Linux

It's seen its renneisance recently

I wish more websites would use RSS Feeds. :-(

Markdown is terrible as a standard because every parser works differently and when you try to standardize it (CommonMark, etc.), you find out that there are a bajillion edge cases, leading to an extremely bloated specification.

I think Obsidian and Logseq are helping to change this.

I frigging love markdown for everything!

My university recently had Internet problems, where the DHCP only leased Out ipv6 addresses. For two days, we could all see which sites implemented ipv6 and which didn't.

Many big corpo sites like GitHub or discord Apperently don't. Small stuff like my personal website or https://suikagame.com do.

IPv6 is great, but NAT is quite functional and is prolonging the demise of IPv4.

Lots of really large sites are horribly misconfigured. I had intermittent issues because one of the edge hosts in Netflix ‘s round robin dns did not do MTU discovery properly.

Nobody knows about unifiedpush. Last time I checked, their Linux dbus distributor also wasn't ready. There has to be a unified push to get it adopted.

Nobody was going to honor that. That's just giving them an extra bit of data to track you with.

Call me old fashioned, but I still call it Jabber.

I came here to say matrix but I'm not gonna lie. If XMPP had gotten the traction it deserved we wouldn't need matrix.

It's not a standard but still its an interesting software so I'll post this here:

Joking aside, I love and hate it. Its paradigm is almost like using the C preprocessor to build a really awkward Turing-machine. TeX/LaTeX does a great job of what it was intended to do; it applies high quality typesetting rules to complex material and produces really good results. I love the output I can get with it and I will be eternally grateful that Donald Knuth decided to tackle this problem. And despite my complaints below, that gratitude is genuine. Being able to redefine something in a context-sensitive way, or to be able to rely on semantics to produce spacing appropriate to an operator vs a variable etc; these are beautiful things.

The problem is, at least once a day I'm left wishing I could just write a callable routine in a normal language with variables, types, arrays, loops and so on. You can implement all those things in TeX, but TeX doesn't have a normal notion of strings, numbers or arrays, so it is rare that you can do a complicated thing in an efficient way, with readable code. So as a language, TeX frequently leads to cargo-cult programming. I'm not aware that you can invoke reflection after a page is output, to see what decisions on glue and breaks were made; but at the same time you can't conditionally include something that is dependent on those decisions, since the decision will depend on what is included. This leads to some horrible conditionals combined with compiling twice, and the results are not always deterministic. Sometimes I find it's quicker to work around things like that by writing an external program that modifies the resulting PDF output, but that seems perverse.

At the same time, there's really nothing else out there that comes close to doing what LaTeX does, and if you have the patience, the quality of documents it can produce is essentially unbounded. The legacy of encodings, category codes, parameter limits, stack limits etc. just makes it very hard for package writers, and consumes a great deal of time for a lot of people. But maybe I am picky about things that a saner person would just live with.

A lot of very talented people have written a lot of very complex packages to save the user from these esoteric details, and as a result LaTeX is alive and well, and 99% of the time you can get the results you want, using off-the-shelf parts. The remaining 1% of the time, getting the result you want requires a level of expertise that is unreasonable to expect of users. (For comparison, I wrote an optimising C compiler and generally found it far easier to make that work as expected, than some of the things I've tried, and failed, to do properly in LaTeX. I now have a rule; if getting some weird alignment to work takes me more than an hour, I just fake it with a postscript file, an image, or write an external program to generate it longhand, in order to save my sanity.)

I think (and certainly hope) that LaTeX is here to stay, in much the same way that C and assembly language are. As time moves forward I think we'll see more and more abstractions and fewer people dealing with the internals. But I will be forever grateful to the people who are experts in TeX, and who keep providing us with incredible packages.

What about Typst?

Probably it would be better to edit my comment, but I'll go with a reply to myself.

To all fans of RSS: there's this service called FeedBase that is essentially a RSS to NNTP gate. You add your RSS feed to that and it becomes a newsgroup on their server, and you can subscribe to it using any NNTP client. New articles appear as new posts in that newsgroup and you can post your own replies to them. So, you get RSS but with discussions or comments.

https://feedbase.org/

If you try this, let me know what RSS feeds you're reading, so we could read the articles together and have some discussion there!

P.S. This comment is not an ad. I genuinely love feedbase and use that myself.

I was actually surprised to find out QUIC is fairly close to being default.

Wikipedia

HTTP/3 uses QUIC, a multiplexed transport protocol built on UDP.

HTTP/3 is (at least partially) supported by 97% of tracked web browser installations (thereof of 98% of "tracked mobile" web browsers), and 29% of the top 10 million websites.