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s0l1dsnak3123

941 karma · joined September 13, 2009

I see problems, and I want to solve them.

I like being meticulous, I'm a grafter, and I'm a pragmatist. I like to surround myself with people who are just as or more hardworking and ambitious than I am.

I love getting carried away in the possibilities of a cool new idea.

A programmer by trade, I'm a polyglot: I know lots of programming languages and can tune myself into the nuances of a new language fairly easily. I started coding when I was 12, and my fingers (and imagination) have been on fire ever since.

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/johnhamelink; my proof: https://keybase.io/johnhamelink/sigs/0RLdQsWjvs_59B8_wI2HH0slzjdf0RGGB2Jj7ee9lM8 ]

s0l1dsnak3123.at.hn

$argon2id$v=19$m=64,t=512,p=2$DGsBCuBynJcMNZ2WRDzJhA$amIftiHhfifantvvOBRhLA

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s0l1dsnak3123··on Webmention (2017)
I've began implementing Webmention on my blog just this week after seeing it in action at EmacsConf - it's a good sign to see it also syndicated here not long after. I hope many more adopt it, it's a great idea.

The talk in question: https://emacsconf.org/2022/talks/indieweb/

s0l1dsnak3123··on Emacs: Feature/tree-sitter merged into master
Indeed, I'm using Emacs for Code, reading/writing documents and emails, as well as consuming RSS feeds. The ecosystem and values that underpin Emacs are fantastic - in my personal case the only downside to heavy use of Emacs is that it can struggle to utilise my hardware. This tends to be particularly noticeable when using TRAMP and Eglot, or producing large org tables.
s0l1dsnak3123··on LemmyBB, a federated bulletin board
What a ridiculous false equivalence to make.
s0l1dsnak3123··on Amazon instructs New York workers “don't sign” union cards
It's lovely to see so much solidarity on this subject from HN. A lot of people are fed up right now, and they're very much justified.
s0l1dsnak3123··on Give up GitHub: The time has come
One similarly ignored bug that springs to mind is the performance of the "Send To" context menu item in File Explorer. I always dreaded dragging my mouse over it by accident.
s0l1dsnak3123··on Tell HN: Brother printers now locking out non-OEM paraphernalia
Yes, when replying to my general comment, you shouldn't use the typical conservative rhetorical tactic of using the specific to ridicule the principle.

I was making a general argument about the pattern one can see across the economy. The printer market is another example of the same pattern that we see all over the place.

I don't claim that the printer market is a single entity that towers over all - my point is that our economic system optimises for this eventuality. Again: this isn't controversial, antitrust laws have been in place for a very long time.

s0l1dsnak3123··on Glasgow council four-day week on full pay moves closer after study agreed
They approved a trial for Glasgow city council workers - so they approved it for themselves.

I do see your point though - it could've been a bit clearer

s0l1dsnak3123··on Tell HN: Brother printers now locking out non-OEM paraphernalia
Inequality is getting worse and worse across the west:

https://equalitytrust.org.uk/scale-economic-inequality-uk

Businesses are choosing to use their profits to perform stock buybacks instead of innovating or improving standards for their workers:

https://hbr.org/2020/01/why-stock-buybacks-are-dangerous-for...

Meanwhile the cost of living is going through the roof:

https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-...

And pay is not catching up, further aggravated by inflation:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1272447/uk-wage-growth-v...

In the UK we also have a 54% increase in the residential cost of energy (within the context of extreme profiteering from energy manufacturers):

https://edition.cnn.com/2022/02/03/business/energy-prices-uk...

And 9.1% inflation:

https://www.msn.com/en-in/news/other/uk-inflation-rate-hits-...

This is true across the world. I'm not sure what your life is like, but it sure as hell doesn't match the lived experience of many.

s0l1dsnak3123··on Tell HN: Brother printers now locking out non-OEM paraphernalia
Competition isn't allowed to flourish when the market leaders use their runaway profits to buy up any and all possible contenders. My point is that this exact process can be seen across our economy, because anti-competitive behaviour is inherent to the economic system we live in. This is not controversial.
s0l1dsnak3123··on Tell HN: Brother printers now locking out non-OEM paraphernalia
Capitalism optimises for monopolies. Everyone agrees on this - this is why we have antitrust mechanisms. Unfortunately, they tend to facilitate and reinforce the problem instead of combat it.

My comment is a general one on markets at large, hyper-focusing on the printer market is only valid as a rhetorical device.

s0l1dsnak3123··on Tell HN: Brother printers now locking out non-OEM paraphernalia
My point is a general one - the printer market is doing exactly what all elastic markets do.
s0l1dsnak3123··on Tell HN: Brother printers now locking out non-OEM paraphernalia
Once again the "market" is abusing everyone in the pursuit of endless economic growth. Our economic system forces successful businesses into enemies of the consumer once they can't keep momentum.

