Mark Youngman's Website

Notes

18:03, 12 May 2025

The Gentleman's Guide To Forum Spies https://archive.org/details/the_gentlemans_guide_to_forum_spies_spooks

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16:20, 12 May 2025

https://jangafx.com/insights/linux-binary-compatibility The Atrocious State Of Binary Compatibility on Linux and How To Address It

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20:38, 11 May 2025

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis "Hungarian physician and scientist of German descent who was an early pioneer of antiseptic procedures [...] He could offer no theoretical explanation for his findings of reduced mortality due to hand-washing, and some doctors were offended at the suggestion that they should wash their hands and mocked him for it. In 1865, the increasingly outspoken Semmelweis allegedly suffered a nervous breakdown and was committed to an asylum by his colleagues. In the asylum, he was beaten by the guards. He died 14 days later" Punished for innovation.

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12:43, 7 May 2025

Death diving competition https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cN_m9wMhidw

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13:24, 4 May 2025

I like to revisit this talk every few years - timeless message. The Silver Bullet Syndrome by Hadi Hariri: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wyd6J3yjcs

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09:59, 4 May 2025

If web browsers are in trouble if they don't have support from one of the world's largest corporations, then I'd suggest there is something fundamentally wrong. I want to produce a website without any html/css/js. The specs for these are thousands of paged - it's nuts. https://danfabulich.medium.com/all-four-major-web-browsers-are-about-to-lose-80-of-their-funding-0e42ceb358f1

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12:40, 20 April 2025

US crosswalk hacked to deliver messages as Bezo, Zuckerberg, Musk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe2j7q_5xlA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPwM0q_yNsY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w05x8U0RPe8

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07:13, 14 April 2025

https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/12/ai_code_suggestions_sabotage_supply_chain/ [S]ecurity and academic researchers have found that AI code assistants invent package names. In a recent study, researchers found that about 5.2 percent of package suggestions from commercial models didn't exist, compared to 21.7 percent from open source or openly available models. Running that code should result in an error when importing a non-existent package. But miscreants have realized that they can hijack the hallucination for their own benefit.

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12:17, 7 April 2025

*large amounts of documents

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12:15, 7 April 2025

Talk on how to search large documents https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80LKF2qph6I Bloom filters https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom_filter Seems you've got to read a paper to understand hierarchical bloom filters https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.04544

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07:01, 4 April 2025

Stanley Druckenmiller 2023 keynote at USC Marshall https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRPMHinrFKQ

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08:31, 19 March 2025

AI coding woes https://x.com/leojr94_/status/1901598955508494573

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09:28, 12 March 2025

Reviews of Three Colours: Blue tend to miss a key part of the film, in my opinion. Julie composes music with her husband, which he takes credit for despite her being the creative driving force behind them. When he dies, they are half way through composing a piece, so Julie feels she must stop writing the piece. But it doesn't work: she is literally haunted by the half-complete composition, and cannot stop new sections coming to mind. Her desire to stop composing is symbolic of her desire to escape her grief, and resolves when she agrees to finish the piece and put her name on it. The interplay between her grief and the unfinished composition is central to understanding the film.

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09:02, 5 March 2025

Ukraine conflict summarised in a 5 min video clip https://x.com/TheFirstonTV/status/1897059481378545714

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07:52, 5 March 2025

More accurate inflation charts (supposedly) https://truflation.com/marketplace

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23:45, 1 March 2025

Firas Zahabi on how to exercise https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CMwXs85PDts

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17:05, 25 February 2025

Russell Brand has a spiritual experience, described from 1hrs 4mins https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJfw-YG3fWM&t=3829

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15:41, 22 February 2025

But simplicity is not so simple to attain. Steve jobs figured out that "you have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple." The Arabs have an expression for trenchant prose: no skill to understand it, mastery to write it - Taleb

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17:26, 19 February 2025

64 bytes program competition winner. Scroll down for assembly. Not heard of "sizecoding" before https://demozoo.org/productions/367702/

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13:32, 18 February 2025

They'll pay individuals to post rather than the platform - that's slightly better as you can unfollow someone who posts loads of ads, but if twitter is a guide, most people will accept it. So my guess is it's not a big change for marketers.

