Stampo00

I don't know if the author will see this or not. The RF shielding probably didn't get wet. It just looks like that. I have a TI-83 Plus Silver Edition which sports a semi-transparent case. I'm the original owner. I never got a drop of liquid on it. And the RF shield in mine looks exactly like yours. It has since the day I bought it.

Pardon me while I go add Optimus Prime to my corporate letterhead.

Sometimes I wonder if the long interview process isn't a psychological game. Maybe they think they can leverage sunk cost fallacy against you just so they can low-ball you. Yeah, the pay might not be great, but if you walk away now, you'll have wasted 9 weeks of effort! You can't give up now. You're invested. ;-)

I've recently started using devcontainers for some of my projects. VSCode makes using them pretty seamless and convenient. I'd be shocked if Codespaces on Github didn't have first class support for devcontainers by the time it becomes available for individual users. It seems like a logical extention of their utility.

This company doesn't understand public relations. Rather than countering bad PR with good PR, they decided to double down, cutting off their nose to spite their face.

Looks like it's open source only.

That's very true. I just wish there was a middle ground. I'd pay for a service that just runs a managed version of Gitea. Something similar to installing WordPress or a PHP bulletin board system to an old-fashioned web host. Hell, I could probably do just that if there was a super low end version of these types of services that will run with just PHP and Apache.

EDIT: Oh my god. I think I understand Sqlite and Fossil a little better now.

That's true. But I use VSCode every day. FWIW, I tried the de-Microsofted version and it worked well for almost a year. But then the plugin store split happened and it just made life more difficult than sucking it up and going back to vanilla VSCode. So I'd be a huge hypocrite if I said Github is a step too far.

I'm sure the tools are out there. But I'm at a point where I have more money than time for this. I empathize with the self-hosting ethos. I want a more decentralized internet. But I don't enjoy the setup and maintenance. I have previous little free time. I even spend much of it writing software, because I enjoy that. I don't enjoy being a sysadmim or my own personal devops.

I think I realized that in college when a friend tried to get me to run Gentoo as my first linux distro. I never made it to a desktop! I still run linux as my daily driver today, but I'm currently using Pop!_OS after having used Ubuntu since college. Because when I'm using my daily driver computer, I want to use it, not maintain it.

I'm so tired of this argument. I want to host stuff myself. Really, I do. But I really don't have enough time in the day to do it.

I set up a blog this weekend using Hugo, Ansible, and Github Actions to host it on NearlyFreeSpeech.NET. It "only" took two days, but I'm exhausted and I don't actually have any content yet.

I host Plex and TiddlyWiki at home on my Raspberry Pi. I used docker and traefik. Sometimes it still has weird issues and I have to reboot it. It was another project that "only" took a weekend and left me exhausted.

So let's say I don't want to self host, but I don't want to use Github. What are my options? I used to use Bitbucket, but I moved to Github a few years ago to consolidate my accounts. I liked Bitbucket, but people give you weird looks when you give them a Bitbucket URL. It's not as seamlessly supported in apps that can automatically understand Github urls. Confluence kept buying other products and tacking them on. And they kept trying to upsell me.

Then there's Gitlab. I'm going to have to get used to it because my employer is transitioning to it, away from Github. This article mentions developers having short memories. I remember when Gitlab decidedly said they'll do business with anyone back when people were shaming tech companies for helping and cooperating with ICE a few years ago. That left a bad taste in my mouth.

There's Sourcehut. But I have friends with beef with the guy who made it and I don't want to support him.

I can't help but feel like Github is probably the lesser evil here. Honestly, I'd pay for a service if I believed in it. It's important to me that I'm the customer, not the product. That's why I switched from Gmail to ProtonMail a few years ago. I have their top tier paid account because I believe in them and I want to get what I pay for.

Sorry, I don't really have a point. I'm just tired of this argument. I'd self host in a second if I could do it quickly, easily, and reliably. But I don't think I can.

If you like the style of the blog, there's a theme available for Hugo and a Go-based clone available for self-hosting. Links in the project README.

Maybe not directly, but if you like the style, you have some options: https://github.com/HermanMartinus/bearblog/#can-bear-blog-be...

