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You can. It’s called Linux.

Vimwiki has some basic keyboard shortcuts for editing and navigating between pages in your wiki. It also has a couple of neat features, like the ability to export your entire wiki as HTML documents using a single command. But you could accomplish all of this with some basic configuration changes so I wouldn't call any of those "advantages". To be honest, I don't remember why I started using vimwiki as it was years ago but for whatever reason it has stuck with me.

I'm interested to check this out but for me simplicity is more important than features when it comes to note taking software in general. I've tried apps like Notion, Evernote, etc. but I always find myself going back to Simplenote; it doesn't have all of the bells and whistles of those other apps but it works well for my use case of quickly writing some text and having access to it across all platforms. When it comes to Vim, I get a ton of use out of vimwiki [0] with Markdown syntax. It may not be as powerful as Org-mode (or Neorg in this case) but it's had the most "stickiness" out of any comparable plugin I've tried.

[0] https://github.com/vimwiki/vimwiki

I wonder when someone will try to use the “it came from Copilot” defense to get away with stealing copyrighted code.

I’d love to see a performance comparison between that 286 laptop and the Raspberry Pi that went into it.

I feel like the only person who actually likes the Fidelity app. Sure, it's not visually attractive like Robinhood but the amount of information you get is far greater. Also the iOS app works on both my iPhone and iPad whereas Robinhood only renders the phone view on iPad. The app even has proper support for the Magic Keyboard so cursor interactions work the way they should on iPadOS. Fidelity definitely has a "boomer UX" quality about it but once you get used to it, it's really not that bad.

I just assumed it was common knowledge that Google doesn’t even try to implement human support resources. From what I can tell, literally 100% of YouTube support tickets go to what is essentially a spam inbox with auto-reply and the only way to have your concerns be dealt with is to have a personal connection to someone in upper management.

One of the cool things you can do with `Mix.install` is enable the use of Hex packages in Livebook [0]. I’m excited to use this to start writing some rich documentation for our Phoenix app at work, as well as for some other projects I’m working on.

[0] https://github.com/elixir-nx/livebook

Trans people are a hot button issue these days but it feels like we don’t really have a seat at the table in that debate. The healthiest thing you can do for yourself is just live your life, surround yourself with people who make you feel safe, valued and loved, and stop trying to convince random strangers online that you’re worth something. I take a lot of inspiration from the ball room / drag culture - how it creates families for LGBTQ folks where none exist and uses expression as a form of activism. It’s not my place to change anyone’s mind; all I can do is live my life and hopefully others will grow as a result of observing me.

Yeah, I just tend to avoid political posts and threads altogether. Speaking as a trans woman who doesn’t use Twitter or most other social media, it can feel like I don’t have a voice and I’m just seeing this debate play out. But in a way I’m fine with that. Online it’s like people either hate me because I’m trans or hate others on my behalf because they’re not trans-inclusive enough. My lived experience is nowhere near as extreme. To most of my friends, family and coworkers, I’m the only trans person they know and the topic of gender rarely comes up. Aside from a few friends and family who disowned me early in my transition, I’ve found that people are generally respectful. Strangers can sometimes be mean / scary / creepy and dating isn’t easy (most guys aren’t into trans girls or if they are it’s usually a fetish thing) - so I just try to avoid situations where I’m unsafe or feeling bad vibes.

I know that was a bit off-topic but I guess what I’m trying to say is, it’s okay to create distance between you and the things that bring you down. I’ve found so much interesting content through Hacker News and it would be a shame to throw that away just because the politics here don’t always align with my own.

I agree with almost all of this except for avoiding else and annotation in with statements. Here’s my reasoning:

1. The argument the author makes here assumes that else clauses can or should only used be for error handling. There are instances where you might want to drop out of a with statement without returning an error however. Some examples might include connection Plugs that don’t need to perform some behavior due to certain assigns already being present on the Connection struct or configurable / optional behavior encoded in an options list. In these instances, pattern matching on a successful fallback clause actually reduces complexity as it avoids the need to position that branching logic somewhere outside of the main with statement that it is actually concerned with.

2. I find error handling through with / else and annotated tuples to actually lead to very expressive, easy to read code. Having built and maintained a Phoenix application in production since 2015, this is actually a very common pattern I and other members of my team use so I’m curious as to why the author considers it something you do under “no circumstances”.

Wow, I just checked and you're right. I find it fascinating that all of this modern software continues to support JPEG 2000 in such a buggy state. Or maybe it's the file itself that's corrupted? I don't know enough about the file format to say.

It also seems like support for JPEG 2000 can be hit or miss. I tried to open a .jp2 file I downloaded from the web into GIMP, but it looks all funky.

Original image: https://www.fnordware.com/j2k/jp2samples.html

What it looks like in GIMP: https://imgur.com/a/HCNz7ga

I suppose it takes less characters than marking the ordinal of the tweet and probably familiar to Carmack's technically-minded audience as escaping the return character in a command line (to add a new line to the command instead of running it).

Yeah, I do recall playing around with that at one point! I remember it saying something like, "I'll remember you said that once robots have taken over the world" if you ever insulted it. Actually kind of eerie in retrospect.

I know it's silly but I actually have some pretty fond childhood memories of Bonzi Buddy. Me and my cousin installed it on the family computer (running Windows ME at the time!) and would use the text-to-speech feature to make it say crazy, usually profanity-laden, things. In retrospect it was obvious adware / malware but not as bad as some of the other junk that would end up on your PC back in those days. The litany of Internet Explorer toolbars that would hijack your start page and embed HTML on any page you viewed comes to mind.

