HN user

marcodiego

27,351 karma

Using your last breath of life to fix a bug or why I love free software: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=78514#c19

Although I really like open source ideas, the humane, social and altruistic principles of free software are very beautiful. Reading this bug report a long time ago certainly influenced me on the software I choose to use.

I love the simplicity of the C programming language although I admit it is far from the most adequate tool for most of what I do.

https://hnbadges.netlify.app/?user=marcodiego

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fosstodon.org 2mo ago

GIMP 3.4 Will probably draw circles

marcodiego
4pts1
gitlab.com 4mo ago

XMMS Resuscitated: XMMS ported to gtk4 with gstreamer/pipewire

marcodiego
3pts0
www.gimp.org 4mo ago

Gimp 3.2 RC3: Third Release Candidate for Gimp 3.2

marcodiego
4pts0
forums.atariage.com 4mo ago

UNIX99, a UNIX-like OS for the TI-99/4A (2025)

marcodiego
206pts74
www.wbaltv.com 5mo ago

Bill Gates cancels AI summit address amid fresh scrutiny over Epstein links

marcodiego
12pts0
www.nature.com 5mo ago

Possible identification of the Luna 9 Moon landing site using machine learning

marcodiego
2pts0
files.mastodon.social 5mo ago

Blender source code was 9 files in January-8-1994

marcodiego
3pts0
www.phoronix.com 5mo ago

GNU Gettext Reaches Version 1.0 After 30 Years in Development

marcodiego
8pts0
github.com 5mo ago

Better C Generics: The Extendible _Generic

marcodiego
1pts0
www.wikifunctions.org 6mo ago

Welcome to Wikifunctions

marcodiego
2pts0
linuxiac.com 6mo ago

GitHub Takes Down Rockchip MPP Repository After FFmpeg Copyright Claim

marcodiego
15pts1
www.patreon.com 7mo ago

Planning the Future of Gimp

marcodiego
3pts0
www.phoronix.com 7mo ago

Steam on Linux Use Easily Hits an All-Time High in November

marcodiego
8pts0
www.collaboraonline.com 7mo ago

Press Release: Bringing Collabora Online to the Desktop

marcodiego
4pts0
sourceforge.net 7mo ago

CDE – Common Desktop Environment – Release 2.5.3

marcodiego
43pts3
www.cnn.com 8mo ago

Brazil's ex-president Bolsonaro arrested to prevent 'escape' court says

marcodiego
29pts24
www.cs.brandeis.edu 8mo ago

Lunar Landing Game Related Documents

marcodiego
2pts0
www.gimp.org 8mo ago

Gimp 3.2 RC1: First Release Candidate for Gimp 3.2

marcodiego
4pts0
www.open-std.org 8mo ago

C – defer, a mechanism for general purpose, lexical scope-based undo [pdf]

marcodiego
5pts0
github.com 8mo ago

WebAssembly (WASM) arch support for the Linux kernel

marcodiego
299pts65
news.ycombinator.com 8mo ago

Ask HN: Is the Abacus a Digital Device?

marcodiego
2pts2
freebsdfoundation.org 8mo ago

FreeBSD now builds reproducibly and without root privilege

marcodiego
58pts15
mijorus.it 9mo ago

Gear Lever: Integrate AppImages into your app menu with just one click

marcodiego
1pts1
www.theregister.com 9mo ago

Google to merge Android and ChromeOS in 2026, because AI

marcodiego
4pts1
old.reddit.com 10mo ago

ChatGPT Prompt to Practice French

marcodiego
1pts0
blogs.gnome.org 10mo ago

Casilda 1.0 Released

marcodiego
2pts0
www.nytimes.com 10mo ago

Lula: Brazilian Democracy and Sovereignty Are Non-Negotiable

marcodiego
21pts19
godotengine.org 10mo ago

Release candidate: Godot 4.5 RC 2

marcodiego
7pts0
savannah.gnu.org 10mo ago

Bug #67477: file gone after unexpected reboot

marcodiego
1pts1
www.blockbench.net 10mo ago

Blockbench: A low-poly 3D model editor

marcodiego
1pts0

The author blames interest in critical metals for the action.

Now, consider: Brazil has the second biggest known rare earth reserves in the World (second only to China). As a Brazilian, this scares me a bit.

