My "production stuff" is listed at https://github.com/alexpdp7/alexpdp7/blob/master/README.md#other-usable-projects-of-mine
@aparrish but then we should also separate pure programming and programming in the real world; the former might be a smaller part than we think. And it's the latter where everything is hostile!
I've had many conversations that amounted to "everything is broken and our job is more about learning how to work with broken things than about building stuff". A kind interpretation would be that market pressure impedes doing things properly, another would be gatekeeping.
@aparrish I think understanding how most programs execute is relatively easy to learn, yet just like with integration, I feel we don't know well enough how to teach how to put the pieces in the right order so that when your program executes it will do the right thing.
This might be just another manifestation of gatekeeping; maybe we just haven't invested enough in figuring out how to teach programming, although there are many visible efforts to do so.
@aparrish agreed, although I would also analyze the teaching of programming. I always use compare with symbolic differentiation and integration of mathematical functions.
I learned symbolic differentiation easily; it's mostly a straightforward process. However, I struggle with integration as it seems like learning to identify so many patterns that are much more complex.
As they are "opposite" processes I feel they compare well with understanding execution and programming.
here's a take that'll please no one: the belief that computers are difficult to use—especially foss and tools related to programming—is mostly constructed by politics and marketing, not by any inherent characteristics of the software. reasoning: (a) people master very complicated and user-hostile processes *all the time*. knitting, driving a car on the interstate, playing a musical instrument, being a baseball fan, using the subway—all just as complicated imo as (e.g.) learning the command line
@david_chisnall ah, yes, I was working on private repos so we didn't consider PR permissions a big problem.
Maybe you can run a workflow on a schedule from the main branch. It's not ideal, of course.
@david_chisnall I think I'm lacking a ton of context, but in my previous workplace we had GitHub Actions interacting with the GitHub APIs- so you could schedule ticket/PR creation and that kind of stuff, and the security model looked... somewhat reasonable from an uninformed POV? (You can request the GH Actions token to have more permissions than the default.)
Not sure what's the issue, but I don't see more responses...
Not related to any recent news at all, but my theory is that Nvidia will look at replacing Intel/AMD as the CPU maker for desktops/laptops as their next big cash cow.
(Flawed IMHO because desktops/laptops are dying slowly.)
I'd actually find it nice if I could get a competitive non-x86, non-Apple laptop/desktop. But of course I think I would find it hard to run an operating system that I feel good about on it.
@david_chisnall I keep thinking about some kind of "configuration format shebang". Just have a library that you call to read config and it hands you a JSON-like parsed data structure... and have this library have configurable plugins so that the user can install whatever plugin they like.
Finally a GitHub outage has affected me at home.
(I run two Kubernetes single-node "clusters" with Talos. My monitoring system detects if it needs updates. This involves checking Talos releases in GitHub. And this is failing right now and seems to be acknowledged in the GitHub status page.)
@16af93 @leah I am starting to use hooks and trying to rely on smaller, more focused components like cgit or org-mode (maybe https://vit.am/~ololduck/abbaye/ , Gerrit). However forges have mostly evolved to be convenient, and they are. It is challenging to replace them, although I think all of us have big issues with most.
I often find typos cognitively fascinating.
Some typos are just last-moment motor errors: "aimed for this key and hit the one next to it". Those are easy to understand. But others reveal much more interesting things about the mental process of driving your fingers on the keyboard, or even composing words.
I once aimed to type 'programs', and unexpectedly 'rpgroasm' came out. All the left-hand letters appear in the correct order, and so do all the right-hand letters, but they're interleaved in a spectacularly wrong way. That suggested that one part of my brain had sent an independent set of instructions to a subthing controlling each hand, and everything worked fine except the synchronisation between the two subthings.
There's another class of typo which I think of as 'brain got ahead of fingers': you're typing one word, but already thinking about a word that will come after it, and there's a crossover and you end up mixing up the two. Like 'bit bisect' in place of 'git bisect' – you're already planning the b, and it comes out of your fingers prematurely.
