bemusedthrow75

The thing that I think PHP developers hate most about the Fractal of Bad Design article is hearing it from full-stack JS developers. They really do not have the moral high ground.

PHP has improved since in a way that is rarely considered when reposting it, but JS has some deep language horrors of its own still, and many novel JS horrors like NPM have emerged largely since the Fractal article was published.

As the King sang, so eloquently: o/~ clean up your own backyard o/~

Mmm. It really depends on whether you have the scope to start your projects and stay in control.

This is absolutely a problem.

It's now a powerful, fast, flexible platform with a load of amazing libraries and tools -- graphql, webhooks, databases, all sorts. There's an amazing level of recent PHP support out there you can host on.

And then there are the terrible applications, written from inadequate specs, in a hurry, by people who just aren't developers. And they are embedded, and people want them fixed.

You have to have a knack for, and some enjoyment from, that work.

The worst I have encountered is a Wordpress site built by some people who did not know Wordpress could do several important things, so they'd subverted the loop, ignored where they could hook, and embedded wordpress outside the loop to do stuff, which was a nightmare.

The second worst was, it must be said, a Laravel app, but that problem wasn't the PHP so much (though it had been written in a hurry with an awful lot of duplication that we could have refactored out), it was the unreliable assumptions made about MySQL default result ordering.

Which is actually the secondary problem here: people who make bad PHP decisions usually make bad SQL, email and HTTP decisions too.

If building your own thing from scratch, or starting a new project, etc., PHP is a blast now, actually. But the very old things... not so much.

Indeed.

Also, I have been looking for GraphQL implementations for other server-side languages recently and I have yet to encounter a schema-first implementation that comes close to what the Lighthouse layer for Laravel can do.

That is really productive.

This SQL is definitely supervillain territory.

I just can't decide if you're a sci-fi supervillain, a political thriller supervillain, or a Despicable Me supervillain.

;-)

> Opened in macOS and it appears impossible to open a folder of any sort. I type the folder path into the Open Folder thing at the top and it just silently fails.

That sounds like it could be Lapce failing to handle macOS full disk/folder security permissions (which you can grant in the System Preferences app)

Hm, except high action is also a positive choice for some, not an inherent problem.

(Though I like the attempt at an analogy and I see how it works for you at least)

I am a high-action player —- I know I know, a monster! (but also a brass and heavy glass slide player)

You are a data point for the notion I mention in my own reply to the parent that keyboard-only navigators might be feeling this more than mouse/trackpad users. Which seems likely to me.

I have a sneaking feeling that the people who use only their keyboards to navigate are the ones who really notice latency in e.g. VSCode.

I navigate with the trackpad on a Mac and seem not to ever feel it, but I know others do not like this way of working, which is fair enough.

Lapce is interesting to me for other reasons: it is one of the few[0] GUI text editors with a remote dev option that matches what VSCode can do. And it might have a smaller footprint on the remote machine/in the container while doing it.

VSC’s remote dev support is very nearly non-negotiable for me now, so I say more power to them; I intend to try it again properly soon.

[0] there is another editor that was mentioned here recently that can achieve this with a plugin, but I forget the name

Update: Zed is that editor.

Hell is having to debug perl scripts you wrote yourself long enough ago that you've forgotten and the developers of the packages you depend on have literally died of old age.

Because you have only yourself to blame.

It's a sketch of a thought at the moment.

But I am, well, mid-life at best, and the only crisis I am experiencing is that I think much of what I have done for years is worth less than I would have hoped.

I think it is ironic that technology seems to serve people less and less (and advertisers more and more) at just exactly the same time as every possible piece of technology is falling in price and increasing in availability.

Want to make a small device with a colour LCD display, buttons, an entirely custom enclosure, a rechargeable battery and a custom PCB? The cost of doing that has never been lower. Even if you only want one.

Want to give some tool a comfortable handgrip for accessibility reasons that needs to be parametrically adjustable? The software tools are free and the prototyping tools are incredibly cheap.

Want to find the answer to a question about your local area that would have required months of library time? The software is free and shockingly complete data sets are available from governments.

So why do so many people, even adults my age and younger, feel that technology is out of their control?

I have always felt as a freelance developer that the work I am paid for is just the seed in the middle of a larger fruit, where I listen and discuss and explain and educate.

I feel I should be turning it inside out. Making the listening, discussion, education the product, and the development work ancilliary to it (because it almost always is).

What I find interesting about Python, specifically, is how many applications it is suitable for, considering its ease of access -- CAD packages, 3D printing, PCB design, GIS, microcontrollers, statistics. Children's and adult education etc.

So while I have a little time I am spending it re-orienting myself into Python as a programmer "way-of-life", and away from the tools I have been using so far (which has never, really, meant Python).

