Sure - but in the real world that mostly only happens when the documentation is an afterthought.

Not sure about jellyfin, but I assume it uses ffmpeg? The M1 is fast enough that ffmpeg can re-encode raw video footage from a high end camera (talking file sizes in the 10s of gigabyte range) an order of magnitude faster than realtime.

That would be about 20W. Apparently it uses 5W while idle — which is low compared to an Intel CPU but actually surprisingly high.

Power consumption on my M1 laptop averages at about 2.5 watts with active use based on the battery size and how long it lasts on a charge and that includes the screen. Apple hasn’t optimised the Mac Mini for energy efficiency (though it is naturally pretty efficient).

TLDR if you really want the most energy efficient Mac, get a secondhand M1 MacBook Air. Or even better, consider an iPhone with Linux in a virtual machine - https://getutm.app/ - though I’m not sure how optimsied ffmpeg will be in that environment… the processor is certainly capable of encoding video quickly, it’s a camera so it has to be able to encode video well.

This. My Mac has 16GB but I use half of it with a Linux virtual machine, since I use my Mac to write Linux (server) software.

I don’t need to do that - I could totally run that software directly on my Mac, but I like having a dev environment where I can just delete it all and start over without affecting my main OS. I could totally work effectively with 8GB. Also I don’t need to give the Linux VM less memory, all my production servers have way less than that. But I don’t need to - because 8GB for the host is more than enough.

Obviously it depends what software you’re running, but editing text, compiling code, and browsing the web… it doesn’t use that much. And the AI code completion system I use needs terabytes of RAM. Hard to believe Apple’s one that runs locally will be anywhere near as good.

Here’s a tip on good documentation: try to write the documentation first. Use it as your planning process, to spec out exactly what you’re going to build. Show the code to people (on GitHub or on a mailing list or on lemmy or whatever), get feedback, change the documentation to clarify any misunderstandings and/or add any good ideas people suggest.

Only after the docs are in a good state, then start writing the code.

And any time you (or someone else) finds the documentation doesn’t match the code you wrote… that should usually be treated as a bug in the code. Don’t change the documentation, change the code to make them line up.

You don’t need metaphors. It’s pretty simple.

The Spotify app should have a button that takes you to their website, where you can sign up for a premium subscription.

It doesn’t have one because Apple would kick Spotify out of the App Store.

Also - all other links to the Spotify website (support, terms of service, privacy policy, etc) take you to pages where the main navigation of the website has been removed so that you can’t find the signup page. Because again, Apple bans that. For the longest time apps have not allowed to have any way for users to find a signup form on a website.

That policy is now illegal in the EU (and a growing list of other countries) and Apple’s attempt at compliance is a new API - only available in Europe - that informs the user that they might be a victim of theft, fraud, etc before they get taken to a website that is deliberately sandboxed… supposedly to prevent theft/fraud/etc but more likely because it makes it really difficult for Spotify to link that signup with an existing free account.

Oh and if Spotify opts to expose users to see that horror show… they’d have to pay tens of millions of dollars per year to Apple. They have so far refused to do so, meaning the new regulations have failed (well, they were failing, until the EU declared Apple’s compliance efforts insufficient).

Have they released who is going to pay for these power plants? Because if they put it on my monthly bill, I’m going off grid and I bet half the rest of the country will too.

The big difference is exclusive content. Music has a few exceptions but in general sign up for one service and you can listen to anything.

That forces music services to compete on the overall experience (and price), while video services pretty much exclusively compete based on what content is available and literally none of them offer all of the things a person wants to watch. So nobody will ever be happy with any streaming service.

Everything-but-Windows?

No. Any device that implements a certain DHCP feature is vulnerable. Linux doesn’t support it, because most Linux systems don’t even use DHCP at all let alone this edge case feature. And Android doesn’t support it because it inherited the Linux network stack.

I would bet some Linux systems are vulnerable, just not with the standard network packages installed. If you’re issued a Linux laptop for work, wouldn’t be surprised if it has a package that enables this feature. It essentially gives sysadmins more control over how packets are routed for every computer on the LAN.

That knowledge is mostly trivial. 7/10 repairs a regular Joe could do. Or worse comes to worse you can take it to a mechanic of your choosing.

That’s not true anymore. Modern cars have really complex problems that even mechanics struggle to fix. Especially when it’s a software problem… usually those problems just never get fixed.

