PRODUCT REVIEW: And that's why it's become my go-to for

DIJKSTRA: *immediately closes tab*

always amused when someone in Ontario talks about "driving across the province in 8 hours"

buddy, Ottawa to Kenora was 21 hours of straight driving last I checked

most people have no idea how damn big this place is unless they've done the trip themselves

Yesterday I finally solved the third hardest discrete bug I’ve worked on in my career. Took about 3.5 weeks of work. At the end, I spent 10 consecutive days doing nothing but investigating this bug, all day, every day. I then took a day off to pick up my folks in Pennsylvania because they wrecked their car (everyone is fine, just car damage). Came back, and yesterday I finally found it.

1/

The fact that space indents won out over tabs actually makes me a little sad.

I just don't see why pressing a key four times is better.

After upgrading to #pipewire version 1.2.5. Finally, I am back to an audio system that works as well (or better!) than my old hand-tweaked setup with JACK1 and PulseAudio.

Unlike that system, this one is fully integrated - things using any of the various Linux audio APIs are all visible and routable to each other.

Latency is the same or better as I got with JACK1.

Truly excellent. Good job @pipewire

(and for those who don't know, I wrote JACK1, with the help of a lot of amazing people).

Maybe I Think Differently Because I See Differently

Ever wondered how our senses shape the way we think? It’s a fascinating concept, especially when you consider how different sensory experiences, like those between sighted and blind individuals, create unique cognitive worlds. As someone who navigates the world without sight, I’ve often wondered how this influences my thoughts and perspectives. After all, if we see the world differently, surely we think about it differently, too. Let’s explore how our sensory experiences shape our cognitive processes and perceptions.

Visual Dominance in Sighted People

For sighted people, vision dominates daily information processing. Research suggests that around 80% of their cognitive processing is tied to visual input, shaping not only how they see but also how they think. This visual dominance influences thoughts, understanding, and the focus on details like colours, shapes, and spatial relationships. Sighted individuals are often adept at processing visual patterns and details, like reading body language or interpreting facial expressions. For them, “seeing is believing,” but for those of us who cant rely on sight, belief comes from a different place altogether.

Cognitive Adaptations in Blind People

Without sight, blind people are forced to turn to other senses to form our mental landscapes. We rely on hearing, touch, and smell to navigate the world. Imagine walking into a room and, instead of scanning visually, you map it out through sound and touch. These senses aren’t just backups; they become finely tuned tools that create vivid mental representations. Over time, we develop exceptional auditory and tactile skills, and our memories sharpen to store all the information we gather through these non-visual cues.

Strengths Born from Different Senses

There are some advantages that come with thinking in a world shaped by sound, touch, and smell. For instance, blind people often excel in auditory tasks, like picking up subtle tones in conversations or identifying people by their footsteps. Memory is another area where blind people shine, as we frequently have rely on it to navigate and interact. Spatial awareness also becomes second nature, built from a blend of sound, touch, and movement that lets us “see” the world in our own way.

Beyond physical senses, abstract thinking often plays a prominent role in how we understand the world. Without the constant influx of visual distractions, our minds find other ways to stay busy—often diving into deeper, more abstract realms of thought. This can lead to an especially profound connection with concepts that aren’t tied to visual cues.

Neuroplasticity: The Brain’s Remarkable Adaptability

Perhaps one of the most intriguing aspects of sensory difference is neuroplasticity—the brain’s ability to rewire itself. When one sense is absent, the brain often repurposes the areas typically devoted to that sense. For blind individuals, parts of the brain usually reserved for vision get redeployed to boost other senses, supporting our enhanced skills and abilities in non-visual realms.

A Unique Cognitive Landscape

This distinct mix of sensory information creates a rich, varied internal world that offers a unique perspective on life. It’s a powerful reminder that our brains are remarkably adaptable, moulding our thoughts to the sensory input we experience. So yes, maybe I do think differently because I see differently. And maybe, that’s the beauty of it all.

#Blind #Cognition #Neuroplasticity

The reason I hate C so much has very little to do with its unsafety. Sure, that’s a problem, but the thing I really hate is how bad it is for building abstractions. Even simple things like linked lists or dictionaries require exposing data-structure implementation details in ways that make refactoring hard.

If I write C++ (or almost any higher-level language), I can start with a linked list and then decide that I know the maximum size and want better cache usage and switch to a flat data structure. Iterations stay the same and I change little code. Try building something in C where data structures are exposed with a uniform iteration API or indexed addressing depending on their use.

This extends further to trivial things like object destruction. If you look at Linux or BSD kernel code, you’ll often see a pattern of gotos for cleanup, where each step that can fail jumps to a corresponding error path that frees everything that’s been allocated so far. This exists because a lack of abstractions. In C++ or Rust, RAII would call the destructors on the objects as they go out of scope, so your error handling paths are just return failure and the cleanup happens automatically. You don’t need to write it every driver, the classes that own different resources know how to deallocated themselves.

When I write the same thing in C and C++, I end up writing more code in C, but when I then write another instance of similar code in C, I have to copy and paste a load of things because there is no way to properly abstract them out in C. This is the kind of thing that can cause memory-safety errors (because there aren’t abstractions that enforce properties that the programmer knows) but it also leads to a load of logic bugs.

I have no idea why anyone would choose C today. C++ can target the same ABI and generate identical binaries from less (and more reusable) source code. Rust can enforce more properties at compile time automatically. Garbage-collected languages can let you write complex cyclic data structures and correctly manage them (my current favourite approach for a lot of things is to write some core things in C++ and use Sol3 to expose them into Lua for all of the business logic).

On the Zig vs. Rust debate, people like to focus on memory safety, but Rust's RAII is just as important to writing clean, maintainable code.

There is something truly magical about seeing my GPU driver cleaning up dozens of nested GPU and host objects when the GPU job completes. Always exactly then, never too early, never too late, never leaking anything. That's all thanks to RAII and automatic Drop calls.

`defer foo.deinit()` really doesn't cut it. You have to explicitly write it, and it only works if all code paths free the object at the end. `errdefer` is just a special case, and then the only way to know if you forgot it is by testing with a leak checker. And then the deinit function has to manually deinit all child objects.

All this stuff is just done automatically in Rust. Most of my types don't even implement Drop, or only do something trivial there, because the compiler recursively dropping objects is 99% of the work.

It's *knowing* the compiler is on your side and taking care of all this that makes it magical. If you have to write out the code by yourself, that's more work, and a huge chance for bugs. The compiler is doing some very complex tracking to figure out what to drop when and where. You'd have to do that all in your head correctly without its help.

Lots of love on your way ❤

#vlc #foss #OpenSource #privacy

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I gotta say, having my dad—previously a lifelong Republican—voting for Kamala Harris and sending me stuff like this now is so great 😂

Good job MAGA, good job.

KUnifiedPush: KDE's efficient way of delivering notifications to your apps

KUnifiedPush, KDE's client library for the UnifiedPush protocol, has reached version 1.0.0. KUnifiedPush provides a way to deliver notifications instantly to multiple apps on your devices even if the apps are not running.

Ideal for social media, weather and instant messaging apps, it will also contribute to improving the battery life on your mobile devices.

blogs.kde.org/2024/10/19/kunif…

@kde@lemmy.kde.social

On this day in 2006, 18 years ago, I started offering the Mozilla CA cert bundle as a PEM file for everyone to use. The service is still running, uninterrupted, ever since.

Because I think we need it.

curl.se/docs/caextract.html

Today is **fifteen years** since I posted about the "null-prefix domino" - common problems in TLS server certificate verification functions in many projects, including #curl

daniel.haxx.se/blog/2009/10/19…