Works for me in Wayland on Bazzite. Maybe depends on your distro and GPU drivers.

Kind of the opposite. It takes more effort to make a filesystem case-insensitive. Binary comparison is the laziest approach. (Note that laziness is a virtue.)

I’m on the fence as to which is better. Putting backwards compatibility aside, there’s a perfectly good case to be made for case-insensitivity being more intuitive to the human user.

Apple got into a strange position when marrying Mac OS (case-insensitive) and NeXTSTEP (case-sensitive). It used to be possible to install OS X on case-sensitive HFS+ but it was never very well supported and I think they axed it somewhere down the road.

Is it more for situations that need to be compatible with most *nix systems and you might not necessarily have access to a higher level scripting language?

Yes, and also because integrating Python one-liners into shell pipelines is awkward in general. I’m more likely to write my entire script in Python than to use it just for text processing, and a lot of the time that’s just a pain. Python isn’t really designed for one-liners or for use as a shell. You can twist it into working in those use cases, but then I’d ask the reverse question: why would you do that when you could “just” use awk?

On macOS, Python is not installed by default. So if you are writing scripts that you want to be portable across platforms, or for general Mac administration, using Python is a burden.

This is also true when working with some embedded devices. IIRC I can ssh into my router and use awk (thanks to it being included in Busybox), but I’m definitely not going to install an entire Python environment there. I’m not sure there’d even be enough storage space for that.

Geany is a nice GUI option. It’s a bit more capable but still lean.

It’s probably time for me to re-evaluate the host of coding editors out there. For the most part I just use good text editors. Though I do love Spyder, I only use it for a certain subset of tasks.

Joplin is great. I have its data stored locally with encryption, and I sync across devices with Syncthing. It also has built-in support for some cloud providers like you mentioned, and since it supports local encryption, you don’t need to depend on the cloud provider’s privacy policy.

Setting it up on multiple devices was a bit complex, but the documentation is there. Follow the steps, don’t just waltz through the setup assuming it will work intuitively. I made that mistake and while it was not the end of the world, it would’ve saved me 15 minutes if I’d just RTFM.

Yes, absolutely! I’m in a renter’s mindset so I didn’t even think of that.

In theory, the only difference between an electric heater and your computer, as far as actual heat goes, is the dispersal pattern. They will generate exactly the same heat: 1W of heat per 1W of electricity used. That’s thermodynamics for you!

You said:

The flat was kept not quite as warm as previous years

So I don’t think it makes sense to assign any of the savings to using your PC vs your usual electric heaters. It’s because you kept your place a little cooler, which makes an absolutely huge difference. When heating in winter, every additional degree of air temperature is more costly than the last, since heat loss is relative to the temperature differential between indoors and outdoors (i.e. a warmer room will lose more heat to the outdoors than a cooler room, so you need to generate more heat to maintain it).

This sounds to me a lot like dieting. Most of the time, the success of a diet has less to do with the actual diet and more to do with the fact that dieting has made you more mindful and changed your behavior in other ways.

The two biggest things you can do to save money on heating in winter are:

1. Keep your place cooler. Wear warm socks, long sleeves, etc. instead.
2. Improve insulation. Plastic window insulation kits are cheap and easy to install/remove. For doorways, you can get adhesive insulating foam to fill side gaps and a slide-on door sweep to cover any bottom gaps.

IPFS content IDs (CID) are a hash of the tree of chunks. Changes to chunk size can also change the hash!

I don’t understand why this is a deal-breaker. It seems like you could accomplish what you describe within IPFS simply by committing to a fixed chunk size. That’s valid within IPFS, right?

Is it important to use any specific hashing algorithm(s)? If not, then isn’t an IPFS CID (with a fixed, predetermined chunk size) a stable hash algorithm in and of itself?

Oh nice! I did a quick search for forks but didn’t find that, so thanks for linking. I’ll check it out!

Looks like the open source version was axed, and the cheapest subscription plan is $36.67 per month per user. Yikes.

I’d kill for a modern HyperCard.

I’m not worried about getting raided by the KGB or anything like that, but break-ins happen and my computer equipment would be a prime target for theft.

I occasionally cycle my backup drives off-site, so I want those encrypted as well.

The cost of encryption is very close to zero, so I don’t even entertain the question of whether I should encrypt or not. I just encrypt by default.