Some other nostalgic software experiences from this era: chatting with friends and customizing your away message / profile on AIM and ICQ, downloading unreleased System of a Down songs from KaZaA, playing Ultima Online until the sun came up, Flash games and animations on Newgrounds and the overall vibe of the Internet at the time - message boards, 1337speak, animated GIFs and embedded MIDI everywhere. I miss it and don't at the same time.

I miss Ultima Online. That game really was ahead of its time.

The majority of the human population is religious. Software is generally created by humans so it doesn’t seem unlikely that some of that influence would rub off on their work (same as any other work of art really).

I mean, I’ve replaced Photoshop with Krita for my personal use. It’s not like everyone who pays for Photoshop actually needs all of the professional features that sets it apart from FOSS alternatives.

I'd be satisfied with recipe websites that don't pad out the recipes with 100 paragraphs of blogspam.

I wish Facebook would just stop existing at this point. It truly is a malignant tumor on the face of the humanity.

> GenServers aren't useful for concurrency.

Sure, maybe not by themselves but typically you would run many GenServers concurrently in your application as part of a supervision tree. Libraries like Broadway (and the underlying GenStage) are essentially just leveraging GenServer to make it easier to orchestrate concurrency and state synchronization across multiple processes in your application. But you could build a comparable system on your own just using GenServer and a dynamic supervisor.

Syntactic sugar is of course another form of abstraction and so you have to balance developer ergonomics with that added complexity. As you point out, Elixir's `GenServer` is a fairly simple wrapper module over Erlang's own `gen_server`. As new versions of OTP are released, the maintainers of the Elixir language must also update their own abstractions over those underlying Erlang libraries. It also creates a niche disparity between Erlang and Elixir which some Erlang developers might find superfluous. Coming from Erlang, it's easy to appreciate the syntax of Elixir even if it means getting over some old habits. Perhaps changing the names of foundational parts of the standard library would be less appreciated by those already familiar with OTP, and feel as if the mental overhead is being shifted to those developers rather than simply being ameliorated for developers who are new to the platform.

Designing a programming language is hard, especially when building on top of a 35 year old language like Erlang. As is often the case: if engineers could change the past without breaking everything in the present, we would have already done it. :)

How do you imagine Microsoft pulling off the "extinguish" step? Linux is the most popular OS for servers even on Microsoft Azure [0] so I don't see any threat in that regard. Then you have weirdos like me who have been running some variant of GNU/Linux as their primary desktop OS for years and will continue to do so. Sure, it's cool that Windows can run Linux software now but that doesn't make me want to switch. I like Linux. It handles all of my computing needs, I enjoy the control I have over my OS and a lot of the features of Windows simply do not appeal to me (Windows Shell, Windows Update, the whole "registry" architecture, built-in telemetry and advertising, and more). To people who don't enjoy running Linux as their daily driver or need to use Windows for some other reason there's WSL, and I think that's great.

[0] https://build5nines.com/linux-is-most-used-os-in-microsoft-a...

Does anyone run System76 hardware with a distro other than Pop!_OS and if so, how's it working out for you? I love what the company is doing and will probably consider a System76 laptop in the future (once they move away from Clevo to custom designs), but I'm pretty attached to my Linux environment of choice. Arch Linux and KDE Plasma have been very good to me for years and the idea of moving to an apt + GNOME-based system doesn't quite appeal to me. That said, the tiling window management features here look really nice and I'd love to see something similar for Plasma (KWin scripts work fine but have always felt just a bit jank in my experience).

> linux desktop is never going to take off

Who cares? Why is popularity so important to you?

> linux desktop is doomed to fail

What does this even mean? I’ve been using Arch Linux with KDE as my only desktop OS for years and it’s a wonderful time. If you think Windows is better and prefer to use that, great. I personally prefer Linux and a lot of other people do as well.

> Disable the sound effects on boot

As someone who grew up using an old school Mac in the 90s, this is blasphemy! That triumphant chime is essential to the Macintosh experience (just kidding but kinda not).

That’s fair. I suppose the fact that Nova is proprietary, pay-to-use software that only runs on macOS gives that criticism more merit. And sure, a text editor on its own isn’t all that groundbreaking. I guess my point is that I hope developers don’t settle on VS Code as the be all end all of editors / IDEs. Development tools, as a class of software, are incredibly important and there’s still plenty of innovation to be had in this space.

Ugh. I can see where you’re coming as a matter of practicality but I’m really not fond of this “conform to VS Code for everything” mentality. I’ve noticed that the trend has been to move toward LSP for everything having to do with text editor / IDE architecture and while I understand the appeal in having a set of standards for something that has traditionally been all over the place (cue Vim vs. Emacs flame wars - I like both), I am personally not sold on Microsoft’s design here. I won’t go into too much detail as I don’t want to derail this thread, but “overengineered yet woefully nearsighted” is how I might describe it.

VS Code is a wonderful piece of software and if it works for you, that’s great. But not everyone likes VS Code or the design choices that led to it. Software makers shouldn’t be criticized for wanting to break away from those choices entirely and do something new or different. That may very well mean less community support or third party extensions - but every piece of software doesn’t need to be the most popular to be impactful. You probably won’t find a lot of developers coding in Light Table these days but when it was first released back in 2012 it brought some new and interesting ideas to the IDE space; I want more of that, not less.