tedchs

> Demand for engagement rings gave thousands of South Africans steady work at De Beers. Now, weak sales and lab-grown stones are taking it away.

So wait, on this Labor Day weekend, it sounds like the WSJ is pro-worker, but only if they're in South Africa?

How many more examples of malware postinstall scripts do we need before Node quits running them by default, without warning?

This is another indicator that "lifecycle" scripts in NPM (or other packaging systems, except perhaps Debian or RPM) are an idea we need to learn to live without. At most, packages should be able to emit a message to the user asking them to invoke a one-liner if a setup action is truly necessary.

As a side benefit, eliminating package scripts will contribute toward reproducibility of Docker and VM images.

I realize this will be a controversial opinion.

How does this compare to Temporal? That seems to be the current baseline for application-oriented workflow engines.

The "buy me a coffee" button at the end is :chefskiss:

I was excited about this idea, but based on the writing patterns and vague stories I'm pretty sure these writeups are mostly AI slop. For example, this is classic ChatGPT phrasing:

> The growth I’d been celebrating wasn’t real growth—it was just a spike of first-time buyers who never came back.

If I'm wrong, and these were actually written by a human, I'd love a chance to stand corrected and apologize.

My favorite section in an RFC is "alternatives considered". I've seen many times that an option that had been initially discarded became the solution after review and discussion. It's also a great way to answer later questions about "why didn't you do X instead".

Just imagine being the designer of this thing and sitting at Thanksgiving dinner with your family. "Oh, tedchs, what've you been up to at work?" "Okay well this is gonna sound odd but we invented a camera for your stool... No, not that stool... Yes, it clips onto the bowl..."

Is this announcement just about the gem and bundler packages themselves? I don't think Ruby core team is taking over the rubygems.org site right?

My question is, why can Google themselves not just provide a dump to archive.org themselves? Having volunteer middlemen doing the work seems like an artificial crisis.

I've used strings of Twinkly lights for a couple seasons now. They can sometimes be found on eBay for cheap. They're easy to set up, whether standalone or by clustering multiple units into one larger virtual canvas. The app has a lot of good looking animated patterns included.

Wow, what a great name!

I've had the reMarkable 2 for years and it's amazing. FYI, the reMarkable is itself quite hackable. There is a supported way to run an SSH server on it and push your own binaries and other files to use on the device. One example resource for hacks/mods is https://github.com/danielebruneo/remarkable2-hacks .

FYI you can use a universal infrared remote with Apple TV, which might have larger buttons or a more familiar interface. I have mixed feelings myself about the "touchpad" in the apple remote.

What I've found best is a compromise: send a chat message like "Hi foo, I hope you're having a good day! I'm trying to figure something out with Postgres and I wonder if you might have 30 minutes to chat about it?". As a remote worker, there is also a social cohesion upside to having a synchronous call sometimes.

They say this is the first time an ocelot has been spotted in 50 years, but I beg to differ. An ocelot is /always/ spotted.

I see. It's a different reading of the first word "from". Thanks for pointing that out.

The first line has two errors. First, 9/11 was on a Tuesday. Saying it was a Sunday is just foolish, as it happened at the start of a busy workday. Many of us still remember it like it was yesterday. Also, the line says 2011.

Further question - how do we know these intercepts are authentic?

> From 3AM on Sunday September 11, 2011

I did this, around 2005, but I dropped ALL the prod tables. I was using a SQL GUI called Toad (awesome) and had separate windows open, for both "dev" and "prod". I was trying to reset the dev database, and used the wrong window. Thankfully, the "real" DBA at the time had 15-minute backups, and was able to restore it, and then I replayed a few transactions from logs. Lesson learned!

> While building a feature, we performed a database migration command locally, but it incorrectly pointed to the production environment instead, which dropped all tables in production.

This page has helpful comparisons: https://pkl-lang.org/main/current/introduction/comparison.ht...

This is a clever hack. However, if the intent is serious use, I'd be concerned about resiliency. It sounds like the schedule is maintained in Home Assistant, and that it sends a command to the ESP8266 to dispense food. That means a ton of moving parts have to all be working, otherwise the cat doesn't eat: Home Assistant's server and power source, Wi-Fi, and the $1 microcontroller.

If this is intended for serious usage, i.e. the cat won't eat if it fails to dispense, a different design would be more resilient: maybe still define the schedule in Home Assistant or another control plane, but then have it "push" the whole schedule to the device. The device will also need time sync and a realtime clock. Then, the device manages its scheduled dispensation autonomously, even if the network or control plane are unavailable. And, the dispenser should have a little battery so it can run for a couple days with the power out.

I sold a car to Vroom previously. It was a great experience, with a very easy process. And, I got a very strong price, thousands more than other online dealers. It's a shame to see them out of business.

Fwiw, when I've forgotten to cancel something, I've had success saying something like "I was checking my credit card statement and was surprised I'm still paying for X. I haven't used it at all since Y date. Would it be possible to have a refund, perhaps partial, since then, for $xx?". Basically I make it easy for them to say yes.

We've been using gVisor in production for customer workloads for about a year and a half. Works great!

OTOH, lots of babies wouldn't have been conceived at all if it weren't for a little booze! </joke>

I tried signing up and got an error:

Template render error: (/root/email.radio_admin/views/applied.njk) [Line 32, Column 54] Error: Unable to call `date["getFullYear"]`, which is undefined or falsey at Object._prettifyError (/root/email.radio_admin/node_modules/nunjucks/src/lib.js:32:11) at /root/email.radio_admin/node_modules/nunjucks/src/environment.js:464:19 at Template.root [as rootRenderFunc] (eval at _compile (/root/email.radio_admin/node_modules/nunjucks/src/environment.js:527:18), <anonymous>:21:3) at Template.render (/root/email.radio_admin/node_modules/nunjucks/src/environment.js:454:10) at /root/email.radio_admin/node_modules/nunjucks/src/environment.js:301:27 at createTemplate (/root/email.radio_admin/node_modules/nunjucks/src/environment.js:254:9) at handle (/root/email.radio_admin/node_modules/nunjucks/src/environment.js:265:11) at /root/email.radio_admin/node_modules/nunjucks/src/environment.js:276:9 at next (/root/email.radio_admin/node_modules/nunjucks/src/lib.js:258:7) at Object.asyncIter (/root/email.radio_admin/node_modules/nunjucks/src/lib.js:263:3)

> Chocolate [...] Is a popular treat eaten by children and adults and not an essential part of a someone’s diet

Well that's just, like, your opinion, man.

FYI, there are various other front-ends for NMVTIS data here: https://vehiclehistory.bja.ojp.gov/nmvtis_vehiclehistory

This is a big relief. I have a Samsung Chromebook Plus that still works fine and I like the form factor. I recently got notified that ChromeOS updates were EOL, so I reformatted it with PostmarketOS, an Alpine Linux derivative. Installing was easy, and I want to like it, but it almost works. It has no sound, won't play videos, and the touchscreen behavior is janky.

I hope his funeral has a slide presentation with some amazing animations and sound effects! :)