And as I do so I am getting a sense of how it might fit into me turning my freelance work inside out to become a teacher/trainer/educator/facilitator, largely for adults, to help them have better concepts of technology (even for just the humdrum business of getting suppliers to quote for bespoke projects).

A vague sketch, sorry -- but I think this might answer your question.

Ahhh good point well made!

Oh well :-/

OpenAI egress IP ranges are documented here:

https://platform.openai.com/docs/plugins/production

and here:

https://platform.openai.com/docs/plugins/bot

An IO board that adds the IO ports that the e.g. CM4 lacks. There's a decent range of them from different suppliers, but Raspberry Pi have one themselves called "Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 IO Board".

As with my DSLRs/mirrorless cameras (particularly the ones that use the wretched USB mini) when tethering I have ended up with a right-angle adapter cable secured with a cable tie (or the super-strong Tethertools Jerkstopper), and a USB micro cord into that.

USB micro is designed to snap at the connector, not the board. And the connectors will indeed snap.

> For the life of me I don't really get it why Raspberry Pi Foundation does not include onboard eMMC or SSD storage in their non-compute modules products.

Cost. It's always cost.

If the eMMC or SSD storage is not enough to hold a general purpose OS for all users, then only some users get the value. And if it is big enough, it's put the cost of the machine up above the point at which they feel happiest, when an SD card is perfectly fine for the majority of their target users.

Eben Upton is regularly on record talking about how the cost-per-component/users-per-component tradeoff will lead them to avoid adding a component, and has motivated removing some (composite video for example)

> and if you were playing computer games in the 1980s in a slow DOS box you could not have even imagined modern GPUs and modern games.

I think this bit is really not the case, FWIW.

If you look at what computer magazines were like in the 1980s it's very clear that people were already imagining what photorealism might look like, from the very earliest first-person-perspective 3D games (which date back to the early 1980s if not earlier)

I am profoundly, profoundly cynical about this particular development in computing culture.

But your last paragraph resonates with me pretty deeply, and suggests to me that there might be a way forward for me when this becomes unavoidable, which it will.

Frankly I would rather direct my energies away from the accelerating face of dehumanising technologies and towards rehumanising technology through education, but I do recognise I'll eventually have to engage with this just to educate.

I didn’t mean to be condescending. Sorry. It’s just so perfectly expressive of the nature of culture and the way culture overwrites culture.

No, that’s not the reason they are empty calories, IMO. It’s the banality of the culture around the technology, as well as the banality of the technologies being built with it. It’s just academics chasing the dream of technology transfer to the ad-tech industry.

Generative AI covers it fine, yes.

(I am typing on my phone on a train in between connections, both rail and internet, and I am grateful for your correction)

Everyone knows what I mean by “empty calories” anyway. If they think I am wrong, they are in denial. ;-)

> It's like the Monkey's Paw from the Simpsons

This is really, really funny in the context of age and perspective. But not in the way you meant.

To be fair I mean LLMs, GANs, GPTs, all of this new stuff. It’s a good idea taken way beyond usefulness. Like processed food in plastic packaging.

Toxic and empty. Full of promises and delusions about saving time and effort.

GANs are ruining AI research the way cryptocurrency ruins cryptography research.

These are the empty calories of research. Focus on them and you will end up fat (rich) and useless (no publications worth a damn)

Prove me wrong, but from the pavement. You don’t need to be on my lawn.

It's a pre-order even on Amazon. The publication date for the book isn't until later in the year (at least for the edition available in the UK, which will probably be the same):

https://www.whsmith.co.uk/products/think-python-how-to-think...

https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/Think-Python-by-Al...

(Blackwells think September, incidentally, whereas WHS think the end of July)

Amazon just list books way, way earlier in pre-order than a lot of places.

This is just the sort of thing I needed to read.

I am considering changing the trajectory of my own life, towards a more community/maker/teacher role, and I have a freelance/small business idea about teaching but I need sort of "soft syllabus" materials.

I am learning Python myself, having just never had a need for it in all of my professional web development life (I've written apps in just about every other web-focussed programming language, including Perl and Ruby).

It looks like the right language to teach general concepts in, and having a book I can draw from will help.

As a general rule I would suspect that making four deliveries per hour in a settlement of any size is difficult, because the size of the delivery pitch is going to vary with demand.

National minimum wage in the UK is not enough to remotely live on, most places that have an established deliveroo market.

Interesting. Yes I see, I guess :-) Thanks for the reply.

It's generally true precisely because British parliamentary democracy formalised the concept, mind you. Before that, yes, rulers made laws that would perpetually benefit them and their successors.

That is not why he gave up all the pay, is it? F5 closed the Moscow office.