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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • One counterpoint - even with a weak speed to capacity ratio it could be very useful to have a lot of storage for incremental backup solutions, where you have a small index to check what needs to be backed up, only need to write new/modified data, and when restoring you only need to read the indexes and the amount you’re actually restoring. This saves time writing the data and lets you keep access to historical versions.

    There’s two caveats here, of course, assuming those are not rewritable. One, you need to be able to quickly seek to the latest index, which can’t reliably be at the start, and two, you need a format that works without rewriting any data, possibly with a footer (like tar or zip, forgot which one), which introduces extra complexity (though I foresee a potential trick where the previous index can leave an unallocated block of data to write the address of the next index, to be written later)




  • If you license your project under GPL, and somebody submits some code (like through a pull request) that ends up in the library you use, you are now also bound by the GPL license, meaning you also have to publish the source of any derivatives.

    The way to avoid it is to use something like a CLA, requiring every contributor to sign an agreement giving you special rights to their code, so you can ignore the GPL license in relation to the code they wrote. This works, but is obviously exploitative, taking rights to contributions while giving out less.

    It also means if somebody forks the project, you can’t pull in their changes (if you can’t meet GPL terms, of course), unlike with MIT, where by default everybody can make their own versions, public or private, for any purpose.

    Though it’s worth noting, if you license your code under MIT, a fork can still add the GPL license on top, which means if you wanted to pull in their changes you’d be bound to both licenses and thus GPL terms. I believe this is also by design in the GPL license, to give open-source an edge, though that can be a bit of a dick move when done to a good project, since it lets the GPL fork pull in changes from MIT versions without giving back to them.


  • Doesn’t change the voting situation. Since your votes need to be seen by other instances, Lemmy needs a mechanism for federating votes. Since instances are untrusted, there needs to be some way of preventing manipulation. Thus, AFAIK, Lemmy simply shares your votes across instances, letting each one tally them up. As a side effect, any server admin of an instance you can interact with can also get a list of all your votes.



  • Fundamentally, the repository you have on GitHub is the same thing as the repository you have on your computer when you clone it. Pulling and pushing are shorthands for synchronizing commits between the two repositories, but you could also synchronize them directly with somebody else who cloned the repository. As somebody mentioned, you can also just host the same repository on two servers, and push to both of them.

    The issue is that git doesn’t include convenient features like issues, pull requests, CI, wikis, etc., and by extensions, those aren’t included in your local repository, so if GitHub takes them down, you don’t have a copy.

    An extra fun fact is that git can be considered a blockchain. It’s a distributed ledger of immutable commits, each one representing a change in state relative to the previous one. Everybody who clones a repository gets a copy of its entire history and fast forwards through the changes to calculate the current state.




  • Magic in general is just a plot device that can do whatever the author needs it to do.

    Sounds like that’s just where we disagree. I would instead say that magic is part of the world being shown in the story, and it should have an explanation, just like laws of physics. The hints come not from the narrator knowing things and dropping clues, but from the underlying logic of how magic works and the behaviors of people shaped by the magic of the world. And of course the reader can’t anticipate everything - but I also want there to be a sense of what’s possible and what’s not, and for the cases where the reader’s understanding is broken to be impactful and bring new understanding.

    So yeah, in the end it’s just a matter of preference. I can look at HP and think “man, the magic just does whatever the fuck the author needs”, and other people can look at it and enjoy the whimsical adventure for what it is. Or, in a way, I guess it’s both - I can still appreciate the story, but it’s underlined with a sense of shallowness.


  • The issue is that the wands being made from the same core doesn’t have any explained effect before this event, when an explanation conveniently appears, now being a known event that has happened before. The issue is that, to my knowledge, things just happen that have no prior explanation, which sugests they’re just being made up on the fly to fit the narrative, which in turn means the reader/viewer has no way to anticipate them.

    In what I’d consider a “good” magic system, things fit together. They don’t have to be revealed immediately, but often there will be hints, and when the reveal is made it’s gonna at least fit into the void in prior knowledge. This is, of course, my subjective preference, but I think HP goes so far into the opposite that it’s just random stuff made up to justify whatever the author wanted to happen with no reasonable explanation.