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kettlecorn commented on The Free Software Foundation Europe deleted its account on X   fsfe.org/news/2025/news-2... · Posted by u/latexr
natch · 17 days ago
I see more hate and misinformation on Mastodon than I see on X. Here is a very mild one:

[edit: link removed; I don't want to promote that guy but to give the gist he was saying that people who believe in free speech are trash, targeting X users with hate. Mastodon is absolutely saturated with this.]

Most of the criticism I see of X seems completely made up out of malice or is regurgitation of things other poorly informed or resentful people have said.

The supposed FSF in Europe should post links to the sections of the open source algorithm they claim to be criticizing, and show us their PR.

kettlecorn · 17 days ago
My criticism of X is primarily rooted in 2 things: the massive degradation of my experience using the platform and a distrust that Musk wouldn't use the platform to manipulate public opinion to achieve political goals.

On the first point the simplest thing is I used to report people who use overt slurs or anti-semitic language. When Musk took over it started taking months for them to follow up and the response was simply to lock the account until they deleted the offending tweet. Eventually when I would report those people X just switched to saying they weren't breaking the rules. Now the replies of tons of seemingly normal posts that get lots of visibility are full of vile people trying to derail conversation with racism or anti-semitism.

Another big problem is the way that blue-check accounts are boosted has incentivized every account to act like click-bait all the time. Whenever a post gets semi-viral the blue-check replies are artificially lifted to the top and most of them are totally worthless because the commenters are just trying to 'grab space' so people click their profile and follow them. It used to be that if big accounts posted something interesting you might see a bunch of interesting follow up replies. Now it's spammers at the top and then racists / crazies mixed in with more thoughtful replies if you scroll down a few pages past the blue-checks. It used to be that the algorithmic feed would surface me all sorts of interesting and novel work from people across the tech world but now there's a whole category of people trying to make every single Tweet viral enough to get payouts.

And then there's Musk himself. He's ordered the algorithm to be manipulated to boost himself more. He's clearly expressed discontent when the algorithm doesn't work the way he wants, he's meddled heavily in the platform's AI bot to make it say things Musk prefers, and he's been rather unscrupulous chasing his political goals. I think it's not unlikely he'd use the platform to guide public opinion, perhaps even using AI to do it discretely and intelligently. I view that as a significant risk.

So the platform has gone from something that's highly useful to me, and a place I greatly enjoyed, to something that more often than not wastes my time and exposes me to people that disturb me. And on top of all that I think contributing to the platform may empower someone who I deeply distrust to manipulate public opinion towards their political goals.

kettlecorn commented on Cloudflare outage on November 18, 2025 post mortem   blog.cloudflare.com/18-no... · Posted by u/eastdakota
branko_d · a month ago
Safe things should be easy, dangerous things should be hard.

This .unwrap() sounds too easy for what it does, certainly much easier than having an entire try..catch block with an explicit panic. Full disclosure: I don't actually know Rust.

kettlecorn · a month ago
I don't think 'unwrap' is inherently the problem.

Any project has to reason about what sort of errors can be tolerated gracefully and which cannot. Unwrap is reasonable in scenarios you expect to never be reached, because otherwise your code will be full of all sorts of possible permutations and paths that are harder to reason about and may cascade into extremely nuanced or subtle errors.

Rust also has a version of unwrap called "expect" where you provide a string that logs why the unwrap occurred. It's similar, but for pieces of code that are crucial it could be a good idea to require all 'unwraps' to instead be 'expects' so that people at least are forced to write down a reason why they believe the unwrap can never be reached.

kettlecorn commented on Brimstone: ES2025 JavaScript engine written in Rust   github.com/Hans-Halverson... · Posted by u/ivankra
phplovesong · a month ago
Why is stuff written in rust always promoted as "written in rust" like its some magic thing?
kettlecorn · a month ago
One simple reason: for those of us invested in the Rust ecosystem it helps us spot new projects we could consider using.
kettlecorn commented on Why do we need dithering?   typefully.com/DanHollick/... · Posted by u/ibobev
mordae · a month ago
It's not cheap for streaming. It's harder to compress and is lost in the process. The video codec is a smart low pass filter.
kettlecorn · a month ago
It needs to be done by the client and not be part of the actual video stream, otherwise it doesn't even work. When done by the client it's cheap.
kettlecorn commented on Why do we need dithering?   typefully.com/DanHollick/... · Posted by u/ibobev
kettlecorn · a month ago
Dithering is super useful in dark scenes in games and movies.

By adding random noise to the screen it makes bands of color with harsh transitions imperceptible, and the dithering itself also isn't perceptible.

I'm sure there are better approaches nowadays but in some of my game projects I've used the screen space dither approach used in Portal 2 that was detailed in this talk: https://media.steampowered.com/apps/valve/2015/Alex_Vlachos_...

It's only a 3 line function but the jump in visual quality in dark scenes was dramatic. It always makes me sad when I see streamed content or games with bad banding, because the fix is so simple and cheap!

