Your harddrive is probably full
23 points by gonz
23 points by gonz
In most of these cases, waiting until we’ve reached the pain point where we’re forced to confront the issue makes solving the problem a much bigger ordeal than if we’d addressed them along the way.
This applies to writing cross-platform desktop software. I applied the following rule: "I will always compile / run on Windows, Mac & Linux from the very first git commit."
It was a painful constraint. It also eliminated an entire class of customer support requests. I often see competitors claim they're cross-platform but only have Mac and Linux. Or maybe it's just Windows with UNIX targets promised for later. I witness their exhausting back-and-forth with users (always asking "when Linux?") and I'm just over here breathing a sigh of relief!
P.S. I still get "BSD ports when?" haha, but that's a manageable number.
This is a neat line of thought. My hard drive is definitely full. Currently sitting at 97% of my 1 TB.
I have historically chalked this up to me wanting to keep more content. When I had a 256 GB hard drive, I could store X amount of content. When I upgraded to a 512 GB hard drive, I could store even more. Rinse and repeat. There will always be more repos to clone, songs to download, YouTube videos to save, movies to save. And file sizes keep getting larger as we go from 720p to 1080p to 4k. On top of that, games keep getting larger, to the point where I often need to uninstall a Steam game in order to install another. More and more content, at higher and higher fidelity.
Is it as simple as that? We hold as much as we can in our basket, until we get a bigger basket.
There will always be more repos to clone
Hi @jeaye Silly question (because maybe i'm totally mis-interpreting what is stated here), are you cloning repos in order to merely archiv them (like to save an offline copy)? Or, did you mean that repo cloning is simply part of, say, installing some software for usage of said software, etc.? I'm asking because I tend to "star" repos that i like on github, codeberg, whatever...But i can't wait for the day when all these git forges enable "starring" across the different platforms (like on the fediverse, and how some forge software will eventually support that)...so that i no longer need to keep different accounts on github, gitlab, codeberg, etc. So, back to my quesiton, are you cloning code repos to "bookmark them" offline (which i suppose saves the app/code if/whenever the repo is offline/unavailable)?? :-)
Yeah, I tend to clone things I like, so I have an offline copy in case the original is ever removed. I do the same thing with YouTube videos, with yt-dlp. I've had too many videos, mostly music videos, I've really liked be removed and then lost.
Also, if I try out some software, from Github, I sometimes choose to clone it, explore the source, and build it locally. I then tend to keep these repos around.
Let me tell you, if you deploy and dogfood your software on a raspberry pi, then it will be fast on a Threadripper too.
Yes!! I'm a big fan of low-level optimizations targeting "modern CPUs" (optimizing around branch prediction, memory access latencies, inlining, etc.), and in my experience they serve you well on any CPU from the last 15-20 years. Recent CPUs with fancier SIMD instructions are fun and all, but I try to target all my optimizations at my 2015 MacBook Pro (Intel Haswell, AVX2). Code that runs well on one of those will run equally well today.
My /nix partition is nearly always over 90% full, except on a completely fresh install. This offers one perspective, at least for software developers, which Nix makes explicit: we only reclaim disk when we need more space, via garbage collection, akin to how we manage memory. Also, multiple versions of intermediate build artifacts take up enormous amounts of space.
My media server is never full, but it is also backed by heterogenous RAID which slowly grows every few years as old drives die and are replaced by larger drives at roughly the same price point. Also, I gave up on digitizing literally every CD and DVD in my house; it's worthwhile for audio CDs and Wii games with lossless compression, but not at all worth it for HD-DVDs.