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PSA: Libraries
  • About ten years back, I had moved away from home and was living in a small town with no Internet in my apartment. The only internet connection I had was the local library.

    I remember being so surprised at the amount of viruses on those dumb computers. I wondered what the heck people were doing to them to get them in that state, and then one time I saw some dude looking up porn and just downloading whatever programs the pages he came to told him to.

    Anyway, I'm glad I have Internet in my apartment now.

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    Taking Pirated Copies Offline Can Benefit Book Sales, Research Finds.
  • Most new books I find are books I check out from my local library. While the library did pay for a copy, so it's not quite the same, as a reader I didn't pay anything for it. The barrier to trying the new book is very small, and if I don't like it I haven't lost anything.

    Readers finding your book online for free are having the same experience. Maybe not everyone who reads it will want to buy copies, but some will. Just like how some who find your book in a library would want to buy their own copy.

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    Do you guys do ROMhacking? What are you working on?
  • The tools will be fairly specific to the game you're hacking. For example, a lot of tools exist for GBA Pokemon games, but something like porymap won't work for another game.

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    Rust has a HUGE supply chain security problem | Sylvain Kerkour | July 2, 2024
  • So, the argument was that there was absolutely no way whatsoever that one could figure out they needed to depend on mio for a good event loop interface. It was totally an insurmountable task!

    You still see this same mindset now with people making things like blessed.rs. It's the same idea, just not wrapped into a library. I find it hilarious when it gets shared in discussions and some people go "oh wow so helpful!", as if we all couldn't have found serde and rand on crates.io without it.

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    Does anyone know some good Pokemon ROM hacks that stay vanilla but have quality of life additions and edits?
  • What do you mean by "vanilla"? Like, one of the official games just updated with QoL features? Honestly, you can just compile the Emerald Expansion with whatever features you want and play that.

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    FLOSS communities right now
  • Honestly, you ever tried to look back through a long thread on Discord? It's impossible. If you want to read the original message that started the thread, good luck, you'll be scrolling all day and may never get there. How anyone can claim that's "easy to use" is beyond me.

    Discord works for quick discussions happening right now, and that's it.

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    What do people here think about the movie web app extension?
  • The problem they're addressing is that some sites they were scraping from have begun instituting measures to stop them. The site went from working beautifully to working barely at all, with most sources either loading incredibly slowly or failing to load at all. I followed the discussions a bit on their discord, and it seems like the first recommendation was for users to host their own proxies. From what I see on the site's initial splash, that still is one of the recommendations. I'm guessing they also rolled out the browser extension as an alternate method for users who don't want to set up a proxy, since they were getting tons of people on thsir discord complaining about it being too hard or whatever.

    But yeah, who knows if the extension is safe. The project is open source, so you can always examine it for yourself. But at that point you may as well just host your own proxy.

    Edit: looked into it a bit more; the extension's originally proposed purpose seems to be to get around CORS restrictions on certain sources. Seems the original proposal was here: https://github.com/movie-web/movie-web/issues/581

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    the rust project has a burnout problem
  • I used to work at a company that held to the concept of "don't be a hero." Basically, if you were having to step up, work overtime, and always go out of your normal routine to "fix" stuff, then you're actually enabling bad processes.

    I think the same concept applies here. If you can't let any code be submitted without personally reviewing it, then there is something wrong with either the review system, the onboarding system for new devs, or the continuous integration system that should be catching mistakes. Same goes for triaging: if no one is triaging because it's too exhausting and leads to burnout, then some other system may need to be devised for handling outstanding issues.

    Obviously this is much harder to deal with in an organization where most contributors are volunteers. But if we want the project to survive and not be taken over by corporations who can afford to pay people to deal with this stuff full time, I think it should be addressed in a different way.

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    Apps that shouldn't be Subscriptions
  • Companies are using subscription models because it has proven to be far more profitable than a one-time purchase. Why sell the product to each person just once when you can sell it to them over and over again? You no longer have to constantly develop new products and versions, and you now only have to maintain your existing product.

    And it works because people buy it.

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