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Ear is still blocked so went to the doctor today to see if I can get some treatment for it. Turns out the cause is excessive mucus production, a common response from Covid-19. Doctor gave me a nasal spray which should settle things down. Fingers crossed I get over this soon.
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On Using LinkedIn As A Replacement For Twitter
Just listened to Dave Winer’s recent podcast about Guy Kawasaki considering LinkedIn as a replacement for Twitter. I agree with pretty much everything Dave says on why moving to Mastodon is better, particularly in terms of interoperability. But I must add, as someone who uses LinkedIn to maintain professional contacts, there’s another reason why I cannot for the life of me see myself choosing to use LinkedIn for my social contacts, and it has to do with the user experience. Continue reading →
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NASA’s InSight probe has gone quiet:
Saying goodbye to spacecraft such as InSight is always difficult. Humans send these robotic probes out into the frigid depths of the Solar System to increase our scientific understanding. Over that time, they shine brightly for a few years. And then, they’re gone.
It’s strangely emotional reading about a spacecraft going dark. From Spirit, to Opportunity, to Rosetta and Philae, seeing them succumb to the elements is always a bit of a sombre moment.
Seeing the effort that goes into getting these probes out there, and the struggle to keep in contact with them, feels almost like a collective activity. Certainly I feel that, even thought I have absolutely no hand in any of these projects (I don’t even help fund the project, since I don’t live in the US and pay US taxes). And when they do go quiet, among with the sense of loss is a sense of accomplishment: seeing something operate in such a hostile environment for as long as it did.
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Anyone saying that blogging is dead has obviously not been blogging.
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I generally hate shopping for things like groceries and clothes, but I especially hate it for anything significant that involves quotes and sales people. It’s not so much the feeling of being taken advantage of. Just the feeling of not knowing what I need to know before going ahead with a quote, with the associated feeling that if I make a mistake, I end up with something that I’m not happy with. Sure I can ask questions about it, but now I feel like I’m leading the vendor on. Just… not a great experience all around.
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The World Is Bigger Than Twitter
By this time you’re probably sick of all the takes out there about the current direction of Twitter. And a bunch more from someone who hasn’t really used the service for a year and a half — and never really got a whole lot of value from the service apart from following others I found interesting — may not be the best use of my time, or of your. But I do have some opinions about the takes that are flowing across my various feeds, and I thought I’d air them here. Continue reading →
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Ok, thank you for the insistent reminders, Patreon. I know my subscription for CGP Grey is coming up for renewal. You only need to tell me once. 🤦♂️
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Project Exploration: A Check-in App
I’m in a bit of a exploratory phase at the moment. I’ve set aside Dynamo-Browse for now and looking to start something new. Usually I need to start two or three things before I find something that grabs me: it’s very rare that I find myself something to work on that’s exciting before I actually start working on it. And even if I start something, there’s a good chance that I won’t actually finish it. Continue reading →
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Ok, I’ve changed my mind. I’m now following Mastodon users on Mastodon instead of Micro.blog. No real reason for this other than I’d prefer to keep these two worlds separate for the moment.
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Reached the point in my life where I can buy a pair of runners online with the knowledge that I’ll feel comfortable in them. My feet have stopped growing ages ago, and I know which brand and model I like, so I can just continue buying the same thing. A positive development.
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Working on a component design. Need to add a parameter which will store a single event type, like
user-created. But with software systems being what they are — where what you’ve built is worth twice as much as what you’re planning to build — there’s always a chance that this simple value will be extended in some way. Say that it needs to be a list of event types (user create and delete events) or characteristics of the events will need to be configured (are we interested in getting all user create events, or only those for users of a particular type). What to do?I could go with JSON right now, making the value something like
{"events": ["user-delete"]}. But that feels like overkill at this time. There’s no guarantee that what we’re building will ever need something as advanced as this. And the price of locking us into JSON now is that it’ll make configuring and reading these values more tedious than it needs to be.So I’m opting for a simple string value now. If it needs to be extended to something more structured, I’ll use something like comma separated values. Sure it’s one more “ad-hoc mini-language” that’ll be added to the pile, but I think there’s value in keeping things simple now. The effort that may come from building a customer parser for comma separated values seems like a cost worth paying now. And if it does ever get unwieldily, we can always move to JSON down the road.