Best Friends charms for nerds.

Someone with a CNC router or a laser cutter and a Python script or something could probably make some cash by selling these on Etsy.

Does anyone know of a tool like this for Apache?

I think we need to separate IRC the client from IRC the protocol. Everything you just described is possible with a sufficiently advanced client without any changes to the protocol. In fact, some clients already do what you describe.

The spline stuff is super useful to me for another non-cursor idea I've had simmering.

But I'm torn by this. The spline approach seems to look the most accurate. But when all three approaches are shown at the same time at the end, I think the spring animation might look more visually pleasing. But then, if the spring approach is only degrees better than CSS transitions, is it really worth all the extra code?

I've been watching those mesmerizing YouTube videos visualizing sorting algorithms lately. The header of this article uses a screen cap from one of them.

Them: So what shows do you watch?

Me: ... It's complicated.

There are a lot of different sorting algorithms. Like, a lot, a lot.

As I watch them, I try to figure out what they were optimizing for. Some only scan in one direction. Some only use the swap operation. Some seem to do the minimum number of writes. Some are incremental performance improvements over others.

When I see an algorithm like this, I don't assume the person who wrote it was an idiot. I assume they were optimizing for something that's not obvious to me. Its only modifying operation is swap, so maybe that operation is faster than an arbitrary insert for whatever system or data structure they're using. There are no temporary variables besides loop counters, so maybe they're on a memory-constrained environment. There's barely any code here, so maybe this is for a microcontroller with precious little ROM. Or maybe they're applying this as a binary patch and they have a strict ceiling to the number of ops they can fit in.

Or maybe it's just the first sorting algorithm they could think of in an environment that doesn't ship with one and the performance is adequate for their needs. In that case, it's optimized for developer time and productivity. And honestly, it's a far more elegant algorithm than my "naive" version would be.

These are all valid reasons to use a "naive" sorting algorithm.

I know everyone is here to complain about the mess that is "modern" frontend work. But I have to say, I started using Vite a week ago to bootstrap a new project using Typescript, Preact, and Tailwind, and I'm loving it. There is one weird quirk in where it insists the index.html file should be. But if you can live with that, Vite takes care of the details for me and gets out of my way. It also bundles everything exactly how I would have set it up by hand. I think it's weird that it insists its mostly a dev server. It does that well. But it's also a very good bundler with good defaults. I'd recommended it to anyone who just wants to get started, and wants a good middle ground between esbuild and parcel.

The old pros are continuing to age out and retire or die. Places with COBOL systems want to keep their applications limping along instead of replacing them. The shortage of devs is only going to get worse. Remember when lock down started and some government systems built on COBOL started straining under the load? Rather than being dismissive, I'd encourage those with any interest at all to try to pick it up. We need folks to maintain it.

Rumpelstiltskin certainly thought his name was private information.

There's actually quite a bit of folklore suggesting that knowing a person's (or creature's) name gifts you with a kind of power over them.

And like most folklore, there's a grain of truth to that. It's a lot harder to gossip about someone in a way where they'd gain a reputation if you don't know their name.

People who do shady things don't come up with aliases because it's fun. In the same way, I doubt as many people would donate large sums of money to hospitals, universities, and other institutions if they didn't get buildings named after them in return.

I am also very careful about using my name online. I've worked very hard to minimize my so-called digital footprint. My full name is unique enough that there's only one other person in the world who shares it with me. I get his email all the time.

I have friends with very common names. They share their names with hundreds of people, living and dead.

That gave me an idea. If you can't reduce the signal, you can at least increase the noise. If you spam the web with conflicting information tied to your name, and do it in a smart enough way that your noise can't be easily correlated, it should be just as effective. For example, if all of the noise is produced over the course of a single weekend, that's easy to filter out. So you'd need to create a slow, deliberate disinformation campaign around your name.

At one point, I even considered paying for fake obituaries in small local papers around the country. Maybe just one every year or so. Those things last forever on the web.

Good luck! If you choose to go this route, I wish you could share your strategies, but revealing too much might compromise your efforts.

That's what scared me off from learning Elm. It's mostly a one-person project. Naturally, it moves really slowly. Breaking changes can happen with any given release. And the community of developers is very small.

