bahmanm

Got a notification from LinkedIn saying "You're one of the few experts who have been invited to collaborate on ..." I got curious and opened up the link.

Apparently, now instead of professional writers being paid to pen down their, usually, cohesive & authentic views, LinkedIn is trying out the idea of generating content using an LLM and then asking for free editorial services from users in exchange for "badges" 🤯 🤦‍♂️

This is cheap IMO. Even for LinkedIn.

What's happened to the "content team" at LinkedIn!?

Lemmy, in particular lemmy.ml, is so good that I've got completely used to checking it out almost every hour to enjoy the content. Kudos to all the mods and developers ❤️

Recently, in the past few weeks, I couldn't help but notice that momentary outages of lemmy.ml, ranging from a couple of mins to longer than 30mins, have become more frequent.

Is my observation correct? Or I'm just addicted to Lemmy? 😂

If it is correct, have we got any idea what are the possible causes of the outages? In particular, I'd like to know if there's anything that I, as a member of this safe & welcoming community, can do to potentially help ¹.

On a related note, if the outages are of such a nature that may be predicted but not prevented (such as routine maintenance restart, load-testing or new feature deploy), do you folks think it makes sense to have a post here in "meta" at least a few mins prior to the action?

¹ I've got about a quarter of a century experience dealing w/ code and systems.

I thought I'd share how happy I've been w/ my Gnome experience these past few years despite the occasionally controversial UI/UX decisions the Gnome folks tend to make.

I use Gnome Online Accounts integration w/ Google (drive, e-mail, calendar & contacts) and it "just works"™ & it does so quite reliably.

It's so polished & well-integrated in the desktop that I often don't even notice that I'm using in on a daily basis ❤️

PS: I'm using Gnome 44.3 on openSUSE Tumbleweed running on an old ThinkPad T530 w/ an nVidia GPU.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/4079840

"Don't repeat yourself. Make Make make things happen for you!" 😎

I just created a public room dedicated to all things about Make and Makefiles.

#.mk:matrix.org
or
matrix.to/#/#.mk:matrix.org

Hope to see you there.

TIL that I can use Perl's Benchmark module to time and compare the performance of different commands in an OS-agnostic way, ie as long as Perl is installed.

For example, to benchmark curl, wget and httpie you could simply run:

$ perl -MBenchmark=:all \
     -E '$cmd_wget    = sub { system("wget  https://google.com > /dev/null 2>&1") };' \
     -E '$cmd_curl    = sub { system("curl  https://google.com > /dev/null 2>&1") };' \
     -E '$cmd_httpie  = sub { system("https https://google.com > /dev/null 2>&1") };' \
     -E '$timeresult  = timethese(15, { "wget" => $cmd_wget, "curl" => $cmd_curl, "httpie" => $cmd_httpie });' \
     -E 'cmpthese($timeresult)'

which on my old T530 produces:

Benchmark: timing 15 iterations of curl, httpie, wget...

      curl:  2 wallclock secs ( 0.00 usr  0.00 sys +  0.42 cusr  0.11 csys =  0.53 CPU) @ 28.30/s (n=15)
    httpie:  8 wallclock secs ( 0.00 usr  0.01 sys +  4.63 cusr  0.79 csys =  5.43 CPU) @  2.76/s (n=15)
      wget:  3 wallclock secs ( 0.00 usr  0.00 sys +  0.53 cusr  0.19 csys =  0.72 CPU) @ 20.83/s (n=15)
    
         Rate httpie   wget   curl
httpie 2.76/s     --   -87%   -90%
wget   20.8/s   654%     --   -26%
curl   28.3/s   925%    36%     --

Very handy indeed ❤

It's not the 1st time a language/tool will be lost to the annals of the job market, eg VB6 or FoxPro. Though previously all such cases used to happen gradually, giving most people enough time to adapt to the changes.

I wonder what's it going to be like this time now that the machine, w/ the help of humans of course, can accomplish an otherwise multi-month risky corporate project much faster? What happens to all those COBOL developer jobs?

Pray share your thoughts, esp if you're a COBOL professional and have more context around the implication of this announcement 🙏

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/3560540

You probably have already noticed that nowadays it's becoming fashionable online to share technical material via videos (eg YouTube.)

I somehow can understand the appeal of creating videos for sharing thoughts/news, esp b/c it takes way less time and focus compared to writing things (just hit the record button and go.)

But videos are. 👎 not index-able (at least locally)
👎 not searchable. 👎 not copy-paste friendly if at all. 👎 impossible to skim through.
👎 a major distraction from the train of thoughts.

IMO, in most cases, the more effective and impactful medium of technical comms is the written form: a Mastodon toot, a blog post, a gist, a Pastebin entry or even a Facebook post!

What are your thoughts?

When you open a new tab, you can instantly start typing and press ENTER which sends your query to the search engine.

However once that's done, there's no easy way to edit the query directly from the URL bar. The URL bar will contain, well, the URL and not the original query anymore.

Is there a way to edit the search query w/o using the search engine's web page or retyping the whole query again? In other words, is there a way to tell Firefox to show me the previous query in the URL bar instead of showing the URL?

I'd like to try to send as many queries as possible to Google directly from Firefox rather than using Google's webpage (more $$$ for Firefox.)

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/3413371

I've had the (mis)fortune to deal w/ a good number of Makefiles over the years. Enough to take a liking to Gnu Make 🤷‍♂️

I've been haphazardly compiling a collection of common tasks that I'd like my Makefiles to do out-of-the-box for me.

The collection grew to a point where I thought it might benefit my fellow engineers in their day-to-day programming.

Hence bmakelib was born w/ an Apache v2.0 license 👶

It is essentially a collection of useful targets, recipes and variables you can use to augment your Makefiles.

The aim is not to simplify writing Makefiles but rather help you write cleaner and easier to read and maintain ones.

Everything is well tested via CI pipeline (yes, I wrote unittests for Makefiles 😎) and should work out of the box.

Please take a look and let me know what you think. I'd love to hear your thoughts and possibly your experience if you ever use bmakelib in your projects.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/3229278

Suppose I've got a simple #Makefile w/ a few URLs that I'd like to process as dynamic targets.

For example here is a not working snippet:

.DEFAULT_GOAL := all

#####
URLS  = https://foo.example.com
URLS += https://bar.example.com
URLS += https://www.example.org

#####
% :
	@echo the url is $(*)

#####
.PHONY : all
all : $(URLS)

It fails w/

*** target pattern contains no '%'

I believe that's b/c of the character : being part of URLS which confuses Make after expansion (order o

As a workaround, I've removed https:// from all URLs. For example this works:

URLS = foo.example.com
URLS += bar.example.com

I know Make generally doesn't play well w/ targets w/ space or colon in the name but I wonder if the above is the best I can do. What do you think?

I'm working on a hobby project of mine which requires Gnu Make 4.4. I am now trying to setup the project's Travis pipeline on github. Travis, understandably, only offers LTS Ubuntu images and sadly Gnu Make 4.4 is not available on those images.

Is there any way, compiling from the sources aside, to install the said version on an Ubuntu image? Something like a PPA?