I relate very closely, having had the same thoughts over the past few years. Social clubs sound good in theory, but in my experience it's difficult to connect with people without a central activity or subject to act as a touchstone. It's a frustrating sort of paradox where the best social groups diverge greatly from their core theme, and yet the core theme is necessary to reach and maintain critical mass.
I think it's possible to get around the problem, but it would take just the right structure; there should be activities, but enough of a variety to have something for people from all walks of life. But also not too much of a variety so as not to appeal only to those interested in constantly trying new things. Perhaps a set of some baseline, fairly universal activities, with space for individual members to share their own hobbies and interests from time to time in a group setting? I don't know exactly, but it's something I've been considering for a while, and it feels like there must be an answer somewhere in there.
I think the problem comes when certain topical groups interpret their mission narrowly. Based on your other nearby comment, you mention your experience with a rock climbing group that doesn't so narrowly focus on rock climbing. I think that's the right way to do it.
There was one group I used to attend where I was definitely not as interested in the topic as others. I recall someone at the meetup said to me something along the lines of "If you don't agree with X then why are you here?" Well, I attended because I found a lot of interesting people there, and I know I wasn't the only one. Some organizers made the meetups unstructured conversation, which was great for me. Honestly, I'd just like to meet other people interested in a particular topic. Other organizers preferred meetups with more specific assigned discussion topics. I rarely cared much about the assigned topics and they made the unstructured conversation I wanted to have much more difficult or even impossible (particularly for the online meetups). I don't attend those meetups any longer in part because of the assigned topics.
If you don't mind, could you share a bit about those meetups with unstructured conversation? I would like to attend something like that, some keywords to look for would be helpful.
If the website/Facebook event/email/etc. mentions an assigned topic, then it's not likely going to have much unstructured conversation. Other than that, I can't think of any reliable ahead of time signs to look for. One thing I think I've learned from reading tons of comments today at HN is that I should try more meetups just to see what they're like because you can't really know ahead of time.
Anyhow, the specific group I was referring to was LessWrong meetups in 3 different cities over a period of about a decade. As I said, I'm not quite aligned with their philosophy, but I did find a bunch of interesting people at those meetups.
I can't speak for anyone else, but in trying to pursue groups with relevant interests, I've run into one of three issues:
1. The club/etc follows its core conceit closely, and discussions and such naturally don't branch off far
2. Connected to 1, the folks who actively engage in a club are typically very invested in the subject; when my interest is more casual, it can be difficult to connect with those more passionate
And 3., most critically, the things I am passionate about are too niche to sustain dedicated clubs anywhere but the most dense of population centers, which for a variety of reasons I have no interest in relocating to.
I would appreciate a group where a variety of unique interests is encouraged. I enjoy interacting with people who are passionate in their own ways, even when they don't necessarily line up with my own passions; I realize there are clubs and such out there which likely fit my preferences, but I have yet to find one reasonably nearby.
Lua's nature as a primarily embedded language means backwards compatibility is not guaranteed between any version. If 5.2 was a language fork then so was 5.3, 5.4, 5.5, etc. (5.2 did have some more significant changes though)
For that reason luajit staying at ~5.1 actually works in its favor. Rather than trying to follow the moving target of the newest version, it gives a robust focal point for the lua ecosystem, while modern versions can be developed and continue to serve their purpose in embedded systems and whatnot where appropriate.
I don't see a reason not to update LuaJIT still. Changes in Lua aren't just version numbers, it should be improving something, meaning that would be missing in LuaJIT.
Isn't it a bit naive to declare that, just because Lua created a new minor version, it should be somehow better? The author of LuaJIT has often written his arguments, including why he disagrees with the changes to the language, why they should have been implemented as libraries instead, that in his view LuaJIT is still more performant and more widely used than PUC Lua, and more.
As for forking, you can try, but I would warn you that one does not simply fork LuaJIT. Required is deep expertise in tracing JIT compilers, in assembly and in many different computer architectures. Nobody was really up to the task when Mike Pall announced that he was searching for a maintainer, before his eventual return.
LuaJIT does have some backported features from newer versions. But Mike Pall -- the mad genius behind LuaJIT -- has made it clear he doesn't agree with many of the changes made in newer versions, hence why it's staying where it's at.
Seems like an odd change, I wonder what the rationale is. Just making it clear to people new to the language that you can't adjust it mid-loop to change the loop count I guess?
The control variable in for loops is read only. If you need to change it, declare a local variable with the same name in the loop body.
Also [0]:
Roberto Ierusalimschy
> So what's the rationale to make them constant now? Does it have performance
> reasons?
Yes. The old code does an implicit "local x = x" for all loops, in case
you modify 'x'. With the new semantics, the code only does it when you
ask for it.
That was already the case in previous versions of Lua. You could assign to the loop variable but the assignment would be overwritten in the next loop iteration.
