Notes
08:00, 15 May 2024
First things first https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20230725-00/?p=108482
23:59, 5 May 2024
Is it possible to create multiple accounts with the same utxo? If not, this seems like a great solution to spam
20:16, 29 April 2024
AWS charges for unauthorised writes to S3: https://medium.com/@maciej.pocwierz/how-an-empty-s3-bucket-can-make-your-aws-bill-explode-934a383cb8b1
06:59, 28 April 2024
I think the more devs that accept the possibility of jail and continue anyway, the lower the chance gets. Which begs each person to ask themselves a question: Is jail a price worth paying to defeat this injustice?
19:28, 27 April 2024
Already watched it, and felt optimistic myself. I think their bucket already has too many holes, and more are being created, at an ever increasing rate - it's too late to plug them all. It's unfortunate the powers that be cannot see this - or maybe they do but they feel they have to try, that this is just the way it has to be. It seems they intend to throw a tantrum. I imagine it'll be scary, some will have wealth confiscated, some will be jailed - all in their desperate attempt to swim against the current. And then they'll lose the financial powers they have anyway. Such a waste.
20:02, 25 April 2024
10:44, 24 April 2024
Long article, but worth the read. https://medium.com/@john_25313/c-isnt-a-hangover-rust-isn-t-a-hangover-cure-580c9b35b5ce "But, the reputation that memory safety problems currently have of being plentiful and trivial for sophisticated attackers to find and exploit is wrong. [...] C programs generally have a small number of external dependencies, where often those dependencies are among the most used pieces of software out there [...] Most other languages are much better equipped to support programmers leveraging the work of other programmers. In some sense, that’s a good thing from a business perspective. But from a security perspective, more dependencies not only tends to increase our attack surface, but it leaves us more open to supply chain attacks. [...] I have personally always been far more concerned about minimizing dependencies than buffer overflows. There are straightforward approaches to minimizing memory safety problems [...] But digging into each and every dependency? [...] My intent here isn’t to argue for using C over Rust, it’s to show that decisions around language choice are far more complex than the sound bytes people fling around."
07:38, 9 April 2024
Maybe disaster recover drills would be useful - prevent high-level disagreement in the moment and lead to a more polished response https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2015/07/28/analyzing-the-2013-bitcoin-fork-centralized-decision-making-saved-the-day/
07:39, 5 April 2024
Old article about Autotools https://web.archive.org/web/20190120112032/https://voices.canonical.com/jussi.pakkanen/2011/09/13/autotools/
07:28, 4 April 2024
List of qualities of a great dev. I only skimmed it - it's too long. I bet it was written by a dev or team who over complicate problems. They've certainly done that with this pdf. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2019/03/Paul-Li-MSR-Tech-Report.pdf
19:49, 3 April 2024
https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/what-silicon-valley-gets-right-on-software-engineers/
19:48, 3 April 2024
https://benjiweber.co.uk/blog/2016/01/25/why-i-strive-to-be-a-0-1x-engineer/
11:00, 3 April 2024
Can't beat his Newsweek Why the web won't be nirvana article: https://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirvana-185306
21:41, 31 March 2024
Starting to get pretty convinced that AI development isn't going to work https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/28/ai_bots_hallucinate_software_packages/
07:33, 30 March 2024
xz-utils backdoor: https://gist.github.com/thesamesam/223949d5a074ebc3dce9ee78baad9e27 and Ken Thompson lecture: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_ReflectionsonTrustingTrust.pdf
09:37, 27 March 2024
https://gofetch.fail/ - and a good explanation of how it works https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klhDbLV4Los
22:38, 24 March 2024
https://www.computerworld.com/article/2527153/opinion-the-unspoken-truth-about-managing-geeks.html
20:55, 24 March 2024
I remember when I was a kid looking out the window of a car, passing lines and lines of terrace houses and thinking "each of these has people living in them, each with their own life and problems."
17:16, 22 March 2024
Pretty Vacant by The Sex Pistols is a masterclass in avoiding censorship. All he had to do to say the word he really wanted to say - and he does repeat it over and over - was torture the word "vacant".
