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 youā€™ll 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 cutā€™nā€™paste it into its own post ā€” thereā€™s no quota for posting and the bar really isnā€™t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many ā€œesotericā€ right wing freaks, but thereā€™s no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iā€™m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged ā€œculture criticsā€ who write about everything but understand nothing. Iā€™m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyā€™re inescapable at this point, yet I donā€™t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnā€™t be surgeons because they didnā€™t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canā€™t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this.)

  • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
    4Ā·
    1 day ago

    I dunno, MPV has like a million config options and Iā€™ve 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 donā€™t 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?

    • khalid_salad@awful.systemsEnglish
      5Ā·
      1 day ago

      At the end of the day you shouldnā€™t have to maintain anything in order to use a program, in my opinion (at least ideally). I think a ā€œeverything must be present in the fileā€ type of config would require less no extra maintenance (assuming devs donā€™t 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:

      1. multiple config files (I think mpv already supports this)
      2. semver style config (idk if this would be practical)
      3. a config-editing tool (i.e., what the overwhelming majority of applications do, by hiding the implementation details from the user)

      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] programā€™s 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

      • self@awful.systemsEnglish
        5Ā·
        1 day ago

        define a meta-format for specifying the variables, default values, allowed values, etc., for an arbitrary[0] programā€™s config file, and create a program that reads a meta-format file and presents a GUI for editing the config.

        Iā€™d kinda love this even if Iā€™m 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 donā€™t get trampled by the UI, and vice versa)

        • khalid_salad@awful.systemsEnglish
          6Ā·
          1 day ago

          I need an excuse to learn Rust and have wanted to do a ā€œparse, donā€™t validate / make invalid states unrepresentableā€ project for a while. I will definitely share it if I get anything done.