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Using AI for your support chat is good and all but have you considered that those using it can’t really go to their boss and say “this is what the AI told me?”
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Took down my PeerTube instance. I wasn’t uploading videos often enough to justify running it, and given the watch counts from most of the videos there, I doubt anyone will miss them. The goal is to use Micro.blog for hosting videos if I can. The rest will now go to YouTube.
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📘 Devlog
Blogging Tools - Chunking File Uploader
An attempt to improve upload speeds by chunking large files and uploading them via multiple HTTP requests dispatched concurrently. Spoiler: it didn’t help. Continue reading →
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🔗 Andre Franca: Small Web, Big Voice
Really enjoyed this post from Andre. I agree that some may view having a blog in 2025 as being irrational. I guess the belief is that it’s harder to get the exposure or virality with a blog than it is by simply posting on the socials (as if reach or cash is the only reason to do anything online). I’m not sure I agree, but even if that were true, it depends if that’s something you want. If it’s just to have a place that you can call your own, then I’d argue having a blog, even in 2025, makes total rational sense.
Via: Kev Quirk
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One thing about working at the Bureau of Meteorology is that everyone will ask you about the weather, regardless of what your role is. It happened to me, and I’m no meteorologist. Happens to the minister holding the Environment and Water portfolo. There were stories of ministers being given the forecast before official social occasions, should someone like the Prime Minister asked them about the weather.
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🔗 Nikita Prokopov: Needy Programs
A thought provoking post.
And even if you give up and create [an account for a program that requires one], they will never leave you alone: they’ll ask for 2FA, then for password rotation, then will log you out for no good reason. You’ll never see the end of it either way.
The topic of passkeys came up at work yesterday. A colleague made the suggestion that passkeys should be mandated across everything, with very few exceptions. The reasons he gave are decent, of course: protecting accounts from unwanted intrusions. Yet I didn’t really agree with him. I know for myself I find them a little annoying, and knowing a few people who aren’t as steeped in technology as I are, I do wonder how well they would receive such a mandate. Probably in a similar way to Nikita here.
And it’s a tricky balancing act, because they are more secure than passwords. And so is asking for 2FA, and password rotations, and logging you out after a while (that’s to avoid a session token from leaking and falls into the wrong hands, and being usable for ever). And sometimes they’re necessary: there are a lot of arseholes out there. But they are annoying, and when it comes to authentication, it’s usually the default position of any developer to say “lock down all the things,” without considering tradeoffs.
So yeah, I don’t have a good answer here. Not even sure there is one.
Via: Manton Reece
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Using KDiff 3 is like using an old hammer you have lying on the workbench in a joinery. It been there for years, and it’s covered in sawdust and varnish. It leaves your hand sticky after you use it; handling it is not a pleasant experience. But it’s there; and when you need it, it frickin’ works.
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It’s a shame that there’s no market for a low cost, standalone, well designed visual diffing tool. The candidates seem to be either free ones with a mediocre user experience, or anything built into the IDEs. Everything else is quite expensive, upwards of $40.00. Nothing meets in the middle.
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I didn’t expect to like today’s Stratechey interview, what with “turnarounds” sounding somewhat corporatey in the abstract. Yet, I found it really enjoyable. Matthew Bromberg gave some fascinating stories of his career.
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🔗 Android Developers Blog: Android developer verification
Under the heading “Empowering experienced users” (emphasis original):
Based on this feedback and our ongoing conversations with the community, we are building a new advanced flow that allows experienced users to accept the risks of installing software that isn’t verified.
In other words: side loading should be possible without verification. This is good.
Via: Hacker News
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I could be the only Melburnian I know that enjoyed travelling on the Hitachi trains on hot days. To hear the deafening journey they take through the loop with the windows down was always a thrill.
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“Get out more” goal for November achieved. ✅
Boardgames at the Melbourne Central Lion Hotel. Bought along Wingspan tonight. Was a huge hit: better than I hoped. Played a full game with 3 other players. 👍
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I will admit, I was a hater of Stripe’s new developer tools that slid up from the bottom when I first used them. But I’ve grown to really like them. They have the one thing I’ve been wishing from Stripe from the beginning, which is showing how the entity you’re looking at looks from the API.
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On TOON And Human Readable Data Formats
My thoughts on defining human readable formats that are difficult to modify by hand, and taking it out on TOON which is geared towards LLMs. Continue reading →
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Did not expect to be back here again, riding the Comengs like it’s going out of style. Such is this year’s theme, unfortunately.
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TIL that
⎋is the symbol for the Escape key. HT @jason@social.loltils -
Slow strobes.
