tomaytotomato

Github is not Git but I find the Squash and Merge functionality on Github's Pull Request system means I no longer need to worry about rebasing or squashing my commits locally before rebasing.

At work though it is still encouraged to rebase, and I have sometimes forgotten to squash and then had to abort, or just suck it up and resolve conflicts from my many local commits.

Seeing a lot of bullish AI posts today, it makes you wonder if its all a coincidence, or there is a coordinated hype campaign?

Antirez - https://antirez.com/news/158

Addy Osmani - https://addyosmani.com/blog/next-two-years/

I am rebooting a theme inspired by Deus Ex Human Revolution for various apps and tools.

A bit like DraculaTheme.com

https://tomaytotomato.github.io/jensen/

https://github.com/tomaytotomato/jensen

The plan is to get a Chrome and VSCode theme shipped this week.

"I never asked for this...."

The funding mechanism isn't really the point, its the product that comes after.

Sure, the EU contracts developers to build features they want, but when those requirements start coming from regulatory mandates rather than user needs, you're not just adding features to Ubuntu anymore.

You're forking it into something fundamentally different.

"EUbuntu"? :)

Look at how the EU handles tech regulations:

- GDPR a good thing on paper; with some terrible side effects - cookie banners, data bureacracy, walled gardens between US-EU websites.

- AI legislation; lets wait and see

- Digital sovereignty; fundamentally trying to gain access control for EU citizens data from Google and Apple.

Anyways, let's see what happens. Maybe I'm being too cynical and they'll just become savvy end-users of existing distros. But given the pattern, I'm not holding my breath.

With my original flippant comment I was trying to highlight that despite the many Opensource projects and the many awesome people who contribute to them, they should stay at arms length from EU and its legislators.

When legislators start getting involved they will want to inevitably have their "own" version of something and their own SLAs and contracts.

The reason they went with Microsoft/IBM/Oracle and others back in the day for software solutions is; they know on a piece of paper what they are getting, and who they can blame if they don't get it.

With Opensource OS and software, even with auditing and stuff, there is no way to blame anyone apart from end-users. For politicians and bureacracts, that is a scary thing, as they will be the ones to blame (read: asses on the line)

The consultation is great and all but I am skeptical, so I wouldn't be surprised in a few years we will have a EU approved OS that is controlled by bureaucracts.

Hence my comparison to North Korea's Linux distro

I think going by the timestamp of the article and checking the article on a couple of AI detectors, that this article has a low probability of being written by GPT.

More than likely just translation anomalies from Italian to English.

Maybe the EU can develop its own version of Linux OS, just like North Korea.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Star_OS

-- edit

When legislators start getting involved they will want to inevitably have their "own" version of something and their own SLAs and contracts.

The reason they went with Microsoft/IBM/Oracle and others back in the day for software solutions is; they know on a piece of paper what they are getting, and who they can blame if they don't get it.

With Opensource OS and software, even with auditing and stuff, there is no way to blame anyone apart from end-users. For politicians and bureacracts, that is a scary thing, as they will be the ones to blame (read: asses on the line)

The consultation is great and all but

As someone who has watched on the sidelines how Opensource governance turns projects into hydra monsters (Redhat, Jakarta EE). I wouldn't be surprised in a few years we will have a EU approved OS that is controlled by bureaucracts.

But who knows, maybe they will just become end users of a popular distro and other opensource software.

It's interesting to see the commentary on processed meat and inverting the pyramid. T

It feels a bit Orwellian in some way - Oceania is always the enemy, Saturated fat was never the enemy.

Meat is ok, I try and consume fish and chicken with the odd bit of beef, but the amount of chemicals that goes into processed meat like sliced ham would make a chemist blush.

I wrote a light hearted blog piece just before the new year on giving up processed meat if anyone is interested:

https://tomaytotomato.com/no-ham-anuary/

Also mandatory South Park clip:

https://youtu.be/fIGXkh6S8Zw

The title has a grammatical error in it. It should be, "How does a president become a dictator?"

I think the current "path" of AI will come to a dead end. Until we have AGI, we are just relying on specialised LLMs or other models as components to do various tasks; whether its guessing the next word or picking out objects from an image.

It's almost like we have various functional parts of a brain but not synapsed with some AI-bus. How do you build a performant API for that, which will be as good as a human?

Making a realism game mod to Battlefield 6, which recently came out.

If you have played military sim (Milsim) games like Project Reality, Squad or Arma you might appreciate it.

Its quite cool how the game devs have made a lot of tooling to use; they use Typescript to hook into in-game events and functions.

There is a whole community making lots of content too:- https://bfportal.gg/

Currently I am working on an insurgency game mode; where one team has to defend some caches and use guerilla tactics, whilst the other team has a smaller size but the advantage of firepower and vehicles.

