PJB

Windows 11 is fine. It looks less ugly than Windows 10 and has some nice things like a properly organized settings menu (finally).

Oh shit, amazing!

Huh? Which part?

Yeah. People really should be allowed to make things in whatever technology they prefer, but at the same time I can’t help but wince when I see infrastructure such as Mastodon or Matrix Synapse being written in slow inefficient languages like Ruby and Python.

It’s really bad for the strength of decentralized networks like Fedi when I have a friend telling me “I wish I didn’t set up Mastodon because my tiny instance needs multiple gigabytes of RAM”. I might have set up a Matrix homeserver myself by now if Synapse wasn’t Python and notoriously slow. I immediately discarded Kbin as a choice (among other reasons) because it’s PHP and Lemmy is Rust.

Always easy to say “hindsight is 20/20”, but still.

To be honest, the “configuration is an executed .php file” system does make some amount of sense in the context of PHP. When your app has to re-run everything to serve a web request, having to re-load the config (especially if it’s YAML, though JSON is less bad) is expensive. Re-running the PHP code, on the other hand, can be cached way better, in theory.

Of course, this is still all PHP’s fault in the end: the core problem here is that you need to re-run everything to serve a web request, without ability to pre-load state like configuration.

Honestly, just contribute to whatever software you’re already using! The most obvious example (that somebody else mentioned already) is Lemmy itself, but surely there are many other open source pieces of software that you use on a daily basis. If there’s something that annoys you, or think it could be improved… there you go.

At least, that’s how I got into programming.

Now require manufacturers to provide like 5 years of OS updates so devices aren’t insecure bricks once you get updates.

OR disallow banking apps from blocking custom ROMs/root, so you can just install your own updates ROM without losing updates.