One thing that's important to note is that it's a bit tricky to make dithering on / off comparisons because resizing a screenshot of a scene with dithering makes the dithering no longer work unless one pixel in the image ends up exactly corresponding to one pixel on your screen

kettlecorn commented on Zed is now available on Windows   zed.dev/blog/zed-for-wind... · Posted by u/meetpateltech
rs186 · 2 months ago
About no. 1, I think any sane application will show a warning "Do you want to delete abc.c" before permanently removing the file. I cannot verify it now, but pretty sure VSCode has it.

So --

* if there is no such dialog, it's on zed * If there is such a dialog and you clicked yes, it's on you

kettlecorn · 2 months ago
It does have such a dialogue but VSCode's identically named "Delete" option has a nearly identical warning dialogue that moves the file to the trash instead.

Zed's dialogue just says "Delete file.txt?" so if you're used to VSCode it's very easy to skip through that dialogue reflexively.

kettlecorn commented on Zed is now available on Windows   zed.dev/blog/zed-for-wind... · Posted by u/meetpateltech
maccard · 2 months ago
> Delete skips the trash and Zed does not implement Ctrl+Z yet,

I'm not going to claim Zed has a good UI in this space, but saying it doesn't implement Ctrl + Z for a feature which is literally "skip the undo-ability of this option" is a bit misleading.

kettlecorn · 2 months ago
As I just elaborated on in another comment VSCode and Zed both have "Delete" in the right-click menu as the last entry. VSCode only has 'Delete' and while it has a confirm screen it goes to the trash with the ability to Ctrl+Z.

After years of deleting files in VSCode I have a muscle memory for that behavior and I just skip through the dialogue. I didn't realize Zed's 'Delete' worked differently until I lost work, so I was just reflexively skipping through its confirm screen as well.

kettlecorn commented on Zed is now available on Windows   zed.dev/blog/zed-for-wind... · Posted by u/meetpateltech
lintfordpickle · 2 months ago
yeah I just tried the windows build and they are indeed behind a confirmation box (for both trash and delete). That's not the impression I got this morning from reading OP's comment
kettlecorn · 2 months ago
OP here. I have muscle memory from many years of using VSCode before Zed.

"Delete" is the last option in the right click menu for both and when you select it both show a very similar dialogue box asking you to confirm.

VSCode's 'Delete' by default moves the file to the trash and can be undone with Ctrl + Z. Zed's 'Delete' skips the trash and can't be undone with Ctrl + Z.

I should have mentioned the confirmation box but after years of use I've begun clicking through that box so quick I didn't realize the behavior was different in Zed.

kettlecorn commented on Zed is now available on Windows   zed.dev/blog/zed-for-wind... · Posted by u/meetpateltech
kettlecorn · 2 months ago
I've been using Zed primarily for months but I just switched back to VSCode for 2 reasons, one of which is kinda my fault and the other it's unclear where the fault is.

1. I deleted a few hours of work because I was late night coding and I decided to rename a file before check-in and delete the old version. Well I renamed it and Right-Click -> Deleted the new version by accident.

It turns out Zed has both "Delete" and "Trash" right next to each other in its right-click menu. Delete skips the trash and Zed does not implement Ctrl+Z yet, so unless you have a backup that file is gone. Because I renamed it and had not yet checked in it wasn't in version control yet.

2. For some reason a particular crate in my Rust workspace wasn't having errors and warnings show up in the editor. I messed with configuration a bunch and couldn't figure it out, so I tried VSCode and it just worked without any additional configuration.

kettlecorn commented on The great software quality collapse or, how we normalized catastrophe   techtrenches.substack.com... · Posted by u/redbell
kettlecorn · 2 months ago
I've thought a lot about why software doesn't converge on higher quality and I don't know if I've ever come to a satisfying conclusion.

The simple statement is that "Quality isn't what sells" and I think there's some truth to that, but I also think quality can sell and theoretically if all other factors are equal higher quality will sell better.

What I've had a tough time pinning down precisely is I think there's almost an ecosystem balancing act occurring between quality, effort expended, and skill required. Particularly in American culture I think one of our economic 'super powers' is that we sort of have an innate sense for how much something can be half-assed while still being mostly effective. We're great at finding the solution that gets 80% of the job done for 20% of the effort while requiring less skill.

I think you can see that through all sorts of disciplines, and the result is a world of kind of mid quality things that is actually quite efficient and resilient.

Where that goes wrong is when the complexity and problems start to compound in a way that makes any effort substantially more wasteful. It reminds me of how my game jam experiences go: for the first 60% I'm writing code at a tremendous velocity because I'm just putting down whatever works but by the end the spaghetti nightmare of the code reduces my velocity dramatically. Even when that occurs though the ecosystem nature of complexity means that your competitors are likely mired in similar complexity, and the effort to get out may be large enough and require enough talent that you don't you can change.

To improve quality I think it's not enough to just say "People should care about quality more" I think you have to fundamentally target aspects of the ecosystem, like changing the course of a river by moving a few rocks. A good example I think has adjusted the behavior of the ecosystem is Rust: it makes certain things much easier than before and slowly the complex bug-mired world of software is improving just a little bit because of it.

u/kettlecorn

KarmaCake day647October 23, 2015
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