yallpendantools

Which just begs the question, how much can you really change social media? How much are you really in control of your feed? This is where the "pubic square" analogy breaks down. Besides, there are a lot of communication mediums/messaging apps that are not social media.

Even back in the early 2010s I've been trying to consume social media mindfully. I made sure to follow pages with meaningful content (e.g., The Dalai Lama, The Long Now Foundation, Aeon Magazine, tech-related pages, SpaceX, Elon Musk, indie creators). I don't just add or follow blindly.

Back then I could justify why my selection was "good" but even then, they were drowned out by the tedium of vacations, new restaurants, felt-cute-might-delete-later selfies. Slop/engagement bait is quicker to produce than meaningful thought-provoking content.

I am also pretty sure Facebook's negative signals (unfollow, don't show me this type of content) did not work back then, at least not deterministically. If something I did not like had enough traction, it will still pop up in my feed.

And of course, goes without saying that a lot of my choices aged like milk. Elon Musk turned out to be, well, Elon Musk. Some of the tech pages started shilling out crypto (and nowadays doubtless AI). The indie creators either stopped posting or fell out of favor with the algorithm which meant exodus from the platform. All that goes on top of my pre-existing grievances against my feed recommendations.

I'm just getting an anti-bot filter page then an age verification and then nothing.

"Well actually..."

As the word-setter this might be an own-goal. As a word guesser, a random haphazard tactic might get you the word.

I'll Monte-Carlo my point but I have a warm bath tub waiting...

That's a mischaracterization of TFA's point. Your re-phrase makes it sound like the proposal is for filthy-rich Microsoft to pocket additional bucks from other people's open source work. Ostensibly, yes, Microsoft will be doing such action but the spirit of TFA is more like for Microsoft to act as a tax collector and, crucially, redistribute the collected tax back to the community---the money will not add to Microsoft's $3.4T-worth coffers!

Naturally this comment isn't a "fuck yes!" to the idea of Microsoft-as-tax-collector but if we're discussing TFA, let's not be needlessly cynical to the idea presented.

In fairness TFA:

> Hence, a solution. Or an idea, really. Incredibly half-baked. Poke all the holes you want. It’s very unwrought and muy unripe.

I'm no expert when it comes to software packaging and distribution issues but this does give off Internet-Archive-as-CDN levels of Hyrum's Law for me. What could possibly go wrong hmmmmmm....

Can someone please ELI5 what this means for Deno and Python? TFA: "deno is being distributed on pypi for use in python projects" makes it sound like you can now `import deno` and have a JS engine/subsystem in Python, like we finally came full circle from [PyScript](https://pyscript.net/).

However, other comments make it sound like a bunch of other projects have discovered that PyPI is a good distribution channel. Which, to me, sounds like using the Internet Archive as your CDN. Is PyPI the next apt/yum/brew or what?

https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/issues/15530 for those interested to check/chime in.

yt-dlp was also the first application that came to my mind. I got my fingers crossed for this integration. It was interesting to learn how to hijack my own cookies but, nonetheless, rather uncomfortable to say the least.

Colophon:

> this site is built with Eleventy and Sass, and uses ~no JavaScript~ a very small amount of JavaScript for the House of Leaves post.

So, HoL confirmed.

Happy New Year my friend and welcome to this wonderful world: https://raytracing.github.io/books/RayTracingInOneWeekend.ht...

I've been driving for about a year (with my first car too) when I drove a bunch of friends to an out-of-town amusement park. It's some kind of car-warming thing for me. It's about an hour-long drive without traffic.

In the park, I made it a hard point not to ride the bumper cars because I thought it would mess with my muscle-memory as the designated driver. If not for that, I really love bumper cars. However, I've found that responsiveness of bumper cars vary a lot per park; it either depends on the maintenance or the maker of the rides. And IME, none of them are really comparable to even the shittiest cars I've driven (e.g., the ones from the driving school, the assigned car for my license test).

