Vertigo #$FF @vertigo@hackers.town

Run wc -l on a configure script sometime. Go ahead. All that useless and mostly obsolete code and all you wanted to do was build an app. And most of the tests will never be relevant to anyone. As if someone's gonna try to run your program or library on a Cray running Unicos or something.

If you're bringing in libtool, it brings in more worthless tests, like checking if a fortran 77 compiler exists on my system, and then checking if any of my nonexistent f77 compilers support -g.

It got flack in the 80's for doing this, and it should sure as hell get flack today.

This is not to mention that autotools is so horrible, almost everyone just copies and pastes around a configure.ac they found somewhere, tweaking it to their needs. And when things go wrong, it's often spectacularly bad and notoriously hard to debug, because debugging M4 is a damned near impossible chore.

It allows you to pretend to be portable whilst not actually solving the problem of portability.

RT @jonnymorris1973@twitter.com:

20 years ago Douglas Adams died. This made a lot of people very upset and has been widely regarded as a bad move.

I spent 5 days straight working on various (non-work) projects using only my PineBook Pro with Manjaro. It's an amazingly capable little machine, especially for the price.

It's a little flaky around suspend/resume and display management, but not intolerably so -- you just have to be a bit mindful of how you ask it to do those things

The battery life is obscene (in a good way): streaming Spotify from inside Firefox under Plasma while coding -- and so heavily using browsers, editors, compilers, etc. -- pulled a solid 8 hours before I felt like I really couldn't risk not plugging in.

Running in my very own "minimal mode" (Fluxbox, radios off, popping wifi on only to do research/mail checks/etc.) and I put in a solid 13 hours without hitting a wall. Might have gone longer!

Open hardware laptop MNT Reform now available in both DIY (starting at €899!) and assembled + many customization options in our store: https://shop.mntmn.com/products/mnt-reform

Dial with it

Science humor ⚡

**Ransomware Finally Came for the One Thing Americans Care About: Gas Prices**

"Locking down IT systems for hospitals, universities, non-profits, and local governments barely register. But raise gas prices a few cents? Now you've done it."

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/v7eea8/ransomware-finally-came-for-the-one-thing-americans-care-about-gas-prices

#news #bot

BTW: the other day I opened a buymeacoffee account because you know... I have to eat and all that...

If you like my content or my code or anything I do, you can buy me a kebab or something

https://www.buymeacoffee.com/ekaitz

@vortex_egg @djsundog @docskrzyk https://www.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/magic.html

TIL: MGR an old alternative to X https://hack.org/mc/mgr/

I dig the aesthetics

Syntactic Unification Is Easy - Witch of Light: https://web.archive.org/web/20200306075831/https://blog.witchoflight.com/2020/syntactic-unification/

Ternary Computer Architectures - Vega Carlson @ University of Nebraska; linked to by Opinionated Guides: https://opguides.info/posts/ternarylogic/

Oh sweet! The 1988 #HyperCard handbook by Danny Goodman is on the Internet Archive

https://archive.org/details/The_Complete_HyperCard_Handbook/

#RetroComputing

COBOL - Built to Last

In this sense, COBOL and its scapegoating show us an important aspect of high tech that few in Silicon Valley, or in government, seem to understand. Older systems have value, and constantly building new technological systems for short-term profit at the expense of existing infrastructure is not progress. In fact, it is among the most regressive paths a society can take.

https://logicmag.io/care/built-to-last/