Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this.)
Does anyone else get tired of āread documentation and edit this text file to configure your appā Unix shit? I have no problem with the underlying configuration being a text-file (makes for a straightforward API), but do I really need to navigate to https://mpv.io/manual/master/#configuration-files and go through the rigamarole of figuring out which options I need to edit/include[0] because I misplaced (read:
sudo rm -rf /) my config file?[0]: And there is always so much implicit bullshit. āBy default, we summon Cthulhu on Tuesdays and Thursdays if the variable
summon_octopus_guyis unset.ā Itās a fucking config file, my friends, can we just be explicit?Oh yeah. I recently wanted to configure something in pipewireā¦ the idea was simple: just creating a boot-persistent audio loopback, i.e. connecting an audio input to an output. I gave up for now after looking at the config examples for that in the documentation. How can such a simple thing need such complex configuration?
As for losing configs, Iāve started to put all my hand-edited config files in a git repo on my NAS so at least I only have to figure out things once.
Surely itās better to specify those defaults in the config file and have the system just fail if the necessary flags arenāt present. Having worked in support I can vouch for the amount of suffering that could be avoided if more systems actually failed if some important configuration isnāt in place.
Completely agree. I think this may just be an extension of the āyou gotta know what youāre doing to code correctly in Cā old school bullshit.
This is my biggest gripe with that nonsense. If you make it hard to do something well, you wonāt end up with an elite series of uber-coders because there arenāt enough of those people to do all the programming that people want to be done. Instead youāll see that much more software engineering done really goddamned badly and despite appearances at the time it turns out there is a maximum amount of shitty software the world can endure.
Whatās great is even the very best ājust use valgrind lol, lmaoā folks make these errors all the time. Itās basically impossible to write correct C code generally ā the best we can do is verify subsets of code (c.f. Rustās
unsafekeyword). The memory-safety CVEs in EXT3/4 are proof of this, IMO, as if there were anyone able to write correct C code today, it would be Ted Tsāo.Personally I think itās fine to have implicit defaults if you can make them sensible. Maybe ideally have a system-wide config like
/etc/someapp.confwith all the options included and set to defaults out of the box and then allow overrides in~/.config/someapp/someapp.confwhere you only need to specify whatever you want to differ from the system conf file.I personally disagree. I think in the era of āa megabyte is big,ā this made sense, but in my opinion after parsing a config file with missing config data, we should print something indicating they are missing then error out. The existence of a reference config file with all options included would definitely help, but I think itās no coincidence that there is no such config for mpv ā why bother creating and maintaining one if the program will use the default value anyway?
tl;dr explicit is better than implicit
I dunno, MPV has like a million config options and Iāve set like three of them in my config. I would not prefer to maintain an enormous config file where I need to include a bajillion options I donāt care about just to play a video. Would I have to update my config every single time MPV adds, removes or renames an option, too?
At the end of the day you shouldnāt have to maintain anything in order to use a program, in my opinion (at least ideally). I think a āeverything must be present in the fileā type of config would require
lessno extra maintenance (assuming devs donāt do anything too silly). Additionally, while noting that my primary programming language is TeX and also that I am a dipshit, this just strikes me as an API-design problem. Alternative solutions could be:I have thought about doing #3 for Sway (a sort of Sway-config editor). This does give me an idea, though: define a meta-format for specifying the variables, default values, allowed values, etc., for an arbitrary[0] programās config file, and create a program that reads a meta-format file and presents a GUI for editing the config.
tbh i just lost my config file, forgot what i changed, and now i have to read documentation (and figure out which file the mpv flatpak uses for config)
[0]: maybe not too arbitrary
Iād kinda love this even if Iām editing config files in a text editor. emacs could use this with a major-mode or LSP to provide suggestions, validity checking, various rendered versions of the config, and guarantee interoperability with graphical tools (so that changes you make in an editor donāt get trampled by the UI, and vice versa)
I need an excuse to learn Rust and have wanted to do a āparse, donāt validate / make invalid states unrepresentableā project for a while. I will definitely share it if I get anything done.
definitely! that sounds like a great first Rust project.