Thank you, that’s an excellent read! This reminds me of the “expected value of perfect information” - sometimes it is worthwhile to answer a question, and sometimes it isn’t. Every once in a while I find myself in an engineering call discussing a minor problem, and I run the numbers to see if the change we are discussing is even worth talking about. One time the combined salaries of the people on the call had already outpaced the cost savings of the change over the next 10 years. We quickly stopped that discussion lol

I love grammars. It’s like an API or a data schema, but for a language. This would be very cool and I would love to see it!

I recently picked up a pipe. It has all the rituals and escapism of a cigar, without the hour-long commitment.

That being said, sometimes being”occupied” for an hour is part of the appeal. Each has their place ime.

Is American Pragmatism a thing? If you explain it to me, will I feel better about myself?

You’re out here solving impossible problems. You’re “The Fixer” from Pulp Fiction. Fools look at story points. Pros see an unsolvable story that languished for years until you came along and defeated it. A single point for you is an entire epic to other teams.

Everything is a differentiator that can be spun to your advantage. The points aren’t accurate, and you’re the only one with enough guts to step up to the plate and finally work these neglected tickets; even if it won’t “look good” on some “dashboard” - that’s not what’s important; you’re here to help the organization succeed.

If the system doesn’t make you look good, you have to make yourself look good. If you weren’t putting in the effort, it would be hard - but as you say, everyone who takes a deeper look clearly sees the odds stacked against you, and how hard you’re working / the progress you’re making; despite those odds.

Don’t let some metrics dashboard decide your worth, king!

I’m very flaky here, as rust is the big one, but I think zig and/or nim might be

Indeed, and good points. How many users do you have? I assume this isn’t just for you, and setting up multiple nfs shares with tailscale access policies isn’t feasible. SMB might be the best play. I’ll have to refresh my memory on file sharing protocols

NFS for storage, tailscale / wireguard for access control?

It is not too hard and you can definitely do it! It’s like a puzzle - you will get stuck at times, but if you keep going then you’ll get there.

APK files are just zip files, so you can unzip it to see its contents. From there, a java de-compiler get you a version of the source code. It will have random variable names and no comments, so it will take some digging to find and reverse the api layer.

Or, who knows, you could get lucky and find an openapi spec file and auth.txt. Worse apps have been developed.

JavaScript / TypeScript are famously free-form, but a number of styles (and style-enforcing tools) have emerged.

“Prettier” is the most recent. It actually parses your code into an AST and then re-prints it according to its style.

“ESLint” is the most widespread; it is more of a framework into which rules can be plugged.

I use “XO”, which is essentially a custom eslint ruleset with a few other nice things tacked on.

The best part of eslint/xo is the “—fix” command, which can auto-fix most mistakes.

Optimus gets complex quick. You’ll be reading pci bus ids before you know it. Keep the wiki open, go slowly; you got this :)

I have a whole rant on this topic, but the short version:

It’s dentists.

The gnarliest mountain man, who hunts bears with his bear hands, can be brought to his knees with a toothache. The toothache never sleeps, can’t be fought, and always eventually wins. Even basic dentistry is life saving - even another human with a pair of pliers and some moonshine - but I’d much rather have novocaine.

Gonna roll with typescript. In past years I did the challenges at midnight, but would only last a few days before giving up. This year I think I’ll do the challenges while at work / the day after.

Papers: held

It is exceptional, thank you for asking :)

10 minute intro

Proceeds the weedian

5 minute solo

Nazareth

song continues in this manner for another 45 minutes

Any form of bread with a filling, generally assembled cold

But, dare I say, does that not make a ravioli a sandwich? A poptart? Mayhaps even … Lasagna?

Ah, you proclaim! But those are cooked further!

But so too is a grilled cheese! And a patty melt!

Where will the madness end?

This is exceptionally well stated. I saw my parents, myself, and every reddit/lemmy/twitter thread I’ve ever read, in your description.

So much online conversation isn’t conversation at all; it’s posturing; saying something completely irrelevant that attempts to paint the “opponent” into an indefensible corner. The best response, then, also doesn’t respond, and does the same - end result being two people just saying stuff at each other.

I’m here to throw Inconsolata into the mix, though I use Fira more frequently now from a compatibility perspective.

Go a level deeper, beyond this news about news, and read the moat memo.

The third faction is the open source community.

The memo has an entire timeline section, dedicated to showing the speed at which the open source community absorbed and iterated on the leaked facebook model, LaMMa.

The memo puts a lot of emphasis on how google and co are building new models from scratch, over months, with millions of dollars - and yet open source is building patches, in days, with only a few hundred dollars - and the patches stack, and are easily shareable.

The open source models, through these patches, are getting better faster than google can re-architect and re-train new models from scratch.

The main point of the memo is that google needs to change their strategy, if they want to stay “ahead” (some would argue they’re already behind) of the competition.