idoubtit

What was unclear in that article is that the XML is usually embedded in the invoice. For instance, Factur-X is the mandatory format in Germany, and it's a PDF which contains a metadata block with a XML EN16931 content.

This XML will usually not be read by the companies that pay the invoice. For instance, in France by the end of 2027, every business will have to send e-invoices, but never directly to the real recipient. The business sends the invoice to a registered go-between, which will ask a national platform for the address of the recipient's go-between, etc. So, only those official go-between companies will have to securely parse the XML.

BTW, in 2022 when the French government decided to make e-invoicing mandatory, it announced that it would develop a national unique go-between platform. Two years later, it dropped that part of the project and announced that there would be an official list of private platforms. So, by the end of 2026 or 2027, every French business will have to select one of the 112 platforms and buy a subscription. It give the State more control, but for small businesses it means higher costs and complexity.

So, a handful of persons "believe that OpenStreetMap is a creation of Chinese communists" and are removing specific data from OpenStreetMap, and the OP explains why this is stupid but innocuous.

But that's not the first time that a community is tagged "Chinese communists" and attacked as such. Now imagine if some maga/alt-right/whatever leaders asked their followers to attack the "communist" OpenStreetMap by injecting a bit of false data everyday. Could OSM defend itself as easily?

> Codeberg is a fork of Gitea, itself a fork of Gogs.

Codeberg is a website powered by Forgejo which is a fork of Gitea.

> Both forks originated for "philosophical" reasons, not technical ones

Gitea forked because one developer was the only owner of Gogs' repository and refused to share maintaining rights. The fork was more "practical" than "philosophical".

Forgejo forked when a leading developer secretly created a company with the trademark of Gitea and its logo. The fork was to gain back control over the assets of the project (name/trademark, logo, etc.).

Adding new functions and alternative syntax has a long-term cost for PHP and the projects that use the language. I don't see much value in the new features of PHP5 announced on https://www.php.net/releases/8.5/en.php

- URI extension: there was already the internal `parse_url()` which was imperfect, and alternative libraries that were RFC 3986 compliant. An official extension will bring speed, but now there will be 2 official ways to parse URLs.

- The pipe operator is a matter of taste. In the release notes, the new code is more verbose, because it defines anonymous functions. This alternative syntax means keeping a consistent code style will be harder.

- The update of "clone" replaces 2 lines of code in some cases. Unless I misunderstood, it's a very minor change.

- The #Discard/void will replace the similar feature from static analyzers.

- Closures in constants is one of the 2 features that bring more than an alternative syntax. It's one more little step toward a preprocessor. But I'm not thrilled about the future #attributes assigned with complex closures.

- cURL persistent handles are a real performance feature, because curl_init() is costly.

- array_first() is a minor syntax-sugar. In a project of 100k+ lines of PHP, I probably could use it twice or thrice. Was it worth a global function?

Are the new features really readable? I have no idea what this code from the OP is meant for:

    #[SkipDiscovery(static function (Container $container): bool {
        return ! $container->get(Application::class) instanceof ConsoleApplication;
    })]
    final class BlogPostEventHandlers
    { /* … */ }

As a side note, even PHP's official wiki cannot highlight correctly the multiline attributes behind a "#". See https://wiki.php.net/rfc/closures_in_const_expr

A small correction: drivers from the EU do not need a UK license; the driving license from their own country is valid in the UK, even post-Brexit. And the exchange scheme only applies to residents of Great-Britain.

So those bloody foreigners that live in the United Kingdom and dare drive there are from Australia, Canada, Japan, Switzerland... Countries well-known for their dangerous drivers! /s

I share many of the author's delights. I would add another source of "short little difficult books": old books, written in an old form of your modern language.

My native tongue is French, so in my case it was Rabelais' "Gargantua" (~1500) and "La Chanson de Roland" (~1100). Both books require some motivation to get used to their respective languages. After a while, I could read almost fluently Rabelais' prose ; it was immensely funny, coarse and impudent. Roland was harder to grasp, I had to use a specialized dictionary, but it's a concise and epic tale, and I read some verses so many times I ended learning them by rote.

Even translated, some short books from a very different culture far in the past can be challenging. For instance "Eugene Onegin" or "Gilgamesh". As a counterpoint, "The art of war" is an easy read, though written 2300 years ago in a small kingdom of China.