But my bigger concern that day was the fact that the bumper car mindset is not the roadcar driver mindset. For learners, the free-for-all chaotic nature of the track is not even a good simulation! Not even if you're driving somewhere like India or China.

Speaking of simulation, I really want an affordable but legit way to practice dealing with outlier driving scenarios. Like, what if my brake fails in the highway, what if I get a flat while doing 100KPH---stuff even the safest, most defensive drivers can't entirely rule out. Anyone know of games that might fit the bill?

I think this is well covered by his first line:

> the main thing you need is free time and obsession (and money for your free time btw).

Free time (and money for your free time) is a privilege not everyone may have had. Also, access to computers which, don't forget, has only become ubiquitous this century, and sadly not always in the form that might encourage experimentation. Without getting too much into the Nature-Nurture debate, talent and obsession sadly won't go anywhere without the proper environment to cultivate it. You don't become Bellard/Knuth/Dijkstra with just a bunch of rocks[1] and a whole host of other concerns on top.

[1] https://xkcd.com/505/

> If that's an issue (visibility into middle layers) it just means your events aren't wide enough.

I hate this kind of No-True-Scotsman handwaves for how a certain approach is supposed to solve my problems. "If brute-force search is not solving all your problems, it just means your EC2 servers are not beefy enough."

I gotta admit, I don't quite "get" TFA's point and the one issue that jumped out at me while reading it and your comment is that sooner than later your wide events just become fat, supposedly-still-human-readable JSON dumps.

I think a machine-parseable log-line format is still better than wide events, each line hopefully correlated with a request id though in practice I find that user id + time correlation isn't that bad either.

>> [TFA] Wide Event: A single, context-rich log event emitted per request per service. Instead of 13 log lines for one request, you emit 1 line with 50+ fields containing everything you might need to debug.

I am not convinced this is supposed to help the poor soul who has to debug an incident at 2AM. Take for example a function that has to watch out for a special kind of user (`isUserFoo`) where "special kind" is defined as a metric on five user attributes. I.e.,

    lambda isUserFoo(u): u.isA && (u.isB || u.isC) && (u.isD || u.isE)

With usual logging I might find

    <timestamp> : <function> : {"level": "INFO", "requestID": "xxxaaa", "msg": "user is foo"}

Which immediately tells me that foo-ness is something I might want to pay attention to in this context.

With wide events, as I understand it, either you log the user in the wide event dump with attributes A to E (and potentially more!) or coalesce these into a boolean field `isUserFoo`. None of which tells me that foo-ness might be something that might be relevant in this context.

Multiply that with all the possible special-cases any logging unit might have to deal with. There's bar-ness which is also dependent on attributes A-E but with different logical connectives. There's baz-ness which is `isUserFoo(u) XOR (217828 < u.zCount < 3141592)`. The wide event is soooo context-rich I'm drowning.

> But creating and picking those placeholders used to be somebody's job, maybe a junior artist.

Is it really though? After all it's just maybe a junior artist.

I've had to work with some form of asset pipeline for the past ten years. The past six in an actual game though not AAA. In all these years, devs have had the privilege of picking placeholders when the actual asset is not yet available. Sometimes, we just lift it off Google Images. Sometimes we pick a random sprite/image in our pre-existing collection. The important part is to not let the placeholder end up in the "finished" product.

> It's up to the Indie Game Awards to decide the criteria.

True and I'm really not too fond of GenAI myself but I can't be arsed to raise a fuss over Sandfall's admission here. As I said above, the line for me is to not let GenAI assets end up in the finished product.

> it's impossible to have this discussion with someone who will not touch generative AI tools with a 10 foot pole.

Why? Would you say the same if the topic was about recreational drugs? Or, to bring it closer to home, if the topic was about social media?