As a software developer (not an automotive one) my take is the fix is to have everyone be running the same software, so that fifty thousand dollars diagnosing and fixing a problem for one car will result in it being fixed for all cars. Spread the cost out like that and it’s affordable. Otherwise it just won’t get fixed at all.

Should we go back to basic cars? I think so yes… but then I ride a motorcycle that doesn’t even have water cooling or a battery. But most people aren’t like me. They want lane keeping cruise control/etc.

Sure - for example we migrated all our stuff from MySQL to MariaDB.

It was completely painless, because all of the source code and many of the people who wrote that code migrated to MariaDB at the same time. They made sure the transition was effortless. We spent a months second guessing ourselves, weighing all of our options, checking and triple checking our backups, verifying everything worked smoothly afterwards… but the actual transition itself was a very short shell script that ran in a few seconds.

I will never use a proprietary database unless it’s one I wrote myself and I’d be extremely reluctant to do that. You’d need a damned good reason to convince me not to pick a good open source option.

My one exception to that rule is Backblaze B2. I do use their proprietary backup system, because it’s so cheap. But it’s only a backup and it’s not my only backup, so I could easily switch.

I’m currently mid transition from MariaDB to SQLite. That one is more complex, but not because we did anything MariaDB specific. It’s more that SQLite is so different we have a completely different database design (for one thing, we have hundreds of databases instead of just one database… some of those databases are less than 100KB - the server just reads the whole thing into RAM and slow queries on our old monolithic database are less than 1 millisecond with this new system).

never use anything vendor specific like stored procedures, vendor specific datatypes or meta queries

Yeah we don’t do anything like that. All the data in our database is in a JSON type (string, number, boolean, null) with the exception of binary data (primarily images). It doesn’t even distinguish between float/int - though our code obviously does. All of the queries we run are simple “get this row by primary key” or "find all rows matching these simple where clauses. I don’t even use joins.

Stored procedures/etc are done in the application layer. For example we don’t do an insert query anywhere. We have a “storage” object with simple read/write functions, and on top of that there’s an object for each model. That model does all kinds of things, such as writing the same data in different places (with different indexes) and catching “row not found” failures with an “ok, lets check if it’s in this other place”. That’s also the layer we do constraints which includes complex business rules, such as “even if this data is invalid — we will record it anyway, and flag it for a human to follow up on”.

Blender and games run great on my M1 MacBook Air which doesn’t get hot even with no cooling at all except via the external case and I mostly play games on the couch with the laptop on my lap.

After two or three hours with all 8 CPU cores and the GPU both pegged under 100% load, I can notice the heat on my bare skin but it’s not uncomfortable. And it only does that in games - Blender gives the CPU/GPU enough of a break between renders to keep it cool.

The MacBook Pro, which does have a fan, is definitely not going to get hot. Forget about that issue. The fan will make it run cooler, and also faster since the CPU won’t be thermally throttled (my M1 is permanently thermally throttled while playing games… still fast enough to get good framerates at moderately high graphics settings though);.

Just buy the most expensive one you can afford. You’re going to love it. The only thing to be aware of is external display support, which isn’t very good on the low end models… but the M3 MacBook Air has improved that significantly and Apple has said there will be a firmware update to the M3 MacBook Pro soon to do the same thing.

Edit 3: Since this is for newbies, some information about recruiters: we pay the recruiter in addition to what we pay you. The recruiter’s typical pay for a rookie hire is around $50,000.00, if you stay for a full year. Half up front, in case you don’t stay.

On top of that - where I work it takes about six months for a new hire to start carrying their own weight. Until that happens, you’re paying other people to spend time helping the new person find their feet in the company. It’s not just coding either, a lot of it is little things like “who do I talk to when I when the VPN stops working?”

The loss in productivity during that time is often worse than if you’d never hired the person at all. And most new people don’t last six months, so it’s generally a bad investment. One that is only done because if you don’t hire people, you’ll have no workers at all since established employees can’t be expected to work for you forever.

Hiring people is a big risk. Anything you can do to mitigate that risk (evidence that you’re someone they should hire) will increase your chances of being hired exponentially.

I love the comparison of string length of the same UTF-8 string in four programming languages (only the last one is correct, by the way):

Python 3:

len(“🤦🏼‍♂️”)

5

JavaScript / Java / C#:

“🤦🏼‍♂️”.length

7

Rust:

println!(“{}”, “🤦🏼‍♂️”.len());

17

Swift:

print(“🤦🏼‍♂️”.count)

1