A last comment: the author conflate books that are difficult because of a technicality in their writing, and those that are strange in their story. The translations of Abe Kobo or Kafka I've read had nothing difficult in their words, but the surrealist plots were very unsettling. In "Pedro Páramo" the reader feels lost in a harsh world and unsure of reality. Meanwhile, Perec's "La disparition" or Becket's "Molloy" are more about style tricks.

The post has many links to OpenBSD's man pages, FAQ and manual. But I thought it was quite unsatisfying, even common tasks are missing. Or at least I couldn't find them.

I had a test case in mind while reading the documentation: running a custom web service with Nginx as a reverse-proxy. In the documentation, I couldn't find anything about creating a service. Are we supposed to write a frontend script (in ksh) that accepts various arguments (ie start/reload/...)? And what about the logs of this wrapper? And if I want an auto-restart when my program crashes, I have to find another tool that will wrap and monitor the process? I've done all this tedious work in Linux long ago, and I'm not willing to do it again.

If the question was "Why OpenBSD instead of Linux", I don't think documentation is a good argument. In fact, the only strong response I've read is "to try something a bit different and more niche".

Not the Grand Poster, but we use the Debian package "unattended-upgrades" to install security updates automatically on our servers, and send an email if a reboot is required to complete the process (kernel upgrade).

Unattended upgrades could be configured to install more than the security release. Even with the stable release, one can add the official APT source for the Debian backports.

I wanted to find users that loved the same kinds of classical novels. The core of my list was each famous work of famous classical writers like Dostoievsky, Tolstoi, Huxley and Borges. I added a few excellent authors, still famous but to a lesser degree, like Italo Calvino or Marguerite Yourcenar. I know there are many readers of the whole list I wrote, I could name a few among my friends and family.

So I think the problem was not in the existence of similar readers, but in the way to reach them. Few people that read classical books log in Goodreads (I don't) and even fewer input what they've read over the past decades.

The "Intersect" page was useless for me. I added 15 books, but got no matching user. I entered a cycle of removing-searching, and at 10 books I had 2 users: one had read 41353 books, and the other 85363, with no ratings...

To be useful, the "Intersect" page should have:

- find near matches when there is no exact match with every book,

- ignore fake users (can any human read 80k books in many languages?),

- do not ignore users' votes (my input was books I liked, I expected to find users that rated them highly).

With the "Recommend" page I had the same problem as the GP, and all the recommendations were useless. To fix that, I think some features are needed:

- do not list books by authors from my list (I don't need recommendations for them),

- add a button for marking a suggested book as "disliked" (at the bare minimum, it should remove it from the suggestion, and ideally it should influence le suggestions as much as a "liked" book),

- do not suggest several books by the same author,

- add a button to hide a suggestion or show more suggestions (there were dozens of books I'd read but wouldn't rate high).

Is that really a good article? I thought it was average. It had some big flaws but was probably still informative for readers with no mathematical knowledge in the domain.

For instance, consider the only concrete example in the article: the space of all possible configurations of a double pendulum is a manifold. The author claims it's useful to see it in a manifold, but why? Precisely, why more as a manifold than as a square [O,2π[²?

I also expected more talk about atlases. In simple cases, it's easy to think of a surface as a deformation of a flat shape, so a natural idea is to think of having a map from the plan to the surface. But, even for a simple sphere, most surfaces can't map to a single flat part of the plan, and you need several maps. But how do you handle the parts where the maps overlap? What Riemmann did was defining properties on this relationship between manifold points and maps (which can be countless).

BTW, I know just enough about relativity to deny that "space-time [is] a four-dimensional manifold", at least a Riemmannian manifold. IIRC, the usual term is Minkowski-spacetime.

No, the situation about image compression has not changed. The Grand Poster you were replying to was writing about typical web usage, that is "medium-to-heavily compressed images", while your benchmark is about lossless compression.

BTW, I don't see how Mozilla's interest in a jpegxl _decoder_ (your first link) has anything to do with the performance of jpegxl encoders compared to avif's encoders. In case you're really interested in the former, Firefox now has more than intentions, but it's still not at production level: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1986393

I've read 3 out of those 5 books, and I see our preferences differ. For instance, I've a few books from Van Vogt, and I can't imagine I could like anything he wrote.

- "A voyage to Arcturus" tried hard at being strange and philosophical, but it seemed shallow and I did not feel interested.