(Appropriately, as I typed _that_ sentence, 'in place' came out as 'pl inace', wow.)
Even the 'boring' motor errors have something cognitively interesting about them, just on the reading rather than writing side. We see 'adjacent letter on the keyboard' typos a lot, so our brains get good at correcting them. Sometimes _over_-correcting, so that you imagine a typo where none existed. When a sentence is a bit unexpected in context, I've been known to consider the possibility of a typo before figuring out how the sentence as originally spelled makes sense.
The best ones of those are when I hadn't even _realised_ the two words were a typo apart. I misread 'auction' as 'suction' once and it was a total surprise!
I wonder if there's any serious scholarly study of this kind of thing.
@datarama congrats! but I have to ask, do you consider you had a season 0?
(Technically, if I had no season 0, then I think I'll start season 48 in 5 weeks.)
WHY IS EVERYTHING AN OFF-BY-ONE PROBLEM?
@andrewg @coder @david_chisnall ah, nice. I think I misread a bit the original toot; I thought the DST *differences* between US and Europe granted GWB more golf time somehow.
But I think I made up that idea in my head because it was too fun :)
(I worked in a US company for a while with recurring meetings created by someone in Mexico. I believe their DST transitions are also different? In any case, there was some chaos during two weeks a year.)
I have been lately writing in Spanish about the framing I'm using lately for computing activities. Someone's writing prompted me to make this readable also by English speakers:
https://alex.corcoles.net/notes/tech/the-compliance-device-and-the-cult-device
@datarama yeah, for me it's been going a long time. It's mostly grammar errors, though. (Surprisingly, it bothers me more on English. I think I now make "silly" "phonetical" mistakes that natives make and I think I didn't use to.)
For me, I think it started before the recent tsunamis in communication, so I don't really attribute it to that. I think I'm just getting to a serious age.
@david_chisnall do you have a source of any kind? I don't really "need" authority, but I'm very curious and I've read like a half dozen search hits for "bush" + "daylight saving" and none mentioned anything like this.
I'm not sure Windows Sandbox is very well-known. It starts a clean Windows VM quite easily. It's not available in Windows Home, but Pro and other editions have it.
It is quite handy for recording tutorials so you can show how everything works on a clean Windows. I don't think it has snapshots or anything like that, which would be pretty convenient, but it's fine if you can do everything in one go without dying.
Bizarre thing: the Windows VM for instance does not have... Notepad.
The previous toot was about testing LanguageTool usage on Windows. It's more tedious than on Linux or macOS as no one has provided a decent "package", but I think the process required is reasonable. I wrote down some notes here:
https://alex.corcoles.net/notes/tech/language-tool
In my opinion, LanguageTool is quite good for English, Spanish and Catalan. Plus running it yourself seems to avoid some problems.
If you do a web search for "Java" you'll land on a java.com page offering a Java 8 download. Update 511, because Java 8 came out on 2014. Only about 70 seem to be public updates, that's still close to 6 releases a year.
This must be one of the longest running long-term support public/free updates for any piece of software.
The next LTS no longer has applets and Java Web Start and JavaFX was separated, the policy makes sense on some levels.
@bnuuy @coder @datarama oh, I don't disagree. With Wordpress it's kinda funny because I feel coders have just went all in in static site generators which are not really usable by non-coders, therefore making making Wordpress even more irreplaceable. (Yeah, I know there are alternatives.)
Also, shared PHP hosting is just... well, there's nothing quite like it also. Despite its flaws, it has enabled *so* much.
@datarama also there must be a reason PHP is half of the Internet!
(I dislike PHP myself, but in the past I loved it.)
There's also thoughts about monocultures there somewhere...
@mjg59 isn't the main problem software that bundles their own roots?
I think there should be a couple of alternatives to FUSE anyway.
https://www.mcmillen.dev/sigbovik/
(Presented without comment.)
@datarama https://scalie.computer/ and https://sic.pm/ have policies about LLM content that might work for you. Scalie is more computer-related and you might like the theme. sic.pm is more generalistic. Neither has a lot of traffic, I suspect you would make nice contributions to sic.pm