Coupled with the concentrating monopolisation of the economy, this creates a phenomenon where helpless consumers are held at ransom: the ultimatum being that they either continue to be exploited in ever more devious ways, or to simply do without. Small businesses that spring up to fulfill the void are bought up quickly in order to squash any hope of real competition.

This is not an economy that works for ordinary people. Ordinary people does include temporarily embarrassed millionaires (and real millionaires, and startups and micro-businesses for that matter) on Hacker News.

The only people who are benefiting overall from these practices are major shareholders and those chasing endless quarterly growth targets.

s0l1dsnak3123··on Mu4e – Emacs email client backed by Xapian
Some tips:

- The mu4e-alert package allows you to receive alerts with libnotify/growl/etc

- The org-msg package allows you to write your emails in org-mode and render them in both text and HTML

- message-view-patch is very helpful if you are dealing with patches over email (which I started doing as I started using https://sr.ht instead of Github)

- The mu4e-view-actions variable lets you implement quick actions for messages. One of my favourites is mu4e-action-git-apply-patch!

- The mu4e-contexts variable can be used to segment your config for different email accounts

- Mu4e has fantastic support for GPG signing and encryption. I use it way more now that I have it.

- mu4e-icalendar allows you to accept calendar invites and for them to be imported into Emacs as a calendar invite

- I prefer to read plaintext emails over HTML. You can discourage HTML and richtext mimetypes with the mm-discouraged-alternatives variable

s0l1dsnak3123··on I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)
Exactly. Managers are there to facilitate people and communication, business leaders are there to facilitate capital and strategic vision, engineers actually make the thing and master the detail in the process. Good businesses learn to listen: not just to their customers, but also to their domain experts.
s0l1dsnak3123··on I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)
> Give me a PM (or good engineer) that understands the bigger picture every time.

I was referring to this sentence: you're now telling us that the ideal good engineer understands the developer's point of view but doesn't agree with it. It sounds like you just want to be surrounded by yes men to me. The perfect recipe for a failed startup.

s0l1dsnak3123··on Ask HN: I miss Usenet. Are there any modern equivalents?
Thank you for Newzbin, I've used it many times over the years!
s0l1dsnak3123··on I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)
> There is also the solution that you set up your own company, or convince your manager your time is best spent on this.

This is the definition of a flippant comment. Why should society require we become the lord of our own domain or a political chameleon just so that we can advocate for decent standards? Should people who live on flood plains "just move" when the tide comes in? Ridiculous.

Understanding the bigger picture includes understanding the developer's point of view.

> I’ve worked around too many startups ruled by developers. They’re being run into the ground because those developers think technical NFRs as defined by them are the be all and end all. They’re not. Those same developers will happily spend months fiddling with the system without making any actual improvements and call it “paying down technical debt”.

Sounds like those super-clever managers didn't understand what the hell was going on to me. Perhaps they should've held their nose and tried to learn about their product so they can understand and communicate that bigger picture they speak of instead of abdicating their adversarial role and leaving dev teams rudderless.

s0l1dsnak3123··on I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)
I very much agree with you as well actually.

One of the things that I've instituted at my work is our methodology for acquiring test phones for our product (WhatsApp for hospitals, basically). We go to a supermarket and buy the most eye-catching box of the budget phones available in the phone aisle.

We've squashed so many bugs and performance problems this way. It's cheaper, it instils empathy in product decisions, and our customers love the user experience as a result.

Similarly, one of my first big decisions after joining was to wean ourselves from our AWS addiction using Kubernetes. This also allowed us to design a dev env that fits on a modern machine comfortably, but can scale to entire Hospital Trusts in production. Once again: focusing on portability now means we can sell our product on-prem and hybrid, because we designed our developer UX this way.

s0l1dsnak3123··on I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)
Screw this. Developers should advocate for their craft and for quality, and business metrics should hold an adversarial position to balance things out. We definitely should not be accepting the narrative that developers just do what they are told and don't push back on what we know is good for product - we are in a unique position of power, we should recognise this and use it for the betterment of the industry as a whole. The alternative is we let corporate greed slide our standards of quality into the gutter thereby making the job at hand miserable.
s0l1dsnak3123··on Price of UK petrol makes biggest daily jump in 17 years
And this is exactly it: we need to redefine value to include the social and ecological consequences of a given action. Profit margin as a sole or primary indicator just doesn't cut it anymore.
s0l1dsnak3123··on No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me
I use the RSS feeds with Elfeed for Emacs which allows me to search, filter, and modify feed entries as they are fetched. Additionally, you can use an https://invidious.io instance - which also provides RSS feeds - to avoid sharing any personally identifiable info to YouTube. I've setup elfeed to provide a keystroke to watch the videos ad-free using mpv. All together, this is a much more privacy and attention respecting way of consuming videos.
s0l1dsnak3123··on Changes to LastPass Free
> just checked BitWarden v2.8.0 (449) on iOS 14.4, no setting for “swipe to refresh” anywhere in its settings

