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ajorgensen

80 karma · joined December 18, 2014

https://aj.codes
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ajorgensen··on 2400 phone providers may be shut down by the FCC for failing to stop robocalls
I recently did the same thing, as 95% of my incoming call volume in a week was spam calls. It's been great. The friction I feel is when interacting with ephemeral contacts like contractors, etc. I've had to try to be diligent about adding them as contacts if I expect a call back, or hoping they leave a voicemail.

It's sad there really isn't much you can do about it. I tried do-not-call lists, answering and telling them to stop calling me, reporting them - all was apparently a waste of time.

ajorgensen··on The Rules of Programming (2023)
1000%. The number of times I’ve tried to go straight to the correct well factored abstraction and it worked out are countable on one hand. This is one of those pieces of advise that I know to be true yet it takes continuous effort to enact.
ajorgensen··on Why I use Firefox
Oh interesting. I actually find custom docs sites (mermaid.js was the most recent one for me) seem to be the ones that break most commonly for me in Firefox but work in Chrome and Safari.
ajorgensen··on Why I use Firefox
The most recent ones that I ran into seem to have been fixed based on a quick check. mermaid.js docs site was one of them where nothing on the page was clickable (I think Firefox was rendering an invisible div over the entire page) but this issue wasn't present in Chrome or Safari. That appears to have been fixed. Examples are hard to provide since they almost always get fixed but in the moment its enough pain to always get me to drop Firefox.
ajorgensen··on Why I use Firefox
I unfortunately do not have a running list. The one that made me drop Firefox last time was the mermaid.js docs site. None of the sidebar navigation was clickable but only on Firefox, the same issue did not appear on Safari or Chrome. It appears they have since fixed that issue as I retested and it appears fine.

The "give me examples" is sort of a moving target, anecdotally I have run into many more completely or partially broken sites when using Firefox as compared to Chrome and Safari. It is likely that some or all of those examples are now fixed but the pain in the moment is enough to keep me from using the browser long term.

ajorgensen··on Why I use Firefox
I have tried to switch quite a few times over the years to Firefox and I still to this day consistently run into websites that are unusably broken on Firefox, do you have the same experience? I realize this probably speaks volumes to the need for more people to use browsers other than Chrome but its unfortunately frequent enough that I always end up switching back to Chrome after a few months.
ajorgensen··on “What If Linus Torvalds Gets Hit by a Bus?” – An Empirical Study (2000)
I was recently introduced to the “lottery factor” as a less morbid alternative. As in, if one of us won the lottery tomorrow and quit on the spot what would happen.
ajorgensen··on Twitter is threatening to sue Meta over Threads [pdf]
I would venture to guess that 80%+ of the handles are the same on both, enough for the graph to be useful especially for the more popular accounts. If not I bet there’s enough other metadata to do a decent job of mapping them it doesn’t have to be perfect just good enough to get the recommendation engine going. At least enough to bootstrap a recommendation algorithm that is geared more toward primary accounts that create text based content.
ajorgensen··on Twitter is threatening to sue Meta over Threads [pdf]
I'd estimate less than 25% overlap between my social graph on Twitter and Meta so building a account recommendation system based on my graph from Twitter would be mighty useful. Again this was a just a thought experiment based on two temporally related events and specific wording in a letter nothing more. Of course its on them to prove it.
ajorgensen··on Twitter is threatening to sue Meta over Threads [pdf]
I'm not sure I follow. I'd estimate there's less than a 25% overlap between my Twitter social graph and my Meta (instagram + facebook) social graph. If I was going to build a system to recommend accounts to follow it sure would be handy to know what accounts you followed on the platform most related to the one I'm building. Again I have 0 evidence of anything as I've said and of course its on Musk's team to prove it but just thought the timing and specific wording chosen in the letter was interesting.
ajorgensen··on Twitter is threatening to sue Meta over Threads [pdf]
I'm not arguing that... I'm saying that my follower graph for facebook (mostly family) and instagram (mostly friends and diy etc) looks very different than my Twitter graph because the use cases are very different. I would say there is less than 25% overlap between my Twitter social graph and my Meta social graph. If I was bootstrapping a platform like Twitter it would be nice to be able to recommend accounts to follow based on a similar platform (Twitter). Again I have no evidence of anything here... it was literally just two temporally related events that seemed interesting.
ajorgensen··on Twitter is threatening to sue Meta over Threads [pdf]
100% I think this is the most likely case. I just noticed a couple things, explicit follower graph/following data called out in the letter and the timing and abruptness of the rate limiting change that made me think there's a chance there's more going on behind the scenes. Total conjecture of course but thought the two data points were interesting.
ajorgensen··on Twitter is threatening to sue Meta over Threads [pdf]
Totally... the only thing I can be convinced of is my Twitter social graph looks quite different from my Instagram and Facebook graphs. The letter explicitly calls out follower graph and following data which is the only reason why I would even entertain this as a even remotely plausible theory.
ajorgensen··on Twitter is threatening to sue Meta over Threads [pdf]
I disagree... follower graph would be pretty important to bootstrap a Twitter like experience. My follower graph on Twitter looks quite different than Instagram or Facebook. The letter also explicitly calls out follower graph and following data which is why I mention it.
ajorgensen··on Reddit Doubles Down
Really? Maybe I'm in an A/B test but on mobile for me every page load pops up a dialog that says "this looks better in the app" and they only load a limited number of comments and gate the rest behind the app.