Silly question perhaps, but are you sure you’re using the correct port on your Linux system? If I plug my external HD into a USB2 port, I’m stuck at 30-40MB/sec, while on a USB3 port I get ~150-180MB/sec. That’s proportionally similar to the difference you described so I wonder if that’s the culprit.

You can verify this in a few different ways. From Terminal, if you run lsusb you’ll see a list of all your USB hubs and devices.

It should look something like this:

Bus 002 Device 001: ID xxxx:yyyy Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub
Bus 002 Device 002: ID xxxx:yyyy <HDD device name>
Bus 003 Device 001: ID xxxx:yyyy Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 004 Device 001: ID xxxx:yyyy Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub

So you can see three hubs, one of which is 2.0 and the other two are 3.0. The HDD is on bus 002, which we can see is a USB 3.0 hub by looking at the description of Bus 002 Device 001. That’s good.

If you see it on a 2.0 bus, or on a bus with many other devices on it, that’s bad and you should re-organize your USB devices so your low-speed peripherals (mouse, keyboard, etc.) are on a USB2 bus and only high-speed devices are on the USB3 bus.

You can also consult your motherboard’s manual, or just look at the colors of your USB ports. By convention, gray ports are USB 1.0, blue ports are 2.0, and green ports are 3.x.

If you’re running KDE, you can also view these details in the GUI with kinfocenter. Not sure what the Gnome equivalent is.

DBAs think everything is a database.

Yeah, Matrix is a very, very hard sell. I mean, “normal” people (for lack of a better term) are put off by Mastodon, and Matrix is a hundred times more complicated to join. I’m also not sure what it would look like to use Matrix the way I use Discord. Perhaps there is functionality in Element/Matrix I have never explored since I use it more for messaging and group chat, not for communities with multiple channels like IRC/Discord/Slack.

In any case, Discord is too entrenched to be replaced by something that is merely technically superior, or even more user-friendly. Realistically, you can’t migrate entire communities if they’re bigger than a tight-knit IRL friend group, and even that is hard. That seems to be the only reason X still exists.

Almost, yeah. Certainly the big corps.

This is why I strongly favor services that use end-to-end encryption or do not store history in the first place.

There are not many times when I’ve needed to search back through history on a Discord server, and every time I have I thought to myself “this would be much better on any platform besides Discord”. Discord would, IMHO, be a better product if they did not retain history forever.

Ditto for Slack. Slack has the additional gall to limit access to that data unless you pay for a premium plan, despite the fact that they keep the data forever regardless (as evidenced by their occasional free trials which magically bring all history back, and some search tricks you can use to access old posts regardless).

Both Slack and Discord have lulled their user base into a false sense of privacy. Nothing you post there should be considered private.

It doesn’t really matter if they do or don’t. What matters is that they can change their TOS at any time, they keep an archive of all historical data, and you will have pretty much no recourse no matter what they decide to do with it in the future.

Who knows what will happen to Discord in five or ten years?

They might get bought by a narcissistic billionaire.

They might sell all their data to Google for training AI.

They might go bankrupt and sell off their assets to the highest bidder.

They might have an IPO and begin the usual value extraction at the expense of their users.

I know, I know…crazy ideas, right? When has anything like that ever happened?!

My guess is that this is a teenager, and this is probably their first experience with git and version control in general. Just a hunch.

Anyway, it is reasonable to expect a mainstream GUI app from one of the largest companies in the world to be approachable for people who do not know all the inner workings of the command line tools that are used behind the scenes. And it is reasonable to expect any destructive action to have clear and bold warnings. “Changes will be discarded” is not clear. What changes? From the user’s perspective, the only changes were regarding version control, so “discarding” that should leave them where they started — with their files intact but not in version control.

Have mercy on the poor noobs. We were all there once.

I feel bad for this kid. That really is a bad warning dialog. Nowhere does it say it’s going to delete files. Anyone who thinks that’s good design needs a break.

Half the replies are basically “This should be obvious if your past five years of life experience is similar to mine, and if it isn’t then get fucked.” Just adding insult to injury.

In practice, Python is not easy to learn programming with. Not at all. I see beginners wrestling with Anaconda and Jupyter notebooks and I weep.

The fact that pip is intentionally broken on macOS and some modern Linux distros sure doesn’t help. Everything about environment management is insane.