niccl

and reader-mode doesn't show the text

yes. TLA and XTLA overloading is a real problem, particularly when going cross domain.

Maybe we should insist on some standardised expansion of TLAs and XTLAs so you know unambiguously what any particular Three Letter Acronym or eXtended Three Letter Acronym means. I wish I could think of a way of doing that...

Thank you for posting this. I thought I knew a bit about what was going on with audio sampling and reproduction, but I learned a surprising amount from this well presented introduction

Darwin Award recipients!

until quite recently I dealt with a machine that had uptime in excess of 16,000 days. Before anyone panics, it was on a closed network. It was a second hand machine and we were very worried that if it was shut down the disk wouldn't recover, hence just not touching it. It was in a hut in the back of beyond so exceedingly tedious to replace if we needed to.

and the comment there about using emacs for the different shells in different modes possibly explains the un-resolved nit in TFA about proportional and monospaced fonts in different areas

I think it's more like the old adage 'the first 50% of the job takes the first 90% of the time, and the other 50% of the job takes the other 90%'.

Except that with vibe-coded AI stuff it's more like there's yet another 50% of the job to deal with the edge cases that takes yet another 90% of the time

There's much more information in the linked github repo at https://github.com/krauseler/muxcard

It even includes an eInk display as well as the battery.Insane, but really impressive.

Having associations with Aotearoa/NZ, I read it as w-eh-roh, which is part of the traditional Maori greeting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wero_(M%C4%81ori)

That wouldn't work (for me, at least). As soon as I figured out the pattern, I'd know I had a week after the 'deadline' and then the pressure is off until that week is passed/nearly up

How about Bill Gates as US's Benevolent Dictator For Life?

Sturgeon's Law (2026): 99% of everything is crap or slop

Another anecdatum: it definitely seems better to me in the last few days.

Thanks again to you and tomhow for all your stellar work on keeping the site as close to its original intent as practical these days

you've got me. What's the typo?

And then there's trucks flashing an indicator to say it's safe to overtake if you're behind them. In the UK it's the nearside indicator, which makes sense: it's a bit like the truck is pulling over to let you pass. In Aotearo, it's often the off-side indicator, so you think the truck is going to pull out in front of you. I've never understood what the Aotearoa drivers are thinking there

thank you. I knew there was something I was missing

Sadly, I think the only answer is some other form of payment than ad clicks. I've no idea what that could be, though.

All. The. Time. And I hate it. Imagine giving a customer a rebate based on buggy code. You fix a bug, the customer comes back and wants to check that the rebate was correct that last time. Now you have to somehow hard-code the rebate they did get so that your (slightly less buggy) code gives the same result. But hard-coding has the risk of introducing other errors on its own. Oh yes, and you've never enough time to do things properly because Customers (or maybe Management). A tangled mess of soul destroying lifeblood-sucking code and pressures ensues.

But at least they're taking _some_ stance. Yes, it could be higher, but it's better than nothing, and requires courage

I invoke Hanlon's Razor [0]. Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor

back working on my lighting desk, after a couple of years of hating it because the communications bus between the many different modules was flakey and so the whole thing wasn't fun to use. I bit the bullet last year and re-implemented everything with CAN-bus communications and it's actually fun to use now.

Current work has been improving boot time. Was nearly two minutes because of one board, and that's a long time for the lights to be out if you have to reboot during a show. I'd wanted to use buildroot to get a custom kernel that should boot much more quickly, but the buildroot learning curve was steep for me, particularly as I've no expectation of ever needing the knowledge again.

Independently but concurrently I decided I really ought to understand what all this AI stuff was about, for fear of getting left behind. That coincided with the release of opus 4.5, and holy heck has it made a difference! With a little guidance from me Claude got the buildroot environment working and the boot time down to less than 10 seconds. I've been _really_ impressed. I've had Claude write a few boring utilities that I could easily have done but Claude managed much faster and with less boredom on my part. Fortunately for my AI revolution I think I'm a better Business Analyst/writer than I am a coder, so it fits with my temperament.

obligatory xkcd https://xkcd.com/882/

This is one of the things I actually remember my mother saying. Festina lente [0]: Make haste slowly. I've always tried to stick to it because when I have I've found more to appreciate in whatever I'm doing (as TFA says)

Sadly, for some reason I now can't read slowly, which pisses me off. I and my partner read aloud together alternating chapters of a chosen book, and I love how get _much_ more out of the book than I would reading alone in a tenth of the time.

I've also found that some books seem written to be read aloud: the sentence structure and punctuation lends itself to easy reading aloud, whereas some books have really convoluted sentences with multiple parenthetical sub-clauses that are a real challenge to read aloud in an a way that's easy to follow. I've ended up so that normally try to write in a way that's easy to read aloud. I think if something's easy to read aloud it's going to be easy to comprehend when read normally. And Yes, I know that the sentence at the beginning of the paragraph probably doesn't match that.

0: (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/festina%20lente)

_totally_ off topic, but what sort of brain must Ms Collier have that she can play a game at the same time as giving a cogent lecture on String Theory with very few hesitations? I could hardly concentrate on the lecture because of the game being shown in an inset window. Truly impressive

One thing not mentioned in TFA but I came across following the 'we're hiring' link to the Back-end Engineer role. They use PERL (v5). That certainly surprised me!

Brilliant! Mr Boole would love this

I really, really, hope so. Local live music seems to be dying where I live.

I had a gig last night. Small local band with a bit of a following that hasn't performed for a few months. Audience of 120 or so. Great fun. My occasional hobby is lighting live music so I have to take what bands I can. Fortunately I really enjoy working with these people.

After the show two of the band (40 and 37 y.o.) were talking about what next. They realise that, sadly, they're probably not going to make it big, but aren't sure that the occasional local gig with audience of 120, or supporting someone bigger but where the audience don't care, is enough. What should they do? give up? change mental focus and do something completely different (one thought about being a counsellor, the other about going into visual art). I'm older, so they were asking whether I'd had similar thoughts. Sure have. I long ago realised I could never make a living lighting live music unless I moved to the US, or possibly europe. For reasons, neither were practical, so I consciously decided that desgining hardware, writing software, and doing the occasional hobby lighting gig were enough. But for those two? No idea.

Not really sure where this is going, but the tone of the article really resonated with the discussion with those two last night, and my tiredness this morning.

I still think live music beats the pants off recordings. And show in smaller venues where you can really see and interact with the band are _way_ better than big shows where you just have loud television

It's just the way I am. anxiety disorder? I dunno, but conflict really stresses me

Not the original poster but:

  * that the interaction with a peer _is_ the problem. I know we should all be grown up and able to talk about these things in a mature and effective way, but I can't cope with conflict in any shape or form, so if someone says Boo to me I cave in which doesn't get me any further

  * because peers aren't the people that need to hear some of the things I've got to say, it's layers above me that need to hear it