patwolf

I went through this on a few projects, and what surprised me the most was that some devs have very strong opinions about import ordering. I mostly rely on the IDE to manage imports, and most the time they're not even visible. We had to add a lot of prettier rules to get import orders just right.

I wish the article had gone into detail about SoundFonts. I had an AWE64 back in the day, and the SoundFonts were a relatively inexpensive way to do sampling. CPUs were generally too slow to do sampling without dedicated hardware. I still remember the day I got the memory daughterboard and was able to load bigger SoundFonts.

I also remember working a summer job to save up money for a Nomad. I would come home from work every day and check their website to see if it was available for purchase, and it never was. I eventually gave up on getting a Nomad and bought an RCA Lyra instead, which was a regrettable decision.

The antennas on mine don't appear to come off, at least not easily. I read somewhere that they came off on the early models but are now glued.

It does enforce time limits. If I send a message or something that uses digital communication (like gps coordinates), it won't let me send another one immediately after.

For anyone looking for an off-the-shelf solution for wireless texting, I've used the BTECH GMRS-PRO. You can send messages on the device, but it's much easier to connect it to your phone via BLE and text through the app.

However, it uses GMRS bands, not LoRA, so all the FCC restrictions apply.

> Surely you are old enough to hear the comotion about switchgrass

I hadn't heard "switchgrass" since GWB mentioned it in his State of the Union years ago. Did it end up becoming a significant source of biofuel?

I occasionally hear people pronounce it out loud as "vah tech". But seeing it written "VA Tech" is even more bizarre.

I'm old enough to remember when Google released AJAXSLT in 2005. It was a JS implementation of XSLT so that you could consistently use XSLT in the browser.

The funny thing is that the concept of AJAX was fairly new at the time, and so for them it made sense that the future of "fat" web pages (that's the term they use in their doc) was to use AJAX to download XML and transform it. But then people quickly learned that if you could just use JS to generate content, why bother with XML at all?

Back in 2005 I was evaluating some web framework concepts from R&D at the company I worked, and they were still very much in an XML mindset. I remember they created an HTML table widget that loaded XML documents and used XPATH to select content to render in the cells.

I was using it earlier today and noticed something was different. It sounded more lethargic, and added a lot more "umms". It's not necessary bad, just something I need to get used to.

I always get a laugh asking it to talk like an Ent, and I made sure to check that it could still do that.

The Game Gear, Atari Lynx, and TurboExpress all got around 4 hours of battery life and burned through 6 AA batteries.

I had heard KJV had some translation issues, but I'm surprised to hear that about John. I tried to learn Koine Greek, and a lot of the lessons started with John 1, so I always assumed it was one of the easier things to translate.

I haven't used mIRC since the 5.X days, but I recall the author always included an updated profile photo in the about page. It was interesting to watch him age with each release update.

I downloaded this version to see if that was still the case, and sadly the about page no longer includes a photo.

Same. mIRC scripting was really what motivated me to learn to program. I had tinkered a little bit with BASIC before that, but mIRC was what kept me interested. It's one thing to write uninteresting "hello world" CLI apps, but mIRC scripting was something you and your friends could immediately interact with. I wonder if kids today have something similar...maybe Roblox scripting?

I played around in Windows 2000 for the first time in 20 years. I know nostalgia can be blinding, but I would go back to that UI in a heartbeat. The uncluttered taskbar, the simple start menu that isn't full of useless recommendations and ads—such a joy!

I use ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, and Gemini regularly. Even though 2.5 pro is really good, I find myself using Gemini the least because I have an aversion to giving Google even more data about me.

I know that even if they never inject ads directly in Gemini, they'll be using my prompts to target me.

I've been building SPA apps for years with express and React. For a recent project we decided to use Next.js and self host. The biggest benefits have been 1) having the middleware contained in the same runtime and therefore not having to set up multiple projects and hosting for each. We just build a single docker image and put it in ECS. 2) having things like routing, bundling, linting, etc. already included. There are some downsides--like I would rather have biome out of the box than prettier/eslint, but most the developers haven't really cared.

There is a lot of magic and complexity under the covers that I haven't fully groked, and from that perspective I have reservations about it, especially after the recent CVE. As an example of the complexity, I had to set up Sentry, and while Sentry does have a package specifically for next.js, it was still tricky to ensure we were capturing errors with appropriate context in every possible spot.

