thom

Not everything is about taking information in?

Perhaps I am the only person well served by the modern music industry, but I absolutely love Apple Music. The new music playlist it gives me each week has introduced me to hundreds of new artists and dozens of songs that rank up there with my teenage heart songs. I think I mostly skipped the golden age of piracy as my formative music experiences were the Evening Session and John Peel on the BBC, coupled with lax parenting and a proximity to Camden.

There are still some CDs and MP3s I take special care of because I know they’re not in Apple’s catalogue, and I’ve no doubt I’m contributing to the death of the very thing I love by participating in capitalism, but until access to all my music is unilaterally rescinded I will continue to be a very happy (paying) customer.

Ah yes, the missing seventeenth way to validate function parameters.

Always loved this. There are still parts of the UK where you’ll have no data offline navigation is great, and the walking paths are better than you can get elsewhere.

I quit in June. No real absurdity, I'd just spent two years after we were acquired feeling bad about leaving and abandoning everybody, or that's what I'd tell myself to not feel like a coward. Either way, out now, trying to balance curing burnout with a dozen personal projects and lots of well-intentioned, interesting people talking about new opportunities. I told people (my wife most pertinently) that my plan was to walk the dog a lot and not have a plan, but no lack of a plan survives contact with boredom. So, behold my thundering herd of shaven yaks: three screenplays, two TTRPGs (one CMS for TTRPGs that will do data-driven print layout for you), one video game, one piece of consumer electronics, slowly going through Lingua Latina. And I still feel like I have a lot of unfinished business in football analytics, which was the day job.

I don't really know what the right balance is now, but I'm having fun and generally much happier.

I loved Bazzite for hardware compatibility out of the box but the necessity of flatpak made it enormously inconvenient as a general machine. CachyOS sounds worth checking out if I still want to game but also occasionally do real work.

Do we have a sense for what proportion of text is actually retrievable from these scrolls?

Sure as shit won't answer them without that though.

I agree that saying that they have now trained on lots of proprietary data allows them to muddy the legislative waters further than they already have. What a happy coincidence!

No, you just parroted an increasingly popular talking point, the entire purpose of which seems to be to absolve AI companies of the enormous theft that put them in the position to hire experts in the first place.

Happy father's day! Here's my dad on the front of the very first Dragon User magazine. It's been a bit of a bumpy ride but I loved growing up surrounded by every microcomputer under the sun.

https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/4201/Dragon-User-May...

Surely it’s called Candid Camera specifically because it reveals something that would otherwise be hidden?

How unfortunate that even the act of quitting the rat race of notoriety that comprises life in a modern online society requires the publishing of manifestos, books, newspaper profiles, viral photos of you holding up your non-smart phone published to every corner of the internet.

Couple of videos from the Roman Society recently, connecting landscapes and Latin epistolography, which may be of interest to those enjoying this map:

https://youtu.be/9aBxIRCGkl4?si=Dh5P6_NGzSasBG_1

https://youtu.be/nxCNrTYQ_ys?si=ngWa94p2KQdri_Fz

At least we agree “modern software development” is the root cause.

I personally think CSS animations are wonderful. I’ve recently returned to dabble in frontend stuff and was delighted with what you could achieve with purely declarative HTML and CSS. I’m finding that you can often match the feel of an SPA with just HTMX and some CSS and I’ve found that simultaneously very satisfying and productive.

A software team’s job is to collaboratively learn an effective model for operating in a domain. They express that model and those learnings in code, tests and associated documentation. So on the one hand I wholeheartedly agree that pull requests and code reviews fatally undermine this process, but immediately recoil that we’re creating yet more secondary processes and artefacts to distract ourselves. This stuff should all be evident from your codebase. It’s not an extra thing. It’s not a bunch of commit messages or ADRs. If your codebase isn’t entirely self explanatory (both the what and the why) to both humans and AIs you’ve failed and will spend your whole life creating more and more process to manage that failure.

Commits should have no information in them. Teams should be aligned on the design of their software, and all the information about that software should be apparent from its source code.

Not sure what my knot is called but it’s never come undone or gone wonky for me. At step five of the standard knot above, just pull the yellow loop into the empty space on the left and the blue loop to the right. Surely that saves you having to change hands?

And in case this comes off too negative, I don’t think anyone has mentioned KStars, my favourite KDE app for many years. All my early Linux experiences were eye opening and mind expanding about what computers could be, but somehow none more than that.

It feels to me that a lot of the bigger ideas in KDE fell away over the years. In the 2000s I would log in every morning, open a KWord doc in one Konqueror tab, a KSpread sheet in another, and some browser tabs alongside them, then I'd launch Kate and open some files over SSH or FTP and get to work. It felt like someone had really embraced OO and applied it to every part of the desktop, and I assume something like KParts and KIOSlaves still exist. But for the most part, I use KDE now as a bog standard boring Linux desktop that just works. I am grateful that it hasn't been dumbed down quite as much as GNOME over the years, but I hope they have a few bold experiments left in them (and would love to hear what I'm missing if it's already there!)

Yeah we have one of these in our kitchen diner and it's excellent.

Was about to comment, anyone who finds themselves bouncing off Kerouac could do worse than read Miller. The latter is more like your first torrid love affair versus the former’s first giggling glimpse at a porno mag.

You don’t necessarily know when someone will decide to do a commercial release of an old game, causing it to disappear from various abandonware sites. Much simpler to grab eXoDOS once and use it for life.

iDOS 3 works perfectly on my iPad Pro for both DOS games and Win 3.11.

I first read this on an HTC Typhoon smartphone on my daily commute to my first job out of university. I must have felt pretty smug and futuristic at the time.

I think when there’s a step change in our ability to find one type of vulnerability, other types of vulnerability are probably going to become more common as well. Let’s see where we stand at the end of the year.

After all these years, we finally have enough eyeballs that all bugs are shallow, and it kinda sucks. How many times a week am I going to be updating my kernel from now on?

Same reason people muck about with knowledge management systems... to put off the day when you have to sit down at your desk and actually do something.

What's core issues are you thinking of?