It's a shame, too, because there are a lot of really exciting ideas in the language. But unless you're working at NoRedInk with the lead developer, you might be better off sticking with tech that's a little more boring and less cutting edge, especially if the thing you're using it for is supposed to be making you money.

Good analysis! Thanks.

For context, I was using Rust for hobbyist stuff because I value provable correctness and I love tools to yell at me if I try doing something stupid. But Rust moved too fast for me. Every time I sat down to use it, I spent more time catching up on the developments I'd missed than actually being productive.

I'm choosing instead to learn how to write C in a modern, sustainable way since at least the ecosystem won't shift from under me any time soon.

To be completely clear, I don't hate Rust. I'm not ragging on it. If I used it in my day job, the experience of keeping up with it would be a totally different story. But for hobby and personal stuff, I need something where I can be productive whenever I find the time to devote to it.

Obligatory disclaimer that I'm not trolling or trying to start a flame war.

I have dismissed Zig in the past in favor of Rust. But I've since found Rust difficult to keep up with since it's developing so rapidly and I don't use it daily.

Zig seems like it has similar goals to Rust, but with a gentler learning curve. I know the Zig community isn't as big as Rust's, but maybe I wrote off Zig too soon.

Anyone know of any objective comparisons out there? Is Zig gaining traction in a similar space to Rust?

I agree that this is a solution in search of a problem. Don't get me wrong. It's very clever and fun. But it also suffers from a lot of problems traditional solutions like street addresses and the use of landmarks don't. Those issues have been well-documented elsewhere.

The biggest issue this type of solution faces is a lack of standardization. There's this, What3Words, other people's hobbyist versions, Google has something like this built into their map product, etc. Every additional implementation is yet another nail in the coffin of the very concept.

The only way it would gain traction is if it were a government-mandated system. But every government already has one, and the benefits of adopting such a system don't outweigh the costs yet.

Although this was a fascinating article, the quality of webcams is pretty low on my list of things that could use improvement in the teleconferencing experience.

To not understand recursion, you must first... wait, I think that's all!

AI Statler and Waldorf.

It would be such a force for good in the world that Disney should allow it to be used for free like Volvo did with their patent for the three-point seat belt.

I agree with the overall sentiment. There's a loud minority of developers out there who are nostalgic for something they never actually experienced. It's a reaction to the explosion of complexity of computers and the increasing depth of the stack of software we must depend on to get anything done. It makes us vulnerable because we must depend on leaky abstractions since there's too much software to fully understand all of it. And sometimes there are bugs and it only takes being burned once or twice before you become suspicious of any software you haven't (or couldn't have) written yourself. But starting from scratch kills your productivity, maybe for years!

I'm truly sympathetic. The simplicity of the microcomputer era has a certain romance to it, especially if you never lived through the reality of it. There's a sense of freedom to the model of computing where only your program is running and the entirety of the machine is your own little playground. So I get why people make stuff like PICO-8 and uxn.

I agree with the criticism of Jon Blow's rhetoric, even though the tone is harsher than strictly necessary. Blow's criticisms and proposed solutions seem overly opinionated to me, and he's throwing out the baby with the bath water. He describes things like compile time and runtime hygienic macros like they're a new invention that hasn't existed in Lisp since before he was born.

However, I think targeting uxn is unfair. Uxn would be viewed better as an experiment in minimalism and portability. I think of it more like an art project.

It's unfair because the author is comparing mainstream languages that benefit from countless users' input and innovations over the course of 60 years to a niche system with a small handful of developers that has existed for maybe 2 years or so. That's a strawman if I ever heard one.

I'm enjoying fly.io so far.

I just dropped DigitalOcean because of their price hike. No hard feelings. I was barely using it, and the product is growing more towards full-featured apps and teams, which is not as good a fit for me, an individual just screwing around. I don't fault them. I'm not their target customer.

Fly.io is very much designed for use primarily via their CLI tool. Their web interface needs some polish. But it does everything it says on the tin, for a price that's more than reasonable.

I only used Heroku briefly so I can't comment on similarities or differences with any authority.

As someone who is already very comfortable with container-based development, I'm happy with fly.io.