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gimboland

388 karma · joined September 27, 2012

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gimboland··on If you're remote, ramble
Why do people write in a journal?

Why do people pray?

Why do people do rubber-duck debugging?

gimboland··on Just use HTML
Genuinely curious (as someone who didn't know about the implicit ID mapping until today): given that IDs are global, why is doing this any worse (or in any way different) to using getElementById? I.e. why is it bad advice?
gimboland··on Ask HN: What do Russians on HN think about this war?
That's an idea that goes back to Hobbes' Leviathan.
gimboland··on Ask HN: What do Russians on HN think about this war?
> The weak don't deserve the products of their labor if they can't defend it. We've seen this as a fact of life since life has been a fact.

Amazing how "may not be able to retain" collapses down to "do not deserve" here.

gimboland··on Every M1 Mac is due for a 2022 refresh with faster M2 chip, new designs
Yeah, I do this; 2020 M1 13" MBP; 4K external monitor and iPad Pro on Sidecar, plus I keep the laptop open so I have three screens. I find Sidecar a bit flaky (it disconnects or freezes a bit too often to be breezily accepted), but with a big iPad (mine is basically A4 paper sized) and SwitchResX in play, it's not bad at all.

Edit: ... and having said all that, I'm looking forward to upgrading some time in the next year and going back to two "proper" external monitors. I'll still love using the Sidecar'ed iPad Pro as a second screen when working in cafes, though...

gimboland··on My own personal AWS S3 bucket
Anybody who thinks cryptocurrency is in the class of assets which are "supposed to be able to sit there growing in value" really hasn't been paying attention.
gimboland··on Where do type systems come from? (2017)
I had that realisation when I saw this library: https://pint.readthedocs.io/en/stable/ (for a dynamically typed language, somewhat amusingly).
gimboland··on Big list of HTTP static server one-liners
...aaaand it's more than 20 years old, so yeah, that kinda agrees with the point that it took us a long time to stop doing that because it's confusing.
gimboland··on John Sullivan resign as executive director of the Free Software Foundation
Oh, has he apologised for the years-long pattern of sexual harassment as testified to by multiple women? I must have missed that, sorry.
gimboland··on John Sullivan resign as executive director of the Free Software Foundation
Yup — that basically requires extremely high levels of compassion and unconditional love, something we can all aspire to, but in reality and in general forgiveness tends to be conditional.
gimboland··on John Sullivan resign as executive director of the Free Software Foundation
I have not, and would be interested to see a link to that (the posting(s) in question, not the whole blog), particularly if it addresses the many accusations of sexual harassment, as my understanding was that this had not happened. Prompted by your comment, I had a look on his site, but nothing seemed to be fit the bill, either in the "Political Articles" section or the "Non-political Articles" section — but maybe I'm looking in the wrong places? Please, enlighten me.
gimboland··on Developer tools can be magic but instead collect dust
Not OP but they're not saying they want to use emacs keybindings, they're saying they want to use emacs keyboard macros [1], which I agree really are a very handy feature having no equivalent in JetBrains.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Ke...

gimboland··on John Sullivan resign as executive director of the Free Software Foundation
> I don't want to live in a world where we can't be forgiven.

Forgiveness requires accountability and commitment to change, neither of which have been forthcoming.

gimboland··on Suez canal blocked by a massive ship
The podcast "Containers" also covers how shipping containers have shaped the mordern world — well worth a listen, though I don't recall it mentioning this aspect of their logistics.
gimboland··on Fuzz me wrong – How QuickCheck destroyed my favourite theory
Haskell is what happens when you take the idea of pure functions (i.e. no side effects) _really_ seriously, and try to create a programming language that works in that world (modulo mechanisms for doing the side effects you _need_ such as I/O).

It turns out that when you do that, all sorts of stuff that simply doesn't fly in other languages "just works", particularly around representing things using structures otherwise rarely seen outside of mathematical logic and category theory. This is all very powerful and elegant, but it means the landscape is unfamiliar, confusing, and intimidating to programmers who don't have that background or the inclination to learn about it.

