• 0 posts
  • 49 comments
Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: June 19th, 2023
  • They are both perfectly fine editors but they don’t hold a candle to a proper IDE

    I’m not sure what you mean by “proper” in this context. Every IDE I’ve ever used has seemed like a child’s toy compared to Emacs. An annoying child’s toy with cracks and sharp edges.

    I also want to play some games that go beyond the production values of SuperTuxKart and Battle for Wesnoth.

    Try 0 A.D. or FreeOrion.

  • Location: AMD is hosting the 2025 Display Next Hackfest in Markham at the AMD office

    Participants should feel free to propose any topic which interests them.

    How about reverse engineering radeon firmware, am I free to propose that topic?

  • linux culture

    snigger

    you’re teaching newbies the wrong lessons

    The problem is not that it’s teaching bad lessons, it’s that it’s actually doing bad things.

    most people can parse that they’re essentially asking you to run some commands at a url

    I know not to take it completely literally

    Then it needn’t be written literally.

    I think you’re giving the authors of such installation instructions too much credit. I think they intend people to take it literally. I think this because I’ve argued with many of them.

  • You have the option of piping it into a file instead, inspecting that file for yourself and then running it, or running it in some sandboxed environment.

    That’s not what projects recommend though. Many recommend piping the output of an HTTP transfer over the public Internet directly into a shell interpreter. Even just

    curl https://... > install.sh; sh install.sh
    

    would be one step up. The absolute minimum recommendation IMHO should be

    curl https://... > install.sh; less install.sh; sh install.sh
    

    but this is still problematic.

    Ultimately, installing software is a labourious process which requires care, attention and the informed use of GPG. It shouldn’t be simplified for convenience.

    Also, FYI, the word “option” implies that I’m somehow restricted to a limited set of options in how I can use my GNU/Linux computer which is not the case.