edw

Or coffee shops.

My intuitive understanding of Quora, formed about five years ago, is that it’s a WikiHow with VC mojo.

Amen. Not to mention the non sequitur replies from randos trying to insert themselves, grasping for fifteen milliseconds of microcelebrity.

I recently read HG Wells’s Island of Dr Moreau; the protagonist describes one of Moreau’s creatures, who specialized in Big Think: big-worded, incoherent rambling intended to confuse and impress in equal parts. The argot of Twitter, in other words.

I'd like to advocate for remote development environments. Most of my day is spent typing into a tmux session on a cloud-hosted box. (I picked up a Magic Keyboard for my 11" iPad Pro, and thanks to Blink it's a great glass terminal. It's not going to work if you're debugging let's say a React app, but I've been very happy on it the last several days churning out Golang.)

Running stuff on your laptop makes it run slow, get hot, and burn battery. I've considered getting a small x86 or ARM media appliance as a (physically local) remote server for when I can't count on an Internet connection. A media PC costs how much? The big holdup has been the tyranny of choice I'm confronted with. (Suggestions are welcome!)

I think very few people would be surprised if the coming of ARM Macs will, along with AWS's ARM moves (and Microsoft's), drive acceptance and adoption of ARM-based server computing. The mechanism won't be anything formal, just the vague pressure that comes from people wanting their programs and libraries to compile locally.

Me too! It was bundled with OS X server, which I was running on the G4 Cube that got relegated to utility box status when I went all-in on laptop life.

This article touches on something that I really enjoyed about (the early days) of Perl 5, and I think it may body well for the future of the language.

You could write Perl 5 like it was just a better Perl 4. All of the craziness with modules and references was hidden to you if you wanted to write a Perl 4-esque script that needed to talk to a database or do something else that you could find a module in for in CPAN.

The people would wrote those modules, God help them, I don't know how they managed to write the executable line noise that was in the source, but I didn't care. I could get my job done with a few simple `use` statements.

My understanding is that Android existed not to pursue the goal of "winning," whatever that would have been, but to prevent Apple from running away with the show. Chrome was the same thing, though the competitor was Microsoft. Google Docs? Same thing, Microsoft again.

Google is good at building things 90% as good as they could be. For Gmail that 90% was leaps and bounds better than the web mail alternatives of 2004 which included…SquirrelMail.

Does Google care that you're switching to Hey or Safari or whatever has replaced Google Sheets? No. Are they going to buckle down at finish the last 10% of all of these products? No. Is that an opportunity for all of us reading this story? Yes.

One way to think of Google's products as the equivalent of Microsoft Write — or Apple's iWork. Google's platform is not Windows or Mac OS or iOS: it is the Internet. Google's products come free in the shrink-wrapped box when you drive to Egghead Software pick a copy of "Internet" up off the shelf.

There’s a lot of gross stuff that your ISPs (which includes your mobile phone provider) do to further monetize your relationship with them, and having a VPN can negate that.

ISPs can observe your DNS lookups to their servers and assemble a profile on you based on the domain names you look up, and put you into a series of audiences that marketers can then use (for a fee) for ad targeting.

ISPs can also observer your DNS lookups to Google’s or anyone else’s public DNS servers.

ISPs can snoop on your unencrypted traffic, proxy it, and inject headers into HTTP responses to facilitate (you guessed it) the creation and sale of audience data to advertisers.

ISPs can transcode (and downsample) multimedia content to decongest their pipes or airwaves.

If you are a spy or a member of a disfavored political group, you should almost appreciate the scummy practices of ISPs, as it drives a bunch of non-spies and people not associated with disfavored political groups to adopt privacy-enhancing technologies.

If I worked at the NSA or CIA or FSB or Mossad or wherever, I would highly encourage lawmakers to enact laws to protect consumer privacy in order to drastically reduce the perceived need for people not in the above groups (et alia) to adopt VPNs and other technologies; there would be fewer “boring” people using such technologies, giving the needles a lot less haystack to get lost in.

Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these babies…

In other screen-related news, I recently ditched my LG 24” 4K display and replaced it with Sidecar and one of my iPads. What a change in perspective! While with the large external display, my MacBook’s internal display felt like an irritating afterthought.

An iPad screen is much closer in size to the MacBook display, and I find I make better use of this more balanced setup than I did my very lopsided previous big monitor and small laptop display configuration. Less can be more.

NB: Sidecar sometimes flakes out on wakeup, so it’s not a total win.

If the problem is not that Google is (not) stealing Wikipedia’s clicks but instead is stealing the clicks —- and, more accurately, content — of other, for profit, sites then why go with that headline? Because it’s good clickbait.

I’m pretty sympathetic to the plights of Weather.com, Genius.com, Zagats (oops, Google bought them and then resold them), Yelp, and whomever else Google is appropriating non-public domain and non-Creative Commons content from. But that’s a story that’s already been told, so the site decided to find a heart-string tugging yet intellectually-dishonest angle.

For many of the tools that have improved my productivity, it was not the tool that was the breakthrough but the realization of the tool’s value. For example, version control has existed since the beginning of time practically, and I begrudgingly used RCS, SCCS, VSS, and probably other version control systems for ten or fifteen years until I had that Eureka! moment (coinciding with Git’s release, roughly) that inspired me to actually embrace version control tools. A similar experience happened with automated testing: I’d gotten the testing-is-good bondage and discipline spiel many times, but it wasn’t until I started writing extensive units tests for language parsers that I realized how wonderfully empowering they can be.

That said, along with Git, I’d list Gdb (or LLdb or any real debugger), Emacs keyboard macros, Python’s venv facilities, and Django’s database migrations among the tools that changed my life.