The loop count was fixed at the start of the loop. One of the reasons for this was performance. For loops behave differently if the step count is positive or negative, and it's a bit faster to compute that once, before the loop, than to repeat it every iteration.
In previous versions, you could change it mid-loop. This apparently caused some unintuitive behavior when paired with generators (e.g. `for k, v in pairs(table)`).
I haven't run into this myself, but it does make sense, and eliminating this footgun sounds like a good idea.
Functionally it makes no difference whether you split near the middle or not -- a truly random selection would sometimes end up with a pile of one, and that's totally fine. As long as you're not trying to game the system by, say, specifically counting out the sticks to get the outcome you want, it makes no difference. (and if you're doing that, then what's the point?)
Splitting closer to the middle does make it easier to avoid unintentionally counting though. If you make the same splits every time, you'll get the same outcome of course.
Philosophically / spiritually speaking, "don't think about it too much and just split wherever feels right" is the simple answer. Keep in mind the question you want to ask when you make the split and let whatever happens happen. Close your eyes if it helps you focus.
> Functionally it makes no difference whether you split near the middle or not -- a truly random selection would sometimes end up with a pile of one, and that's totally fine.
Yeah I just mean I would be very conscious of splitting with a single stalk in one group and would wonder if that was really a 'fair' selection or something I did intentionally since I know the exact number of the yarrow in one hand. In practice, I can't imagine anyone would make a selection like that, even though in a truly random system it would happen not infrequently.
Having a certain number in one hand is still a couple steps removed from getting a specific outcome, so there isn't anything inherently 'unfair' about it. My point was more that it's the intention that matters. If you make a split because it feels right, with your question in mind, then it's fine if it's totally uneven and/or you're aware of how many there are. Splits like that do happen from time to time, it's all part of it.
> YouTube: identifying copyrighted material can't be an automated process. Startup disagrees.
Also kind of interesting how little HN commenting styles have changed. Aside from the subject matter, it's barely noticeable that the comments are from 2007. I don't think the same would be true of many other places round the web.
I admit didn't spend a lot of time with it, but right after installing it, I needed to work on a project with Platform.io in VSCode. What was a 10 minute process in Zorin (mainly due to not using Flatpaks) didn't work out after over an hour in Bazzite.
Also, Bazzite takes over 2 minutes to boot, while Zorin takes less than 20 seconds.
I'm pretty new to Linux as a daily driver, and need a stable base that I'm familiar with for my non-gaming daily work, and Bazzite isn't that for me yet. On the other hand, Bazzite just worked out of the box for gaming, better than Zorin did.
I have a big enough SSD to split the partition and let each distro do its best work for me.
Bazzite is naturally a bit slower to boot compared to other distros due to the things it bundles in and the ostree system, but 2 minutes is unusually long.
On my 3.5yr old ThinkPad Z13 Gen 1 with the stock SSD, if takes exactly 34 seconds to cold boot to the full desktop (KDE) from the boot menu (I have enabled auto-logon), which I find acceptable. Warm boot is 30 seconds.
So there might me something odd about your setup. Are you using nVidia by any chance?
As for VScode, I'm not familiar with platform.io but you really want to be using dev containers. On uBlue distros, Distrobox makes this easy. Just follow the guide here: https://distrobox.it/posts/integrate_vscode_distrobox/
Próxima Centauri is about 250 million years older than our sun. Makes it not-impossible their earth like planet had advanced entities capable of sending their own voyager towards earth. Possibly it flew by while we were still in our Mesozoic Era and all they saw were dinosaurs.
I love thinking about things like this, but we will never know!
Sometimes I close my eyes and imagine I traveled back in time to the days of the Dinosaurs and just observed how the world was back then.
But I wonder if I'd be able to survive. The atmosphere, environment, microbes, etc, would be drastically different from what we've evolved to handle. Millions of years ago is a very long time!
Edit: Apparently microbes from millions of years ago would be so evolutionary distant that they might not regard me as host.
I've always had a soft spot for Metro design, aka Windows 8 UI. Win8 as a whole was a mess of course -- but looking beyond the glaring flaws, I think the new direction captured some of that Win95-esque spartan functionality while also having its own sense of personality. The modern minimalist UI hellscape is miserable, but overly skeumorphic designs like Win7 Aero (or Apple Liquid Glass) are obnoxious and cluttered to my eye, and I think Win8 Metro is an interesting attempt at a best-of-both-worlds.
Honorable mention goes to the original Nintendo DS UI. For a console so laser focused on the casual market it's weirdly professional looking. A little on the sterile side but it works great for the low resolution.
I think it's possible to get around the problem, but it would take just the right structure; there should be activities, but enough of a variety to have something for people from all walks of life. But also not too much of a variety so as not to appeal only to those interested in constantly trying new things. Perhaps a set of some baseline, fairly universal activities, with space for individual members to share their own hobbies and interests from time to time in a group setting? I don't know exactly, but it's something I've been considering for a while, and it feels like there must be an answer somewhere in there.