I think you're being disingenuous by making the analogy to religious people refusing to read a certain book. A book is a foundational source of information. OTOH, one can be informed about GenAI without having used GenAI; you can study the math behind the model, the transformer architecture, etc---the foundational sources of information on this topic. If our goal is to "drop the politics, and discuss things on their technical merits" well I don't see how it can get more purely technical than that.

This. My personal daily driver of a laptop has a collage on it. My work-issued laptop is a lot cleaner but it has a small red sticker declaring it to be "Editor's Choice Bestseller of the Month".

Several years ago, it was new laptop day at the startup I worked for. We didn't have an office as much as a coworking space. When people went to lunch, they just left their new MBAs on this big communal table. Some shut the lid, some didn't even lock the screen but those would've been taken care of in ~5min.

Anyway, I may or may not have switched some laptops around but the point is someone definitely did. Half an hour later people returned. Some of them were instantly confused. Some of them entered a wrong password a couple of times. Some of them were greeted by an unfamiliar Google Chrome window.

I may or may not have wasted a collective forty or so man-minutes in the span of five but I definitely enjoyed watching the confusion unfold.

I'm glad you mentioned nuclear power plants because this whole topic reminded me of the following clause in the Java SE license:

> You will not use the Programs for, and will not allow the Programs to be used for, any purposes prohibited by applicable law, including, without limitation, for the development, design, manufacture or production of nuclear, chemical or biological weapons of mass destruction. > > https://www.oracle.com/downloads/licenses/javase-license1.ht...

IANAL but I've come to interpret this as something along the lines of "You can't use a JDK-based language to develop nuclear weapons". I would even go as far as saying don't use JDK-based languages in anything related to nuclear energy (like, for example, administration of a nuclear power plant) because that could indirectly contribute to the development, design, manufacture or production of nuclear WMD.

And I always wondered how they plan to enforce this clause. At least with ChatGPT (and I didn't look any deeper into this beyond the article) you can analyze API calls/request IPs correlated with prompts. But how will one go about proving that the Republic of Wadiya didn't build their nuclear arsenal with the help of any JDK-based language?

Those are rhetorical questions, of course. What's "unnecessary" to you and "unenforceable" to me is a cover-your-ass clause that lets lawyers sleep soundly at night.

The difference is a lot of "computer education" (as opposed to computing education most in this forum have) has happened with GUIs. "Simple" CLI tools doesn't mean they're understandable or even user-friendly.

Heck, even computing education (and the profession even!) has been propped up by GUIs. After my first year in CS, there were like only three to five of us in a section of forty to fifty who could compile Java from the command line, who would dare edit PATH variables. I'm pretty sure that number didn't improve by much when we graduated. A lot of professionals wouldn't touch a CLI either. I'm not saying they are bad programmers but fact of the matter is there are competent professional programmers who pretty much just expect a working machine handed to them by IT and then expect DevOps to fix Jenkins when it's borked out.

Remember: HN isn't all programmers. There are more out there.

> But, if we assume the user has never seen a graphical application before, then likely all GUI tools will be useless too.

We don't even need to assume, we just need to look at history. GUIs came with a huge amount of educational campaigning behind it, be it corporate (i.e., ads/training programs that teach users how to use their products) or even government campaigns (i.e., computer literacy classes, computer curriculum integrated at school). That's of course followed by man-years upon man-years of usability studies and the bigger vendors keeping consistent GUI metaphors across their products.

Before all of this, users did ask the questions that you enumerated and certain demographics still do to this day.

> Of all of that, CLI tools rely on some of the least amount of assumptions by their nature - they're low fidelity, forced to be simple.

"Everything should be made simple, but not simpler." Has it occurred to you that maybe CLI tools assume too little?

Not to be needlessly cynical but I'd really like an official citation for that :)

Another question in my head is whether they had to license Snoopy from the estate of Schulz (or whoever holds the rights the Peanuts gang).

ETA that unsnap_biceps just answered my questions.

WP has corporate momentum/network effect though, in the same way that Jira, Jenkins, and Java (among other things) have.