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This clip made me think. Not because of anything to do with Apple, Google, and their dealings. Rather, it made me wonder if this is applicable to things like how one spends their time and effort at self improvement. Focusing more on what you know your good at, for example.
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Oof! Stock music is expensive, but I found the track I’ve been craving. One useful feature of the stock music site: ability to filter songs based on key and tempo. Tapped what I thought the tempo was on my keyboard metronome to get around 8 BPM off the actual one. Perfect pitch did the rest.
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I think I know why it always takes two attempts to get the Myki readers to work with Google Wallet. The new readers throwing up the error “credit card not supported” provides a decent hint.
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Idea for browser plugin: something that scans all the links on the page, and annotates each one pointing to YouTube, offering you to add the video to your “watch later” list. I see plenty of interesting videos I never watch because I find a link to it at a time that’s not ideal for watching video.
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Watched an episode of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. In one day the crew of that sub encountered:
- a collision with a whale,
- being threatened by sea monster,
- the diving bell getting loose,
- overpressure in the ballast tank,
- a smoke bomb,
- a sabatour sending fake radio signals,
- an explosion of the main tank causing flooding, and
- getting hijacked by a duo of criminals, twice.
Not a dull moment on that sub, apparently. 😛
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Ooh, looks like the Pixel 9 Pro has a HDR screen. I’ve been using this phone for 10 months and it’s only today when I’ve noticed it. So this is how the other half were living all these years.
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I ♥️ Stock Music.
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Lazy vibes on this cold, wet Saturday afternoon. 🦜
I think Ricco’s preening techniques are improving. His feathers are looking a bit neater. Must be taking cues from Ivy.
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📘 Devlog
Laying The Groundwork For Dynamic Header Images
Making some changes to the Card theme I’m using for this blog. First think I’m considering is a banner image, similar to the one in Scripting News. And like Scripting News, I’m hoping for the image to change occasionally. I’d like the change to happen when the blog is being built, and in order to do this, I need a way to configure this value. I’m hoping to use Blogging Tools to do this, but to actually make use of these values, I’m hoping to use Hugo’s resource data methods.
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🔗 Raph Koster: Game design is simple, actually
I’m only half way through this, but I’m finding this post on the theory of game design absolutely riveting. I’ve already got a bunch of linked posts ready to go, marking this one as the entrance to a good ol’ blogging rabbit hole.
Via: Simon Willison
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The ultimate irony of fully understanding Stripe and its API is that you really need to use it to sell something. You can understand a lot just by working on the customer facing side, but when it comes to understanding how payouts work end-to-end; well, owning a business would come in handy here.
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I really need to get a lower desk. Long periods of typing cause pain to form in my palms. In lieu of that, I am reminded that I can just take advantage of the wirelessness of my keyboard. It’s actually more comfortable than it looks.
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I find it ironic that the concurrent logic added by my colleague, design to (theoretically) save the a nanosecond or two from each API request, has cost me an hour and a half of my time trying to debug it. I doubt the API will see the 27,000,000,000,000 requests needed to offset these “savings”. 😕
Actually, I lie: I don’t find it ironic, I find it maddening. The parallel code is for marshalling from one in-memory data structure to another. The amount of overhead involved with dispatching these goroutines with the scheduler dwarfs any theoretical savings from doing this in parallel. It’s stupid.
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Today’s comp sci’s version of a Freudian slip: typing
whomaiinstead ofwhoamiin Bash. “Whom AI” is the question of the day, apparently. 😛 -
The bridge is open again. My long, personal national nightmare (i.e. mild, almost insignificant, inconvenience for a couple of days) is finally over!
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Kind of crazy seeing Go packages which are effectively WASM builds of C libraries running in a Go WASM runtime, like this sqlite3 port. So that’s WASM sandwiched between two layers of Go. A “WASM smash burger,” if you will. Still, if you want to avoid using Cgo, then I can understand the motivation.
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Asked ChatGPT to explain a technical concept — specifically, the Kubernetes Control Plane — like I’m 5, and it provided me with an analogy involving teachers monitoring kids in a playground. Interesting choice of setting for the analogy. I mean, that is sort of what I asked for.
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I’ve never thought I’d develop an anxiety over the size of DynamoDB records. They max out at 400 KB, and I worry I’d go beyond that whenever I’m extending an already large record. They do take up less space than they seem, though.
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Putting up the Christmas decorations (this is why the ped bridge I use to cross the Yarra is closed.)
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📘 Devlog
Dynamo Browse - Item View Annotations and Asynchronous Tasks
Adding to the UCL extension support in Dynamo Browse the ability to annotate displayed result items, plus scheduling tasks that will be executed in the background. Continue reading →
