflix), but when it was clear thege wouldn’t be a fourth year, the writers threw together the worst, most unsatisfying, rushed, cop-out conclusion. Ever. Like, GoT season 8, but worse. Like they collectively said, “cancel us? Then fuck you!”
I honestly wish I’d have quit in the middle of S3. Not knowing would have been better.
- Comment on How long do you think until AI writes and debugs code better than the average programmer? 1 year ago:
I’ve managed software development orgs, and have seen better code from CS interns than from many veteran devs.
There’s a joke that goes:
Q: What do you call the med student who graduates lowest in his class?
A: “Doctor”
It applies to every career, IME.
- Comment on How long do you think until AI writes and debugs code better than the average programmer? 1 year ago:
This can’t be understated. Like many professions, software development is full of mediocre professionals.