Life is Tetris @tetrislife@social.cleverlibre.org

I’m still pissed at Elon for two things:

1) making me learn how to spell Mastodon
2) that he didn’t buy and ruin LinkedIn instead

The definitive guide!

#FreudianTypoOfTheWeek

Ecomimics (adj.): The social science of blindly copying economic policy from another country.

The new #LFE site looks great! With a cornucopia of learning and reference material.
https://lfe.io/
#Erlang #Lisp

@choanmusic

As it turned out, reverting to distro #orgmode was a simple matter of deleting the site-list/org and restarting, and magically #orgroam is working again, so that's a plus. Lilypond will just need to wait.

I spent years coding in #Prolog, so my general solution to problematic things is "revert back to before your last decision, and make a different one" 🤣

@LordCaramac still using smalltalk every day.

Regarding #email, screw the old #filesystem-centric non #transactional approach btw.

Both #mbox and #maildir suck.

Program crashed while you were modifying a mail? Who knows what the on-disk file looks like now. You had it git-versioned? Good. If all goes well and git or the computer itself doesn't crash while updating things, that might be enough.

Even key-value #databases like #BerkelyDB do it better, and they did so before #SQLite even existed.

So why can't I have tools using DBs?

This is such a simple and useful SQLite hack.

Get the best out of #git and #sqlite by having your database versioned in a human-readable format:

```
# Create a local git repo and a db file
$ git init
$ sqlite3 ./test.db
sqlite> create table test(id int primary key, value text);
$ git add test.db

# Set the diff format for *.db files
git config diff.sqlite3.binary true
git config diff.sqlite3.textconv "echo .dump | sqlite3"
echo '*.db diff=sqlite3' >> .gitattributes

# Do some stuff with the db
$ sqlite3 ./test.db
sqlite> insert into test values(1, 'a');
sqlite> insert into test values(2, 'b');
sqlite> insert into test values(3, 'c');
sqlite> update test set text = 'aaa' where id = 1;
sqlite> delete from test where id = 3;

# Check the diff
$ git diff
diff --git a/test.db b/test.db
index 9d6e6db..c9a7a08 100644
--- a/test.db
+++ b/test.db
@@ -1,4 +1,6 @@
PRAGMA foreign_keys=OFF;
BEGIN TRANSACTION;
CREATE TABLE test(id int primary key, text text);
+INSERT INTO test VALUES(1,'aaa');
+INSERT INTO test VALUES(2,'b');
COMMIT;
```

https://garrit.xyz/posts/2023-11-01-tracking-sqlite-database-changes-in-git

TIL that in #Erlang, _ can be used in type specifications and has the same meaning as term() or any(). I love this kind of discovery because it makes total sense and is consistent with pattern matching. Erlang is one of these rare sane languages.

@nixCraft I go a call yesterday asking for help on a system I had deployed on a TV operator 11 years ago. It was a hardware glitch. Unfortunately they rebooted the operating system: 3588 days of uptime. The software in question had been restarted in 2015.

Mostly #erlang and some C.

@Natanox @juliobiason @borisanthony It's still not great.

More for reasons that ergonomically-speaking, it's the Perl of web development.

What’s sad is realising you live in a world where every exaggerated analogy you used to make a point is actually happening:

Having Google in schools is like having McDonalds in nutrition class. (I find out that McDonalds does, in fact, sponsor nutrition classes in US schools.)

Having a surveillance capitalist sponsor a conference on free and open source/human rights is like having an oil company sponsor a climate conference. (Forget sponsoring, turns out head of #Cop28 runs an oil firm.)

🤬

my cold take on the Threads federation thing is: if you simply consider them not as some mystical "platform" but as any other "instance", then they're an over-sized under-moderated data-scraping instance housing many vile users right up to the point of "technically legal free speech"... and we've all suspended instances before for much less.

I have a question about #cryptobro thought (for want of a better term) processes.

When something like [this](https://web3isgoinggreat.com/?id=nft-trader-hack) happens, how is it a "#hack"? The whole point of #SmartContracts, as I understand them, is that the code is the contract. Whatever is in the code is *by definition* the contract and anything the code allows forms the terms and conditions of the contract.

So how can this be called a "hack" or a "#theft". You're literally abiding by the terms of the contract!

I run my own #selfhosted Mastodon server, so hadn't really felt the need for domain blocking. However, the whole Threads stuff got me looking into it.

I feel that there is a quite a bit of risk in using aggregated block lists. Given that the sources seem to be only a handful of instances, it feels that one could easily over block using these lists.

Remember back before systemd how when something went wrong on a computer it put text into a log file and you could find out what happened? That was neat. We should do that again.