Somewhat consistent with the it’s-not-the-thing-but-the-realization-of-the-thing’s-value theme above, I’d say reading the Practice of Programming back in ‘99 took my programming productivity to a new level, because it made me realize that one of the central tasks of an abstraction builder is creating a language that allows you to express thoughts in terms of that abstraction. Once you’ve done that, you “just” need to implement the language and all of the problems expressible in it become easy, even trivial.

Occasionally I fall asleep and awake to a channel like this, usually one showing science television content with an extremely active stream of real-time commenters. This gestalt of this channel is nearly identical. Has anyone written up an explanation of these vaguely (or not so vaguely) scammy YouTube channels? Or posted a YouTube video, more likely?

I can confirm that AppleSoft ][ BASIC stored its programs in memory in tokenized form.

On another note, I went ahead and wrote a code emitter, because I couldn't wait for part three (though I noticed it's in the GitHub repo). Once you get this compiler up and running the sane thing to do is write a Makefile so you can treat Teeny as a first-class programming language. Just add a Makefile with the following:

    %.c : %.tiny
    <TAB>python3 ./teenytiny.py $< > $@

And you'll be able to type `make hello` and have hello.tiny compiled to hello.c compiled to hello automagically. I can never pass up an opportunity to remind people that Make is wonderful.

Passion can cut more than one way. It’s quite possible that the poster you replied to is, as you said, super passionate and is turned off by Take Two’s hardball tactics to the point that they don’t purchase the game when it’s released.

A former client of mine had a Linode box running the app another of his connsultants hosted on some random Ubuntu Linux box. It ran for ten years with the occasional (once every couple months) restart. The ancient Python 2.x version the app used finally started causing problems because it didn't support TLS version one-point-whatever. A month ago I re-wrote the part of the app he actually needed and put it on a Linode box using the latest Debian. I suspect it will run with the occasional restart for another decade.

Get someone to host (and backup) your PostgreSQL database for you and don't sweat literally everything else. 99.999% uptime is for Walmart.

Perhaps. Something happened between those first-generation web sites where you were writing SQL by hand -- so you could just as easily be writing (injection-attack-prone) queries that made use of stored procedures etc -- and today.

A big reason I called out RoR is that back in '04-05 I was railing against its default use of plural table names, and DHH on IRC recommended I shut up and just flip the configuration switch and turn off the feature, but of course when I did that all sorts of latent bugs were exposed.

RoR was the beginning of hipster "coding" and I therefore blame it for everything.

I'm wasn't previously familiar with the FriendFeed approach to database (ab)use. I paid about as much attention to it as I did to MySpace back in the day -- nearly zilch -- so its etc innards are doubly obscure to me.

MySQL's rise IMO cannot be considered without also looking at the rise of Ruby on Rails and other CRUD-optimized platforms and frameworks. Also ORMs. These things denigrated the idea of using an RDBMS as anything but a dumb table store. Features like stored procedures and views were seen as pointless. MySQL was the perfect database for people who had no respect for databases.

I disagree. The author's point is that if you have a network connection, you can view it as:

* A medium with a series of photons or EM waves propagating in one or both directions. * An exchange of packets between two boxes. * … * A conversation between two applications.

It's the all the same thing, but it's an increasingly holistic or reductive view of that one thing as you take the thing in from the perspective from increasing or decreasing layers of the OSI stack.

And yet he is, per the PDF, acquitted.

Joel Spolsky wrote about this in detail, OMG, fifteen years ago:

> There’s no software priced between $1000 and $75,000. I’ll tell you why. The minute you charge more than $1000 you need to get serious corporate signoffs. You need a line item in their budget. You need purchasing managers and CEO approval and competitive bids and paperwork. So you need to send a salesperson out to the customer to do PowerPoint, with his airfare, golf course memberships, and $19.95 porn movies at the Ritz Carlton. And with all this, the cost of making one successful sale is going to average about $50,000. If you’re sending salespeople out to customers and charging less than $75,000, you’re losing money.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-...

The boring low-risk unsexy thing that works is often underrated. I didn't choose CF — at the time I argued that it was a tool for scrubs, but the VPE said, "Hey, I know it, and I know it can do the job." We launched that CF-based web site on time and sold the company for $350MM fewer than six months later. Only then did we incrementally port it to Java.

Nor greater than zero.

https://rew-online.com/paramount-sells-zero-bond-street-for-...

The process of building things is embedded in various contexts. As is the process of being paid to build things. And those contexts are themselves embedded in other contexts. There are first-, second-, third-, nth-order "smart" moves in a given situation given the specific contexts in play.

In terms of creating web apps or other software, there are organizational, hiring, funding, exit, marketing, and many other meta-games going on — and they're all in constant flux.

It was all very start-uppy. What were you using to build your commercial web applications in 1996 if not CGI? Mod_perl did not even exist until 1995, and FastCGI didn't exist IIRC until after Netscape released their enterprise server.

OMG you cannot know how many times some SwiftUI thing has worked fine on my iPhone but not on the simulator … that was simulating my iPhone model running my iOS version.

What you’re describing is so hard to convey to people. In 1994 the we were building raised-floor data centers with halon for suppressors and marveling at our 2GB behemoth UNIX boxes. And writing our own web application framework using CGI. In ‘99 we were renting a suite at a colo and putting our own hardware there, running ColdFusion web apps. In ‘04 we were renting half a rack at the same colo and trying not to write three tier Java servlet based apps with 1,000 line web.xml files. And then AWS happened.

Additionally, I don’t think such a rating system would work absent some sort of collaborative filtering system. One person’s ten is another person’s zero. That said, if you had a date with a ten, would you want to share that information?

Triplebyte is doing the dating app equivalent of criminal background checks. It abjectly failed to find a match for me (despite passing the programming eval with flying colors) because none of the matches resulted in any sparks, to use the dating term of art.

Canon, Android.