Just one example: Around 2009 I met Thiago Vignatti. His master thesis was about improving X so it was easy to use in a multi-seat setup (2 monitors/keyboard/mouse) so a single computer could be simultaneously used by two people.

He later worked for Nokia, Intel and eventually his own startup related to VR.

During his time as a Google summer of code student, his project was to paralelize X code so it could run in multiple threads, making better use of modern hardware with many cores. His project failed. The reason: X code was so bad that paralelizing and making it thread-safe required so many locks that it ran slower! It was a better idea to start from scratch. I remember, at the time, taking a look at the source code and asking him why there was a X86 emulator built-in in X source code. His answer was that that was required to run some video BIOS on non-x86 computers, namely Sun workstations. That was the level of legacy code in X.

This is just an illustration of many problems X had. Vignatti was one of the X devs that migrated to wayland development. Many other core X devs did the same. People saying that X is fixable, that it can be improved or what else... These people may be right, but I trust X core developers more than these people when the subject is X development.

Around 2008 I saw two girls, not too versed in technology, share a mp3 song over bluetooth. At the time I thought that if technology finally arrived at the point where "normal people" could be able to do things that required lots of technical knowledge just a few years ago then we were very close to a future where technology could be a giant enabler of powers to everyone.

I am really ashamed by how wrong I was and how WE allowed things to became so artificially limited.

install Windows 11. This came with the laptop. And the installation makes installing Linux feel easy: I had to do so many weird tricks to avoid having to create an account with Microsoft during the installation.

The way secure boot evolved is disgusting. Specially because, at the time it was becoming popular, people we're warned that was more a tool of control than for security. Having to install a proprietary OS to install another should be forbidden.

Technically Asahi Linux isn’t facing a much different situation than standard Linux distributions as they relate to x86 hardware.

Very very different.

There are thousands of PC components that don’t provide any sort of Linux driver where contributors reverse engineer those drivers.

Increasingly more rare. Maybe that only happens thèse d'ays on extremely specialized hardware.

Apple does not support running other OS's on their hardware. This is bad in many senses but it is specially bad since it weakens competition and reduces incentives for Apple to improve their own OS, meaning it is bad even for their users in the long run.

If you choose to buy hardware from apple, you must consider that you're encouraging a behaviour that is bad for everyone, including yourself.

And since it will be a freemium model or ad-supported, here comes one more example why we should use and support free software.

The closest to vibecoding in the 90's was to open Borland's Turbo C help in any page, copy and paste the example and modify it until you understand it or until it did what you wanted.

Microsoft Quick Basic help was also gold.

I have some friends who say that "learning to learn" (the skill and the book with the same title) is key to being successful; specially if you're not a genius. Through my whole life, I met people who seemed nowhere near as bright as me but eventually got to surpass me both in academia and at work. From what I could observe about these people, the main difference was regularity; these people studied or wrote code every single day; they took small steps, but never stopped. Also there was the point of asking for help, not to get the answer, but to find a way out. There's also the "curse of the genius", but I don't think that is the case.

In the moments I was struggling the most in my life, what helped me the most was managing my time and finding ways to work a little bit every day, even if it was only writing down the plan of what I had to do. Pomodoro timers also helped me a lot to "start doing something".

I really think motivational, self improvement, anti-procrastination and studying advice courses should be offered by universities. I'm convinced that regularity and a good study strategy is enough to move even the weakest among the mediocres to attain a doctorate level. I saw some cases like these myself.

As I said other times: we need a Free Hardware Foundation now like we needed the Free Software Foundation for many years. The GSD (GNU software distribution) is basically a standard GNU-Linux distro using GUIX as the package manager seems very interesting, but if you want to run 100% free software on a RYF-certified device you'll have to pay a lot of extra money for 15 years old class hardware.

We need the equivalent of a Linus Torvalds + Richard Stallman but hardware. We were lucky to have had both for software at the same time. We need the same luck again now.

That was for show purposes. It was certainly intended to display OS capabilities while impressing people at the same time. Linux eventually came to dominate the live-cd scene in the early 2000's but, to this day, people still cute this demo as specially incredible. Actually, there was Linux with X11 and a functional browser that run from a floppy. And that is something that is really impressive: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28515025