I'm not sure needing 160MB of RAM for a weather app is such a boast you're trying to make it look… Even with all the graphics, it's just an HTTP client querying some service. It should fit in hundreds of KBs.
https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2026/08/linux-vs-windows-weather-app-ram
"Modern software sucks. It’s built by self-proclaimed “engineers” who make their chat box addiction your problem and still use Twitter."
My favorite test for whether I'm listening to an urbanist or just a car hater: mentally substitute "cars" with "people" and see if the phrase still make sense.
"Your city is full of space that could be used for parks or houses but is instead used for people" — what a horrible place, indeed!
This is just one of those topics where nuance is absolutely everything. Implying that houses and parks are used by people, but that cars are just objects by themselves is not nuanced.
Here's a public announcement for #opensource maintainers!
I consider highlight.js[1] and ijson[2] to be my most successful projects. Not because of the reach they achieved, but because when I got tired of maintaining them I immediately handed them off to people who were the most active contributors at the time.
Quitting and handing off is a normal thing you do with your project.
[1]: https://highlightjs.org/
[2]: https://pypi.org/project/ijson/
Programmers: do you also use "we" in comments and commit messages, even if you work on the code alone?
My good mood of this morning is due very much to NLTK, a #Python library for Natural Language Processing. Lexing, stemming, Levenshtein distance — a treasure trove of clever algorithms and datasets.
Today specifically I was trying out an idea to make my grocery classifier more resilient to spelling variants, and I wondered if you could easily break an English word into syllables… And of course you can: https://www.nltk.org/api/nltk.tokenize.SyllableTokenizer.html
Amazing!
Forest path. #mosstodon
Okay, that went well. And I culled the trillium shots from 13 to just 3. Now's the hard part — WHICH ONE OF THE THREE! Interesting angle vs. classic face-on shot, vs. the one highlighted by the sun. What do you think?
The plan for tomorrow is to drive to a place without Internet connection and photograph a trillium.
… oh, and not to keep you folks in suspense any longer, the answer was 4.
Old habits die hard. Needed to choose randomly one of 18 items printed out on a piece of paper, with some exclusions. Went to #Python:
random.choice(list(set(range(1, 19)) - {5, 11}))
Naked lady trail. Didn't have a chance to investigate it that time, but I want to go back now :-)
This documentary about #Clojure is extremely soothing to me. One of the most wholesome projects in the sea of cutthroat rivalry.
Them: "I was a skeptic too, but I can't ignore anymore how productive this technology makes me! There's no way I could produce so much stuff if I'd be doing everything myself."
Me: "But… Do you understand that *owning* people and working them to death is utterly immoral?"
Them: "Yeah, I'm a little concerned about it. But it's just how cotton farming is going to look from now on, so I'm not going to be sidelined. Slavery is the future!"
Spent an hour updating an old local #Python code to a yet another current vision of how project metadata should be described.
Somehow we as a discipline (software engineering) can't quite figure out a way for code not to break if you simply don't touch it for a while.
(I'm just grumbling, don't mind me.)
Watching news about the war in #Ukraine I often wonder how feasible it is for infantry to shoot down drones from the skies. Here's one test done by a Finnish shotgun champion:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mORdXxZ2uKU
Turns out it's bloody difficult and probably even practically impossible with a standard automatic rifle designed to shoot at people.
As a status update: quite a few people recommended Mint (Ubuntu sans snaps), which is pretty tempting. Pop_OS! was another recommendation in the same vein. Fedora was also confirmed as a good choice for artists.
Contemplating which Linux to install on my teenage kid's laptop. Ubuntu is out, as I don't want to touch snaps ever again (been using Ubuntu myself for the past 20 years, thank you). So I'm thinking @debian, @fedora or @elementary.
She's an artist (so Krita, Shotcut, Inkscape), and she'll probably get used to any DE pretty quickly. What I do care about is drawing tablet support and color management. Is Wayland ready for this yet? Any artists care to share their setups?
"If the appeals court denies the petition, Anthropic argued, the emerging company may be doomed."
Yes. That's the point.