donatj

Most of what I know him for was coming on TWiT, driving Leo Laporte nuts, and making claims that ended up not coming true.

He was a hilarious curmudgeon. He will be missed.

Frank Lloyd Wright. The true spirit of America is building.

You don't even need a hack, there's built-in support for this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_JPEG

I've been here screaming "Motion JPEG EXISTS and is well supported in browsers" the entire time those gif hacks were popular. I've built a bunch of cool stuff with it.

https://github.com/donatj/mjpeg-php/blob/master/mjpeg.php

https://github.com/donatj/imgboard/blob/master/main.go

The PHP example here is an illustration of how easy it is to pull off, and the Go example is part of a JavaScript-free multiuser drawing board.

My biggest complaint about Photoshop is that every time CPUs have gotten faster, it's gotten slower. I've used it since the mid 1990s recreationally, early 2000s professionally. Every time I get a major CPU upgrade, it will be fast for a while, but with updates become slow again. This pattern has repeated over and over again.

Most recently when I moved to Apple Silicon from an Intel Mac, I was excited how quickly everything worked again. Now my M1 is showing its age, and I noted when I started Photoshop the other day it took close to 30 seconds.

The UI is a little snapper than it was on a 68k Mac back in the 90s, but nowhere near the order of magnitude one would expect.

I honestly didn't know he was a Kiwi until I saw Hunt for the Wilder People. Absolutely fantastic movie.

Neat! I did a fair bit of toying with Go's WASM target early on and was able to port a couple neat things to the web. The sheer size of the WASM output though was a limiting factor for me, and I kind of stopped toying with it a number of years ago.

Are you using the built in WASM target? I've been told Tiny Go's WASM build target is worth investigating but haven't tried.

I was about to make the same comment about Minnesota, but I'd only get a three month vacation.

I'm not deeply involved in the community, but I know people who were, and my understanding is the removal of custom infix operators lost a lot of community support. Very popular feature removed specifically because the creator of the language didn't like it, and despite large community cries for it to remain.

In my eyes, it was probably the right decision technically, but deeply unpopular and probably the wrong decision socially.

I want dark window chrome and light contents but browsers seem completely unwilling to let me have this option.

It's a little my complicated than that though, I'm very rarely driving to the store for a single item.

Ever time I see one of these public forms hosted on a generic form platform, I wonder whether it’s legitimate or just a phishing attempt to collect personal information.

Social media

read only

That fails to be social media. That's just media.

What I find to be maybe the single most important part of code review is knowledge transfer.

Our entire small team thumbs up a PR before it's merged unless there's a big rush on it, and this gives everyone on the team a rough idea of the state of the codebase at any given time. There's no being blindsided like "this whole system I depend on is gone" like I had happen at far more siloed places I've worked.

Beyond that, it gives a forum to ask questions about how things work to further build understanding. On a high functioning team, every developer should have at least a modest understanding of the entire system, including parts they never touch.

Another important feature is just the institutional knowledge check. For instance recently I made a small change to a table and a coworker pointed out that there was a microservice I wasn't considering that wrote to that table that would break (yes, sharing tables is bad design, unrelated). I had no idea this microservice existed let alone had access to this table. The institutional knowledge check here though prevented a larger issue and potential data cleanup situation.

Does this hold true in the modern age though? I haven't seen a single thing I wanted to see on social media basically since COVID. It's all famous people, posturing, and things I never followed. Entirely crap I don't care about. At this point I open Facebook like once a day.

I used to go on Instagram to see my friend's pictures, now there's nothing of my friends on there and I'll just spam and AI slop...

All I want is to see what my friends and acquaintances are up to and it doesn't show me any of that.

I think the kids are using discord for this, but as a 40-year-old non-gamer, I'm not going to get my friends to use discord.

I genuinely feel like there's a major gap in the market for an actual "social" network.

what does ASIF do that Qcow2 doesn't

Mount natively in macOS

why does it take so long to copy [...] out of a dmg

Compression mostly. DMG contents can optionally be compressed using zlib, lzfse, or slow as molasses bzip2.

Also Gatekeeper.

My deep rooted mistrust of Oracle has me thinking this is some sort of a trick like they pulled with OpenSolaris.

Here's hoping it's actually a good thing.

At AIs absolute best (rarely) it builds software like a very competent 9-5er. It's fine, it works, it's largely inoffensive.

It never does anything interesting or inspired. It never gets halfway into building something and then questions the entire premise of your app. It's automated milquetoast.

I spent way too much time trying to figure out if this is satire. I'm pretty sure it's not.

