Stefan Soc writes about programming language design and software standards, including generics syntax, type annotations, and home directory clutter.
Commenters cite his posts on square brackets for generics, defending the home directory from dot-files, and Intel's original 64-bit x86 extensions.
From the same person: https://soc.me/standards/defending-home
I'm aware it mentions Linux specifically, but this is golden:
> From this point on, the number of dot-files and dot-directories can only shrink as the remaining applications get fixed and start conforming to the XDG base directory spec, while no new dot-files and dot-directories can be added to your home directory.
As is original reasoning for not using ~/.config from https://github.com/dirs-dev/directories-rs/issues/62#issuecomment-586716033
> As Apple keeps tightening its after-sale ownership of macOS appliances, it's becoming increasingly unlikely that randomly dumping stuff in $HOME will keep working.
I get the feel he just does not like macOS?
On that page, there is a link to another interesting page on the same site:
https://soc.me/interfaces/intels-original-64bit-extensions-for-x86.html
where there are links to a couple of patents filed by Intel in 2000, about a 64-bit extension of the x86 ISA, which had been implemented in Pentium 4, but which had been nonetheless disabled and hidden from the users, in order to not compete with Itanium.
The page explains the content of the patents.
As already mentioned by another poster, at least on Firefox you have to open a tab and then copy this link there, to avoid being identified as an "undesirable" :-)
If you have JavaScript enabled, that is. JWZ at least does the redirect on the server side.
The following is pulled in from `https://soc.me/assets/js/turnBack.js`:
const undesirables = [
"news.ycombinator.com/",
// "reddit.com/", // disable temporaily
"lobste.rs/"
] ;
if (undesirables.find(site => document.referrer.includes(site))) {
window.location.replace(document.referrer);
}
I wonder why Reddit is "temporarily not undesirable".
The modern belief is that [] should be reserved for generics[0]. In fairness, I've never seen a language actually stick to that and that's also a bit hollow when Java itself uses <> for generics in the first place.
[0]https://soc.me/languages/stop-using-angle-brackets-for-generics.html
In case anyone ever stumbles across this thread, a couple of posts about this:
https://keleshev.com/parsing-ambiguity-type-argument-v-less-than
https://soc.me/languages/stop-using-for-generics
Making home read-only can get there, and I can't find the project that forced using XDG paths. I think it used LD_PRELOAD or somesuch trick.
edit: https://soc.me/standards/defending-home