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18:57, 17 February 2025

Reads like someone having a psychotic break

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18:42, 17 February 2025

Seems DOGE hasn't been fixed

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18:35, 17 February 2025

Not surprised about twitter's grok AI having a security hole (and the doge website). When you prioritise efficiency, it's difficult to distinguish devs who do things right from those that cut corners. In fact, those that cut corners might initially seem better to management. On the other hand, lots of slow devs hide behind "doing things right". There is no easy answer. Pushing for efficiency isn't necessarily wrong - just that it's difficult for management to push in that direction without these kinds of issues. That cost (along with the reputation and likely maintenance cost) might be acceptable given the speed of shipping - although that balance changes significantly if personal/payment data are involved.

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10:18, 17 February 2025


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16:40, 16 February 2025

Dragonsweeper - minesweeper variant: https://danielben.itch.io/dragonsweeper

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18:19, 13 February 2025

How to bring down a dictatorship https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=r7dNLt5mC1A

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09:33, 12 February 2025

Overview of Trump's first 100 days as president: https://www.demographyunplugged.com/p/trumps-first-100-days-part-1

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08:07, 7 February 2025

The end of programming as we know it: https://www.oreilly.com/radar/the-end-of-programming-as-we-know-it/ Feel like a point that is missing is the loss of expertise. Users of intepreted languages (mostly) don't understand the what their code boils down to, and so solutions are generally scuffed. Hardware performance gains allowed this. Without those gains, much of what is done today where I work wouldn't be feasible. I think many of the efficiency gains of AI for programming might not materialise if AI produces even worse performing code and hardware doesn't continue to speed up. The loss of expertise will become a problem. Or maybe its a transfer, from underdtanding how the computer works to understanding how AI works - people building solutions they don't understand.

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21:27, 4 February 2025

"As civil society activists, we present a list of “red lines not to be crossed”. Should the President cross these red lines, such actions will inevitably lead to political instability in our country and the deterioration of international relations" https://uacrisis.org/en/71966-joint-appeal-of-civil-society-representatives

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21:14, 30 January 2025

The spotless man
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21:57, 28 January 2025

Wifi router turned into a camera https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3ZPFE4zHfk

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12:26, 21 January 2025

Rossi face helmet https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Prx8ppLIxQ0

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22:17, 19 January 2025

You are a goddess, and I am a simple being, trembling beneath the weight of your presence. I believed you would heal me— wrap me in silken light, stroke the knots of my sorrow until they unraveled into grace. And you said, “Sure, let’s begin.” But what I meant wasn’t this. What I thought was gentleness wasn’t the fire you lit in me. I thought healing would be soft and sensual, a balm against my bruises, a dream made flesh, a cocoon for my desires. Not this— this unmasking, this shattering of the mirror that held the fragile portrait of my persona. Not this pain, raw and unrelenting, flaying my illusions one by one until I stood exposed, naked in your gaze. You loved me in the discomfort, held me in the discovery, kissed the breaking open as though it were a blessing. And perhaps it is. Perhaps healing isn’t soft, but sharp, jagged, alive. Perhaps the only way to live is to be pierced by it, to be stripped of every lie until the truth shines like a wound, like a gift. And so I stand, shivering in this unmaking, no longer sure where I begin or end. Your hands are not kind, but they are sure— sculptor’s hands, breaking me apart to rebuild a thing I cannot yet fathom. “Trust,” you whisper, though it sounds like thunder. And I do, though the trust tastes of blood, though it feels like falling into endless sky. Your eyes burn with something ancient, and I realize— you are not here to save me. You are here to remind me I was never broken, only buried beneath the weight of my own forgetting. Larson Langston

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17:00, 19 January 2025

This "obviousness" is what I strive for: http://blog.wilshipley.com/2013/12/my-doom-20th-anniversary-stories.html?m=1 "Don't take this to mean his code was spaghetti—it was actually some of the easiest-to-understand code I've ever worked with. It has an almost indescribable quality of "obviousness." Like, you know when a really good teacher explains something, it seems obvious? That's what his code was like. I mean, OF COURSE there's a loop where you service the pending events and call a refresh on the UI layer."

