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fiddlerwoaroof

6,536 karma · joined July 16, 2014

el-hn [at] elangley.org

fiddlerwoaroof.at.hn

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fiddlerwoaroof··on Scaleway turns Mac Minis into high‑density, Raspberry Pi–managed servers
The thing that got me was always referring to Scaleway in the third person. e.g. this read like the response I get when I ask AI to review code:

> Scaleway’s solution to that problem was ingenious: embedding a Raspberry Pi module with each Mac mini.

(I realize this may be an artifact of a corporate style guide, but I'd much prefer "Our solution to that problem was embedding . . ." Both because the "was ingenious" doesn't add a ton and reads like puffery and because this is Scaleway's own blog and referring to yourself in the third person is grating.)

fiddlerwoaroof··on Building a Durable Execution Engine with SQLite
Every several years people reinvent serializable continuations
fiddlerwoaroof··on Installing and using HP-UX 9
The C in CDE is “common” because it was a collaboration between the major Unix vendors on a standard for how Unix desktops worked.
fiddlerwoaroof··on Minecraft removing obfuscation in Java Edition
I've found that IntelliJ's refactorings don't work as well for Kotlin as Java but, also, I've avoided Kotlin because I don't like it very much.
fiddlerwoaroof··on Minecraft removing obfuscation in Java Edition
On the other hand, Java's tooling for correctly refactoring at scale is pretty impressive: using IntelliJ, it's pretty tractable to unwind quite a few messes using automatic tools in a way that's hard to match in many languages that are often considered better.
fiddlerwoaroof··on Avoid 2:00 and 3:00 am cron jobs (2013)
This shouldn’t be hard to deal with if the timestamp is always serialized with the offset: I’m much more picky about always persisting the offset than about always persisting UTC
fiddlerwoaroof··on Compare Single Board Computers
That looks about the right size, I think: my goal was to put it on top of my ubiquiti dream machine and directly wire it, but I’m limited in terms of power supply because of the number of outlets in the area.
fiddlerwoaroof··on Scripts I wrote that I use all the time
I just use the autocd zsh shell option for this. And I also use `hash -d` to define shortcuts for common directories. Then just “executing” something like `~gh/apache/kafka` will cd to the right place.
fiddlerwoaroof··on Compare Single Board Computers
Is there a SBC that can run entirely off PoE+ and that can take a couple SATA or M.2 drives?
fiddlerwoaroof··on Show HN: Rift – A tiling window manager for macOS
Yeah, this is sort of annoying, but I’ve switched to using “hyper” (caps lock mapped with karabiner to command-option-control) plus a homerow key to activate the frontmost window of key apps. So, Hyper-L activates the most recent terminal, Hyper-j emacs, etc. l
fiddlerwoaroof··on Liquid Glass Is Cracked, and Usability Suffers in iOS 26
These aren’t animations that add any time: a lot of the liquid UI elements are just fun to fidget with while bored
fiddlerwoaroof··on Microsoft only lets you opt out of AI photo scanning 3x a year
As far as I know, most data protection laws accept cryptoshredding as long as the party with a deletion requirement actually destroys the key. For one thing, it’s hard to reconcile deletion requirements with immutable architectures and backups without a mechanism like this.

IANAL, but I think the key remaining in the user’s possession doesn’t matter as far as the company with a deletion requirement is concerned.

fiddlerwoaroof··on Show HN: Rift – A tiling window manager for macOS
I used to be a big user of tiling window managers but, more recently, I’ve discovered that the workflow of something like Moom is nicer in more situations.
fiddlerwoaroof··on Microsoft only lets you opt out of AI photo scanning 3x a year
In theory, you could store a private key on the device and cryptoshred the data on Microsoft’s servers when the setting is disabled (Microsoft deletes their copy of the key). Then, when the feature is re-enabled, upload the private key to Microsoft again.
fiddlerwoaroof··on Liquid Glass Is Cracked, and Usability Suffers in iOS 26
One thing I’ve noticed is that search fields are now generally at the bottom of the screen which makes them a lot easier to activate. (No more flicking the screen down to search).

I disliked the update for a week or so at first, but I have to say I find the liquid animations fun now.

fiddlerwoaroof··on Diff Algorithms
I wonder about the importance of minimality: it itself seems like a heuristic for “interest” or some other thing that users of diffs actually care about.

For example, a diff like:

    + x += 1
    - x -= 1
Seems almost useless: it doesn’t provide any context about the meaning of x and, as a result, nearly every source review tool provides unchanged line in addition to highlighting the change. And, even then, by preventing comments on arbitrary lines of the file, GitHub’s code review makes it pretty hard to call out other relevant code.
fiddlerwoaroof··on Vapor chamber tech keeps iPhone 17 Pro cool
I would buy a case anyways because I prefer the appearance of my leather case to the plain phone appearance.
fiddlerwoaroof··on Are touchscreens in cars dangerous?
I’ve rented cars with CarPlay and the Tesla solution is a lot nicer imo.
fiddlerwoaroof··on Want to piss off your IT department? Are the links not malicious looking enough?
I worked somewhere that would send the notice to do mandatory security training from a suspicious email and the message was very short (something like you have been enrolled in training at https://phishing.site.example.com/abdlejrj). In always just reported them as phishing and no one ever followed up.
fiddlerwoaroof··on Public static void main(String[] args) is dead
Everywhere I’ve worked has used Eclipse Temurin or another open source release: the Oracle JVM isn’t used all that often because of license issues.
fiddlerwoaroof··on How Britain built some of the world’s safest roads
I think the concept of a “speed limit” is part of the problem. On controlled-access roads, I think it would be better for the posted speed to be advisory and, instead, train drivers to think of driving too slow for your lane as being just as dangerous as speeding because, in a moving group of cars, you want to be as close to 0mph relative to the other cars as is feasible.
fiddlerwoaroof··on OpenWrt: A Linux OS targeting embedded devices
I gave up on openwrt when I realized that a lot of the recent WiFi standards seem to be badly supported. I think 802.11ac was significantly faster with vendor firmware than openwrt, for example.
fiddlerwoaroof··on Nuclear: Desktop music player focused on streaming from free sources
I like Pete Seeger’s paraphrase of his father: “Plagiarism is basic to all culture”. I think we underestimate the damage to society at large when “remixing” the work of others is legally fraught.

The mere reproduction of a previous performance is not additional work for the artist and so does not require compensation: to demand royalties undermines the fundamental structure of art for most of history.

fiddlerwoaroof··on A Unique, High-Tech (Family) Computer
I’ve been wanting to do something like this to make a modern iPod / audiobook reader.
fiddlerwoaroof··on Jujutsu for everyone
pijul uses a completely different model of version control than git (stores diffs rather than snapshots). And so the cost of switching and interoperation is a bit higher than jj which basically acts like a nice UI over git.
fiddlerwoaroof··on GNU Artanis – A fast web application framework for Scheme
The very first text on the page tells you what it is: “ GNU Artanis - A fast web application framework for Scheme”
fiddlerwoaroof··on ClickHouse vs PostgreSQL UPDATE performance comparison
I haven’t read that post yet. I assume you merge the updates into the main data files when you merge the segments of the log-structured merge tree?
fiddlerwoaroof··on California unemployment rises to 5.5%, worst in the U.S. as tech falters
I think defining industries this narrowly isn’t helpful
fiddlerwoaroof··on If you're remote, ramble
There are a handful of Spatial Audio videoconferencing solutions that work pretty well to allow multiple simultaneous conversations.
fiddlerwoaroof··on Emacs: The macOS Bug
I wonder how hard it would be to run the pgtk version on macOS
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