For a long time now WP no longer just caters to the hacker "Code is Poetry" crowd---and, of course, even less so nowadays with the controversies WP has embroiled itself with. The people who are inclined to choose WP by default do so because of the wealth of plugins available to them, be that Shopify integration or fine-grained tracking of a marketing campaign. They would wonder why someone would ever prefer something "headless". They think static websites are the dinosaurs the Y2K comet wiped out.

Sure we can argue about whether WP is the "best solution" but WP is definitely the solution that works acceptably out-of-the-box. Your CMS of choice probably has a bunch of out-of-the-box solutions for common concerns as well but I doubt that it can handle the edge cases that Head of Marketing will inevitably introduce with their ol' reliable set of integrated services. Shopify + Google Analytics + Salesforce + Airtable[1] always worked for them with WP but suddenly this allegedly-better "headless" CMS is throwing all sorts of dumb errors.

And if a plugin is not available, there is no shortage of WP/PHP developers who can make one at a reasonable price. In contrast, I'm sorry, but honestly your comment is the first time I've heard about Strapi and Astro.

I'm not saying I like the status quo but if someone asks me for a WP site, I give them a hardened EC2 box with WP over Apache/NGINX. Then I return to frying bigger fish.

[1] Just an example.

Folks, read yourself some GDPR for the greater good. Even just https://gdpr-info.eu/art-4-gdpr/

Public data can be personal data and anyone doing the same as TFA is making itself a liable processor. But, aren't you a processor by using OAuth in the first place? Yes but with what TFA is doing you have a greater liability surface.

(IANAL but I cite GDPR because the broad concepts apply to data privacy laws in other jurisdictions. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brussels_effect)

Haha. I honestly don't know. Which makes him...a great entertainer at least? The show was a real good time though.

Take this with lots of salt but I read somewhere that circus shows "fail" at least one jump to help sell to the audience the risk the performers are taking. My friend did flub his opening trick with a cheeky see-I-told-you and we just laughed it off.

He incorporated the audience a lot that night so I thought the stand-up comedy claim was his insurance policy. In his hour-long set he flubbed maybe two or three tricks.

I have a friend who does magic shows. He sells his shows as magic and stand-up comedy. It's both live entertainment, okay, but he is the only person I've ever seen use that tagline. We went to see him perform once and everything became clear when he opened the night.

"This is supposed to be a magic show," he told us. "But if my tricks fail you can laugh at it and we'll just do stand-up comedy."

Zuck, for a modest and totally-reasonable fee, I will introduce you to my friend. You can add his tricks (wink wink) to your newly-assembled repertoire of human charisma.

Hey. I think we all accept that all companies are inevitably fallible. What companies can be consistently good at---but very few take the effort to excel at sadly---is customer support communication. Honestly, reading TFA, it's still conceivable that putting Hack Club in the wrong pricing tier was an honest error on your part, but the communication was horrible to say the least. As others already pointed out, seven days to pay-up or your data goes poof sounds more like ransomware than a company trying to meet a customer half way.

And ofc, it has C-level attention now because it blew up on HN. Sorry but this screams damage limitation. For every Hack Club, you wonder which other non-profits suffered this "mistake" but didn't have the social media reach to get C-level treatment.

(Speaking as someone who spent this week being gaslit by Amazon and Google support. :mad: )

> this is something you learn like day 1 on learning java, and it's something you write once in a blue moon, like 0.001% of the code you are going to write.

I think this is the exact audience for this change: for newbies in day 1 of 10 years in their programming journey. Less boilerplate to just swallow, less time spent debugging an otherwise-fine lab exercise if not for the wrong instantiation of Scanner, more time actually focusing on the basics they should be focusing on.

Granted, I still think Java is a horrible first language to learn from or teach with but this is a step in the right direction. Might revisit this opinion in a few years, who knows.

