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 you’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 cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

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

  • khalid_salad@awful.systemsEnglish
    5·
    1 day ago

    I personally disagree. I think in the era of “a megabyte is big,” 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 it’s no coincidence that there is no such config for mpv — why bother creating and maintaining one if the program will use the default value anyway?

    tl;dr explicit is better than implicit

    • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
      4·
      1 day ago

      I dunno, MPV has like a million config options and I’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 don’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
        4·
        24 hours ago

        At the end of the day you shouldn’t have to maintain anything in order to use a program, in my opinion (at least ideally). I think a “everything must be present in the file” type of config would require less no extra maintenance (assuming devs don’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] program’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
          4·
          22 hours ago

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

          I’d kinda love this even if I’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 don’t get trampled by the UI, and vice versa)

          • khalid_salad@awful.systemsEnglish
            5·
            22 hours ago

            I need an excuse to learn Rust and have wanted to do a “parse, don’t validate / make invalid states unrepresentable” project for a while. I will definitely share it if I get anything done.