Fired by Google for creating the Google workspace CLI 29 days ago
I'm confused, this tweet reads like the lead-in or movie-trailer to a story, but where is the actual story?
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The map tile backend is in the middle of a multi year effort to migrate from the Flippity Service to the Floopity Service. The FlippityFlooper was believed to have finished the necessary format conversions for all map tiles in the US and Canada but 5% of the data sources were missed due to a bug that was discovered after the creator of FlippityFlooper had been promoted and changed teams, so those Floopity tiles are filled in from an older source. A junior engineer vibe-coded a stopgap fallback called FloopityFlipper that redirects to legacy Flippity Service when Floopity staleness is detected, but that redirect broke three months later due to a change in an injected dependency's experiment configuration. A bug was auto-filed and marked P2 by an overworked product manager who slightly misunderstood the scope, but the FloopityFlipper engineer will probably have a look once they are back from paternity leave.
I made all of that up but it's more plausible than conspiracy theories.
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Facebook is cooked 5 months ago
I think you can still go directly to /messages/ and not see the feed.
Font Rendering from First Principles 5 months ago
Why is the whole implementation in header files?
Do not apologize for replying late to my email 5 months ago
I mean, it's also an attentional commitment for me to remember your idiosyncratic apology-preferences. So I might continue apologizing for replying late to your email, unless you convince me that _everyone_ doesn't like this...
Puget Systems Most Reliable Hardware of 2025 6 months ago
My main home PC is a Puget Serenity workstation from 2017. It has been rock solid and outperforms much newer laptops. And it has almost zero fan noise which is a priority for me. Unfortunately it looks like they may have discontinued the Serenity model, at least I don't see it on the website anymore.
Modetc: Move your dotfiles from kernel space 6 months ago
Tomorrow: modify man pages from kernel space!
Omitting <body> can lead to weird surprises. I once had some JavaScript mysteriously breaking because document.body was null during inline execution.
Since then I always write <body> explicitly even though it is optional.
10 years of personal finances in plain text files 7 months ago
Shoutout to fava, the beancount GUI frontend:
https://beancount.github.io/fava/
I really like its big picture view of the accounts, the search / query interface, and live editing of transactions.
Why users cannot create Issues directly 7 months ago
This illustrates the difficulty of maintaining a separation between bugs and discussions:
To be clear, I 100% believe that there is some kind of leak affecting some specific configuration of users
In this case it seems you believe a bug exists, but it isn't sufficiently well-understood and actionable to graduate to the bug tracker.
But the threshold of well-understood and actionable is fuzzy and subjective. Most bugs, in my experience, start with some amount of investigative work, and are actionable in the sense that some concrete steps would further the investigation, but full understanding is not achieved until very late in the game, around the time I am prototyping a fix.
Similarly the line between bug and feature request is often unclear. If the product breaks in specific configuration X, is it a bug, or a request to add support for configuration X?
I find it easier to have a single place for issue discussion at all stages of understanding or actionability, so that we don't have to worry about distinctions like this that feel a bit arbitrary.
A brief history of Times New Roman 7 months ago
This is not a standalone article but a section from Butterick's book, "Typography for Lawyers", which is hosted in full on the website. The book is an opinionated style manual, and many alternatives are described in nearby sections.
A brief history of Times New Roman 7 months ago
I'm fond of STIX Two, which is very close to Times New Roman but just a little bit nicer, especially the italic.
Good conversations have lots of doorknobs (2022) 7 months ago
Once I realized that some people expect and are happy for you to jump in with unprompted thoughts or stories, it became easier for me to be intentional about doing so.
I think I'm a lot better now than when I was younger at adapting to a wide range of conversational styles, mostly just from paying more attention to that dynamic.
Do you feel like your conversational toolbox has evolved over time? :)
I hate these too, but I'm worried that a ban just incentivizes being more sneaky about it.
Developers have been anthropomorphizing computers for as long as they've been around though.
"The compiler thinks my variable isn't declared" "That function wants a null-terminated string" "Teach this code to use a cache"
Even the word computer once referred to a human.
If LLMs produce fake citations, why would we trust LLMs to check them?
Wouldn't this fall under Auer deference (agency's interpretation of its own regulation)?
There is some uncertainty about whether Auer deference survives after Loper Bright.
Google is killing the open web, part 2 8 months ago
Your link is just the abstract, I had to hunt for the full talk:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1kc7fcF5Ao
But it is quite interesting and especially learning about the security problems of the document() function (described @ 19:40-25:38) made me feel more convinced that removing XSLT is a good decision.
Prefer Boring Technology 8 months ago
I tried to read this but the pronouns are so grating
Rock Tumbler Instructions 9 months ago
The only thing I know about rock tumblers is that Steve Jobs thinks they're like teams of people building software...
Apple must have been a noisy, violent place :P
SGI demos from long ago in the browser via WASM 10 months ago
Interesting that the canvas looks to be in a 5:3 aspect ratio. Did SGI displays have that shape, or would they have used non-square pixels like many DOS games in CGA/EGA resolution?
The Fisherman and His Wife (1857) 10 months ago
Interesting, you read it as if the fish said "You want to be like God? No, that's too far. Game over!"
But another reading is: God would have chosen the shack (grace to the humble, etc.) So she got her wish.
Configuration files are user interfaces 10 months ago
Why is TOML allegedly "too minimal" for a "small configuration file"?
Traps to Developers 11 months ago
Layout is more bazaar than cathedral. It has had many ideas mixed in by different contributors over decades.
Traps to Developers 11 months ago
The first "trap" on the page says "min-width: auto makes min width determined by content", but this is false outside of flex/grid.
From MDN: "For block boxes, inline boxes, inline blocks, and all table layout boxes auto resolves to 0."
VBA is the famous example, but Power Query deserves a shout out. I use it to make tables that pull their data from other tables with custom transformation logic.
Google Sheets didn't even support tables until fairly recently.
I'll say it too!
There's no serious alternative to Excel for those who rely on its advanced features.
You can't just edit Excel files in Libre Office Calc, Google Sheets, or Numbers without any problem whatsoever.
Advanced Python Features 1 year ago
I once broke some Python by changing a = a + b to a += b.
If a and b are lists, the latter modifies the existing list (which may be referenced elsewhere) instead of creating a new one.
I think Python is the only language I've encountered that uses the + operator with mutable reference semantics like this. It seems like a poor design choice.
How to win an argument with a toddler 1 year ago
Are you sure you are not experiencing some selection bias yourself, where you only recall the validation attempts that landed as patronizing or insincere, and do not notice when they are adeptly executed?