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wittekm

248 karma · joined March 12, 2012

connoisseur of animated gifs
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wittekm··on Visualizing 13M Bluesky users
Anecdotally, I see a lot more “normal” human to human engagement than the addressed-to-millions engagement bait I see on Threads.
wittekm··on Shellcheck finds bugs in your shell scripts
Shellcheck is great, but dealing with source/imports is suuuch a pain. Not their fault sh is a nightmare.
wittekm··on Cisco Acquires Splunk
Genuinely surprised anybody would acquire Splunk in 2023. Whenever you hear about Splunk from security engineers, they're actively trying to get off it (edit: yes, primarily because of cost). Better, next-gen SIEMs are either here or around the corner.
wittekm··on Pixel Tablet
I do wonder if something like the MagSafe (laptop) adaptor would strike a happy medium.

Also - I don't know if Apple's 15w Qi is strong enough for a tablet.

wittekm··on Make your Python functions return something meaningful, typed, and safe
Having worked at a company with a million-lines-plus of Python monolith, gradual typing annotations made all the difference. Why do you need it enforced at runtime? It's static types!
wittekm··on Dropbox to reduce global workforce by about 16%, or 500 staff
Drew Houston needs to step down. The company has been aimless for a decade. The 'collaborative workspace' was an obviously bad idea that they sunk years of company-wide resources on (ask me how I know!)
wittekm··on E-Scooters roll into New York
Agreed - the common rental ones really have no power. I think Lime and its ilk are usually in the 300w range.

I bought my own scooter on a whim; it can toggle between 500w and 1000w of power, and I rarely need the 1000w except for the craziest Seattle hills.

Basically what I'm trying to say here is: totally solvable problem, just comes down to the unit cost of the rental scooters

wittekm··on Our journey from a Python monolith to a managed platform
(I was at Dropbox from 2015-2020)

The legacy framework was Pylons, which eventually evolved into Pyramid.

The tldr is there were hundreds of unowned endpoints that, yes, were allowed to fester. They eventually got ownership on all endpoints, so you had somebody to exert pressure on to make things happen.

wittekm··on Employee works for both Google and Facebook from home
plus one, also having twitter issues besides this tweet
wittekm··on Experience report on a large Python-to-Go translation
Some projects need performant regexes, and some honestly just don't. I agree that keeping the base regex library linear is admirable, but it's be nice if they offered a well-marked thing like regex.slow_and_perl_like in the stdlib
wittekm··on Internal documents show how Amazon scrambled to fix Prime Day glitches
(Note: my knowledge here is out of date as of 2015.)

Sable is relatively ancient and badly in need of deprecation. (If I remember correctly, as of 2011 it was sort of in a "please consider alternate storage solutions" mode.) It is the closest to a single point of failure I can think of at Amazon.

Hopefully this is the kick in the ass they need to move to something more robust.

wittekm··on Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand
Skype for Android is unbelievably bad. I uninstalled it after the following:

- a spam bot texts me asking to connect - which, whatever.

- my locked phone wakes up from sleep and /launches into Skype/ to show me this exciting information

- it literally could be solved by a notification

- it is not configurable in settings

I can understand the "bypass lock screen" behavior for an incoming phone call, but this is such an unbelievably bad interaction even for contacts you do know, nevermind contacts you don't.

Skype engineers - and I know you're reading this - show this to your PMs.

wittekm··on Samsung is building its own AI assistant for the Galaxy S8
So, when is somebody going to do an assistant abstraction layer so you can plug your service into all N of these things?
wittekm··on 9 reasons you should be using PyCharm
I'd just like to give a shout-out to Jetbrains for being really responsive on their bug tracker! I've reported a couple bugs about PEP 484 type comments and they've acknowledged or fixed them usually within a week.
wittekm··on Distant languages have similar sounds for common words
'bo*' is pretty common for cows in european languages - they are the genus 'bos' after all (see: english 'bovine').

As for the Vietnamese roots, I thought it might have been a French loanword but it looks like it came from a proto-vietnamese language: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/b%C3%B2#Etymology_1

wittekm··on Amazon Is Quietly Eliminating List Prices
Most likely, they A/B tested it and liked what they saw. Interesting development considering Nordstrom's failure with the same experiment.
wittekm··on The new Ford, a Silicon Valley software company
While I agree that the article is all business-speak ("we're just like Apple!" said every auto exec ever), the Mazda/Ford partnership is basically done as of the market crash. Ford at one point owned 33% of it in the 90s, now down to 2.1%.
wittekm··on Python 8 will be the next major Python version
A unique ode to the biggest changes between 2->3
wittekm··on Modern Peanut's Wild Cousin, Thought Extinct, Found in Andes
The article says that the modern peanut has 20 chromosomes, whereas its ancestors each had 10. At least in animal hybridization, the hybrid chromosome amount lies between that of the two parents. So what's up with that? Wikipedia mentions "doubling."
wittekm··on “Make HTML Great Again”: Campaign site teardowns
My favorite is that Jeb Bush's website used a capitalized I instead of a pipe symbol, assuming it'd be sans-serifs.

http://imgur.com/hc3LVwI

wittekm··on Mypy 0.3 Released – optional static type checker for Python
We've been using the Python 2 support at work for the past ~month and it's a gamechanger for me personally. I like that it's easy to incrementally add types, and silo it to one piece of the codebase at a time.

Thanks Jukka!

wittekm··on WebExtensions in Firefox 45
They want to add hooks for it, noting Opera already has a sidebar API. https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebExtensions/Future

I've seen similar sentiments echoed by Mozilla devs in a reddit AMA a few weeks ago.

wittekm··on RoboTrumpDNN: Generating Donald Trump Speeches with Dictionary Embedding and LSTM
Can somebody wrap this in a Slackbot and call it SmarterManchild?
wittekm··on Michael D. Hammond, Co-Founder of Gateway, Is Dead at 53
His poor kids - their mother died 4 to 5 months ago. :(
wittekm··on Google to Fold Chrome Operating System into Android
Seriously, that's ridiculous.

Alphabet's Nest, for instance, would make sense - it's not a household name.

wittekm··on What The New York Times Didn’t Say About Amazon
Interesting note: the hiring of Jay Carney (Feb 26, 2015) coincides exactly with this article ("We were in regular communication with Ms. Kantor from February through the publication date in mid-August"). I wonder if such a high-visibility PR hire came about /because/ of this article?
wittekm··on Lyft Announces Strategic Partnership with Didi
A number have tried, and failed. Interestingly, the following three failed as a function of being based in transit-legislation-heavy San Francisco:

* Loup

* Leap

* Night School

My understanding is that Chariot is still operating and doing well, though.

wittekm··on Altitude has become the defining characteristic of roller coasters
This article is confusing - what defines a gigacoaster? Why isn't the Kingda Ka (tallest North American roller coaster), for example, among them?
wittekm··on “The Interview” Now Available on Google Play and YouTube Movies
I would have originally agreed, but the emails and employee info leaked are pretty damaging; and how exactly would they have roped the FBI in on it?
wittekm··on The House Always Wins
I realize this is off topic, but I take serious issue with the statement that "Nevada is the entertainment capital of the world."
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