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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • A balance has to be struck. The alternative isn’t not getting anything better, it’s being sure the benefits are worth the costs. The comment was “Why is [adding another decoder] a negative?” There is a cost to it, and while most people don’t think about this stuff, someone does.

    The floppy code was destined to be removed from Linux because no one wanted to maintain it and it had such a small user base. Fortunately I think some people stepped up to look after it but that could have made preserving old software significantly harder.

    If image formats get abandoned, browsers are going to face hard decisions as to whether to drop support. There has to be some push-back to over-proliferation of formats or we could be in a worse position than now, where there are only two or three viable browser alternatives that can keep up with the churn of web technologies.









  • I guess the funny thing is that each Git commit is internally just a file. Branches and tags are just links to specific commit files and of course commits link to their parents. If a branch gets deleted or jumped back to a previous commit, the orphaned commits are still left in the filesystem. Various Git actions can trigger a garbage collection, but unless you generate huge diffs, they usually stick around for a really long time. Determining if a commit is orphaned is work that Git usually doesn’t bother doing. There’s also a reflog that can let you recover lost commits if you make a mistake.