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• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Plans to launch 111-style hotline to nudge millions of long term sick back to work⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  https://archive.ph/xl8qC for those who want to read the article. It says more or less exactly what the headline claims, though.

  With long term sickness a driving force behind the rise in people locked out the labour market, a focus of the upcoming statement will be to ensure fewer people are signed off and fall out of the workforce.

  The assumption here is that those people don't need to be off work, and are simply having trouble getting approval to return to work. I find that not only disingenuous, but also offensive. Typical Tory, IOW.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do you get an executable from a GitHub link?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  If binaries aren't pre-built, compiling it yourself is not particularly difficult (assuming it's a decent repo that's well-maintained).

  • Readme often has a list of dependencies and basic instructions. On linux, build steps might look something like make && sudo make install, possibly with a ./configure thrown in beforehand. You can, of course, run configure where present with a help flag to see all available options, and change them as you like, but many programs 'just work' with the default options on a variety of platforms.

  • Before that, you have to install the dependencies. Often, it's a copy/paste command in the readme, and on Debian might look like sudo apt install libsomething libsomethingelse libsomethingelse - the overwhelming majority of the time, that gives you the correct versions (may be part of package name)

  • Otherwise, you can make several times, and if you read the errors, it will often tell you what's missing and you can iterate through the deps that way.

  • I don't suggest building the dependencies initially. It might be necessary (If memory serves, you still need to drop the PCRE library source in a specific place for Nginx to find, for instance, but the build process also builds that). It's usually not necessary, and if you delve too far down it can be a frustrating experience.

  I'm not in the habit of building for windows, as the only computer I run it on is my work computer, but there may be instructions for that in readme as well. If the dependency installs fail, you'll have to search your distro's package manager to find the correct name of the package on your distro, but once it's present you should be able to proceed from there without problems (in well-maintained projects)

  If it doesn't build, you can always open an issue on the GitHub - there are no stupid questions, particularly if you search issues/closed issues first for keywords in the errors you see. The vast majority of projects are run by decent people who respond reasonably and/or some community member will jump in with an answer.

  For some languages, the build steps look very different - Maven projects in Java come to mind. I don't love that tool, but it's less evil than some of the alternatives. OTOH, if it's rust, the build steps are very quick and painless - including installing Rust in the first place.