So it looks like Squarespace has been acquired by a private equity firm. I wonder if the new owners will keep buying podcast ads, or if they’ll pull them like Akamai did when they acquired Linode. I get the feeling a lot of shows are relying on Squarespace’s consistent ad money to remain viable.

I’m going to a meetup surrounding a book that I haven’t read yet. I wanted to finish what I was reading at the time and I figured I’d have about a week to read this book before the meetup started. I thought I remembered buying it, so when it came time to start reading it, I was a little surprised to find it missing from the Kindle app.

Fearing that I was running out of time, I went to Amazon to buy it again, only to discover that I actually pre-ordered it and that it’s going to be released on the date of the meetup.

So, yeah, feeling releaved about that.

Oof, it’s been quite the week! Almost over though: only around 30 minutes left, then it’s the weekend.

I’m officially a Zio today. 🙌

I’m generally not someone who likes to talk to people working on my hair. Even so, if silent cuts were offered to me, I not sure I would accept. The occasional “what do you do” and “how’s business”, enough to acknowledge each other, is fine. Not even having that would seem a little strange.

Don’t use access permissions to control what a user can and can’t do if the correct functionality of the system you’re building depends on it.

A user’s permission should dictate what a user has the right to do and see based on the policies of the resources themselves. But when it comes to the correct functionality of a system, it should be built such that if you were to disable all the permission checks, the user should be able to do whatever they can without breaking things. Relying on permissions to prevent this feels like a code smell to me, and can leave you with policies that have blanket denies for everyone that just can’t be taken out, and no one remembers why it was added there in the first place.

I don’t count myself a Safari fan, but full credit to Apple: they’ve made remote debugging for iPad Safari very easy. Plug the iPad in, tap “Trust the Device” a few times¹, and Safari’s developer tools menu shows the iPad right there. It also works for SafariViewController sessions in modals, which is nice.

Goland’s LLM-powered auto-complete is really good. It’s got to the point where it feels like Goland is broken when I’m using a version that doesn’t have it. I’m sure they hope to expand of this, and if I can make a request on what they could do next, it would be to add “auto-complete” suggestions in other areas of the code.

For example, I’m working on a function which uses AWS’s Golang SDK to send an SQS message. I started writing out the call to send a message, when I found out that I forgot to define both the context and queue name in the function I’m working in. Nothing too hard to fix, of course, but it would mean moving away from where I’m am now, and conducting a mini context-switch away from calling the SDK to fixing my function definition.

It would be nice for the LLM-based auto-completer to suggest adding the context as the first parameter of the function, as per the convention. The queue name is a little more ambiguous: it could either be suggested as another function parameter or as a field on the provider type. I suppose both are just as likely, but assuming that Goland is refining it’s model based on my trends, it could suggest adding the topic name as a field, along with adding it in as a parameter to the constructor function.

Anyway, something for them to look at when they run out of work.

Maybe there’s still a chance for Apple to release a car of some sort, although probably not how they were planning to. 😜

I think I’ve added more features to my TUI-based table editor over the last couple of weeks than I have over the last couple of years. Today, I added a command to collate two CSV files together based on the value of a particular column — sort of like an inner join in a relational database — and also a command to remove duplicate rows. This is in addition to the changes made last week, which included making the editor “header aware” and a command to map the values of a column. Granted, all these features were implemented using the bare minimum necessary to get my work done, but they’re there, and they weren’t a few weeks ago.

Reading this post from FLaMEd Fury and this passage caught my eye:

Music is so personal now, as is the access, the range, and the personalisation of your listening experience. (Being forced to hear the same twenty songs that the DSPs push on you aside). When I was growing up and at school, a handful of radio stations played a handful of songs (similar to those same twenty songs the DSPs push down your throats now). Everyone you knew was listening to the same music (obviously with exception) most of the time.

Every weekend at parties, you’d all be listening to the popular songs, hearing them in every car that drove past, pumping on the stereo as you got ready. Music is so varied these days, right?

Might be that I am one of the exceptions here: music has always been considered a very personal thing to me all my life. I have never felt the songs I listen to being part of the zeitgeist. And yeah, this is definitely because of the type of music I prefer to listen too: long, instrumental pieces, usually written 50 years ago. Definitely not what you’d call mainstream.

But it’s also the feeling I have about music in general, which is one that is quite private and personal, to the point where it feels like I need to protect it from others. For example, I tend to be very resistant in sharing with others the type of music I prefer, even if not doing so came at the cost of expanding my musical horizons. I remember that brief period when I was in a band and we were sharing the types of songs we liked to listen to, trying to get ideas. I never offered any of the songs I listened to. I did talk about it with the other band members so they knew of them, but it was never played during these listening sessions. And I made no apologies for this: they were “my” songs, and I prefer to listen to them on my terms.

I suppose I should feel bad for this, but I think I prefer it this way. I am trying to get better at this, at least when it comes to sharing things online. It is interesting to think that it’s easier for me to share links to albums than it is to share albums with others in person. A fear of judgement perhaps? 🤷

Returned from the doctor after getting my ears cleared. I can hear the world in stereo again. 🙌

Small thing I learnt about Safari for iPad: you can reopen recently closed tabs by long-tapping the “new tab” button. I thought this feature was completely missing from iPad Safari before I found this out. Although I shouldn’t be too surprised as I think Mac Safari does something similar.

Arrived at Albury station. Someone mentioned on the train that it’s the longest covered platform in the southern hemisphere.