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21:35, 13 January 2025


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02:32, 4 January 2025

Man suffers from centralised platform woes: https://x.com/MikeBenzCyber/status/1875214258046193880

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12:52, 2 January 2025

Interior design idea: exclusively display prints of stolen, location-unknown paintings.

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20:11, 27 December 2024

I expect umbrellas to continue to go strong.

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15:02, 25 December 2024

"To many, the end of the war and the failure of the peace would validate the Christmas cease-fire as the only meaningful episode in the apocalypse. It belied the bellicose slogans and suggested that the men fighting and often dying were, as usual, proxies for governments and issues that had little to do with their everyday lives. A candle lit in the darkness of Flanders, the truce flickered briefly and survives only in memoirs, letters, song, drama and story."

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14:53, 25 December 2024

Xmas truce in 1914: https://mises.org/mises-daily/christmas-truce-world-war-i

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12:51, 23 December 2024

Coding adventure: rendering text https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SO83KQuuZvg

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10:58, 23 December 2024

https://unpoly.com/

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10:42, 23 December 2024

Person conplains about unnecessary complexity in software: https://www.radicalsimpli.city/

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00:25, 22 December 2024

Chaser: Miles Davis - Concierto de Aranjuez: Adagio https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpRXA3lFrqM

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00:24, 22 December 2024

Shot: Brassed Off - Rodrigo's Concierto de Aranjuez https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8uoY9e5YVY

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11:11, 18 December 2024

https://wastedwind.energy/2024-12-18 and explanation for why too much renewable energy leads to increased costs due to congestion https://www.arcuspower.com/post/what-is-grid-congestion-and-how-can-we-solve-it

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07:26, 15 December 2024

I'd say suffering that doesn't overwhelm creates character: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOvQSqY7Jgc

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23:55, 10 December 2024

Nanowar of steel - helloworld.java https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yup8gIXxWDU

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21:51, 7 December 2024

Salvation is Created by The Dale Warland Singers https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GJSbw8Ea2Os

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18:53, 7 December 2024

https://everyuuid.com/

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21:43, 29 November 2024

Rocket explosions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K48AasRJpag

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07:02, 26 November 2024

War and growth of government: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6oEqATh3_DQ

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08:00, 19 November 2024

Threads over async/await https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2024/11/18/threads-beat-async-await/

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21:05, 18 November 2024

git bisect https://sundry.jerryorr.com/2024/11/15/git-bisect

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21:08, 13 November 2024

For me, so much music pales in comparison to Elgar https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7iM5dymBBI4

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14:01, 10 November 2024

Interesting election analysis - left/right paradigm lost the election: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XK5yQ8ieBTA

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12:25, 8 November 2024

US election in a nutshell. The result is predominantly down to economics. All the other stories about why are mostly surface and/or minor influences, in my opinion

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22:27, 4 November 2024

Windows: unsafe. Linux: unsafe. Major browsers: unsafe. https://thenewstack.io/feds-critical-software-must-drop-c-c-by-2026-or-face-risk/

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11:26, 3 November 2024

Discovered a new musical instrument: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=h0AAFhx3RmA

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08:42, 28 October 2024

Neural net visualisation: https://x.com/gabeElbling/status/1850220333631943068

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17:39, 25 October 2024

Lots of different shots of the booster catch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpxB1S-ohEU

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07:54, 25 October 2024

How to sharpen a knife: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pagPuiuA9cY

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06:52, 25 October 2024

Dogs sort ducks: https://x.com/perry_ron/status/1849545657331126379

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07:01, 15 October 2024

Copying someone's voice with just a 10 second example https://x.com/emollick/status/1845619684709679517

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16:17, 14 October 2024

Video YouTube recommended to me. Some things change and some things remain the same https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWqIExUfp4Q

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12:29, 6 October 2024

Cleaned the chimney...