- "The worm Ouroboros" was better, with a very unusual epic style, both in writing style and in the story. But some points made me cringe, e.g. the focus on nobles and the despise of common people, even heroic characters. Then it got repetitive, with a final trick that felt like a mockery of the whole story.

- "The dying Earth" was a good book, but it is far from my favorites. I prefer continuous novels to collections of short stories, even when they share a common setting. The book sometimes felt like a poetic tale, with nature and nostalgia as strong themes, though it was also quite brutal.

Since anonymous suggestions aren't very useful without any context, I'll match little-known books with famous books:

- If you thought that "1984" had good ideas, but also many stupid parts that spoiled the whole book, then try two older books. "We", by Zamiatin, is a bit old and naive but enjoyable. It was a source of inspiration for "Brave new world" and "1984". The Swede "Kollocain" (1940), by Karin Boye, is excellent, and much more subtle than the latter.

- If you like collections of related short stories, like "The dying Earth", then "The carpet makers" (1995) by Andreas Eschbach is a must. I remember the joy when I finally had a global understanding of the whole situation.

- If you wish for bizarre fantasy, not the epic Tolkien style, not even the dark saga of Ouroboros, but something more gothic and unsettling, then Mervyn Peake's "Titus groans" is perfect.

- I think "Brain twister" (1961) is the only funny book I've read in SF-Fantasy-supernatural.

That's not how I remember the event. The fact that "people still largely depended on edited, gatekept outlets for their reading and viewing" played no role, as far as I know. Newspapers wrote about the Sokal-Bricmont story, not because they were concerned as gatekeepers, but because it was a spectacular hoax. I was in academia at the time, and it was widely discussed.

The hoax intended to show two facts:

- Philosophy and social studies sometimes have an unsuitable fascination for science, with a tendency to wrongly apply scientific concepts they don't understand. Some impostors had perfect fame in their academic domain, despite writing this pseudo-scientific gibberish.

- Scientific journals were supposed to publish provable or reproducible articles, so when a flawed article went through the publishing process, there was hope the errors would be detected and other articles would fix it. And a publication in a top-tier journal would bring intense scrutiny. In philosophy and social science, nonsense could get published, widely accepted, and even studied.

BTW, I remember Jean Bricmont telling how much he liked good philosophy, and how he was pained when reading fraudulent philosophy.

When I compile LaTeX files, I use tectonic¹ which automatically download dependencies, compiles in one pass, and hides temporary files. But the regulars users of LaTeX I know all use a web interface — IIRC, it's an instance of Overleaf² installed by their university, with real-time rendering.

So when I read your list, I had these tools in mind, and the only items that made sense to me were:

2. (minor compared to Overleaf) typst compiles faster.

3. Diagnostics are better.

4. (minor and arguable) Lists have 2 simpler syntaxes.

The other points were irrelevant (dependencies), wrong (macros) or really dubious (margins, Git, bibliography). I think Typst has many more interesting features over LaTeX.

¹: https://tectonic-typesetting.github.io/

²: https://docs.overleaf.com/on-premises/installation/using-the...

Other examples where native features are better than these self-made scripts...

> vim [...] I select a region and then run :'<,'>!markdownquote

Just select the first column with ctrl-v, then "i> " then escape. That's 4 keys after the selection, instead of 20.

> u+ 2025 returns ñ, LATIN SMALL LETTER N WITH TILDE

`unicode` is widely available, has a good default search, and many options. BTW, I wonder why "2025" matched "ñ".

     unicode ñ
    U+00F1 LATIN SMALL LETTER N WITH TILDE
    UTF-8: c3 b1 UTF-16BE: 00f1 Decimal: ñ Octal: \0361

> catbin foo is basically cat "$(which foo)"

Since the author is using zsh, `cat =foo` is shorter and more powerful. It's also much less error-prone with long commands, since zsh can smartly complete after =.

I use it often, e.g. `file =firefox` or `vim =myscript.sh`.

The important rule is that this works for you, but everyone has to discover their own rules.

Most days, I drink 5 to 7 expressos, though there are days I don't drink any coffee, e.g. when not at home. I often drink one (sometimes two) expressos in the hour before going to bed. I'm almost always asleep in a couple of minutes after switching off the lights.

