A reminder that there are still valid escape options for us systemd haters. Probably the best if you're not a heavy desktop environment user is Alpine. I ran Devuan for a couple years with only minor issues. And there's always Gentoo. I find it very comforting that I can control the init system just by editing shell scripts.
I think this falls in line with the sentiment from "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy":
"And so the problem remained; lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches. Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees
in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans."
The way fossil fuels have been exploited has been categorically evil, and from that perspective I think the "industry" is going to be seen as a net negative. The negative externalities are in line with the waste generated by the development of nuclear weapons (think Hanford) on an even grander scale. But it would have been impossible for us to reach a point where it was possible to produce solar cells, hydro, and wind energy without the incredible energy density of petroleum fuels. The fuel for the industrial revolution that gave us our modern livelihoods. Petroleum-derived fertilizers are what enable the global population that we have today, so in a very real sense you and I would not exist without the development of fossil fuels on a grand scale. Whether or not that is a benefit or a deficit to mankind will probably be left to the historians.
Lest anyone think I condone the irreparable damage done to the planet by the industrialization enabled by reckless exploitation of petroleum, I think the whole thing is shameful, and I feel a bit of shame every time I have to drive my gasoline-powered car to the store. But I think there was a responsible way to harvest and benefit from that natural resource and like most natural resources, human greed found a way to make the worst of it.
For starters, Sublime Text is closed-source. A better parallel would be something like Neovim, which also is extensible with Lua. What draws me to Textadept over Neovim is that it's intentionally kept very small, which means it's very easy to understand and extend. Contrast with Vim and its massive manual. However, like Emacs, almost everything is fair game for customization. For example, I wanted minimap functionality, so I implemented it:
Textadept's biggest strength is also its biggest weakness: Scintilla allows for a lot of features that are nigh-impossible in the likes of Vim and Emacs due to their reliance on terminal behavior. However, Scintilla is not terribly well optimized and does not support GPU rendering, meaning that while there is very little bloat, Textadept can still chug in some edge cases. The most notable instance right now is large files with no line breaks (e.g. minified js libraries). Other Scintilla-based editors also suffer from this to varying degrees, although Notepad++ has some performance optimizations that seem to mostly mitigate it. Notepad++ is also Windows only and not as easily extensible.
Lexing is handled by one of Mitchell's other projects, Scintillua. You'll find the source for all the built-in lexers in there. https://github.com/orbitalquark/scintillua
The documentation for Scintillua also gets pulled into Textadept's API documentation as a dependency, so the syntax is also explained there. It's basically a bridge between Scintilla's native lexing and LPeg.
Legitimately curious, how would you implement a “secure” scratch file functionality? Or is it just that the whole notion of scratch files is insecure?
The great thing about Textadept’s extensibility (and use of Lua specifically) is that it’s easy to pull in other Lua modules to add functionality. I don’t think it would be much work to modify the scratch file extension to prompt you for an encryption key on startup and then run the scratch files through libsodium (via luasodium) if you want to have your cake (scratch files) and eat it (some cursory level of security).
I use Joplin, which is a cross-platform FOSS notes app featuring E2EE. It's not a perfect solution and not much of a text editor, but it's the right direction.
Everything else is explicitly saved (without secrets) or just an ephemeral buffer in Neovim.
It uses Scintilla. In fact, at its core, it’s basically just a wrapper around the Scintilla message passing API. There’s a Lua script that parses the Scintilla header files to create the Lua tables that interface with the Scintilla library.
Glad to see this hit the front page again! I’ve been making some contributions lately and it introduced me to Lua. At its core it’s basically a very thin wrapper around the Scintilla editing component used by many open source editors. I’ve been working on getting some lower level APIs added for more control over the UI.
Mitchell is to be commended for maintaining the editor solo for so many years and keeping the LOC count really low (2000 lines of C, 4000 lines of Lua). If you’re willing to read the source it’s really easy to wrap your head around the whole thing, which can’t be said for Emacs or Vim. When I find the time I’ll finish my vi mode…
While the idea is noble, the press release states:
"This measure is based on NHK’s mission as an international public service media to provide essential information to Japanese nationals residing in or traveling in the region."
Broadcasting in English or Arabic isn't going to be of much use to Japanese nationals.
In general, Japanese are not very comfortable in using English. Thus for safety and critical information, broadcasting in their native language would feel much more trustworthy, reassuring and connected than any other language.
This problem affects most brick and mortar retail. Every online pickup system has some method of substituting or excluding items when the system thinks they’re in stock but can’t be found on the shelves.
My guess is that it’s a function of products either being shoplifted or just “wandering off” when a customer takes an item and then returns it to the wrong location. Recently I thought Walmart was out of an item I wanted, but I scoured the shelves and found one unit left sitting 3 shelves down and 4 feet away. I doubt a picker would have gone to the same lentils to locate it. In the case of many perishables the store is actually obligated to discard these items because you can’t tell how long that package of ham has been sitting in the sporting goods aisle.
One particularly egregious case recently was when an auto parts store said they had an item in stock that they keep behind the counter. To their credit, they called me and told me they could get the part from a neighboring store by the next day. Still faster than I would have received it from Amazon.
Still faster than I would have received it from Amazon.
Maybe faster but I doubt it was any cheaper --- certainly not enough to compensate for the time and effort and gasoline you spent looking for the item and returning back the next day to pick it up.
Actually, because I only needed a small quantity of a bulk product, it was much cheaper than ordering from Amazon. And I selected a location such that it was a quick detour from where we were out running errands the next day anyway. Amazon beats brick and mortar prices frequently, but not always.
This is also my experience, except for small parts (where Amazon still inflates the cost to cover shipping, even if you pay for Prime) and parts sold in bulk (like hoses). Sure, I can buy 5 feet of hose on Amazon for $15, but I can just buy the 1 foot I actually need for $4 in store. Also, a lot of Amazon parts are of dubious quality, whereas if I buy a name brand in store I know I'm getting a part I can trust.
RockAuto is fantastic and usually has the best prices by a huge margin, but if you're not careful you'll kill any savings with shipping costs.
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