Hopefully have it released by Christmas time.

Reject US car imports, instead let China flood the EU and UK with cheap and dangerous cars like BYD, Maxxus, Jaecoo, Chery etc.

It seems myopic for this group to go after American vehicles and the size of their market share in the EU and UK, whilst China guts our car market with a thousand cuts from the other side.

I could not find one negative article about China on their website, maybe it's not an area of focus for them (or they're bought out already)

https://etsc.eu/?s=china&submit=

As a Brit I am less worried about my VW Passat blowing up or having some wiretap back to Beijing, or locking me out of the car when the firmware defaults back to Mandarin.

I would say as well as using SDKMan, you should use Jenv shell plugin to easily manage your JDK versions across projects.

https://github.com/jenv/jenv

All you have to do is link your SDKMan binaries with Jenv and you can easily switch with one command.

Could someone remake the "MongoDB is webscale" skit with AI gen please?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs

Could npm adopt a reverse domain naming system similar to Java's for Maven libraries?

com.foo.bar

That would require domain verification, but it would add significant developer friction.

Also mandatory Dune reference:

"Bless the maker and his water"

Claude 4.5 - "Claude Flagged this input and didn't process it"

Gemma 3.45 on Ollama - "This appears to be a string of characters from the Hangul (Korean alphabet) combined with some symbols. It's not a coherent sentence or phrase in Korean."

GrokAI - "Uh-oh, too much information for me to digest all at once. You know, sometimes less is more!"

Reminds me of this scene in Silicon Valley

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjtr64ZQUWA

I've not got kids yet, but I do wonder if the best way to prepare them for the internet is by teaching them the many dangers by navigating it with them (scams, grooming, bullying, hacking)?

Indeed, Germany has a Raccoon problem

https://youtu.be/eq3brUMm3gA

Loved Splinter Cell

I wonder if any of the original devs will stumble upon the author's article and then remember why they did those weird file offsets.

There was a difference in the PC and Xbox versions, so it will be interesting to find out if the author sees any snippets or missing game assets in the Xbox version.

Agreed - a boiled egg is absolutely safe after a day. Had many I've "acquired" at hotel breakfast buffets, and left at the bottom of my backpack. Only to consume +1,+2 days later.

I think the author meant well with their security metaphor but overindulged in the classic overthinking engineer and food safety.

Github is currently encountering issues with Pushing and Pull from branches and other Git ops.

My first graduate job at a large British telco involved a lot of XML...

- WSDL files that were used to describe Enterprise services on a bus. These were then stored and shared in the most convoluted way in a Sharepoint page <shudders>

- XSD definitions of our custom XML responses to be validated <grimace>

- XSLTs to allow us to manipulate and display XML from other services, just so it would display properly on Oracle Siebel CRM <heavy sweats>

Random fact:

You only get stung by nettles around the edge of their leaves. You can touch the middle of the leaf and you won't get stung.

"Funds are safu"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DelF6zEHXpE

There was a proposal in Java a few years back to introduce "val".

I think it never gained traction but it would have been nice to have this in Java

    val firstName = "Bob";
    val lastName = "Tables";
    var fullName = "";

    fullName = firstName + " " + lastName;

There was a blog post on here the other day about moving back to bare metal hosting with practical explanations and problem solving.

Cloud is great but its just borrowing someone else's machine for a fee. It's like a hyper-scalable and granular mainframe but like all mainframes, the client is powerless without it.

We need to get our acts together and not allow ourselves to be smothered in silicon nimbus (clouds) and lose track of the open sky that is the internet.

I am not suggesting going back to the 2000s with a small tower PC under someone's desk with a blinking light running a business critical cron job.

Just that we need more appetite to take responsibility of our servers and systems. Yes it takes time to manage and get up to speed, but that's empowering right....?

Slack, Jira and Zoom are all sluggish for me in the UK

A family member lives on the Outer Hebrides of Scotland.

There is a community trust on one of the islands which has built wind turbines.

However it took about 2 years before they were certified and connected up to the grid, and rather disappointingly it hasn't made local prices cheaper.

The electricity is sold to the grid and that money goes to the community trust.

Which seems bureaucratic?

I wish we could have decentralized electrical grid generation.

(not an Electrical engineer)

Tinkering away on my opensource Java NLP library to parse text and find geographical information from it.

https://github.com/tomaytotomato/location4j

I think I am going to re-write the logic to calculate a score on all matches it makes from a given piece of text.

e.g.

"us ca" ---> is this "USA California" or "USA and Canada (CA ISO2 code)"?

"san jose usa" ---> is this "San Jose California, USA" or another San Jose in America

A bit uncanny and made me forget I was talking to an Artificial intelligence.

Your mileage may vary