No apologies necessary! I was partly kicking the hornets nest to see if an interesting discussion fell out…

That blog post is absolutely brilliant! It does a great job of stating what a user should want from a system: easy and deterministic re-deployment. If atomic ends up being the best too for that job, I’ll come back. But for now I’m happy with Debian, a separate home partition, and a strong preference for flatpak over apt.

Hmm, I think I agree with this.

Certainly I’d love a universal GUI/CLI package manager with optional sandboxing. I don’t use nix, but it seems like the closest solution out there right now

Its not so much the UX that I take issue with, but the complexity of what’s going on under the hood.

The way I see it, either the base image of an atomic/immutable distro is suitable for you, or it isn’t. Once you start getting into the territory of layering new tools/drivers/whatever on top, you’re reintroducing the statefulness that the atomicity was supposed to eliminate.

This is cool, and I’m interested to see where this goes. But to me the whole sysext thing is actually a compelling argument for why Linux power users (i.e. most Linux users on lemmy) aren’t suited to immutable distros.

When something as fundamental as git requires multiple obscure commands to install, you’ve got to think twice about the target audience.

Exactly this. IMO we just need better ways of rendering a mailing list inbox as a series of issues/PRs. And maybe better tooling from IDEs to “open a PR” using git send-email.

Source hut is close to my ideal here, but still seems rather complex. Maybe I just don’t appreciate the necessary problems it solves yet.

Agree with several people here that named parameters are a good solution, they add minimal overhead at the call site and function declaration and look very natural.

Another option for languages that want function arguments to have fixed size is bitmasks. I wonder if it could be a useful language feature to infer the flag names from the function declaration. Something like

def my_function(arg1, arg2, [FLAG1, FLAG2]) {
    if (FLAG1) {
        do thing
    } 
   ...
}

my_function(val1, val2, FLAG1 | FLAG2)

Dumper’s delight

Its a fair point, and well explained. However, I think it implies that illegal immigrants are fine so long as they’re not more criminal than the general population.

Generally if somebody is using crime statistics to argue for more immigration control, they’re probably the kind of person that believes the only acceptable amount of crime for an illegal immigrant to commit is zero crime.

Personally, I do think it’s a useful exercise to decide what your red-lines are when it comes to OS level age verification.

For me: Having a field in a database that could contain my DoB is acceptable. Having a prompt to populate it during first time set up is very concerning. Requiring that data to be validated by a third party is the red line.

If you don’t want to be boiled like a frog, bring a thermometer.

I’d say don’t risk it if you’re not based in the UK.

I have a .uk domain and had to provide proof of residence or something to nominet. I can’t remember the exact process now, but they did temporarily suspend my domain (without warning) until I contacted them.

Maybe gamers aren’t a monolith and the ones adding waifus to Skyrim aren’t the same as the ones criticising DLSS5?