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This week’s earworm: an arrangement of Svalbard Theme, from Orion’s Belt by Anders Enger Jensen. 🎵
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The grammar checker in my IDE is complaining about a missing article? My comment can’t be “if slice is empty,” it has to be “if the slice is empty?” Has the IDE ever worked with someone who writes code? 😛
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Free idea for an online game. You’re given 60 seconds to read a post. While you’re reading, ads causes the page to reflow, video ads fly in covering the prose, and you need to do your best to dismiss them or deal with them. Then, at the end, the page blanks and you need to answer a comprehension question about what you were asked to read.
There could even be level progressions here. Level 1 would have a single ad causing the page to reflow. Then later, you start getting video ads flowing across the screen, or maybe even popup notifications for notifications or to sign-up to an email address. The boss could be a paywall, where you need to either pay (thereby getting a lower score) or find a way around the paywall by browsing the plugin directory and finding one that won’t hack you or make the problem worse.
I guess there’s more here than I originally expected.
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Ultimate issue with such posts is that their purpose of existence changes over time. You make a post about seeing someone mentioning a tool, about you using that tool, and your opinions of it. And because’s in the moment, you don’t write about the tool itself. Why would you? You know what the tool does. The post is just an expression of you using it.
But eventually, time passes and all you remember is that you used a tool that does something, or worked a particular way. You forgot the name, and you think you know who mentioned it, but you refer to this person in many different ways. The post now needs to act as a reference, a way to recall something.
The only solution I see is making sure you say a few words about the tool itself. Just a few, like “key-frame animation.” or “motion graphics.” or heck, just write “browser” if that’s where you use it. Anything that would help with indexing and eventually recall.
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Speaking about being disorganised, it took me forever to find the post I made a while back about a tool used for making animation. Didn’t find it in search, and ChatGPT was not help either. Eventually found it by searching for “.gif” in Micro.blog, as I knew the post had a Gif animation.
Turns out the post contained none of the terms I was using to search. Made sure to have fixed that.
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Another useful use of Claude Code, especially for us Obsidian users that can’t keep their notes in order. Launch it in your Obsidian vault and ask it “what was I thinking when I made this paricular decision?” 😀
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I wonder if Zuck would be okay with staff using an LLM to interact with Meta. 😏
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TIL that moon towers, a thing I saw in an episode of Rick and Morty that I thought was completely fictional, are actually a real thing, or at least were. I guess Rick and Morty live in Austin, Texas. 😏
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Kind of validating to see coding agents having just as much trouble with code generators for gRPC schemas as I do (it’s means these gRPC tools kinda suck).
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Bit sad that it’s come to the point that news of someone conceding their defeat in an election is worthy of the exclamation, “wow, really?”
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This is why I think the whole crunch culture is fucking stupid. People need rest. Without it, you spend more time doing things badly, because the tunnel vision that comes from working 10’s of hours straight means you’re not open to the possibility that the problem might be elsewhere.
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Whoever said that a good night sleep is all that’s needed to solve a problem is absolutely right. Was facing a problem last evening, decided to call it a day, took a look at it this morning, and fixed it. Wasn’t even that good a sleep.
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The month of free public transport has introduced an interesting problem. A completely open barrier does not provide a way to force people in a particular direction. So PTV staff have to make do with alternatives for controlling flow, like directing people manually, or paper signs like these.
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When you deploy your service to the wrong environment, Dev instead of Test, you know it’s time to call it a day. Just be glad I didn’t accidently deploy to Prod. 😬
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Now that coding agents can produce code in reasonably working order, the real source of problems will come from the human’s miss-understanding of how the code should work. If the human has some bad assumptions, and conveys that information to the agent, then things could quickly get quite messy.
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I can’t see how OpenAI pivoting to a “super-app” would entice developers from moving away from the likes of Claude Code. Having a purpose-built TUI works perfectly here: I know where I launched it, I can have multiple sessions, etc. Plus, I’m already using the Terminal for building, Git, tailing logs, etc. Having one more tool in the same collection of windows is a small price on the old spacial awareness budget.
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Oof! Jacket and beanie weather sort of snuck up on us. I’m a little unprepared for it. 🥶
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You know, just because you did manage to deploy something on a Thursday doesn’t mean you’ve saved yourself from spending the weekend fixing said something. 😫
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It’s said that the price of freedom is constant vigilance. In the same vein, the price of working software is constant paranoia. Is it working? Sure you tested it yesterday, but is it still working today? Maybe you should check. 😥
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Tiny victories: I spelt “amalgamation” correctly on the first try. 🏆
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Amusing how many podcasts are just interviews with people while they do X. Got me thinking about starting a podcast where I interview people about their work BUT, and here’s the hook, they clean my house. Will you learn anything new here that you wouldn’t from any of these other shows? Well, no, but I end up with a clean house, so it’s a win-win. 😛
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🔗 Robert Birming: How to kill a blog
What can you do to prolong [your blog’s] life?
It’s very simple. Don’t go niche.
Blog about whatever you feel like. Some posts get more attention than others. It’s not important.
Love it! And so true.
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Some people are just incapable of being quiet.
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It just occurred to me that the ability to fully dog-food the software one is paid to work on is actually quite a small subset of software people are willing to spend money on building. Realistically, it could only be achieved for those working on consumer apps, or for tools used by other software developers. For anything else that serves a niche that requires it’s own set of skills, dog-fooding would be difficult to pull off. I’m paid to work on software for pro-videographers, yet I’m not a pro-videographers. My skills are in software development, not film or television.
So while the goal of dog-fooding is one to strive for, sometimes it’s just not feasible.
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No level crossing is spared from the Level Crossing Removal Project. The one near my station is up for replacement. The rumour was that was to be replaced with the rail line going over the road. The issue, though, was it’s location: it’s right next to some stabling yards, where trains are kept when they’re not in use.
I was unsure what they were going to do about this. You could see from the photo that these stabling yards, along with platform 3 at the station, are accessed by a pretty broad flat junction. And I couldn’t see how they could keep this and elevate the rail line to cross the road. They could move the yard, but speaking to a driver while we were both waiting for our
coffeetrain, there isn’t a suitable place to move the yard to, unless they start taking parkland.Well, the proposal is in, and from the concept drawings, it looks like they’re planning to keep the yard:
So, okay. I guess they could find a way to do this. I would be interested in knowing what they do about access to platform 3 though. I can’t see them keeping the existing rail road that goes along the yard fence line. I’m guessing that they’ll need to reconfigure the junction in some way. Either that, or they scrap platform 3 altogether. It does see some use, and provides a good terminal for certain services, but maybe they could live without it? 🤷
Anyway, something to look forward to.