Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46242700

Points: 73

# Comments: 27

I have taken a (short) look at KOReader and saw that there's an instructions page on its wiki on how to install it on the rM2; it still uses rm2fb but it suggests using timower's version, which works on newer versions of the OS. What I should've made more clear in the post was that there are options, they're just less convenient to use because Toltec doesn't work.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Japanese_words_of_Po...

https://x.com/jasonlk/status/1946641193644798118

I think this list should also include descriptors[0]: it's another metaprogramming feature that allows running code when accessing or setting class attributes similar to @property but more powerful. (edit: nvm, I saw that they are covered in the proxy properties section!)

I think the type system is quite good actually, even if you end up having to sidestep it when doing this kind of meta-programming. The errors I do get are generally the library's fault (old versions of SQLAlchemy make it impossible to assign types anywhere...) and there's a few gotchas (like mutable collections being invariant, so if you take a list as an argument you may have to type it as `Sequence[]` or you'll get type errors) but it's functional and makes the language usable for me.

I stopped using Ruby because upstream would not commit on type checking (yes I know you have a few choices if you want typing, but they're a bit too much overhead for what I usually use Ruby for, which is writing scripts), and I'm glad Python is committing here.

[0]: https://docs.python.org/3/howto/descriptor.html

> The truth is that any reasonably complicated software system created by humans will have bugs, regardless of what technology was used to create it.

"Drivers wearing seatbelts still die in car accidents and in some cases seatbelts prevent drivers from getting out of the wreckage so we're better off without them." This is cope.

> Using a stricter language helps with reducing some classes of bugs, at the cost of reduced flexibility in expressing a solution and increased effort creating the software.

...and a much smaller effort debugging the software. A logic error is much easier to reason about than memory corruption or race condition on shared memory. The time you spend designing your system and handling the errors upfront pays dividends later when you get the inevitable errors.

I'm not saying that all software should be rewritten in memory-safe languages, but I'd rather those who choose to use the only language where this kind of errors regularly happens be honest about it.

If you're looking for examples of ringing and hallucinated details, they're really obvious in the framed picture on the right on respectively the character's shirt and the frame.

Forgot to add something to a previous commit? Run "jj squash -i" to move the lines you select to whatever commit you want. Or you can run "jj edit" to check out that commit and edit it directly.

Want to split a commit into two separate commits? Run "jj split".

Need to reorder commits? Run "jj rebase", and if you have a conflict you can "jj edit" the commits that are marked as conflicted to fix it later, unlike Git where you have to run through a lengthy process of fixing conflicts on commits you don't remember and then review the changes later to see whether they still make sense.

If you want to have a messy working copy of your repo that's very easy to do. The workflow would mostly involve:

- Develop the feature

- "jj split" to pick out the stuff you need into a separate commit, which will appear between master and the working copy commit

- "jj describe" to add a commit message

- "jj bookmark set feature-branch" on the commit containing the stuff you want to push

- "jj git push" to push it

- "jj edit" to return to the commit containing the working copy.

You'd end up with a tree that looks kind of like this:

    @  ptswumyk 2025-02-12 13:16:36 de46f8c1
    │  messy working copy
    ○  slwozrlr 2025-02-12 13:16:22 feature-branch@origin d3d246a1
    │  feature implementation
    ◆  tssssuzr 2025-02-12 12:34:28 master* 8a9bab0f
    │  generate flake registry from inputs
    ~

JJ doesn't currently have a "native" repository format (or rather, it's in development and not ready for general usage), so right now a JJ forge wouldn't look too different from your usual Git forges.

Everybody who's using it right now uses it on Git repos on Git forges. I've been using it for months on my own and at work and I didn't make any changes to the infrastructure outside of my own command line usage.

It would be interesting to see what a JJ-native forge would even look like in the future, but I don't think anybody knows exactly what that would be right now! JJ is in development (but stable enough to work with) and people have only just started using it, so it's still in the phase of discovering what workflows are possible.

> Plus a good IDE support.

Now that's something I would love to see. Git tooling works mostly fine but due to how JJ's git backend works, it always thinks it's in a "detached HEAD" state.

systemd is very good because it makes many things that the Linux kernel can do very easy. I would like to know how the people who swear against it implement features that I regularly use in systemd like socket/mount/dbus activation, services that dynamically create a user and group on activation and keep their service and temp directories private from other services, syscall filtering, user session services that start when I log into a graphical session (very useful when you have issues with your system tray's config, for example), network mounts that get mounted asynchronously only when you're using them, actual service management and restarting a service when it fails and service dependencies (which some init systems still don't do!), and so on and so forth...

Yes you could do all of these things by composing other programs, but there is lots of value in having them all bundled together and only having to consult one resource for documentation on them, and the fact that these are all designed to work together reduces the friction that you would get by composing other "general-purpose" tools.

On the other hand, systemd is bad because the implementation is messy, when it does fail it tends to do so in odd and obscure ways, it comes bundled with tons of components that most people won't need, and yes the fact that it's essentially the only option you're given and that it's not portable to BSDs is not very nice.

I would encourage people to read dinit's comparison page and Chimera Linux's FAQ section on systemd for good arguments that are not fueled by religious belief as to both why systemd is valuable and in which ways it is bad.

https://github.com/davmac314/dinit/blob/master/doc/COMPARISO...

http://chimera-linux.org/docs/faq#what-is-the-projects-take-...

To me that is backwards. I prefer code written in a topological order for a number of reasons:

- It mirrors how you write code within a function.

- It's obvious where you should put that function in the module.

- Most importantly, it makes circular dependencies between pieces of code in a module really obvious.

I'm generally not a fan of circular dependencies, because they make codebases much more entangled and prevent you from being able to understand a module as a contained unit. In Python they can even lead to problems you won't see until you run the code[0], but circular imports are probably so common that current type checkers disable that diagnostic by default[1].

I think languages that don't support forward references (C, but also OCaml and SML) let me apply the "principle of least surprise" to circular dependencies. OCaml even disallows recursive dependencies between functions unless you declare the functions with "let rec fn1 = .. and fn2 = ..", which may be a bit annoying while you're writing the code but it's important information when you're reading it.

[0]: https://gist.github.com/Mark24Code/2073470277437f2241033c200...

[1]: https://microsoft.github.io/pyright/#/configuration?id=type-... (see reportImportCycles)

I think that's what this post is saying, but all the posturing about forcing people to working harder to build "grit" is making it hard to read it as genuine. Clearly this is not a management issue, it's the team's fault for not having enough grit to work hard all the time!

JS is in a different spot where to benefit from type checking you have to add a build step or reconfigure your build tool, switch files to another extension, add some "type stubs" dependencies, and make significant changes to the codebase to benefit from type checking.

I think if Node and the browsers started allowing type hints in their parsers you'd see much less resistance to TypeScript.

Other scripting languages are probably not popular enough to matter as much as JS does.

Once you have written down the shape of the data flowing through your program in a way that a compiler can check you'll be able to reason about the whole program better and you might find issues much faster.

I think that types can directly help a lot with logic errors as well: one of the things people say most often when discussing typed programming language is that you can make illegal states unrepresentable, which means that you can encode logic into the type system itself.