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schindlabua

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meet.hn/city/48.2083537,16.3725042/Vienna

https://t3.at

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Nova Rock is mostly camping on and inhaling dry dirt, camping in and being covered in mud, not going to the toilet for 2-3 days, and eating canned food. But I hear you.

Austria is a small country but festival-wise it does host a couple superlatives -- Donauinselfest as the largest festival in the world, Novarock being the largest rock festival depending on how you count. And then theres so many great other festivals in austria and the surrounding countries, big and small.

People keep raving about burning man so I kind of want to go but I wonder whether I'd just be slightly disappointed. Or whether it's an american media influencing europeans thing where expectations become overinflated compared to what we have here.

Why I love NixOS 4 months ago

I've been using apt for 20 years too and was never a fan of it, canonical repos are never up-to-date and managing ppas is a pain. Yes I'm very hype about nixOS (and that's a rare thing for me), but it is just really really good.

I understand that "just check it out" is not the best advice because the setup cost to using nixOS is really high, and the learning curve is really steep, so it's not like you can give it a whirl for a few hours to experience the workflow. But believe me, once you are used to it, it just so so much more convenient. I'm currently managing my dev laptop, home PC, a WSL, and a hetzner server all in the same repository (allowing for a lot of code reuse). Everything is super orderly and split into modules, everything is declarative, I can roll back to a previous build of my system if I mess up installing nvidia drivers or iwd or bluetooth etc.

It's also not like installing software is harder than with apt (oftentimes it is easer, `programs.firefox.enable = true`) so after you've paid the setup cost there is just no downside. It's a bit like react vs jQuery, or Kubernetes vs hand-written deployment scripts.

Why I love NixOS 4 months ago

Fair point but I've stopped trying to declaratively manage stuff in nix that has its own idiosyncratic state management. That way youre just using nix to run an installer.

Why I love NixOS 4 months ago

After having done the switch to nixOS, I can confidently say that managing a system any other way (like with apt/brew + 20 handwritten bash scripts) really is neanderthal technology and nix is superior in every single way.

It's also great for the AI era, copilot is really good with that stuff.

I do leave PR commits separate. In my teams I don't set up pre-commit hooks altogether, unless others feel strongly otherwise. In projects where they are forced upon me I frequently --no-verify hooks if they are slow, as the linter runs on save and I run tests during development. CI failing unintentionally is usually not a problem for me.

I was thinking that he's describing implementing an initial algebra for a functor (≈AST) and an F-Algebra for evaluation. But I guess those are different words for the same things.

According to the wayback machine, the change happened somewhere between Oct 7 and Oct 10. Interestingly there are no recorded snapshots on Oct 8 and Oct 9, perhaps the redesign caused a couple days of outage.

Haha hey lyc! I didn't forget, you guys were second family! You taught me a lot about maths and code, not sure where I'd be without you :) Learnt more while messing around with fractals and gfx than in all my time at uni.

Honestly I try not doing much computer stuff in my free time because I'm doing so much in my day to day but I'll stop by some time! I've been in the Chaotica discord for years but never said hello.

Did the switch to NixOS a few months ago on my Thinkpad and ChatGPT worked wonders. I'm not very experienced with Linux distros and have been an Ubuntu user for a long time. I don't think I'll be switching away from NixOS anytime soon, it's great.

The learning curve is still extremely steep but after the initial 10 hours of googling it just all falls into place.

Except making employers do only easy things will make them stagnate. People who do nothing but simple CRUD apps over and over won't even be particularly good at making CRUD apps... whereas the guy who builds an Unicode font renderer in his free time always seems to write better code for some reason.

Getting better at your job is not just a "personal want" but very much something that the employer appreciates aswell.

Of course reinventing the wheel isn't good in corporate because the reinvented wheel is buggier than the ready made npm package but employers should go out of their way to find hard problems to solve that they can pass to their employees. It's called a growth opportunity.

I probably spend 30% of time on refactoring. Deduplicating common things different people have done, adding seperating layers between old shitty code and the fancy new abstractions, adding friction to some areas to discourage crossing module boundaries, that sort of thing.

For some reason new devs keep telling me how easy it is to implement features.

Really wonder why that is. The managers keep telling me that refactoring is a nice-to-have thing and not necessary and maybe we have time next sprint.

You just have to do it without telling anyone, it improves velocity for everyone. It's architecture work on the small scale.

I totally just verbalize my inner monologue, swearing and everything. Sometimes I just type "weeeeeeeelllllll" and send it, to get more LLM output or to have it provide alternatives.

It might sound weird but I try to make the LLM comfortable. Because I find you get worse results when you point out mistake after mistake and it goes into apologetic mode. Also because being nice puts me in a better mood and it makes my own programming better.

vibe coding as it were :p

I think you're supposed to let the AI write the bad python code and then do the refactoring yourself. No way I'm letting the AI make changes to 150 files with tons of cross-concerns when I don't even fully understand it all myself unless I dig into the code.

That being said copilot and chatgpt have been a 40% productivity boost at least. I just write types that are as tightly fitting as possible, and segregate code based on what side effects are going to happen, stub a few function heads and let the LLM fill in the gaps. I'm so much faster at coding than I was 2-3 years ago. It's like I'm designing the codebase more than writing it.

Chess is not exactly a simple logic task. It requires you to keep track of 32 things in a 2d space.

I remember being extremely surprised when I could ask GPT3 to rotate a 3d model of a car in it's head and ask it about what I would see when sitting inside, or which doors would refuse to open because they're in contact with the ground.

It really depends on how much you want to shift the goalposts on what constitutes "simple".

Not that I would know but I'd assume it's just one of those early internet things. Like somebody decided that 6 levels of headers were good enough hence h1 through h6, and well you need to be able to distinguish them by size but also h1 shouldn't be too big so h5 and h6 being smaller than body text is a good compromise?

It's not like we had decades of UI experience then, so it would surprise me if the thought process was much deeper than that.

It would have been bootstrapped in assembly (or B/BCPL?) and then once you can compile enough C to write a C compiler you rewrite your compiler in C.

I remember a Computerphile video where prof. Brailsford said something along the lines of "nobody knew who wrote the first C compiler, everybody just kinda had it and passed it around the office" which I think is funny. There's some sort of analogy to life and things emerging from the primordial soup there, if you squint hard enough.

Hooks were great. But yeah eslint flat config is probably also better than the old format but we could have easily done without that breaking change you're right.

The churn is part of why I try to do mostly backend these days, especially with the current state of tooling. Like when react came out it was immediately clear it was going to be a mainstay, I can't imagine nextjs in it's current form to be around in a few years because it's very terrible and I want the metaframework dust to settle a bit before diving back in.

And I think the Javascript problem exists because frontend/UI is just a very complicated domain, in the sense that frontend is a big messy ball of side effects. If you've been around and saw the web grow up, and saw all the new ideas all those libraries brought to the table (jQuery deferreds becoming async/await, 960 grid slowly morphing into flexbox and css grid, etc etc) then all the breaking changes make sense, we're still in a discovery stage in the frontend. Though now that I'm not doing much FE these days I get a feel for how frustrating it is to keep up to date. The current metaframeworks also solve interesting problems (that I'm not sure I had tbh) and no doubt new web standards will follow from them. But yeah if you're a new developer who doesn't have all those years of context it must be insanely confusing to swim in a sea of libraries and frameworks without having a good grip on the core web platform.

It's basically what agglutinative languages do, no?

y'all'd've: y=second person, all=plural, d=subjunctive, ve=posessive

Fun to see stuff like this pop up where it usually doesn't.