Denys Nykula

There are a few websites dedicated to translating free software: Hosted Weblate (by Weblate developers), Codeberg Translate (independent), GNOME’s Damned Lies, KDE Localization, and GNU Translation Project, each hosting many apps and components that publish translatable sources in a standard way (such as Gettext PO files) and have continuous integration pulling back the work of translators. Weblate instances are somewhat of a wiki-like wild West, with enthusiasts translating many projects at once; they could use help with proofreading - if you notice a mistake in the software you use and it happens to be on Weblate, it’s easy to sign in and fix it.

How does btop compare against a GTK+ task manager in terms of memory usage when you include the terminal emulator in the btop count? It’d be a more technically correct comparison that way.

Reading reviews on Google Maps in private browsing mode also got blocked for me.

Unsure about offline-first, but yes, local-first, for which a LAN is enough and no cloud is needed, is very much what I’d rather we depended on more, instead of what’s considered professional and an industry standard. Organizations requiring SaaS (as in, a network of 20 computers simultaneously becoming unable to open an app because the Internet went down) in a country experiencing war and blackouts is an additional source of stress. Free software requiring containers and gigabytes of dependencies is also suboptimal, we should aim to simplify native packaging for GNU/Linux and BSD distributions.

Another thing, programmer visions of what would suffice in bad situations are often very Western, anglophone. Software, including operating systems, eschewing localization in a quest for a lightweight footprint are not accessible or are outright unusable for the majority of the people in the world. Please take care to make your software possible to translate, including documentation. Best if the focus is on tutorials and handbooks; manpages are less of a priority.

Yes, I tried multiple popular SSR frameworks and use one at work. As a hobby, I’ve been making my own SSR framework that is much more minimal, based on Preact, Valibot, Vite, node:sqlite, URLPattern, gettext.js and a few companion libraries. (But components look more like old-school Mithril than React because no JSX extension, just standard JS.) I want its node_modules to stay below 200 MB and to pick such dependencies that the apps built with it can be included in Debian repositories and potentially FreedomBox. Hopefully I’ll be ready to make a fedi post about it next month.

JavaScript has been my favorite language for a decade. Still, I try to make websites server-rendered so that they can be read if my code fails to load or execute. For example, there are power outages in Ukrainian cities for most of the day because of the war. When there’s no power, there’s still 4G for a while but it switches to economic mode and slows down to a crawl. The websites of the monopolist energy company require a lot of JavaScript. It often fails to load for me during the outage. It’s also not keyboard-accessible because of how its JS is implemented (I won’t image I’d do better, they have a team while I’m a solo programmer, but I try and they don’t). For me to see when there will be electricity at what place and plan where to go study and work, I have to rent a VPS, scrape their website and show me a static table that doesn’t require JS to load. Some code to see what I mean: https://codeberg.org/nykula/powerup

It doesn’t seem any money that the sudo developer had received was redirected to systemd, even though systemd has its own sudo called run0, with interesting features such as limiting the amount of memory or CPU a command it runs can use. His employer supported sudo as his side project while he was employed to work on something else. The funding from big tech is instead going to the Rust rewrite, sudo-rs and other projects of its community.