15:06, 21 March 2024
Yeah this got me - and inspired me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qa0yz_9upiY
18:55, 16 March 2024
Understanding the EU's Cyber Resilience Act https://www.linuxfoundation.org/blog/understanding-the-cyber-resilience-act
21:32, 14 March 2024
"Abuna Yemata Guh is a monolithic church located in Ethiopia. It is situated at a height of 2,580 metres and has to be climbed on foot to reach" https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IJCy64adY3Y
22:29, 29 February 2024
If you enjoy chocolate, seems might be worth enjoying it while prices are still reasonable
19:25, 29 February 2024
Doesn't feel like it's going to be long now before the world is hit with mass starvation - this decade I think: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-africa-68427383
23:46, 27 February 2024
Always been a sucker for a good speech: "Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrims' pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring." Poetry. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vP4iY1TtS3s
22:04, 26 February 2024
He's captured my exasperation with me shiny technology: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WN3CSOai_ZU
18:35, 25 February 2024
What I try to do: "The highest paid most skilled engineers are generally language ambiguous, meaning they can quickly learn to code in any language, are not strictly tied to conventions, meaning they will do what works, are able to code in simple ways, and are extremely pragmatic to reach goals "It's the low end of engineers who overengineer, overcomplicate, are cultist about their tech stack, etc." https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/1761817375492497525
22:06, 18 February 2024
https://www.myrmikan.com/pub/Myrmikan_Research_2024_02_15.pdf The fall of the US dollar?
17:15, 15 February 2024
More Apple scumbaggery https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/08/apple_web_apps_eu/
18:21, 10 February 2024
Some soviet-era animation: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=C3Rx3tYL7tw https://animatsiya.net/film.php?filmid=983
15:24, 4 February 2024
My favourite short story, I bought a little city by Donald Barthelme https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9tzXj-PL6Ms
10:57, 4 February 2024
Interesting talk on human behaviour / advertising https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZtCG-Jo51d4
22:16, 1 February 2024
US elite 1% opinions vs pleb opinions: https://www.rmgresearch.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Elite-One-Percent.pdf
12:48, 29 January 2024
Easy to forget as a programmer that we're here to solve problems - that's it. If Costco's solution works, there is no need to waste money modernising it https://twitter.com/scottew/status/1751357591375208689
08:54, 26 January 2024
Aligns with me on how complexity gets into codebases: https://twitter.com/transmutrix/status/1750563200708309466
08:31, 31 December 2023
Just discovered https://search.marginalia.nu/ Looks like the kind of search I'd want
08:26, 31 December 2023
4 billion if statements https://andreasjhkarlsson.github.io//jekyll/update/2023/12/27/4-billion-if-statements.html
00:07, 8 December 2023
Trains with built in obsolescence: https://badcyber.com/dieselgate-but-for-trains-some-heavyweight-hardware-hacking/
08:18, 6 December 2023
A taste of what's to come https://www.express.co.uk/finance/city/1838394/financial-contagion-hsbc-china-hong-kong
20:09, 29 November 2023
“The big money is not in the buying and the selling but in the waiting” - Charlie Munger. This talk is a good one, basically a condensed version of Cialdini's book Influence: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Jv7sLrON7QY
16:31, 23 November 2023
Reflection is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be unnatural
10:38, 19 November 2023
When I watch a talk like this, I am startled by all the complexity and syntax added to languages to hide some implementation details or allow you to write one function instead of several or whatever else. Everything has its use case, but generally I feel it's insane. Devs are forever learning the new hotness for a marginal benefit. Nobody ever masters their tools. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BbfBJv0iXm8
21:23, 18 November 2023
Great podcast on the importance of software performance: https://www.se-radio.net/2023/08/se-radio-577-casey-muratori-on-clean-code-horrible-performance/
22:17, 15 November 2023
Another approach to solving the problems of multiple representations of data and the associated transformations required in currently popular web apps: "local-first software". Seems like is useful for different use cases that you may reach for HTMX. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=esMjP-7jlRE
19:41, 15 November 2023
In my experience, programmers totally overlook costs due to "buying the coffee company to make a cup of coffee" https://vimeo.com/644068002
16:52, 13 November 2023
Think this is true not just for dependencies, but also for changing the standard approach of doing something. There are many hidden costs beyond the benefits of the switch. For example, there may be the time cost of all devs on project having to learn the new approach. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wu8F-LbkgQA
16:28, 8 November 2023
Good Dalio talk on having an idea meritocracy: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HXbsVbFAczg
11:38, 8 November 2023
"Rules can aid the wise, but they are snares to the fool" https://www.jstor.org/stable/45104797
23:55, 7 November 2023
Always been fascinated by this: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=I9Z2Oy8pPyQ
14:45, 5 November 2023
Managed to follow some Mastadon people - very nice https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bHzRCILEvY0
23:15, 4 November 2023