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08:05, 6 October 2024

I suspect many nation's elites prefer to have data on their citizens grabbed by rival states than having to give up that spying https://www.wsj.com/tech/cybersecurity/u-s-wiretap-systems-targeted-in-china-linked-hack-327fc63b

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16:12, 1 October 2024

Assange starts 44 mins in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QnzfTROPOdQ&t=2679

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18:49, 24 September 2024

My experience of the dev world is the tooling (language, dependencies, etc.) on projects changes so fast that it's a major life sacrifice to keep up. And even if you sacrificed everything, mastering those tools is still impossible. I think the knowledge required to work on a project needs to be carefully scoped such that, if programming is your profession, you can be reasonably expected to understand the tooling's subtleties. The need for learning should be minimised to allow for the possibility of mastery. The first thing every project should do is establish a membrane, such that everything inside can be reasonably expected to be understood by those working on the project. And that membrane should be fanatically defended. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMv2egxQuxY

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17:25, 24 September 2024

The games played with "science": https://x.com/JonathanShedler/status/1797342199656694237

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00:03, 19 September 2024

Lots of insights into chinese culture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xv0Xpw4gd3I

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20:58, 18 September 2024

Just spam, I believe. You can filter them out if your client has that ability. I use Amethyst and it was easy enough

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16:25, 17 September 2024

My prediction of Starmer being the UK's Obama is looking on - early optimising leads to complete disillusionment with the political establishment. And as Obama led to Trump, maybe Starmer leads to Farage: https://www.declassifieduk.org/revealed-keir-starmer-billed-taxpayer-nearly-250000-for-travel-expenses-at-cps/

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07:16, 15 September 2024

I find this more amusing than I should: https://github.com/Speykious/cve-rs

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23:05, 14 September 2024

Good advice on allocating memory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xt1KNDmOYqA

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07:03, 13 September 2024

Spacewalk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd2ZcpirFew

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21:39, 9 September 2024

Group chat problems https://37signals.com/group-chat-problems/

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13:19, 6 September 2024

It's one thing to read of the genocides of the past. It's another thing to watch it in happen and justified in real time. A lesson of what happens to humans when their animalistic, tribal nature is engaged: https://alonmizrahi.substack.com/p/shame-is-dead-zionism-killed-it

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10:39, 18 August 2024

Glenn Greenwald teaches journalism 101 https://rumble.com/v5b2z25

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17:42, 3 August 2024

Undefined behaviour endgame: https://blog.cr.yp.to/20240803-clang.html

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07:55, 31 July 2024

Using git bisect to find when an issue was introduced: https://research.swtch.com/bisect

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17:33, 25 July 2024

I feel like Bubbles in the suburbs: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sEQUR7Fts-w

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17:22, 25 July 2024

What's going on over there is difficult to even imagine, let alone justify. And yet Western elites are unified on the issue. Not often you see the Bidens and the Trumps agree. I struggle to understand what outcome or strategic goal they believe makes such carnage worthwhile. They must realise they will evoke intense karmic forces in response to this - in the cause-and-effect sense, not the spiritual-bollocks sense. It's either complacency or something they deem crazily important. https://x.com/SMohyeddin/status/1815348253212246440

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19:16, 22 July 2024

I learned a new word: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia

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18:03, 22 July 2024

State of the British psyche update: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lfq3auK808

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18:43, 18 July 2024

I was hoping someone would come up with some clever cryptography that allows you to have a master, cold-storage key that generates child keys which are all used to post under one identity. If you lose a child key, you sign a message with your master key to publicly revoke it somehow and generate a new child key. No idea if this is feasible or not.

