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LAC-Tech

6,943 karma · joined May 8, 2021

Anti-Agile Consultant

lewiscampbell.tech

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LAC-Tech··on Don't Take the Black Pill [video]
lmao. fish, water, etc.
LAC-Tech··on Git rebase -i is not that scary
I still don't know it very well, and it's been well over a decade. I think it's a combination of a few things:

- I find it uninteresting. My version control needs are very simple.

- Most teams I have been in use a small subset of it.

- It's confusing terms and inconsistent cli are huge warning signs to not go down that rabbithole. Today instead of learning Git I read some Tony Hoare, much better.

I've been at once place where they rebased, and it was awful. Complete waste of time. (great place otherwise though)

LAC-Tech··on Git rebase -I is not that scary
yeah I would really love to see a subset of git with a sane cli. would switch in a heartbeat.
LAC-Tech··on Git rebase -I is not that scary
Correct on both counts.
LAC-Tech··on Don't Take the Black Pill [video]
See? I can't even mention it without scare quotes and downvotes :)
LAC-Tech··on Don't Take the Black Pill [video]
If I talked about how I needed to recover from being raised in a progressive environment, it would not be so well received in well-respected tech circles.

There's an assymetry here no one wants to acknowledge.

LAC-Tech··on If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?
I think the truth is whether people want to admit it or not is that coding has not been solved, and producing good software is really not any easier.

Making legacy code however is now very fast. So fast you can practically ship it straight to production.

LAC-Tech··on Writing by hand is good for your brain
Hmmm - I guess all the "chatbot" web interfaces for LLMs have an option to upload images. And they're really good at this now you say? That's a really useful tip; thanks.
LAC-Tech··on Writing by hand is good for your brain
Anecdotally I find I connect more with what I write by pen as well.

Ultimately I want things to in text documents though (typst for me these days). If there was a non-slopware solution to ocr scanning to a typst doc, I would do it a lot more .

LAC-Tech··on I joined the IndieWeb, here's what I learned
lewiscampbell.tech

Good suggestion, I will :)

LAC-Tech··on Claude Code uses Bun written in Rust now
Has all of this drama turned anyone else a bit sour on bun?

I have a long running side project I migrated to bun, and I'm starting to regret it. I don't want to build on top of this much churn.

LAC-Tech··on I joined the IndieWeb, here's what I learned
Though I don't brand my site as indie web, my own website is a bit like this - I have a link to my consulting site and a headshot on there.

Why is that so bad? My professional life is a part of who I am. One could call me an IndieWorker, in that I'm self employed....

LAC-Tech··on What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph
Right, there's a lot of schadenfreude about SA not being so popular and serves them right for being mean when I asked them a question... but it was also no doubt a gold mine of AI training data. Stands to reason this may be an agentic AI golding age, as future models just eating their own data.
LAC-Tech··on How Our Rust-to-Zig Rewrite Is Going
Counter Argument - with Zig it's perfectly viable to make programs using just the standard library. You have json serde, zon (zig object notation) serde, system functions (ie libc/rustix equivalent), random number generators... all without a single dependency.
LAC-Tech··on Code Ownership and Software Quality: A Replication Study (2015)
10 years ago we had a series of studies suggesting that code ownership was beneficial. And in 10 years I feel very little has changed, and IME we still still lack even a weak code ownership model in teams.

What has been your experience?

LAC-Tech··on How Our Rust-to-Zig Rewrite Is Going
> I enjoy Rust, I've taught a course on it, and I happily use it daily for my work at Zed. Despite what Internet comments might have us believe, it's extremely normal for one language to be the best fit for one project, while a different language turns out to be the best fit for a different project. One size does not actually fit all!

Amen. I like both Zig and Rust, and if I praise/criticise one of them, people act like I'm "switching", as if they were two exclusionary religions (though I think some people may indeed view them that way).

The stuff on memory safety written in the article is well worth reading, because in a lot of programmer discourse it's talked of as if it's some binary, that Rust Is Memory Safe, and Zig Is Not Memory safe. That's simply not the case.

LAC-Tech··on The Tokio/Rayon Trap and Why Async/Await Fails Concurrency
There's a few runtimes for IO bound work loads; monoio from bytedance comes to mind.
LAC-Tech··on The Tokio/Rayon Trap and Why Async/Await Fails Concurrency
I've been thinking similar thoughts recently, in that I am not sure that a function call is the best way to model asynchronicity. Io-uring in particular feels much more suited to a req/res type model, which has the benefit that you can make a single threaded state machine the core of your app - very pleasant to test and reason about.

I'd draw the analogy to RPC; it's a leaky abstraction because HTTP is fundamentally a different thing than a function call. I'd argue that event loops are a different thing as well.

LAC-Tech··on Your 'app' could have been a webpage (so I fixed it for you)
But on the same page

> On iOS 16.4 and later, PWAs can be installed from the Share menu in Safari, Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Orion.

So you can't have an install prompt, but it's still pretty easy. If people can learn hamburger menus they can learn this.

LAC-Tech··on Your 'app' could have been a webpage (so I fixed it for you)
My PWA skills are rusty, but IIRC it's one click on Android to install web page as an "app" (ie it appears on the home screen like anything else), and it was about 3 in Safari - perhaps a onerous for B2C, but surely not for internal users.

So you can easily make an "App" for normies, from a web page.

LAC-Tech··on Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke
Agreed. The outrage around what Andrew said was performative and melodramatic. I remember the "no work-life balance if you work here" thing, and then I remember Bun's CEO last year complaining he might not be able to get H1Bs anymore...

And this whole thing reeked of a publicity stunt. Show people you can use $$$ of tokens to vibe code a refactor. The headline is how great anthropic - bun's owner - is.

LAC-Tech··on Why Vanilla JavaScript
Based and Vanilla JS pilled.

I know posts like this get a lot of whinging, but you are 100% right. The browser is in itself a platform; frameworks are not like some kind of hyper abstracted Web Scrinting Language for people too important to deal with "raw" CSS/DOM. They're a an awkward, alternate abstraction, slow as molasses, and they leak like a sieve.

LAC-Tech··on The architecture of the internet creates risks for democracy
Democracy is government of the uninformed, by the uninformed, for the uninformed.

Populism is inherent in the whole set up and always has been.

LAC-Tech··on The architecture of the internet creates risks for democracy
And by democracy they mean... people agreeing with each other and voting for the correct parties:

broadband reduced civic participation, eroded social trust, and boosted voting for extreme-right and populist parties in Italy and Germany.

Is the "extreme-right" party in Germany still chaired by a brown lesbian woman?

LAC-Tech··on The circus freaks of open source
He called a mentally ill man who died a tragic death "a circus freak".

It's unreasonable to post an article like that then ask us to speak politely about him.

LAC-Tech··on Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
I just simply don't think it's that good.
LAC-Tech··on Mornings and nights no longer exist at 47C: A day in the hottest place in India
"We"? I haven't even been to India let alone cut down trees there.
LAC-Tech··on Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing
Because we have spent a lot of time and money using AI to generate code and have been unimpressed with the results.

As for why they got accepted so quickly 1) the industry's long running desperation to deskill computer programming 2) the addictive psychology baked into LLMs "That's an elegant solution! Shall I ... ?"

LAC-Tech··on Chuwi Minibook X
Exactly.
LAC-Tech··on Strace-ui, Bonsai_term, and the TUI renaissance
Questiom for TUI writers - in 2026 is there any terminal emulator that doesn't understand ecma 48 control codes?
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