Hence all the monad tutorials — not because monads are particularly special, but because beginners encounter them quickly due to IO, so they need some sort of explanation (it's like how if you teach a beginning programmer Java, there's loads of ceremony to explain around classes and public and so on just to do "hello world")... whereas you can get away with using haskell for longer without learning about, say, functors and monoids — though it somewhat misses the point of the language if you do so.

gimboland··on M1 Macs cannot support dual Extended displays through their Thunderbolt 3 ports
+1 for BTT, particularly in combination with Karabiner Elements and goku to handle Karabiner configs in a good way.

If you like tiling window managers, you can get a very similar experience (in terms of using the whole screen and being able to flexibly throw things all over the place) with this kind of setup.

gimboland··on How I learned to love and fear the Riemann Hypothesis
> but how did the author learned to love, and more importantly to "fear" the RH? What's there to fear?

It's made abundantly clear: they learned to love it through the course they were fortunate enough to take as an undergraduate, and they learned to fear it later, as a researcher, when they realised that what there was to fear was wasting their career attacking something that was probably just too big and too hard to be sensible for them to attack.

gimboland··on How bad is your Spotify?
I agree that some curation effort makes a huge difference.

I have a "Queue" playlist into which I copy my "Discover Weekly" every now and then; then I listen to that Queue playlist, which lets me delete the tracks I don't want, and keep the ones I do (you can't modify your Discover Weekly). Then, every time I refresh the Queue playlist from Discover Weekly, I first move the current Queue contents into a YYYY-MM playlist (e.g. 2020-12 for this month).

I've been doing this for several years and it's been great — I've got a timestamped record of what I was enjoying/discovering during those months, and it does seem to have helped Spotify to keep recommending me things I really do enjoy. (Weirdly some weeks seem _really bad_, like I delete virtually everything — but I guess there's some A/Bing going on there.)

(Also: I'll only like/heart tracks I _particularly_ like, and sometimes I'll just listen to my "Liked Songs" playlist; I think this helps teach Spotify what I really like.)

gimboland··on In Pictures: How much plastic are you eating?
"Pretty sure" is a thought/judgement, not a feeling.
gimboland··on Functional Programming Is Not What Makes Haskell Great
> The real killer feature of Haskell is that it is the closest language to mathematics and makes reasoning mathematically much easier than even other functional languages.

And the reason is it's like that is its focus on purity.

gimboland··on What I Learned About UX Writing from a British Prog Drummer and David Lynch
"But clarity is also this", followed by a screenshot of a booking that says "$73/night" even though the actual cost is $92/night (which it doesn't say - you have to work it out yourself).

I guess the author really _did_ work in advertising if they think that's clarity.

gimboland··on RCEP, the world’s biggest trade agreement
"Spanish flu" didn't start in Spain, after all.
gimboland··on Biden wins White House, vowing new direction for divided U.S.
Not so much that (I think Q has thus far been mainly a US phenomenon, though it _is_ making inroads here apparently), but mainly I'm seeing stuff around covid being a hoax and/or a control ploy, forced vaccinations, tracking chip injections, Agenda 21, Bill Gates, etc. — all that stuff. It sort of makes sense in a group of people tending to favour "natural" stuff (some of whom were also antivax tbh) but it's been surprising how far it's gone, and how fast, with some of them.
gimboland··on Biden wins White House, vowing new direction for divided U.S.
Interestingly, it's not just conservatives. I'm in the UK, and some of the circles I move in are a bit "hippy" (and thus not conservative/right wing at all) and some of those folks are absolutely lapping it up. It is bewildering to see.
gimboland··on I found black-hat content marketers: sockpuppet bloggers, fake Reddit/HN accts
Well, fuck it.
gimboland··on 2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read
Anyone else remember alt.sex.cost-benefits-accounting ? I swear it existed (around 1995?) but I've never been able to find any evidence for it.
gimboland··on The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled
Also useful for doing the development in the first place!
gimboland··on Down the ergonomic keyboard rabbit hole
If you're using karabiner, you might want to use goku to configure it: much nicer: https://github.com/yqrashawn/GokuRakuJoudo
gimboland··on JQuery to React: How we rewrote the HelloSign editor
Via rust, obviously.
gimboland··on The Era of Visual Studio Code
... because of rendering/scaling/4K? Or just anyway?
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