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oopsallmagic

69 karma · joined June 16, 2024

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oopsallmagic··on The tiny chip that powers Montreal subway tickets
Is that the fault of the system, or the fault of the tourists for visiting a new place and not reading up on local customs?
oopsallmagic··on Singapore doubles down on lab-grown meat as Silicon Valley backs off
Or even the fifth-grade science project you can do. Fill a soda bottle with air, a soda bottle with CO2, put them in the sun, then measure their internal temperature. You can do it with your kids in an afternoon.
oopsallmagic··on Llama.ttf: A font which is also an LLM
Not exactly. Harfbuzz, the font shaping library, has an optional feature to use WASM for shaping. Normal font hinting is much more restricted, precisely because Turing-complete fonts are a horrible idea.
oopsallmagic··on Llama.ttf: A font which is also an LLM
The engine isn't built with it by default, so this is a non-issue.
oopsallmagic··on Llama.ttf: A font which is also an LLM
It's technically not arbitrary. There is a stack, of sorts, but IIRC it has a depth of six or so, by default. You can do cool stuff with font shaping, but you can't easily execute arbitrary code.
oopsallmagic··on Llama.ttf: A font which is also an LLM
No, because Unicode doesn't concern itself with rendering, it's just for codepoints.
oopsallmagic··on Traffic engineers build roads relying on outdated research, faulty data
Except road funding, huge chunks of which come from the federal government (because, big surprise, cities and states can't afford thousands of miles of stroads and highways without invoking a government that can print its own reserve currency).
oopsallmagic··on Traffic engineers build roads relying on outdated research, faulty data
To be fair, I used to live like two or three miles from school, and we would've had to pay for the bus because I was "too close". So mom dropped me off at like 6:00 AM because we were poor as shit. If we cared about education at all, we wouldn't make families pay for something that I'm pretty sure used to just be free.
oopsallmagic··on Traffic engineers build roads relying on outdated research, faulty data
You can fit like 50 people on a bus, and maybe 10 in the equivalent space taken up by two SUVs. Seriously, how is this a question?
oopsallmagic··on Traffic engineers build roads relying on outdated research, faulty data
The entirety of the Netherlands used to look like the US in the '60s and '70s, albeit not at Super Sized(TM) scale. Look up their urban design in 2024, it's quite pleasant and human-friendly.
oopsallmagic··on Traffic engineers build roads relying on outdated research, faulty data
Are these the same bike lanes that start and stop randomly and are often just the shoulder of a 45-mi/h road with a bike, and implied middle finger, painted on?
oopsallmagic··on Traffic noise hurts children's brains
Adult brains, too. I appreciate the study, but this is one of those "yes, obviously" situations for anyone who has ever been outside amongst cars.
oopsallmagic··on I kind of like rebasing
People need to get comfortable with git being a DAG, and not the degenerate case of just a straight line. Merge commits aren't scary, folks.
oopsallmagic··on I kind of like rebasing
Then why are you even using a VCS?
oopsallmagic··on Ruby: A great language for shell scripts
How is it supposed to know how you want your errors handled by default? Handling errors is the programmer's job.
oopsallmagic··on Ruby: A great language for shell scripts
Can't you just install it?
oopsallmagic··on Ruby: A great language for shell scripts
It's not. This is a non-issue. Every web shop is writing bash to twiddle a build script on servers they also manage, which includes the ability to install any package they want.
oopsallmagic··on Ruby: A great language for shell scripts
And of course, it is impossible to install additional interpreters on the computer.
oopsallmagic··on Ruby: A great language for shell scripts
Not once have I worked anywhere where the people writing shell scripts didn't also control all of the boxen those scripts ran on.
oopsallmagic··on TinyLetter shut down by Mailchimp, so I built the letterdrop
That depends on your valuation.
oopsallmagic··on TinyLetter shut down by Mailchimp, so I built the letterdrop
I mean, the crap that was already there wasn't great to begin with.
oopsallmagic··on Curating my corner of the Internet with a freehand web editor
> We can't expect to turn back the clock and have everyone writing HTML by hand again, not when we're all accustomed to typing text and uploading media via carefully manicured, intentionally minimal user interfaces.

I mean, I do it. That was always allowed! You've been able to write as much or as little HTML as you want since the Web was invented.

oopsallmagic··on The short, happy reign of CD-ROM
Children, um, don't use this kind of reasoning.
oopsallmagic··on The short, happy reign of CD-ROM
I miss actually owning software that couldn't be rewritten or revoked at any given time.
oopsallmagic··on Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization
Concur. It's an unfortunate race to the bottom which is just indicative of the dilution of ability in this godforsaken industry. Why can't a team of grunts manage a basic CRUD web app? That's what's so frustrating: most of these problems aren't even _hard_, and yet devs screw them up anyway.

Signed, a greybeard sick of cleaning up messes.

oopsallmagic··on Software design gets worse before it gets better
You don't necessarily get them at high pay grades, either. I know people making fat salaries who truly can't manage to write anything decent, it's all a big JS monstrosity with 500 MB of broken dependencies and six build tools that all jump major versions every eight weeks.

Salary has long since been disconnected from skill, ever since cheap money flooded the industry, and easier abstractions made it seem like "everyone can code". Perhaps "fog a mirror" shouldn't be the only programmer criterion.

oopsallmagic··on A Rant about Front-end Development
And all this for marketing emails nobody reads anyway.
oopsallmagic··on Wc2: Investigates optimizing 'wc', the Unix word count program
That used to not be the case. Has something changed?
oopsallmagic··on FDA, Industry Actions End Sales of PFAS Used in Food Packaging
"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

All magic comes with a price, and the inside of Mylar packaging is absolutely magic. That is, it seems like whenever we try to science our way out of some food mistake, we end up making it worse.

Don't get me wrong, science has kept a lot of people from starving (although heavy nitrogen fertilizer use and monocultures are a challenge for the environment), but after a certain point, we started losing gains in health because we started optimizing for profit.

Now, we put pictures of nature on ultraprocessed food and convince people it's good for them, when all they really need is to eat an apple, which, unfortunately, has no marketing department.

Humans are smart, but there is probably no magic bullet. The safest food packaging is the skin on an orange.

oopsallmagic··on A Rant about Front-end Development
It sounds like your issue is with the syntax of Jinja, and the hellscape of HTML email. I'm not sure how 20 MB of inscrutable JavaScript would help, considering it's also just template rendering with extra steps (bonus: using the user's CPU cycles and power instead of your own).
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