I think this focus on the default configuration of Caddy is a poor incentive, in a professional context. Here is the same config for nginx on a Debian box:

    server {
        server_name example.com;
        root /var/www/wordpress;
        location ~ \.php(/|$) {
            include snippets/fastcgi-php.conf;
            fastcgi_pass unix:/run/php/php-version-fpm.sock;
        }
        ssl_certificate /etc/ssl/local/service.pem;
        ssl_certificate_key /etc/ssl/local/service-key.pem;
    }

It's very similar to Caddy's, except for the explicit cert.

No professional should care about a handful of extra lines. Anyway, in many real life situations, the config will be long and complex, whatever tool you use.

In the case above, the cert was created offline with the excellent mkcert from mkcert.dev, which is perfect for a developer machine. In other cases, I've had to use a certificate provided by my client. For the remaining cases, cerbot automates all, including nginx's config. Or if one installs the latest nginx, ACME cert retrieval is now included, so the difference to Caddy is shrinking.

I don't deny that Caddy is a worthy tool, but I don't care if it makes me write a few lines less in configuration files that I rarely write or update. Praise should focus on more important features. [edit] The excellent leadership shown in this post seems more important!

We can only hope that she will not behave like the previous career politicians that got the Nobel Peace Prize in recent years.

Abiy Ahmed (2019), from Ethiopia, ended the cold war with Eritrea. Then he launched a war against the region of Tigray, with mass rapes and mass civilian killings. He harassed the free press, and turned the country into an autocracy.

Juan Manuel Santos (2016) from Colombia and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf (2011) from Liberia later appeared in Paradise Papers because they had secret offshore companies in Panama and Barbades. Their political activity was more tame after the prize than before. Both ended their presidential tenures with plummeting approval rates, especially because of corruption allegations.

Barack Obama (2009) received the Prize for his generous discourses on foreign policy, just after being elected. Then he lead the USA to more war in Afghanistan, and a new war in Libya. He helped Saudi Arabia invade Yemen (UN states this war killed 300,000 people). He helped the Egyptian army with its coup, that killed thousands of opponents and sent 60,000 in jails (including the elected president who died there).

In my opinion, this prize is, most of the time, a dark and heavily political joke.

Among the famous writers that I know through their writings, I'd expect Jorge Luis Borges and Umberto Eco to have read many thousands of books, because that wide culture was a major element of their fictions. The later did have 50,000 books at home, but the former became blind and probably didn't own many books.

With simple math, reading 2 books each week leads to at most 7,000 over a lifetime. If Denny McCarthy's guess is right (read 85% of 20k), his older brother read about 4 to 5 books a week, every week, from teenager to his old age.

> Our PISA reading scores were worse than Canada, Ireland, Estonia, and the rich Asian countries, but higher than everyone else in Europe.

Wrong.

In the article, the nearest link that was supposed to prove that claim points to a blog post that uses the 2019 PISA data. And in that post, there's not just Ireland and Estonia in Europe that do better than USA, but also Finland, Poland and Sweden. US-Americans have a reputation of knowing little of the world geography, maybe that's why these countries were forgotten ;-)

The article also has a link to a blog about 2021 PISA data, but with a very limited sample: e.g. Estonia is missing. And Poland still does better than the USA.

Other significant issues I've had with `pass`:

- Important processes are undocumented. E.g. sharing the pass repository with another computer is not obvious: you need to copy more than the `.password-store/` directory...

- Hard to install if not packaged. I tried to install `pass` on a headless NAS, but it required gpg, which looked hard to cross-compile to aarch64.

- `pass` is a light interface over `gpg`. So it has all the problems of GPG – I've had a few annoyances with `gpg-agent`. Many organizations are trying to ditch GnuPG and switch to simpler and better cryptography tools, like age. https://github.com/FiloSottile/age

- Android with `pass` was a bad experience. The official package was unmaintained. The fork was not packaged in F-Droid. The UI was cumbersome.

I still use pass, for lack of an obviously better universal solution. There's FiloSottile/passage for minimal change, just replacing gpg with age, but no Android. A better alternative would be gopass, which is portable across all unixes, is compatible with `pass` and has an age plugin. But still no Android packaging. https://www.gopass.pw

Thanks for explaining your goal and some of the context.

