Good morning Fedi friends.
Just a quick message of appreciation for VPS snapshots, which are a real (digital) life saver.
I'll try updating my GoToSocial again this morning. See you on the other side (I hope!) :GoToSocial:
"The Cuneiform Tablets of 2015"
tinlizzie.org/VPRIPapers/tr201… (PDF)
How do we describe a piece of software to a future civilization, so that they can run it while having none of our current hardware? Can we describe a hardware and software environment on one page of A4 paper?
Inspired by the ideas above, we set out to build a system for software preservation, which we christened Cuneiform. It works as follows: in the present day, a preservationist using the Cuneiform tools preserves a software program for posterity. Once a program has been packaged with Cuneiform, an archaeologist of the future spends a fun afternoon “hacking” on an emulator that brings the packaged program back to
life. The packaged programs will look and behave exactly as they did in the past.
A friend and ex-colleague is visiting from Sweden.
He is 16 years younger than I am. He looks pretty much the same he looked 10-years ago. I have a beard.
I still wasn't prepared for being asked 3 times in 3 days by various service staff if he is my son. 🤣
@clacke there was a real life initiative in cologne. They printed coasters with a message like " no beer for fascists" or something ( I don't remember the exact words) They were in a lot of bars in the city. Now the AfD in a pre election effort printed posters because they were so upset about it. Showcasing the text on the coasters and calling it "dangerous leftwing radical scandalous". Worked.
I finally accidentally dipped my toes into listening to #Ado
holy heck what is this level of control, it's out of this world
TIL about the Olivia Hill rule.
rpgmuseum.fandom.com/wiki/No_f…
It starts "If you're a fascist, you're not welcome to play this game. It's against the rules."
As you can imagine, it causes fascists and adjacents to out themselves.
In a new report sponsored by #bigtech they advance the argument that #digitalsovereignty will cost Europe €115 billion over ten years.
Leaving aside i) their obvious incentive to overinflate / scare and ii) this "cost" is also an investment / bootstrap of a new digital economy, it is funny to put in perspective of what bigtech is spending:
#Meta burned > €80 billion in one harebrained #VR project, in less than four years 🤣
https://ecipe.org/publications/economic-impact-of-cada/
h/t #theregister
Most importantly, build community around your writing, and not just online. Put up posters in your local area. Join relevant local groups and talk to them about it. For tech reviews, join makerspaces, repair cafes and maybe the men's shed.
Yes, that local audience is small and niche. *But*, it's also outside your existing social network. Those people know others via online channels who are too. The potential for discovery through genuine relationship-building is huge and mostly untapped.
(5/5)
My unit test did not catch it, as it was not TDD and didn't test full boundary conditions and weird data.
Going faster always goes slower.
"Oh, I am so silly, I forgot to add the same check over here."
*Narrator: There should in fact be no such check over there*
Today I spent two hours getting the full debugging setup working well, then an hour scratching my head and stepping through things until I finally realized that I should just revert that small commit from two days ago.
*Now* this can go live.
I have come back to this excellent StackOverflow question so many times over the years:
"How do I break a string in YAML over multiple lines?"
stackoverflow.com/questions/37…
The best answer has these highlights:
There are ~5~ ~6~ *NINE* (or 63*, depending how you count) different ways to write multi-line strings in YAML.
YAML is crazy.
And the funniest thing is I've usually ended up using the 64th option: A bash here-document with escaped newlines.
ICYMI: Moderna won the combined flu-covid vax race, & more next generation Covid vaccines nearing possible phase 3 trials:
Check out the NextGen Covid Vax Tracker—a reader-supported project! (Thank you!)
This diagram of versions and derivatives of Unix is very neat, and more detailed than the one you usually see, even though it includes fewer of them.
The city of Västerås alone, in Västmanland, Sweden, has won Eurovision as many times or twice as many times as most countries that ever won Eurovision.
Because Loreen won twice. 😁
ssh BBS interaction in 2026 is a refreshing (jarring!) reminder of how horribly bloated and slow most modern web apps and native mobile apps are, by design.
lately I am interacting with a remote, cloud Linux VM-hosted, Golang-written ssh BBS and the roundtrip latency of the "user input -> UI response & rerender" cycle is lightning fast. Massively faster and more resource efficient than The Norm now.
Looks like LibreOffice Calc will get this next year:
As of 2020 or 2021, Excel has lambdas!
This can save you from repeating yourself or using intermediate cells.
For example, when you have an array formula, Excel, quite annoyingly, coerces blank cells to zero instead of the empty string.
Before, to work around this, you would have had to say =if(isblank(...longformula...); ""; ...samelongformula...), but now instead of repeating yourself, you can go =lambda(x, if(isblank(x); ""; x))(...longformula...)
The quinquevirate of Unix workstation architectures:
- HP PA-RISC
- SUN SPARC (or Oracle SPARC, if you will)
- SGI MIPS (or HP MIPS)
- DEC Alpha (or HP Alpha)
- IBM POWER
They're all RISC-camp CPUs, isn't that interesting? There is a great genealogical diagram of the ancient great RISC architectures and their descendants and inspired cousins out there somewhere.
osnews.com/story/146092/the-ho…
RE: toot.mirbsd.org/users/osnews_r…