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16:39, 17 July 2024

More good programming advice: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bmSAYlu0NcY

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16:20, 17 July 2024

Good programming advice https://github.com/zakirullin/cognitive-load

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15:50, 16 July 2024

It's not about delivering lines of code and commits. It's about delivering value

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21:11, 15 July 2024

Spent hours trying to get a self-signed cert working locally - then mkcert solved it in 5 mins https://github.com/FiloSottile/mkcert

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07:22, 12 July 2024

"We have found while Rust mitigates kernel vulnerabilities, it is beyond Rust's capability to fully eliminate them; what is more, if not handled properly, its safety assurance even costs the developers dearly in terms of both runtime overhead and development efforts." https://www.usenix.org/conference/atc24/presentation/li-hongyu

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00:51, 7 July 2024

Fun chart. Labour vote totals 2001-2024. Corbyn losing got more votes than Starmer winning

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12:52, 4 July 2024

Generate audio from text - lots of voice options https://rhasspy.github.io/piper-samples/

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13:36, 1 July 2024

Netflix slides about company culture https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/culture-1798664/1798664

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12:06, 17 June 2024

"If there is an escape that escape will be used" Christine Lagarde

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10:21, 15 June 2024

Wouldn't surprise me if this is what the West's interest in Gaza is really all about: "It has been speculated that one of the reasons behind Israel’s desire to eliminate Hamas from the Gaza Strip and completely control the Palestinian enclave is to give itself the chance to better explore a dramatic economic opportunity [...] The idea is to cut a canal through the Israeli-controlled Negev Desert from the tip of the Gulf of Aqaba — the eastern arm of the Red Sea that juts into Israel’s southern tip and south-western Jordan — to the Eastern Mediterranean coast, thus creating an alternative to the Egyptian-controlled Suez Canal" https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/explained-global/ben-gurion-canal-suez-israel-9021520/

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08:53, 14 June 2024

Early internet news report: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=X84muuaySVQ

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11:28, 12 June 2024

I wonder if anyone questioned the original dependency choice in this situation. Given the colossal effort they've had to make to switch to a different dependency - the switch itself and all the devs learning the new way - it seems to me that a different approach at the start could have potentially saved lots of time. https://slack.engineering/balancing-old-tricks-with-new-feats-ai-powered-conversion-from-enzyme-to-react-testing-library-at-slack/

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22:21, 10 June 2024

Sounds about right: https://read.engineerscodex.com/p/clever-code-is-probably-the-worst While I was proud of it, there was suddenly a problem when I talked to my manager about it. “While I understand how complex this was, when it comes to performance reviews, this code looks trivial. It looks too easy, too simple. I would recommend writing an implementation doc of this module just so we can demonstrate that this was actually quite complex.”

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18:52, 10 June 2024

This guy seems good if you want to understand how LLMs work: https://m.youtube.com/@AndrejKarpathy/videos

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06:11, 6 June 2024

"Many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices." William James

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12:14, 30 May 2024

Basically I want to have groups of npubs I can look at without publicly following them.

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12:14, 30 May 2024

Is there any nostr client that does something similar to twitter's lists? Always surprised by how few people use twitter lists - only way to make twitter usable imo #asknostr

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12:09, 30 May 2024

Mainstream media in a nutshell: https://x.com/LukeGromen/status/1796150043042279775

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19:47, 29 May 2024

"To realize the spirit of Mu you must, without being sidetracked, travel along an iron rail stretching to infinity. One halt, much less many, will thwart enlightenment. The narrowest separation from Mu becomes a separation of miles. So take care, be vigilant! Don’t let go of Mu even for a moment while sitting, standing, walking, eating, or working.”

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18:32, 23 May 2024

One underrated thing about vim modal editing is the magic of having the cursor bounce and then transforming characters in a few keystrokes. It's not even about efficiency. It's the innocent fun of a kid in a jungle gym. And it never seems to get old. It significantly increases the joy of coding for me

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14:19, 22 May 2024

Not sure if I want a new body or a new head. Tough choice. https://x.com/biogerontology/status/1792971189708566837

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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

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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?

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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.

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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."

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21:54, 18 April 2024

Current mood: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5X3ZFu_i_oQ

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07:45, 12 April 2024

https://opsec101.org/

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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/

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07:36, 4 April 2024

http://www.underhanded-c.org/

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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

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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

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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/

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21:58, 30 March 2024

https://letsconvene.im/

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09:37, 27 March 2024

https://gofetch.fail/ - and a good explanation of how it works https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klhDbLV4Los

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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."

