jadero

Not your usual teaser, but still a teaser. “Look at all this techno-marketing. It shouldn’t take more than a couple of weeks. By then we’ll have some actual code to look at and toys to play with.”

In fairness, they are providing what looks like a decent overview of their underlying system (Rama) and how they used it to create their mastodon instance.

But I guess it worked :) I bookmarked their page and will check in from time to time. Maybe their toy (prototyping) system will be enough to run a personal instance…

Yes, and thanks!

Yeah, I’m not a fan of the form of capitalism that’s about selling what they want us to buy instead of what we want to buy, but it seems to be working for pretty much every company out there.

I guess we missed our window of opportunity with Netflix. We moved to the middle of nowhere with no internet or cell service 12 years ago. We’ve had Starlink for nearly 2 years and are just starting to run out of stuff available for free on our Roku. It’s been a couple of decades since I played with, um, other options, but I somehow doubt it’s become more difficult. :)

Perhaps, but don’t forget every god has had to learn a few things the hard way.

Many will cherry pick or apply self-serving interpretations of your pronouncements.

Many false prophets will arise.

Many will rail against your very existence and create competing systems.

Eventually, you will be considered archaic and replaced by the gods of the new thing.

Tongue in cheek, obviously, but not too firmly. :j

I don’t have a recommendation, but I understand the desire for excellent keyboard support in a GUI. I switched to Linux after 3 decades on Windows and I really miss doing all the screen navigation from the keyboard. In Windows, the only time I used a mouse was inside things like drawing tools and badly written apps with inadequate or non-standard keyboard support.

Sort of. I think of the Unix philosophy as being like Lego. Here’s a box of goodies, go crazy. Even Ikea still requires user assembly.

Most end users just can’t do much with the first and often even get tripped up by the second. What we need is something in between that a programmer can use to quickly throw something together to user requirements.

Actually, that’s much like what I was doing with Microsoft Access and Visual Basic decades ago. I probably would never have survived in an actual software development shop, but I was kept very busy by a bunch of small businesses that loved the quick turnaround and manageable costs.

Back in the early 1990s, I was teaching a database course. I had a list of real place names that were pretty much guaranteed to break anything the students did to place any constraints on what could be entered into the “city” field of an address. Little did I know…

Well, sure, it’s frustrating. I haven’t looked at lemmy code, so maybe it is a dumpster fire. But I’ve been programming since about 1980, and I still stumble more than I’d like, even when I’m the one who wrote the crap I’m trying to figure out. :)

Absolutely not! I’m not sure anything in any field is so trivially simple that it can be grasped just by looking at it. Getting even minimally competent in anything requires both study and practice.

The good news is that study and practice are skills worth acquiring, because they are useful in any endeavour.

The great news is that study and practice are what’s needed for mastery, too, so once you start your journey, you can can continue as far as you want.

Not dumb, untrained or not yet sufficiently skilled in this particular area. While you bear some responsibility for getting up to speed, I would argue that it is still their issue if they are not providing the necessary resources. With something like lemmy, you are probably on your own for finding and making use of those resources. But I would be surprised to learn that those resources don’t exist. I haven’t looked, but there must be some kind of documentation written by someone and a community of like-minded people. Maybe even some tutorials.

That said, some people will always struggle with certain kinds of abstraction or multiple layers of abstraction. For myself, one thing that I find helpful is to view each layer as an API that I’m targeting or a library that I’m using. In those cases, you never really worry about how things get done in the background.

Do you really have any idea how the keywords that solicit user input work? Not likely. Even if you do, you still completely ignore the fact that you know it while writing a line of code that solicits user input. That is a layer of abstraction that you use regularly without even thinking about it. A good architecture allows the same kind of reasoning about your code.

There are a few possible reasons for that, but the main ones are:

The architecture may be from the rococo (filled with pretty, but ultimately useless and confusing “decorations”) or surrealist (tenuous relationship to reality) schools. This would make it difficult to grasp for anyone but the people involved from the beginning.

The architecture could be perfectly sound, but for some reason, you are having trouble putting it all together. The most common reason for that is a lack of training and documentation.

We’ve been watching an old TV series called “One Step Beyond.” I actually like the Alcoa ad that runs ahead of the program. It’s written specifically for the program and runs as an introduction. They use “One Step Beyond” as a phrase highlighting their ability to innovate and in contrast to the “One Step Beyond” our normal existence as portrayed by the upcoming episode.

I know I’ll tire of it eventually, but for now I’m enjoying it much the same way I enjoy listening to a piece of music multiple times or rereading a good book.

Hobbyist, professional, hobbyist.

Started with the VIC-20 shortly after the birth of my son. Ended up teaching a few community association recreational classes, which led to teaching introductory programming (among other things) at a private tech school.

That, in turn led to a few requests for small custom programs, software modifications, etc, and eventually my own freelance programming business doing everything from shop floor work order management to Palm Pilot integrations with, yes, mainframe systems.

When that business failed, I went to work full-time for my only remaining client. When that business was sold, the new owners made it clear that I was dead weight, so I left the field entirely and we moved to our cabin at the lake. (That was also the beginning of 10 years with no internet or cell service at home. Now we have Starlink.)

A decade later, I’m about to retire completely and I’m slowly getting back into it as a hobby.

I’ve always been a bit of a language junkie, but my current focus is on go, mostly because I’d like to better understand what’s going on under the hood in my current favourite language, Charm, which is written in go.

In retirement, assuming I can pull myself away from my shop and my fishing rod, I hope to build an as yet undetermined bit of software that others find useful or contribute to a project.

Put BBS discussion boards, FidoNet groups, and Usenet out front and drop Fark for my path. Along with a variety of standalone forums and random stuff that never went anywhere, of course :) (yes, I’m old!)