kovac

Also, Gogol's Chichikov is a better metaphor for the dysfunctional corpo software dev than Akakyevitch...

Implemented search for my website (lup) using Perl + FastCGI + SA index. A throwback to the old net.

Send me some search traffic, and ideas on what I could improve. I've linked the source for both search and the benchmarks.

My goal now is to use less words to convey an idea.

This is what I'm encouraged by Grammarly as well. To some extent, perhaps the book "Elements of style" encourages this too.

However, I read Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. She writes long (wordy?) sentences that are clear, and even feels beautiful to read. I really enjoyed her writing.

But I'm not a native speaker. A question for the native speakers: what's your take on this? Has Shelly's writing style gone out of fashion, or are these two (Shelley's style and succinctness) different things?

I'm not convinced that we can spend quality time with loved ones outside work while spending most of our time at work pretending, and doing useless or unnatural things. I think what you practise shapes you.

Right. During times I'm looking for a job, I use uBlock Origin to completely hide the feed. Otherwise, I see no reason to use LinkedIn at all anymore.

I think this is the right place to start.

A free OS will empower developers to implement technical workarounds that could trick these apps into working there. If the OS is tightly controlled, we have no recourse.

Even in the worst case scenario, we could use a cheap big-tech-approved phone for these applications (a glorified digital token) and use the free phone for everything else. When there's enough adoption and trust in the new phone, non-technical avenues are available to influence these organizations to accept the alternative.

If winning means mass adoption, I think by definition free software won't win while remaining free.

If a tech becomes main stream, corporations (and people) begin commercializing it. The de facto strategy in our era for commercializing any tech is surveilling its users.

If a technology can't be harnessed, corporations will contain if not outright kill it.

We've seen this time and time again. So, the only way to win, in the sense of surviving and thriving, would be for that tech to fly under the radar. Remain in the hands of individuals who care and build it for themselves. In that sense, there are many free software that have already won.

My question is, why on earth are people obsessed with things like the year of the Linux desktop, and more people adopting their software.

Fragmentation is probably the only way free software will remain free.

Thank you for sharing. As a hobbyist with a devotion to the field, I'm fascinated by how the actual professionals work. It's a very challenging domain.

When professionals use Arduinos for such use cases, do they use the Arduino software platform or do they use the chio verndors' toolchains? Just curious how the professionals work with these things.

My daycare sends me updates, my barbershop tells me when they're closing and I used it to sell my fridge.

To consider the other side of this, read "The age of surveillance capitalism" by Shoshana Zuboff (really read it though, not chatgpt the summary :).

All the benefits you mentioned are real. But, at what cost and could we have reaped the same benefits without surrendering all agency to those who can't be held accountable?

Forgot to reset the context after a test run? :p

"Simplicity is a great virtue but it requires hard work to achieve it and education to appreciate it. And to make matters worse: complexity sells better." - Edsger Wybe Dijkstra.

Simple/complex is subjective. Software domain is very diverse that it's unlikely we'd agree on them.

Take mathematicians, for instance. They generally have a shared sense of elegance/beauty. That's the result of a refined intuition from years of study.

How is inferno? Is it ready for production? I'm not a frontend dev, but been looking for a light weight, fast framework. Inferno looked pretty good alternative to react.

https://github.com/infernojs/inferno

I thought it was just me. I gave up on reading the book midway,because I was confused most of the time, and found it hard to engage.

Impressive. The page loaded very quickly for me here in Singapore. Is it still running on the Pixel?

Thanks for the bear blog.

Considering how LLM companies don't respect licenses, and if your livelihood depends on it, I'd go a step further and only make the source available upon request, under strict agreements about how it's used.

There's a lot of "open-source" nowadays that has nothing to do with the spirit of hacking.

The 2FAs require their mobile app sometimes.

Do you not have to use a 2FA app for things like banking? In Singapore, they are phasing out 2FA options other than the banking app. The banking apps only work on iPhones and Google-approved Android phones. It's pretty bad.

The wages listed there are pretty reasonable. Someone who wants more could work more hours/jobs. Life a little more on your own terms.

Do these live coding interviews lead to better hires? I haven't noticed a difference between the teams at jobs I had to pass live coding interviews to get in and those that didn't.

I haven't worked at a FAANG, but I've heard they have such gruelling interviews. Is that how they build technically superior teams, or do they just have access to a strong candidate pool to begin with and use these tests to eliminate candidates to get the number they need?

I bought my dad a Nokia phone in 2008. A dumb phone, with just texting and calling features. It continues to work to this day, so, 17 years (the markings on the buttons are fully erased now, other than that it works). It outlived him. I don't know how they managed to build stuff like that. I would expect some electronic part to fail sometime along the way.

The self taught developer will eventually figure it out, if they are intelligent enough to approach the given problem.

As would someone with a CS degree and "are intelligent" in the sense you describe. Early hackers who gave us fine software were computer scientists.

Windows 11 is exceptionally slow. I installed it on a ThinkPad Carbon X1, it was quite unusable. Unresponsive after starting up, copilot and O365 trying to run stuff and i had to wait for them to comolete. I was very surprised that they think this is acceptable. I spent about an hour going through processes and installed programs list, and uninstalling many things. At that point it was more tolerable.

Despite it's limitations on the UX side, PGP is still the better option for email privacy I think. That and using your own domain. There's tor for the web when one needs it. None of these are ideal, but they depend a lot less on trusting third parties.

IT is where words and their meanings come to die. I wonder if words ever needed to mean something :p

In the context of software, I wonder what would qualify as a wheel. I'd say implementations of standards like protocols, BLAS, etc probabaly are wheels and not trivial to reinvent. Would you consider something like Kubernetes, Docker, web browsers, web frameworks as wheels? I can't help but think the software quality would be much higher if the latter set wasn't considered as wheels and we tried to reinvent them often.

Not sure if the author can share the code. For claims like this, I'd like to see source code. I think a lot hinges on the details.

That's a good point. I do see developers overestimating the difficulty when supporting the use a 3rd part lib. I recently came across a library in our code base that's about 200 LOC including comments, line feeds, etc. The library is in C#, a language that takes a fair bit of vertical space due to braces. So, the actual LOCs are just over a 100. I asked the team why can't we write something this simple ourselves. The reality was they didn't know how to, and it isn't a habit to have even a cursory glance at the source of the dependency they were bringing in.

It isn't that hard to write a JSON parser (especially when it targets a specific application).

I didn't mean to sound like a hard-core BSD enthusiast, sorry. I was just very frustrated when they moved to cmake in their newer IDF, they added useless things that excluded BSDs. In its current state, it's untenable to patch it to make it work. This wasn't caused by the use of cmake. They could've moved to cmake, but done so with other OSes in mind, esp since they're already in our neighbourhood.