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⬅️ Previous capture (2021-12-03)
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june 15, 2021
I used to be a freebro. You know, the ones that run around wearing GNU GPL capes yelling "FREEDOOOOOM" in the streets, while never getting much work done.
I also used to be a techbro. The kind that unironically loved cat-v and suckless, and used them as a basis for building my software configuration.
In these circles, "bloat" usually means something like this:
Your program has more lines of code than mine.
The problem with this of course, is that if you were to /write/ a prorgam based on a "no-bloat" philosophy, you'd skip error handling and nearly all optimizations. You'd use the wrong syntactic sugar in places, making your code less readable, in exchange for a smaller footprint.
The other problem is in /using/ software. No matter what you use, kids will come out of the woodworks, and, with their little Luke Smith impression, would rant to you about why what you're using is bloat because it's not software from 1970.
Techbros /and/ freebros often look up to me, simply because "Muto uses a CLI-only parabola install on a 2008 netbook!", but the reality is that /most/ programmers probably use Visual Studio in Windows on modern hardware, and are much better programmers than I!
What I mean to say is that there's a lot of competition around things that don't matter, and I hope that you, the reader, don't fall down that hole.
Sincerely, someone who has gotten out of that hole.