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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".

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15:06, 21 March 2024

Yeah this got me - and inspired me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qa0yz_9upiY

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18:55, 16 March 2024

Understanding the EU's Cyber Resilience Act https://www.linuxfoundation.org/blog/understanding-the-cyber-resilience-act

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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

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21:22, 13 March 2024


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10:17, 10 March 2024

Linux server problems: https://sadservers.com/

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11:00, 2 March 2024

https://www.srenity.online/

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22:29, 29 February 2024

If you enjoy chocolate, seems might be worth enjoying it while prices are still reasonable

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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

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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

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22:04, 26 February 2024

He's captured my exasperation with me shiny technology: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WN3CSOai_ZU

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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

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23:59, 21 February 2024

http://eradman.com/entrproject/

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22:06, 18 February 2024

https://www.myrmikan.com/pub/Myrmikan_Research_2024_02_15.pdf The fall of the US dollar?

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17:15, 15 February 2024

More Apple scumbaggery https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/08/apple_web_apps_eu/

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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

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10:57, 4 February 2024

Interesting talk on human behaviour / advertising https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZtCG-Jo51d4

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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

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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

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08:54, 26 January 2024

Aligns with me on how complexity gets into codebases: https://twitter.com/transmutrix/status/1750563200708309466

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08:31, 31 December 2023

Just discovered https://search.marginalia.nu/ Looks like the kind of search I'd want

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00:07, 8 December 2023

Trains with built in obsolescence: https://badcyber.com/dieselgate-but-for-trains-some-heavyweight-hardware-hacking/

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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

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16:31, 23 November 2023

Reflection is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be unnatural

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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

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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/

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08:37, 16 November 2023

New skyscraper to be built in Saudi, Epicon

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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

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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

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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

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16:28, 8 November 2023

Good Dalio talk on having an idea meritocracy: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HXbsVbFAczg

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11:38, 8 November 2023

"Rules can aid the wise, but they are snares to the fool" https://www.jstor.org/stable/45104797

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23:55, 7 November 2023

Always been fascinated by this: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=I9Z2Oy8pPyQ

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14:45, 5 November 2023

Managed to follow some Mastadon people - very nice https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bHzRCILEvY0

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23:15, 4 November 2023

Good article on scheduling https://www.ardanlabs.com/blog/2018/08/scheduling-in-go-part1.html

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12:32, 22 October 2023

Disappearing down a concurrency rabbithole... https://cs.brown.edu/people/mph/Herlihy91/p124-herlihy.pdf #programming

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10:27, 22 October 2023

Talk on concurrency patterns in golang: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YEKjSzIwAdA

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15:04, 20 October 2023

When programmers start praising code, I start to think something horrible has happened #programming

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17:59, 19 October 2023

Good series on energy transition crisis: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=75c-kHKv0O4

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20:01, 15 October 2023

Interesting talk on the how programming languages are funded: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XZ3w_jec1v8 #programming

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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

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19:47, 5 October 2023

Curl has a high severity CVE #programming https://github.com/curl/curl/discussions/12026

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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

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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

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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

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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

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07:47, 16 September 2023

Some light reading for a Saturday morning https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/

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07:43, 16 September 2023

Programming language creator or serial killer? https://vole.wtf/coder-serial-killer-quiz/

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19:07, 14 September 2023

This month's Trends Journal cover

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13:35, 9 September 2023

Learning some HTMX

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00:13, 8 September 2023

Looks like the Online Safety Bill is dead https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/06/osb-encryption-scanning-feasibility/

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06:50, 7 September 2023

chrome://settings/adPrivacy to turn off spyware in google chrome https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1699021936573940154

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06:50, 3 September 2023

5 million... https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-5-Million-Lines

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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

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12:00, 23 August 2023

ORMs vs SQL: https://wozniak.ca/blog/2014/08/03/1/index.html

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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

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14:47, 12 August 2023

React to Htmx: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3GObi93tjZI

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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/

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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

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