@colby@kosmos.social
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colby

@colby@kosmos.social

The time for smart documentation is now.

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colby, to random
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Around the time of the Twitter exodus, nobody from Cloudflare Workers or Fly.io or any of these other edge computing companies put out a prototype/demo that people could deploy to their platform and enabling the user to sign up with a big Mastodon instance to delegate to for all the heavy lifting on the backend, but with something sitting in the middle to rewrite responses so you could effectively have your own profile on your own vanity domain?

Major missed marketing opportunity.

colby, to random
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If you ever pull up OpenStreetMap and notice that it has stale/bad data for an area, I now have firsthand experience with the knowledge of at least two reasons why:

  1. The community includes the sort of people who'd rather have an incorrect map than an organized queue of issues that need to be addressed while working through them—the type of person for whom a thousand tickets marked "resolved" without the underlying issue being actually resolved is preferable because it gives a clean dashboard.
colby, to random
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I'm waiting for the day when some team realizes that all the infrastructure and inertia behind VS Code (as both a product and a project) gets you more than halfway towards a free, cross-platform replacement for Wordpad that's palatable to the masses. Someone just needs to carry it from its current resting place at "just a text editor" across the finish line to "capable office application—whose native format happens to be HTML (viewable anywhere) instead of .docx/OOXML."

colby, (edited ) to random
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Today's example of misuse of C̶S̶P̶ CSP-like mechanisms is from the blog post at <https://surma.dev/things/cost-of-convenience/>.

This is a blog post. It is not a Web app. There is no user-generated content—it doesn't even support comments. Despite this, the server is configured to send a "cross-origin-embedder-policy: require-corp". If you try to e.g. inject into that page a script hosted by a server that doesn't understand this CORS-like requirement, the script won't work.

Previously: <https://kosmos.social/@colby/110366064446664429>

colby, to random
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@Migueldeicaza almost has me convinced by his latest talk that Swift is a good programming language instead of a massive step backwards from Objective-C on the dynamism question (even as gnarly as Objective-C is on a syntactic level).

colby, to random
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One of the biggest failings of the FOSS world is not embracing Cocoa, esp. to enable rapid application development à la Interface Builder.

I've never been a Mac developer (and don't even own a Mac now), but I recognize the gaping hole regarding the "Linux desktop".

colby, (edited ) to random
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PSA: Content Security Policy makes no sense on static sites that aren't Web apps and just consist of ordinary pages of content (e.g blogs).

If you operate a personal blog (especially a bespoke one generated with templates and/or tools of your own making) or similar, PLEASE DO NOT ADD CSP DIRECTIVES. If you cargo culted them into your server configuration or <head>, please get rid of them. CSP is user hostile and more often than not just ends up breaking things (like bookmarklets).

colby, to random
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Why the heck doesn't Mastodon, an ostensibly mature project, let me at a minimum grep my own posts? I have to request an archive, extract it, actually run grep locally, and then visually scan the output for what I want while trying to ignore the metadata spam. Or am I missing something...?

colby, to random
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People: you don't have to use pip for version control. You can just use Git.

I bring this up, because @dubroy wrote a perfectly lucid post about "cold-blooded software" <https://dubroy.com/blog/cold-blooded-software/> that includes this explicit counsel:

> A cold-blooded project uses boring technology. The build and test scripts don’t depend on external services that might change, break, or disappear entirely. It uses vendored dependencies.

... and still people are arguing in the comments about requirements.txt.

colby, to random
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I want something like a git-stash workflow for my browser so I can gradually shed open tabs without having necessarily to deal with them right this second. The effect that I'm after would be not quite bookmarks—they'd retain scroll position, cached page content, etc., and also wouldn't clutter the bookmarks manager when e.g. doing a search; for all intents and purpose, these would be groups of open tabs, except not actually open.

colby, to random
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HN debates page builders (for ordinary people who are not webdevs): <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35287253>

The best page builder of all, esp. for a non-technical audience, is a word processor. Type it up, save as HTML (instead of the native office format), mint a URL for it, and then put it online so it's actually available at that URL.

Too few people conceive of Web pages as documents; everyone's infected with the mindworm that the Web is a sui generis medium. But it's just documents + identifiers.

colby, to random
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@simon how do you review your TILs?

colby, to random
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The Deno project has excluded its blog from the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. Super lame.

colby, to random
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"Dependencies Belong in Version Control" <https://www.forrestthewoods.com/blog/dependencies-belong-in-version-control/>

via @forrestthewoods

colby, to random
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Another day, another insufficiently introspective companies-are-abusing-the-generosity-of-FOSS-programmers post that doesn't attempt to address the role/culpability that individual developers who are employed at these company have in this system.

colby, to random
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Can people just skip straight to publishing their stuff in some reasonable form where it already feels like Reader Mode (or unclutter.it)? That way there's no need to download all the auxiliary junk that gets stripped out/cleaned up in the first place... (and no need to run the extension)

colby, to random
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I could be overlooking something but I'm pretty sure I can count on two fingers the number of instances where I've heard someone without a CS background use the word "algorithm" without getting it totally wrong.

colby, to random
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@petersuber the link to The MIT Press's page for your book Open Access given on <https://cyber.harvard.edu/hoap/Open_Access_(the_book)> is stale.

Here's one that works: <https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262517638/open-access/>

colby, to random
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@spiralganglion in the latest Future of Coding episode, you were right both about what von Neumann machines are (and aren't) and that bogosort isn't funny.

colby, to random
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Reading through the @DTinitiative's latest blog post <https://dtinit.org/blog/2023/09/26/text-based-social>, I can't help but feel that many of those behind this initiative are somewhat responsible for the problem of link rot in "scholarly references, the posts cited by blog posts and academic papers" in the first place...

colby, to random
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Treating bug reports as if every one is a cry for help from someone looking desperately for a solution that will unblock them is the equivalent of doing a dynamic_cast to an incompatible type. Not something that should make it through review.

colby, to random
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Browser makers could ship native support for viewing and editing CSV sheets tomorrow, just like they shipped native support for PDF; or they could ship native support or sorting and filtering tables on any page, just like they shipped native Picture-in-Picture for video. They choose not to.

colby, (edited ) to random
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I wish that the default response to obnoxious social pressure about slow progress from unpaid FOSS devs weren't phatic, obligatory references to mental health, etc. I wish it were rather unequivocal acknowledgement of the cause:

"Mr Kumar is right. No one has stepped up to cover the costs nor created the conditions otherwise that would permit this to happen swiftly. So it's only going to happen in the small increments that I can sacrifice. I don't owe anyone an apology. Deal with it."

colby, to random
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Please stop saying you can't version control spreadsheets (read: of the sort understood/created by Excel). Sure you can. Why can't you? You can even diff them. OOXML is as check-inable as a dump of HTML + media assets comprising a website.

colby, to random
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I'd love to see a video in the vein of that one about Cleveland tourism parody from years ago that highlights how the Central Library in Austin is not awesome and is actually dogshit and everything you don't want in a public library.

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