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nbevans

584 karma · joined August 2, 2012

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nbevans··on Bonsai: Janestreet's UI Library
It looks like a nice little library; but oh boy must this be so limiting for the product teams that are forced to use. Everything looks like it's straight out of the 1990s.
nbevans··on OfficeCLI: Office suite for AI agents to read and edit Microsoft Office files
The idea of Latex being used in business environments could be a meme
nbevans··on VPN ban update for UK households as government looks at 'age-gate'
That's already happening in the UK too.

Shortly after the Online Safety Act went into operation, there was politically charged/sensitive/opinionated content on X mysteriously disappearing for UK users but nobody else in the world.

nbevans··on Datasette Apps: Host custom HTML applications inside Datasette
Datasette pre-dates agentic AI
nbevans··on Stop Using JWTs
JWT inside of a cookie is fine. This gist is unnecessarily pedantic and seems oblivious to the fact that 99% of JWT impls are indeed just stuffing it inside a cookie.

But yes, short life times with frequent renewals is necessary; that's obvious though. And same applies to any other auth tech.

nbevans··on Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers
"I am a rockstar developer and this characterisation is unwarranted" -- thought bubble emoji
nbevans··on LLMCap – A proxy that hard-stops LLM API calls when you hit a dollar cap
This will fail product-market fit instantly. Nobody is paying $49/mo for a tiny script they can vibe and run locally.
nbevans··on We rewrote JSONata with AI in a day, saved $500k/year
The most baffling thing here is that they allowed a very very simple JSON expression language to become a 500k/year cost burden on their business

My god. But I am happy that they finally realised their error and put it right.

nbevans··on OpenCode – Open source AI coding agent
Codex is 15MB of memory per process. Just sayin'
nbevans··on RE#: how we built the fastest regex engine in F#
It uses far less tokens than C#, so watch this space...
nbevans··on Bunny Database
Why would you move from Cloudflare to this shady company?
nbevans··on The future of software engineering is SRE
Surely SRE is just a .md file like everything else? :upside-down-face:
nbevans··on ISO PDF spec is getting Brotli – ~20 % smaller documents with no quality loss
This is a really really bad idea. Don't break backwards compat. for 20% of gains. Internet connection speeds and storage capacities only go up. In a few years time, 20% of gains will seem crazy to have broken back-compat for.
nbevans··on 'Bandersnatch': The Works That Inspired the 'Black Mirror' Interactive Feature (2019)
I see.

But surely Netflix could have setup 1 to 3 of the "best" variants of the Bandersnatch and let people watch those? Even a "directors cut" based on how the director chose the path, would suffice.

The content is entirely gone right now. Which is pretty tragic as it was excellent.

nbevans··on 'Bandersnatch': The Works That Inspired the 'Black Mirror' Interactive Feature (2019)
I wanted to re-watch this on Netflix but it seems they removed it some time ago and have no plans to bring it back. It seems the interactivity features were obsoleted from their app platform as they were hard to support?
nbevans··on The "Debate Me Bro" Grift: How Trolls Weaponized the Marketplace of Ideas
Regardless of whether he was grifting or not, he still didn't deserve what happened to him. Nobody apart from serious criminals or warlords deserve that. He was neither.

Why not just embarrass him in a viral stunt. Nobody even tried to do that. They leaped all the way from 0 to 11 by shooting him dead.

nbevans··on LeetCode for System Design
Are you aware that other OAuth providers exist and that there is no reason to tie yourself directly to Google's provider?
nbevans··on ARIA, the UK's Bet to Build Scientific Revolutions
Have a read about the "Tube Alloys" project, too. Precursor and seed for the Manhattan Project.
nbevans··on The Barbican
6k is pretty typical for any premium apartments in London. That's actually pretty cheap for that location.
nbevans··on Firebase Studio
I love the Java code sample:

```

// It works, but we have no idea how to send an HTTP request in java.

// If you do, send us a nice example to support@errortexts.com.

// You just need to POST JSON with the keys `api_key` and optionally `message`.

```

That's brilliant. But it does make me wonder why the LLM couldn't have provided you a suitable Java code example?

nbevans··on You're protecting your data wrong – Introducing the Protected Query Pattern
``everything is a function`` <- ``everything is a function`` + 1
nbevans··on China reduced sulphur dioxide emissions by more than two-thirds in past 15 years
I've been visiting China every 1 to 3 years since 2014 and definitely in the last 4 years, on multiple visits, I've noticed that pollution is visibly lower. You can actually see the blue of the sky on most days. Everyone has noticed it. It's a massive change.
nbevans··on In Search of a Faster SQLite
Yes it caches pages in memory. The cache size is configurable via a PRAGMA.

Postgres / MSSQL / all RDBMS is slow because of network I/O.

nbevans··on SQLiteStudio: Create, edit, browse SQLite databases
I've been using this tool pretty much every day for almost a decade. It has a few quirks but it is still the best desktop tool for interacting with SQLite databases.
nbevans··on European Commission's use of Microsoft 365 infringes data protection law for EU
If even the European Commission cannot get GDPR right, then what hope do small/medium businesses have?
nbevans··on SQLite: Wal2 Mode
There is a .shm (shared memory) file that all SQLite connections to the database would use to determine which page ranges are in the WAL versus main DB file. So that overhead already exists when WAL is enabled.
nbevans··on How the design of Disney parks affects our perspective (2020)
It's possible to use Google Street View (or at least, panorama photographs that have been shared with Google) in some locations of the Disney parks and for some reason none of the faces have been blurred. However everyone looks thoroughly miserable in these photos. I wonder if it's because of the amount of walking involved, or if its because they've realised they essentially got scammed out of thousands of dollars for a multi-week holiday in hell?
nbevans··on France’s Mistral AI raises a $113M seed round to take on OpenAI
I'm not sure that $113M is enough? They will also need to find a Tier 1 cloud partner but Azure and GCM are both taken.
nbevans··on Ignore Microsoft’s whines about the Activision takeover. The CMA did its job
Does "cloud gaming" encompass things like Xbox Game Pass though? Subscription model with downloadable access to all games definitely feels cloudy to me.
nbevans··on Ignore Microsoft’s whines about the Activision takeover. The CMA did its job
Brad Smith is definitely part of the old guard. Joined in 1993.

His remarks the other day are going to age terribly. He's basically everything Ballmer was but as a lawyer.

But, we should expect more of this if mega corporations are allowed to continue growing their market caps beyond the GDP of G7 nation states.

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