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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 5th, 2023

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  • The problem isn’t that FOSS projects are getting abandoned. The problem is the consumer mindset where FOSS projects are considered as the free (gratis) equivalent of proprietary software - a well packaged and eternally maintained ware that you just install and run. This is a convention that bigtech cultivated in order to get free labor and support.

    The original free (libre) software philosophy was designed with sharing in mind. Somebody writes software to scratch an itch - i.e solve their own or someone else’s problem. And then they leave the source code for others to adapt and use. You found a software that you like, but is abandoned? No problem! Just take it, update it and use it. I have done this. Don’t know how to code? Ask someone else to do it for you - perhaps for a price.



  • Americans pick up weird habits and then insist that it’s the right way. How is August 9th any better than 9th of August when the 9th is a subunit of August and not the other way around?

    Another good example is the use of the imperial system. I’ve heard Americans often declare that it’s a better system for manual use compared to the metric system. But the metric system has prefixes that differ consistently by 3 orders of magnitude, whereas the imperial system has rather arbitrary jumps between each successive unit. The metric system needs much less cognitive effort even for manual use.

    I can understand that it’s a matter of habit for Americans. But it’s the lack of acceptance that there is a problem that leads to other problems like crashing a spacecraft onto Mars.


  • People rarely use them in real life, but ISO 8601 and RFC 3339 (both are almost identical) are the most natural ways of writing date and time. Just like how we write numbers, their components are written from left to right in the decreasing order of significance: yyyy-mm-ddTHH:MM:SS. I like it by default for precisely the reason you mentioned - sorting. It even helps quick visual comparisons.