It's possible as our project matures we'll hit some roadblocks that will make us question our decision to use next.js and self host, but overall our dev team has been productive with it.

> Point being: SCIFs are the right tool for the job. Smartphone apps like Signal are not.

The job in this case seems to be secure, ad-hoc communication between multiple parties while on the road (the VP at least was doing an event in Michigan). Clearly a public smartphone app isn't the right tool for the job. Is a SCIF the right tool though? I always thought of SCIFs as purpose-built rooms. It seems impractical that every time a message needs to be communicated, the parties have to be whisked away to a SCIF.

I was working on a legacy CSJ project, and I tried to upgrade an OIDC library, but the newer version would only work with ESM. I decided to use that as an excuse to migrate our project to ESM. However, I hit a bug using dd-trace with ESM. Over a year later, that bug hasn't been resolved. I try to use ESM as much as possible for new projects, but it's not always simple to migrate existing projects to ESM.

I purchased an mp3 from Amazon Music, and there was a song that had a glitch in it, like you used to get ripping CDs if there was a problem reading part of the disc. I torrented the same track and the same glitch was there. So either Amazon was using pirated copies or the glitch existed in the actual recording. I guess I'd need to find a physical copy of the recording to compare.

I was always blown away by the fact that YaST could run either as a GTK app or a CLI/ncurses tool. The same config was available in both.

Back when I was using SuSE regularly, I was developing a pluggable web-based admin tool. I always wanted to look at the way YaST was written to see if I could do something similar for creating a web UI, but my project got sidelined before I got very far.

I had a first generation Mac mini, and I was playing around with mouse settings and accidentally changes some setting that basically disabled my mouse. The problem was the button or control to change it back didn't work via keyboard. I eventually recovered but came very close to wiping the machine.

Makes me think of "The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress", where the moon went to war with earth by catapulting rocks.

Lately I've noticed this more frequently with Shorts. It brings about an interesting dilemma because I know for the algorithm to work and benefit creators, people need to watch videos with few views. But I also don't want to spend my time to figure out if a video is worth watching for the benefit of the algorithm.

I'm currently using Yjs to build an app that needs to work offline. It's not actually a real-time or collaborative app. However, if you think of the server as being one collaborator and the app being another, then it's easy to imagine use cases for it.

Brings back memories of visiting northern Virginia as a teenager and recognizing all the town names from IRC servers, like Ashburn, McClean, Vienna, and several others.

I saw the VA governor speak at some point in the late '90s, and he touted Virginia "internet capital of the world". I naively thought it was because of all the IRC servers.

That'd work well for a catastrophic Eron-style collapse, but many companies die a slow death, like Sears.

I previously tried getting military records for my deceased grandfather. From what I can recall, it was complicated by the fact that I wasn't "next of kin", which would limit the data I'd have access to. Even my parent, who was next of kin, would have needed additional paperwork as proof, e.g. a death/marriage certificate for my grandmother.

On one hand, if this works then I'll be happy to have the information I otherwise wouldn't have. But on the other hand, all these processes, no matter how convoluted, exist for a reason. It feels weird bypassing those.

Whenever I say Elo out loud, it takes a lot of mental energy to not say E-L-O, as if I'm talking about the Electric Light Orchestra.

I kind of miss the days where building a mobile app was just plopping giant widgets on a screen, and we didn't need giant figma files and design languages.

I don't, however, miss dealing with the 300ms click delay.

The UI issues I've noticed aren't really bugs as much as they're intentional UI changes that happen to be poorly thought out. I'm used to Google randomly changing the UI for seemingly no benefit, but these changes are especially egregious considering how much of my youtube interaction is muscle memory.

For example, you used to be able to double tap just about anywhere on the screen to fast forward or rewind 10 seconds. Now on the first tap the bottom half of the screen becomes an overlay with a bunch of action buttons, causing the second tap to inadvertently engage one of the buttons.

I worked on WebSphere back in the day. There were a lot of pre-compiled libraries provided by other IBM teams. I too made good use of decompilers (probably jad at the time) as it was often easier than trying to track down the source.