This is what we've come to as a society? Completely given up on creativity and skill for literally while talking up the joys of stealing.

How do the permissions work on Googles GitHub orgs where this guy could somehow create an unapproved public repo. I work for a MUCH smaller org and creating a repo at all requires review, creating a public repo many times more so.

I wish this was more of a full tour than a random sampler of Windows versions. For instance I feel like Windows Me introduced the online search but it's been like... 26 years... since I've used it.

Now there's a big gap. I don't have access to anything between Windows XP and Windows 10. So, Windows 10 (2015) is next

I'm guess these are just what the author already had set up. They're not really difficult to find or set up in a VM...

I got 88 out of 100, but all I learned from that is that I am really good at guessing. For something like 20 of the words I was able to guess by eliminating the options that sounded unlikely and in a few cases just guess from the meaning of parts of the word.

I'd prefer an "I don't know" option just for a more honest assessment of how many words I truly know versus how many words I can guess.

My thoughts exactly. The whole thing is essentially just these rules, and a metric ton of boilerplate for specific plugin systems.

My own personal ponytail says this could just be this in a code block of a README

https://github.com/DietrichGebert/ponytail/blob/main/.github...

I never understood what the heck they were thinking.

I've been an Xbox diehard since the early 2000s but bringing your exclusives to PlayStation just makes me genuinely consider switching to PlayStation.

You are telling me I can now get all the games I want to play on PlayStation, or some of the games I want to play on Xbox? You're really making the case for me to switch.

And the whole "This is an Xbox" marketing strategy, claiming a Firestick streaming Xbox is as good as an Xbox? Firstly it's dumb and no one is buying it. Secondly, if people did believe it, at best you're just canabalizing your market share. You're not going to build any sort of brand loyalty to a dime a dozen streaming platform.

The friendships I'd like mended need more than reaching out I'm afraid.

If I can't be dramatic in my midlife crisis, then when?

I turned 40 the other day.

There has been unrelenting reflection on where I am and how I got here. A lot of lament for a small handful of decisions and a life marked by avoiding uncomfortable decisions. I don't know where the last 20 years have gone. Last I remember, I was playing Wii in my friend's basement. I remember the seemingly endless opportunities nights laid out before us. DVDs and pizza and furious laughter. I remember waking up in strange places. I don't know when that all ended. It ended.

I had a friend describe middle age as suddenly being able to see the outline of the cage. It's apt.

I'd have liked to have gone to a real college, had the college experience. I'd have liked to have mended friendships.

40 has such a strange loneliness to it, I take solace in my children. My friends had children years before me and it made friendships tiring. The age gap in our children now that I have my own has not helped.

I spent much of the last decade collecting retro video games. I have a room full of them. It came to me recently, I don't think I actually enjoy games. I enjoyed playing them with friends, but by myself they're hollow. I don't play games with friends anymore. When my kids get a little older we'll have fun.

I've had Damien Rice's "Older Chests" playing in my head on repeat despite my best efforts to drown it out.

I am in therapy, but I think I have just too strong of a mask for anyone else to truly pierce.

I'll get out of this funk eventually, I should take this as a wake up call.

I frankly can't agree more.

Learn SQL, learn the normal forms at least up to 3NF, profit.

I took an Oracle SQL class in High School in the very early 2000s and frankly it set me up for my career, despite never having touched actual Oracle SQL I've become the go to guy at every job I've had for optimizing queries and reviewing designs.

I read a book on how MySQL actually worked under the hood in the late aughts and it really went a long way towards the effort.

It's really not as hard as the complexity of modern ORM tooling likes to make it seem. That scares people away. It's an elegant language for a more elegant age.

I went to a talk like 10 years ago about how SQL will be displaced by Hadoop/MapReduce in the next 5 years. I posted on Twitter about it at the time like we'll see if that happens. Spoilers, it didn't. I can't even think of the last time I've heard someone invoke the name of Hadoop

If anything I feel like the last decade has been the decade of individual contributors losing all agency in tech.

An online game isn't the dos game you played as a kid. It's temporal. It's the roller coaster you rode as a kid. A law forcing the any roller coaster built to stay open so your children can ride it is just silly and going to deter interesting rollercoasters people might not like from being built.

Moreover, if a game is art, it is a form of speech, no? And compelled speech seems like a moral violation.

I love Last.fm, I've been scrobbling for over 20 years now.

It's amazing to me that they have managed to stick around like they have. They're very much an "old internet" site, and I hope they can stick around for many many more years.