Settings -> Manage -> Sync -> Enable sync on refresh

s0l1dsnak3123··on Asdf – An Extendable Version Manager
I've also written a handful of plugins for asdf, and this is exactly my experience also - I even used the asdf-hashicorp library as the basis for https://github.com/vmware-tanzu/asdf-carvel

Seems like a lot of duplicated work across all these plugins

s0l1dsnak3123··on UK warns people with serious allergies to avoid Pfizer vaccine
I think you miss the point entirely. The broader public's perception of the drug is instrumental to its adoption. If the public are led to believe that the medicine is unsafe, the result will be a reduced level of herd immunity as fewer people will take the vaccine.

Medical institutions (CDC, BMJ, Public Health England), the Government, and the broader media (newspapers, TV stations, companies like Facebook) are responsible for encouraging safe and efficacious use of medicine for the good of society, but they can't do that when the narrative is co-opted by anti-vaxxers, the right, and other shameless opportunists.

s0l1dsnak3123··on 2020's fastest-rising tech jobs? Programming language PHP leads the way
This is why PHP deserves it's reputation. The state of the language is one thing, the state of the ecosystem surrounding the language is another.

Anecdotally speaking, the vast majority of PHP projects I've been exposed to have been horrific precisely because there's a laissez-faire or "get the job done at any cost" attitude to software development that's uniquely prevelant in these communities (this exists in all languages, but in my experience it's way worse and way more normalized within the PHP silo). The language improving will only be positive for new projects that are started today, or that have been maintained by dilligent and empathetic engineers. Often teams are not as united on this front as they should be.

I think using almost any other comparable language in 2020 (Python 3, Go, Typescript) is a better solution than starting a new project in PHP these days. I suspect the real reason many still reach for PHP first is because it is "easy" and PHP developers are ostensibly cheap and easy to replace. It's a false economy.

s0l1dsnak3123··on Fuck You Sunday
Remember folks: you don't hate Mondays, you hate capitalism.
s0l1dsnak3123··on The mystery of why one ant species goes after larger foes (2018)
You seem to equate slacking off with failure, when there's plenty of evidence to the contrary: https://blog.trello.com/slacking-off-speed-up-productivity

It's important to separate what we feel is productive work, from what will actually produce the most work on aggregate across society.

I think we can build a world where those who feel they need downward or lateral pressure to get things done can have this, but not at the expense of everyone else.

s0l1dsnak3123··on UK government’s plans to regulate the internet are a threat to free speech
Eloquently put, thank you. I happen to be a left-wing libertarian - when it comes to preference for utopian projects that is - and that informs my opinion of "the general direction things should go in", if you like. I like to make the distinction between left and right-wing libertarianism wherever possible.

When you look up on Wikipedia, you'll even find that "libertarianism originated as a form of left-wing politics such as anti-authoritarian and anti-state socialists like anarchists, especially social anarchists, but more generally libertarian communists/Marxists and libertarian socialists."

Another quick search, and you'll find that:

> Right-libertarianism, also known as libertarian capitalism or right-wing libertarianism, is a political philosophy and type of libertarianism that supports capitalist property rights and defends market distribution of natural resources and private property. The term right-libertarianism is used to distinguish this class of views on the nature of property and capital from left-libertarianism, a type of libertarianism that combines self-ownership with an egalitarian approach to natural resources. In contrast to socialist libertarianism, right-libertarianism supports free-market capitalism. Like most forms of libertarianism, it supports civil liberties, especially natural law, negative rights and a major reversal of the modern welfare state.

So I do think it's right to make the distinction between left-wing and right-wing libertarianism.

s0l1dsnak3123··on UK government’s plans to regulate the internet are a threat to free speech
Free Speech Union is a right-wing libertarian think tank headed by Toby Young, who has a bit of a reputation for being a clown. A good summary here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lv_kUE6t7n8
s0l1dsnak3123··on David Graeber has died
Meanwhile, the Tory party (The party which is in power) gets a free pass: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism_in_the_UK_Conse...

Corbynite Labour is the party you vote for to fight fascism and antisemitism. But instead media parrots like yourself prefer to ignore any nuance because - I suspect - it suits your conservative political ideology.

It’s destructive thought patterns like the ones you are displaying which have allowed Boris Johnson into power. I think you’ll find that if Jewish people in the UK (and I sincerely And truly hope this never, ever happens - to Jews, or any other vulnerable group) is ever treated like they have been in the past, it won’t be from people like Corbyn, it’ll be by people like Patel.

But, you know, you do you.

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