A Post-It and a pencil, usually.

Not because “app bad” or “return to monke” or anything like that. Mostly because if I stow the note in a dedicated app, that somehow just makes me less inclined to write it down and read it later.

A scrap of papersticking out like a sore thumb on my desk or burning a hole in my pocket? I’m going to be cognizant of that all day long. But an obscure text file chilling in a disused part of my phone, or a txt file lost in the shuffle of random shit on my PC? Outta sight outta mind.

I also find all digital input schemes to be frustratingly less flexible than physical paper. Provided I have a writing utensil on hand that is functional (not always a given, granted) it is trivial to put anything I want on a note. Write anything I want. Draw diagrams. Underline or strike text. Write some things larger or heavier than others. All of these things are possible in note taking apps, but they come with the idiosyncracies of needing to know the selection techniques and menu options to activate them. In this way they’re all death by a thousand tiny annoying cuts for me.

I even had a smart phone with a built-in stylus for a good long while. It definitely extended the things you could do with ease, but it was a far cry from a pencil.

The only thing a note taking app can do in my mind that paper can’t is yell at you with a loud noise at a pre-programmed time. If I need one of those, I just set an alarm in my clock app.

Seeing “please” in the script for some commands but not all of them is giving me INTERCAL flashbacks.

Nvidia and AMD broadly cover the same use cases. Nvidia cards are not intrinsically better to my knowledge, Nvidia simply offers ultra high-performance cards that AMD doesn’t.

If you just need nonspecific games to run decently, a card from either brand will do it. If you need to run the most intensive games there are on unbelievable settings, that’s when Nvidia should be edging out.

ML dabbling may complicate things. Many (most?) tools are written for CUDA, which is a proprietary Nvidia technology. I think AMD offers a counterpart but I do not have details. You will need to do more research on this.

I am going to continue to tell people “just get an AMD card”, but only if they have indicated to me that they are shopping for new parts and haven’t committed to any yet.

Giving that advice to someone who already has an Nvidia card is just as useless as those StackOverflow answers that suggest you dump your whole project architecture and stuff some big dumb library into your build to solve a simple problem.

It’s a huge win, but not the kind of win people reading the statistic with no context (like me) probably thought.

I’m sure a lot of us looked at “15 percent of desktop PCs in India run Linux” and, regardless of whether it was hasty and irresponsible for us to do so, extrapolated that to, “15 percent of Indian PC users are personally selecting Linux and normalizing its paradigms”.

But in reality, it sounds more like “15 percent of Indian PC users use Linux to launch Google Chrome”. Which is impressive, but not the specific kind of impressive we wanted.

It feels a bit like how I imagine, say, a song artist feels when they pour their heart and soul into a piece of music, it gets modest to no traction for a while, and then years later a 20 second loop becomes the backing track for a massive Tiktok meme, and almost zero of that attention trickles back to their other work.

The bar for me is whether the language describes an executable program that has state and control flow.

You could perhaps be generous and describe the DOM as a (write-only) state and the parser as a control flow. I don’t, personally.

HTML is just a data container format to me. Belongs with the likes of XML, JSON, JPG, PNG, GIF, MP3, MOV, etc.

The umbrella term I’d use for all of these is “coding”. That’s the skill of understanding structured languages and format specifications, and understanding how you can and can’t piece things together to make something coherent. This is a critical requisite skill to programming. But programming is more.

Programming is the art of juggling of state and control flow in clever ways to trick funny rocks into computing something you don’t know. It doesn’t need to be general purpose, but I would argue it indeed needs to have a purpose. It has to be something more than just a pile of declarations you know from the outset. Otherwise it’s just structured data.

oh cool. now I can block every trash news article that includes phrases like “blasts”, “slams”, “says”, “should”, “could”, “might”, and “need to”.

In a rather unorthodox way, yes.

Android is one of those rare examples of a Linux kernel not being paired with GNU tools. I believe Android wrote their own versions of all the tools they wanted.

The kernel is also extremely locked down by default. They very intentionally designed the OS in such a way that every facet of the kernel is kept abstracted away from you. It’s about as black-boxed as you can get, to the point where the fact that it’s Linux underneath is almost meaningless.

PHP stack traces are effectively identical to Java’s in every metric I’m concerned about.

If you get them sensibly in a log file, anyway. If you allow PHP to render this god awful fugly table inline with your page? Well, have fun. Yes, all the same info is there, and on paper it’s organized in an easier to read format. But oftentimes the table will collide with and mangle with other elements and styling on your page, making the trace irritating or impossible to read.

This isn’t much of a problem of course, because aforementioned log file is absolutely the way to do it in the first place, and PHP lets you. And hey, absolutely obliterating your page DOM in strange and exciting ways on error sounds like a fantastic way to ensure errors get caught and addressed in testing, so even the unpredictable mangled DOM bullshit is useful in its own way.

But if someone wants to dunk on PHP for at least outwardly appearing to promote trying to debug it with these awful stack trace tables, I think that’s a well-earned roasting.

I have asked many a friend to play modded Minecraft with me.

Unfortunately, I am reminded time and time again that the Venn diagram of people I know who are interested in that and people with PCs who can run that is two circles.

Not to mention a rapidly growing segment of the population is unable to read analog 12 hour clocks, so the analogy is not that helpful.

This, 100%. The only value of preordering is guaranteeing stock of a physical item that threatens to be out of stock if you were to buy it walk-in. In the modern digital age where downloading tens of gigabytes that take up no space, ship near-instantly on demand, and have theoretically infinite supply, preordering is pointless if the actual game itself is all you care about.

Thank you for letting me know about this.

I use a few apps from the SimpleMobileTools suite. They aren’t full FOSS, they have basic and pro versions where the basic version is GPL3 and the proprietary extended features cost a few bucks. The basic FOSS tools are still decent, if barebones.

The suite includes:

• a calculator
• a phone dialer
• a music player
• a calendar
• a photo gallery (with basic editor)
• an audio recorder
• a flashlight
• a clock
• an app launcher
• an SMS messenger
• a camera
• a keyboard
• a note taker
• a file manager
• a contact book
• a simple painting canvas

I use the gallery and file manager the most. Though admittedly I threw a couple bucks their way for the proprietary extensions. It’s not FOSS, but if it was going to be proprietary, I think it’s one of the fairest deals in software these days. Better than another bloody subscription model, or holding the ad-free experience hostage behind a paywall.