Jeff Martin @cuchaz@mastodon.technology

Is it weird that for a while now I've wanted to build a new social network that is basically what Facebook was in the early days?

In a nutshell, just talk to your friends. And that's it. Especially old friends you've fallen out of touch with in recent times.

Oh, and it should be as privacy-preserving as possible. Encrypted, decentralized, yadda yadda.

I've thought about it a bit more recently, and it's all technically possible, except for the networking part.

Update: been using Linux Mint 21 for a few days now and it’s glorious! I’m never going back to Arch again, as long as my hardware is old enough for the LTS kernels.

There are So. Many. Little. Things. that work so much better now. I hadn’t even noticed how many papercuts I picked with Arch until I switched to a desktop environment that was carefully designed by someone who knows what they’re doing.

I have to say. The postfix syntax for `await` in #rust is very nice!

Much better than the prefix syntax in Javascript.

Success!

Now to re-install all the programs I use. Fun.

On the other hand, Sway was very nice. 10/10 would recommend.

Linux Mint 21 is out (yes, it’s 2022, I guess they’re slow) and I’m pretty excited!

It will be nice to use something a bit more stable than Arch again. It had gotten to the point I was afraid to even run pacman anymore because it usually broke something I was using. I’m looking forward to using a distro that just works out of the box again.

My hardware is older now and the distros have caught up with using updated kernels, so I can go back to work instead of fussing with the OS.

Stack Overflow is having issues. This is making it harder to do my job.

Weird how my job is less about actually knowing things these days, but more about knowing how to learn them quickly.

Wow, more wisdom of the crowd, courtesy of Hacker News again:

“America is a wage slave factory. Much like we can’t make the cake and eat it too. We can’t produce both a world of critical thinkers and a world dominating nationalistic war machine. … Americans are raised to both hate our parents and hate our children because it makes better wage slaves. …”

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32262707

Regrettably, I had to shorten the quote due to post limits here.

Just wish I could find something to disagree with.

Just ran into a thread on The Orange Site where lots of people are pleading for the thing I started building a while back.

The validation feels good, man.

Patiently waiting for the Linux Mint 21 release...

I've been working on a different kind of web app recently. I'm learning that browsers are supremely allergic to the idea that the client code should be trusted and the server code should not be trusted.

User agent indeed.

Today I learned about Ventoy:

https://www.ventoy.net/en/index.html

It's basically a multiplexer for bootable ISOs.

Just install Ventoy on your boot media (eg a USB stick) and then copy a bunch of ISOs into the USB stick's file system. Ventoy will let you pick which one you want at boot time.

Brilliant!

TIL: rustc complains if you implement trait functions in a different order than in the trait declaration.

I've been writing rust code for *this* many years and I've never known that, because I've always naturally implemented the functions in declaration order. Except this one time. OCD for the win, I guess. 😋

Hacker News is down today. I wonder if the worldwide productivity boost among software developers is measurable.