And just from a personal perspective, part of me is resisting the immediate turn to JSON whenever we need to represent structured data. It feels like no-one builds mini-languages anymore. And yeah, I see the reason why: no need to build parsers, and “everyone” knows how to work with JSON. Still this lack of diversity feels a little sad.
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Ok, this song is starting to grow on me. Shame it all sort of falls down near the end.
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Trying to get over a blocked ear that I’ve had for a week and a half. I think it’s slowly improving, but each stage seems to introduce other annoyances. Today it’s the burst of static I hear whenever I cough. I guess it’s better than last week, when the ear just remained blocked regardless of what I did.
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Looking for a new project to work on. I kinda want to give Unity a try, maybe look at making a game of sorts. How I’m going to get the artwork made is anyone’s guess though. Goodness knows I can’t draw it. 🤷
Update: Ok, decided against working on a Unity project. Working on Alto Catalogue instead.
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After following a few Mastodon users, the Micro.blog timeline is beginning to feel like my main social feed. I’m being really conservative in who I follow though. The anxiety that came from consuming Twitter’s timeline is one that I rather not recreate here.
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RSS And Tumblr's Quote-Style Posts
Tumblr needs to improve how they generate RSS items. Quote-style posts — in which the post consists of a quote from someone else, followed by a reply by the blog author — show up in my RSS reader with titles consisting of the “quote part” of the post. If the quote is more than just a handful of words, the title dominates the actual body of the item. An example: Continue reading →
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A Mac with everything you’d want in 1995.
A fully loaded version of System 9 running in your browser. Posted here because I found myself opening and playing around with this over the last few days.
(via. podiboq in the Hemispheric Views Discord)
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It’s debatable whether or not frequently posting here has improved my writing. I suspect not so much, given that I mainly write micro-posts here. But I have found myself speaking more clearly than I use to, and I’m wondering if posting here has help that in some small way.
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Ok, I’m probably the only person that feels this way, but I not a fan of all the “yearly wrapped” things that apps like Spotify and now Pocketcasts are offering. To me it just shows how much of your listening behaviour that’s being tracked (the degree to which I’m concerned about this varies from app to app). Besides, I’m not sure how much I’d like to know about my revealed listening preferences. I think I’d like to leave some room for “mystery” (read, personal denial) in that domain. 🙂
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Playing around with location services in a Flutter app. Pretty straight forward getting something up and working, which is something I like about Flutter, but I wish Dart was a better language. I mean it’s fine, but it’s not a language I can fall in love with.
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The weather has been cycling between summer and winter all week. A few days ago it was 33°C and I had the AC on. Today it’s max 18°C and I’ve got the heater on. For someone still recovering from Covid-19, the weather’s not doing any favours.
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Two things occurred to me after reading the Stratechery weekly article about ChatGPT.
First, it might be a good time to read Gödel, Escher, Bach again. From my last read of it — which was ages ago — I do remember something about how a (theoretical at the time) advanced AI systems would not have the same level of determinism as a traditional computer. The conversation may feel natural, but it may include factual inaccuracies. This was a theme that seems to run through from the weekly article as well.
Second, I wish I did better at AI in university. It was the only subject that I almost failed at. At the time, once I got over my disappointment, I sort of waved it away with the expectation that AI would not be a predominant part of the software development industry during my career. How wrong I was. 😬
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Made a telemedicine call for the first time last night (I caught Covid-19 and developed an ear infection) and I’m quite impressed by how pain-free the whole thing was. Doctor called up, asked a few diagnostic questions, and sent through a perscription via SMS. Whole think took a few minutes.
I wonder if it would work for perscription renewals as well.
