I've been using Emacs 30 on my android tablet for a few months now with a bluetooth keyboard. Needless to say, you can't really leverage eglot so it's basically a no-go for any meaningful software development. I've been using it for org-mode and it is fantastic for that.
Readit Newss20n commented on Surprisingly, Emacs on Android is pretty good kristofferbalintona.me/po... · Posted by u/harryday
Not having gpg-agent is a huge deal breaker for me. I feel gpg-agent doesn't get enough love. Not only can it do all the ssh-agent operations, it can also be used with gpgme-json[1] to do web authentication with your [A] key. It's truly a shame that hardly any applications leverage the powerful cryptography afforded by GPG.
[1]: https://manpages.debian.org/trixie/gpgme-json/gpgme-json.1.e...
s20n commented on Transpiler, a Meaningless Word (2023) people.csail.mit.edu/rach... · Posted by u/jumploops
Transpilers are compilers that translate from one programming language to the other. I am not 100% sure where these "lies" come from, but it's literally in the name, it's clearly a portmanteau of translating compiler... Where exactly are people thinking the "-piler" suffix comes from?
Yes, I know. You could argue that a C compiler is a transpiler, because assembly language is generally considered a programming language. If this is you, you have discovered that there are sometimes concepts that are not easy to rigorously define but are easy for people to understand. This is not a rare phenomenon. For me, the difference is that a transpiler is intending to target a programming language that will be later compiled by another compiler, and not just an assembler. But, it is ultimately true that this definition is still likely not 100% rigorous, nor is it likely going to have 100% consensus. Yet, people somehow know a transpiler when they see one. The word will continue to be used because it ultimately serves a useful purpose in communication.
One distinction is that compilers generally translate from a higher-level language to a lower-level language whereas Transpilers target two languages which are very close in the abstraction level.
For example a program that translated x86 assembly to RISC-V assembly would be considered a transpiler.
s20n commented on Transpiler, a Meaningless Word (2023) people.csail.mit.edu/rach... · Posted by u/jumploops
> Lie #3: Transpilers Target the Same Level of Abstraction
> This is pretty much the same as (2). The input and output languages have the syntax of JavaScript but the fact that compiling one feature requires a whole program transformation gives away the fact that these are not the same language
It is not really the same as (2), you can't cherry pick the example of Babel and generalise it to every transpiler ever. There are several transpilers which transpile from one high-level language to another high-level language such as kotlin to swift. i.e; targeting the same level of abstraction.
Wonder what this person would say about macro expansions in scheme, maybe that should also be considered a compiler as per their definition.
s20n commented on KaTeX – The fastest math typesetting library for the web katex.org/... · Posted by u/suioir
I use KaTeX for my blog, and indeed KaTeX was faster than MathJax 2, but MathJax 3 (a complete rewrite) has significantly improved performance from the previous version and is now a bit faster than KaTeX in my experience.
This website has a comparison of the loading times of the same LaTeX rendered in both KaTeX and MathJax: https://www.intmath.com/cg5/katex-mathjax-comparison.php
s20n commented on Hard Rust requirements from May onward lists.debian.org/debian-d... · Posted by u/rkta
> This extends at first to the Rust compiler and standard library, and the Sequoia ecosystem.
By Sequoia, are they talking about replacing GnuPG with https://sequoia-pgp.org/ for signature verification?
I really hope they don't replace the audited and battle-tested GnuPG parts with some new-fangled project like that just because it is written in "memory-safe" rust.
s20n commented on What we talk about when we talk about sideloading f-droid.org/2025/10/28/si... · Posted by u/rom1v
I'm struck with how long the history of Apple's earliest iPhone has shaped and produced long-term damage to the concept of digital ownership. Apple originally didn't allow anybody but Apple to create software for the 1st gen iPhone, and only later was forced "opening" it my market forces.
People who realized they actually owned the thing they bought wanted to do what they wanted, which required circumventing Apple's control or "jailbreaking". This differentiator stimulated Google to "allow" installing on Android without "jailbreaking" the device aka "sideloading", giving the illusion of the kind of freedom that was never in question on normal computers.
It is interesting though how this same conversation doesn't exist in the same way in other areas of computing like video game consoles or other embedded computing devices where the controls against arbitrary applications is even stronger.
The fact that mobile phones aren't yet just a standard type of portable computer with an open-ish harware/driver ecosystem that anybody can just make an OS for (and hence allow anybody to just install what they want) is kind of wild IMHO. Why hasn't the kind of ferver that created Linux driven engineers to fix their phones? Is Android and iOS just good enough to keep us complacent and trapped forever? I can't help but think there might be some effect here that's locking us all in similar to how the U.S. healthcare system can't seem to shake for profit insurance.
I'm sometimes surprised at the plethora of cheap handheld gaming systems coming out of China that support either Linux, Android, or sometimes both, and seem to be based on a handful of chipsets. If anybody ever slapped an LTE module and drivers onto one of those things we'd have criminally cheap and powerful, open phone ecosystem.
> It is interesting though how this same conversation doesn't exist in the same way in other areas of computing like video game consoles
Yes, there needs to be a lot more uproar for these cases as well. One of the most appalling cases is that of macOS. To distribute your app (as a .dmg for instance), you need to sign up and pay for a Developer ID, sign the app with a Developer ID certificate and then notarize it, EVEN if you don't intend to use their App Store.
Why would you use one?
I remember using these for impedance matching back when I was in college. Basically when you connect two transmission lines (like coax cables), you need to match their impedances so the signal does not bounce back. (Ik this is a gross oversimplification but yeah)
Migrating my i3 config to sway hardly took any effort. I was also able to get rid of a lot of xorg specific configurations from various x11 dotfiles and put them directly in the sway config (Such as Natural Scrolling)
[1]: https://itsfoss.com/news/kde-plasma-to-drop-x11-support/.