I suggest that stating them prominently would help the project. When I read Mago's home page, I downloaded the latest release, followed the "Getting started" process on a local repository, then nearly lost interest when I saw the amount of false errors. If I had first read "here is our goal, with this roadmap, this kind of validation on real projects, and this position toward existing well-known tools", I would have been much more willing to follow the project and accept its false positives.

As a side note, for my first try with Mago, I think its lack of parsing `@property` was a major source of false errors, because the source code it analyzed had a few omnipresent classes that used it. BTW, Mago panicked when I tried to lint another repository... I'll open a issue.

The README is quite ahead of reality: it never mention that Mago is still beta software. A roadmap to a first release was created 5 days ago, https://github.com/carthage-software/mago/issues/405.

I've just tried to apply it to a medium-sized project, and it spitted tens of thousands of errors where phpstan and psalm don't see any. At first glance, it's because Mago does not parse phpdoc. In its current beta state, Mago is meaningless for all the big PHP projects, which are its main target.

Mago might succeed, but I wouldn't bet on it. Its main selling point is that it promises to be faster than the usual static analysers-linters (phpstan and psalm). But if it does not reach feature parity with them, the speed gain probably won't convince PHP projects to drop the standard tools. Since phpstan and Co keep evolving, keeping feature parity will require constant work. And PHP is more niche than Python or JS, so contributors mastering Rust and PHP will be fewer, compared to phpstan/psalm which are written in PHP.

I don't understand why they didn't try to alter the ON condition. Instead of moving the JOIN into a per-field-subquery or a preliminary query, why not replace

    LEFT JOIN event_chunks as ec
      ON ec.chunk_id = lc.id

with

    LEFT JOIN event_chunks as ec
      ON case lc.type
        WHEN 'E' THEN ec.chunked_id = lc.id
        ELSE 0
        END

I don't know if it more performant with Sqlite's query planner (and it may depend on many conditions, e.g. strict tables), but it looked like the obvious fix to the initial query. And it's 100% SQL, no need for a Rust hashmap.

I also ditched docker when I could. In my experience...

Podman with pods is a better experience than docker-compose. It's easy to interactively create a pod and add containers to it. The containers ports will behave as if they were on the same machine. Then `podman generate kube` and you have a yaml file that you can run with `podman kube play`.

Rootless networking is very slow unless you install `passt`. With Debian, you probably should install every optional package that podman recommends.

The documentation is lacking. Officially, it's mostly man pages, with a few blog posts announcing features, though the posts are often out of date.

Podman with its docker socket is often compatible with Docker. Even docker-compose can (usually) work with podman. I've had a few failures, though.

Gitlab-runner can use podman instead of docker, but in this case the is no network aliases. So it's useless if the runner needs to orchestrate several images (e.g. code and db).

> I also wish that the world would settle on a sane date-time format like the ISO 8601

IIRC, in most countries the native format is D-M-Y (with varying separators), but some Asian countries use Y-M-D. Since those formats are easy to distinguish, that's no problem. That's why Y-M-D is spreading in Europe for official or technical documents.

There's mainly one country which messes things up...

I've now seen a dozen of articles that explain that jj is wonderful and better than Git for everything. This tutorial is of the same kind. Now that I've read extensively about the good part, I'd be more interested by the bad and the ugly. Because my experience with jj was more balanced.

When I tried jj, I found a few pain points that made me return to Git. For instance, I was sharing a branch with a co-worker where we were just piling commits as soon as they were ready (after `pull --rebase` if necessary). Since jj doesn't have names branches, that workflow was easy with git and tedious with jj – even with the `tug` alias. The process in the "Tracking remote bookmarks" chapter of this tutorial still doesn't look nice to me.

Another pain point was that jj could not colocate with light clones, like `git clone --filter=blob:none`. Maybe that's fixed now.

Even when I don't use directly ffmpeg, I often use tools that embed ffmpeg. For instance, I've recently upscaled an old anime, ripped from a low quality DVD. I used k4yt3x/video2x, which was good enough for what I wanted, and was easy to install. It embedded libffmpeg, so I could use the same arguments for encoding:

    Video2X-x86_64.AppImage -i "$f" \
     -c libvpx-vp9 -e crf=34 -o "${f/480p/480p_upscale2x}" \
     -p realcugan -s 2 --noise-level 1

To find the best arguments for upscaling (last line from above), I first used ffmpeg to extract a short scene that I encoded with various parameter sets. Then I used ffmpeg to capture still images so that I could find the best set.