Oh also, we use Java in production so we also have a bunch of ad-hoc "scripts" written in Java for mostly one-off interactions. Nonetheless, these scripts can get unwieldy fast. You'd think I'm exaggerating the benefit here but I, for one, welcome one less level of indentation in these scripts.

If you quit (because of, say, RTO) then you quit. It's a fairly standard deal between you and your employer.

If you get laid-off, employer has to give you a severance package for any number of reasons (local labor laws, agreement with the union, corporate PR). This is not a standard deal and is, simply put, more expensive than if the employee just quit of their own accord.

In both cases, employer gets the benefit of reduced head count.

Amazing! Thanks for sharing.

The farthest I got in the ICPC was regionals. I was tasked to make the team binder. I was a budding LaTeX enthusiast then but our coach wanted me to do it in...MS Word. Not that he didn't know LaTeX either (he's a published math/CS researcher after all), it's just the cultural ubiquity and comfort of MS Word. :(

The result was something more like https://github.com/ludopulles/tcr/blob/master/TCR-Sudo.pdf . I love how information-dense tcr.pdf looks in comparison. They even have a table of contents!

Preach. Shout out to the be/st bank in Germany, Commerzbank. They advertise being reachable 24h a day[1] but all day you gotta go through a chatbot first and beyond core hours there isn't a human at the end of the line. Worse, they don't tell you what their actual core hours are so if you are calling at, say, 9:00, you could be suckered into waiting on the line for the next hour for an actual human agent. You could call 16:01 on a Friday not realizing that the next opportunity to talk to a human agent is at 10:00 the next Monday.

Okay, the last one is a stretch but people worried about their money are desperate. Not to go all radical all of a sudden here but fact of the matter is banks hold a lot of power over your average guy. The least that they could do is show some respect for your time.

[1] See: https://web.archive.org/web/20250617083138/https://www.comme... and even the actual page as of this writing.

As a fellow fountain-pen enthusiast, I highly doubt this idea that the pen (and especially the nib) becomes "tuned" to your writing. I think it's either [a] placebo effect or [b] the other way around---the hand becomes "tuned" to the pen---or [c] it's more about the other parts of the pen (e.g., body, feed), and rarely, if ever at all, the nib.

> This is a very hard alloy engineered to resist wear and tear.

> As the user writes, this tipping material starts to get polished.

"Polish" is making a surface more even than before either by [a] filling it in with substance so that the depressions in the surface becomes level with the peaks or [b] filing away (i.e., introducing wear) at the surface so that the peaks become level with the depressions.

Either way, I don't see how it can be achieved with writing. Paper and ink doesn't have anything that can achieve [a] nor is it enough to achieve [b]---even over time---otherwise the nib isn't made of alloy that can resist wear and tear.

I'm prepared to wager that a well-used but well-cared for nib isn't gonna exhibit a more polished angle. It could tarnish. It could build-up a patina. Maybe it could have some chemical residues from previous inks. But to have a significant and highly-localized deviation from when it was brand-new, I highly doubt it.

Another part of my hypothesis is that you don't actually keep the pen at the same angle everytime you write. You still produce the same(ish) handwriting but writing angle is easily affected by external factors. In other words, the writer compensates for these external factors subconsciously in order to produce the same handwriting. E.g., I write differently on my journal vs. if I'm filling out a form. I write differently when I'm jotting down notes in a meeting vs. something more deliberate. I might adjust angles if the paper has a different texture, or if the ink isn't drying as quickly. I would write differently on my desk at home vs. a hotel room desk. Heck, I write differently at the start, middle, and end of a journal.

I'm just saying this because I think people could stress over fountain pens over what is basically superstition and there's already plenty to think of when using fountain pens. It won't change your pen's "attunement" if you lend it for friends to try occasionally. Conversely, don't be afraid to give second-hand pens a try just because the previous owner's writing style might be too different from yours.

> A job this week is no guarantee, legally or practically, of a job next week.

If this is the case, I'm just gonna sit on my ass this week and take my paycheck. If there is no long term assurance, why should I even try?