Apollo was by far the best reddit browsing experience on mobile and it seems like the API price was a direct action to shut these third party experiences down knowing their experience was sub par.

Are you using old.reddit.com by chance? If so I have a sneaking suspicious that's going to go away in due time.

ajorgensen··on Be Careful Using Tmux and Environment Variables
Yeah that makes sense. To me it felt unintuitive that environment was global and only copied on server start, with a few exceptions, and not session start but that was likely just a failure in my mental model of how tmux worked.
ajorgensen··on Be Careful Using Tmux and Environment Variables
Yes that should work. In our case we have a few different windows/panes that all want the same environment so it made sense to reach for export as a way to ensure the environment was set but then ran into this quirk of tmux
ajorgensen··on Be Careful Using Tmux and Environment Variables
At least to me, it seemed most intuitive to not have a global server environment and always copy the environment when starting a new session not just on server start and have the existing behavior when attaching to a session.
ajorgensen··on Be Careful Using Tmux and Environment Variables
hahah you caught me!
ajorgensen··on Be Careful Using Tmux and Environment Variables
OP here. Apologies for not providing the real world example that triggered the behavior but here's some more background: We have some make tasks that set up a local dev environment and rely on environment variables to control a few things. We ran into an issue where if someone started another tmux session and then ran the make task to start the dev environment the env vars wouldn't be set correctly causing some confusing behavior.

Ultimately we decided to use a named tmux socket to ensure the environment variables were picked up correctly when set via the make task but you can also use `set-environment` as well if the ergonomics hit of having to use the named socket each time is too much. It's nice that tmux provides a few work arounds but I thought the original behavior was not intuitive.

ajorgensen··on Be Careful Using Tmux and Environment Variables
OP here. We have some make tasks that set up a local dev environment and rely on environment variables to control a few things. We ran into an issue where if someone started another tmux session and then ran the make task to start the dev environment the env vars wouldn't be set correctly causing some confusing behavior.
ajorgensen··on Minimum Viable Hugo
I think the intent of OP was to help people get setup with Hugo so your comment is pretty off topic. Yes you could set up php, elm, a full lamp stack, rails, heck you dont even need nginx to serve a static .html file but none of that will help someone get setup with Hugo if that's what they want to use for static site generation.
ajorgensen··on YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki is stepping down
ah, good point. I thought when this originally came out the data was still available via api call but it appears thats not the case anymore, or possibly never was.

From the FAQ

> Where does the extension get its data?

> A combination of archived data from before the offical YouTube dislike API shut down, and extrapolated extension user behavior.

ajorgensen··on YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki is stepping down
I've been using this chrome extension [1] and actually forgot they removed the dislike button.

[1]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/return-youtube-dis...

ajorgensen··on Code reviews need to shift-left
Having the “why” in the same place as the code I think is critically important. Who knows what ticketing system you’ll use in the future, it’s fine to link to but it shouldn’t be where all the context is stored.

If you think about a pull request as a story you have who, what, where, when, and why. Most tools handle the first 4 but the why is critically important to anyone, including yourself, who needs to understand the nuance of the change that can’t easily be expressed by the code itself without a novel size comment block.

I find that a lot of times people forget the “why” when submitting a change set and simply restate the “what”. At the time you make the change it’s all fresh in your mind and you trick yourself into believing you’ll remember all the details but in reality that’s no my experience.

ajorgensen··on Bitwarden design flaw: Server side iterations
oof me too thanks for the nudge to check!
ajorgensen··on CircleCI security alert: Rotate any secrets stored in CircleCI
I received an email to my inbox but a few of my colleague did not.
ajorgensen··on The quest for a family-friendly password manager
Full disclosure I haven't used 1Password in a while and I have limited experience sharing vaults. That being said Bitwarden just worked™. It was easy to set up a shared space. The iOS app is good, the plugins are good, all around solid. The open source nature is nice, I can run my own vault if I wanted to. So the tldr is that it hit the right balance between portability, ease of use, and price to be the right choice.
ajorgensen··on The quest for a family-friendly password manager
Bitwarden has worked really well for me and my wife to share passwords to common services (daycare, shared email, etc) and it has been well worth the money. I've used 1Password and LastPass in the past but Bitwarden has been the best experience I've had thusfar.
ajorgensen··on Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended
oh yes the how and whether its actually a product people want or not are huge open questions that haven't been answered, at least not externally and seemingly not internally as well.
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