Notices by Michael F. Lamb (datagrok@tiny.tilde.website), page 2

Hideous. This is not what the end of November should look like y'all. I'm supposed to be chipping ice off my car right now

@ajroach42 https://tilde.town is a bit similar to sdf.org (a shared unix box with community) and we recently got a gopher server set up https://tiny.tilde.website/@tildetown/936388

@archangelic I'm happy that I could help! 👍

@archangelic so you want to take a string with embedded spaces and newlines and turn it into several strings each no longer than n characters without breaking mid-word?

something like this might work, or at least be a starting point (here, the limit is 140 characters)

re.findall('.{,139}(?:\s|$)', input_text)

the idea is "find all strings of characters up to 139 characters followed by either space or newline"

@craigmaloney you're a programmer like me so this is a safe guess https://tiny.tilde.website/media/qoN3cS5WhAMDuX8eXuU

@m455 me too!

my biggest wtf moment so far was learning that the guile standard library is named for an obscure reference to a plot element in a science fiction story https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guile-devel/2010-07/msg00046.html

@cassolotl tilde.town is a community of users of a shared unix box that I'm a member of. (Check it out!) One of my tilde.town neighbors started an instance and invited us.

@m455 I've heard that common lisp is the more "practical" language with a large library of available tools, ("common lisp object system" for object-oriented programming is a big one that comes to mind) while scheme is more minimalist and the libraries less unified or likely to work across implementations

(but I don't care, because the projects I'm interested in use guile scheme)

but get more opinions because i don't know wtf i'm talking about

@m455 well i mean, no promises, and i might get swamped by other obligations, but i've worked through debian-installer troubles before and i'm also genuinely curious what the current state of things is

and if i can tempt you back into using debian as your main OS, bonus 😁

@brennen @m455 @archangelic sorry for blowing up your mentions, i got overexcited to talk about a thing i like

@archangelic @m455 @brennen I also like GuixSD because of several excellent technical decisions they make, and some of my favorite Free Software people are working on it, but I don't run it now because it doesn't support LVM yet and it tries to be a "pristine" Free Software-only distro.

I hope I can find a way to enable that same "none of us like non-free stuff but if you really need it and understand the danger, it is easy to install" when I eventually try again to switch to GuixSD

@brennen @m455 @archangelic sorry, misspoke:
not "the closest to perfect that we can get" but
"the closest to perfect that currently exists"

@archangelic @m455 @brennen I especially like Debian's main/contrib/non-free split. Even though FSF says it's not good enough to "endorse" I think it's the closest thing to perfect that we can get.

Want a pristine, free-software-only OS? Only use main.

Have encumbered hardware or forced to use some proprietary stuff by your boss? No need to retreat to horrible Windows, just take the explicit and intentional step of enabling non-free.