Good article on scheduling https://www.ardanlabs.com/blog/2018/08/scheduling-in-go-part1.html
12:32, 22 October 2023
Disappearing down a concurrency rabbithole... https://cs.brown.edu/people/mph/Herlihy91/p124-herlihy.pdf #programming
10:27, 22 October 2023
Talk on concurrency patterns in golang: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YEKjSzIwAdA
15:04, 20 October 2023
When programmers start praising code, I start to think something horrible has happened #programming
17:59, 19 October 2023
Good series on energy transition crisis: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=75c-kHKv0O4
20:01, 15 October 2023
Interesting talk on the how programming languages are funded: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XZ3w_jec1v8 #programming
21:43, 6 October 2023
I think dependency management generally is madness, highlighted by things like left-pad. But golang's 'go mod vendor' is a good feature and a step in the right direction. On one side, there needs to be a balance between giving the programmer control - not being victim to disappearing packages - and allowing them to pull upstream updates. On the other side, programmers need to start taking responsibility for the code they use: dependencies aren't for free. I think the future of dependency management is somewhere between these two sides. #programming
19:47, 5 October 2023
Curl has a high severity CVE #programming https://github.com/curl/curl/discussions/12026
14:40, 27 September 2023
Rings true to me: "Hard fact. The majority of the people you work with don't actually care how good you are at your job. They care about your ability to collaborate and avoid unnecessary drama." https://twitter.com/TheJackForge/status/1706399505216872934
08:52, 27 September 2023
"Teachings need be related to as prompts for spiritual practice and inquiry, not as monolithic and ultimate statements of reality." https://myemail.constantcontact.com/Retirement-Announcement.html?soid=1126600191855&aid=2-xCMqh-t-s
06:47, 23 September 2023
v0.dev - AI generated UIs. Would like more generic html output, but looks like this could be most web UIs will designed in the future #programming
18:47, 19 September 2023
Learning golang and this is one of the most dubious parts of the language - why wouldn't you let developers choose? The decision stinks of language designer egotism #programming
18:42, 16 September 2023
https://ykulbashian.medium.com/when-a-programmer-holds-the-code-hostage-667b65a10a2d
07:47, 16 September 2023
Some light reading for a Saturday morning https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/
07:43, 16 September 2023
Programming language creator or serial killer? https://vole.wtf/coder-serial-killer-quiz/
00:13, 8 September 2023
Looks like the Online Safety Bill is dead https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/06/osb-encryption-scanning-feasibility/
06:50, 7 September 2023
chrome://settings/adPrivacy to turn off spyware in google chrome https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1699021936573940154
07:01, 1 September 2023
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/56964/speech-tomorrow-and-tomorrow-and-tomorrow
06:56, 31 August 2023
I'm also not an exception fan, but not sure what the best way around it is
https://twitter.com/ThePrimeagen/status/1696941040115101881
07:28, 18 August 2023
00:58, 16 August 2023
I've little knowledge about this, but sounds like a desperation play to me - maybe HashiCorp are running out of ideas of how to sustainable make money? https://blog.gruntwork.io/the-future-of-terraform-must-be-open-ab0b9ba65bca
04:49, 2 August 2023
"Commands sent to Voyager 2 on July 21 accidentally caused the spacecraft’s antenna to point 2 degrees away from Earth." https://edition.cnn.com/2023/08/01/world/voyager-2-communication-blackout-scn/index.html
21:33, 29 July 2023
I keep expecting an uprising about this, but it hasn't materialised https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/07/uk-government-very-close-eroding-encryption-worldwide
17:14, 23 July 2023
"But notice that arguments about technologies—presumably battling for adoption, social acceptance, and popularity—are not only empirically not about rationality, but definitionally cannot be about rationality. A beginner who knows nothing about programming cannot select an ecosystem or technology based on rational arguments, because they’re removed from the technical context which makes such arguments meaningful. They can only select by second-degree metrics of qualities they care for—popularity, what someone seems to produce with said technology, how quickly they produce it, the unique qualities of that production as opposed to those of others, and so on." https://www.rfleury.com/p/the-marketplace-of-ideals
11:30, 23 July 2023
Read these before, and think they do provide good hints on how to make teams more effective. https://butwhatfor.beehiiv.com/p/simple-sabotage-field-manual-destroy-organizations
06:08, 23 July 2023
Good summary of how Google are trying to remove adblockers and the consequences https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0i0Ho-x7s_U
12:42, 21 July 2023
"In every profession there’s a point where further improvements in skills are so subtle that the difference between one level and another can only be appreciated by another expert. Customers tends not to be experts. So after a certain level of skill has been achieved, any improvements that are made through experience are invisible to the people you’re selling to." https://commoncog.com/seeing-expertise-milestone-worth-aiming-for/
05:10, 21 July 2023
If you only learn on the job, you sometimes have to wait for years before you can judge the success of a decision. But I'm also not sure there is a faster way. I'm not sure an architectural decision on a large project can be replicated quickly via practice. https://www.pathsensitive.com/2018/02/the-practice-is-not-performance-why.html