@harshad@sharma.io
@harshad@sharma.io avatar

harshad

@harshad@sharma.io

Tends to soil, plants and various animals on a small farm somewhere in the hills of Kodaikanal, India. Rides a 2008 Royal Enfield Thunderbird everywhere.

No ideologies, handful labels. Friend to life in all shapes and forms.

Expect photos, anecdotes and rants about living off-grid in middle of nowhere with occasional motorcycle rides.

He/him.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

harshad, to random
@harshad@sharma.io avatar

When a site takes a whole minute to load their javashit and presents you with a "Can't show you text because of GDPR" you can be sure they're a very slimy business.

harshad, to random
@harshad@sharma.io avatar

Is it firefly season already? One just flew into my room! (Now to get it back outdoors safely before my army of cats goes bonkers)

harshad,
@harshad@sharma.io avatar

@TheOtterDragon haha, nailed it! Though iirc fireflies are not a great snack for pets (their defences include toxic chemicals).

harshad, to random
@harshad@sharma.io avatar

Heh. Sigh.

"In order to try to resolve this the workgroup seems to be doubling down on more complex JS apis to try to patch over the issues that they created in the first place."

"That's right. I'm here saying passwords are a better experience than passkeys. Do you know how much it pains me to write this sentence?"

https://fy.blackhats.net.au/blog/2024-04-26-passkeys-a-shattered-dream/

I never touched passkeys because the hype smelled wrong, been around long enough to sharpen this gut feeling. Phew, dodged this one too!

harshad,
@harshad@sharma.io avatar

Smartness of people insisting something is the future has no bearing on the value of what they're selling.

It's easier to fool smart people because they're readily convinced that what they believe is the truth because they're so smart.

We keep learning again and again that the quiet voices who seem baffled often tell more truth than the loud hypeboys.

harshad, to FreeBSD
@harshad@sharma.io avatar

What a wonderful conversation, discussing BSDs, communities and the joy of using cough legacy software, with @stefano, @gyptazy and a few more people whose handles I don't know yet.

Thank you!

harshad, to random
@harshad@sharma.io avatar

This one's too close and might affect my patch on the hill side.

A fire burning through trees at the edge of a hill, smoke rising up.

harshad,
@harshad@sharma.io avatar

Not a great day to be windy

harshad,
@harshad@sharma.io avatar

The fire seems to have stopped spreading, wind has slowed down. Just the smell of smoke everywhere. Will keep an eye out through the night, because it's still very dry and no rains predicted for days.

harshad, to Cats
@harshad@sharma.io avatar

Kiki has a box

harshad, to Cats
@harshad@sharma.io avatar

What is a cat? (1972)

https://youtu.be/laLAaTXGnp0

harshad, to random
@harshad@sharma.io avatar

Chai, on the rocks.

harshad, to random
@harshad@sharma.io avatar

The web is dead to me. Managed to keep the thousands of ads at bay for years but now the "consent" and newsletter popups and the non existence of "reject" button, instead several misleading steps to just look at a paragraph or two of text doesn't seem worth my time.

And even if I jump through the artificial hoops, there's no guarantee that a human wrote the text

Either I'll build agents to fetch the data I need or I'm not engaging. The concept of www is no longer fit for humans as consumers.

harshad,
@harshad@sharma.io avatar

@adnan there is no AI, it's autocomplete on crack and it does a shitty job. I'm talking about software written with intent and intelligence, not with probability of next character.

harshad, to gardening
@harshad@sharma.io avatar

Looked up how tall Mullein usually grows, median answer is 6 ft, one site says up to 10 ft/ 3m.

My exuberant plant that's ~ 12ft/4m tall is looking down and laughing. Will save the seeds and share around. Heh, I love the idea of thinking of plants as Earth's middle finger to entropy that rules rest of the universe.

Reference photo for height, I'm 5'10 and barely as tall as the shortest stalk at the base of the taller stalk.

whitequark, to random
@whitequark@mastodon.social avatar

python is a great and fun language to write device drivers in :D

harshad,
@harshad@sharma.io avatar

@whitequark cursed, but what if, embedded micropython in device drivers? (It's tiny!)

harshad, to Cats
@harshad@sharma.io avatar

Testing shelf-hosted infrastructure with chaos cats. Need metal brackets and screws asap.

harshad, to random
@harshad@sharma.io avatar

It's midnight and some jerks are still busy choosing what crap to play on their blasted loudspeakers. The whole day wasn't enough?

Where's the thundering herd of angry Gaur when you need one?

harshad, to random
@harshad@sharma.io avatar

punches everyone involved in "not now" buttons

What? I should stop? But you can learn more about why I'm punching your face!

What? No? That's not an option, how about we pick this up when I feel like punching your face again? Good? Good!

harshad,
@harshad@sharma.io avatar

Don't blame the company that pays your fat salaries, you're sucking on their capitalist teat and doing their bidding, you are complicit. And your face deserves to be punched until it beats the metrics of people clicking "not now" in frustration.

tecoholic, to random

You React/Javascript devs are nuts. I have no idea how you all manage to build stuff.

See, it's been a while since I wrote a React app from scratch. So, when my useEffect was running twice and calling the API twice, I like anyone referred the documentation -> https://react.dev/reference/react/useEffect#fetching-data-with-effects

And it said this

harshad,
@harshad@sharma.io avatar

@tecoholic nods I've come to realise about all this is I don't get paid enough to put up with the cognitive load of using javascript frameworks nor the shapeshifting Linux environment for deploying (hobbyist, no pay 😆)

Currently learning Elixir and Phoenix framework for stuff I want to build and it's a breath of fresh air after unlearning years of Python. I can get to working UI from an idea way faster now. And deploying that to FreeBSD is a breeze.

Hope you find something cosy for yourself.

kate, to random
@kate@fosstodon.org avatar

Last night I discovered my christening candle in a box of childhood items my parents gave me. This morning the bathroom lightbulb died while I was having a shower. So now, for the second time in my life, I’m getting washed by the light of a christening candle.

harshad,
@harshad@sharma.io avatar

@kate the "candle stand" is epic tho!

javi, to random

Actually, let me use this as an example of how everything has gone wrong with web development in the last decade or so.

Dan Abramov is a very brilliant guy who is part of the Facebook's React team. He has been the most important name in the team working on React for years. And now, they are pushing for changes in React that would make it consume streams of data that updates the UI before the entire data request is completed, instead of just requesting the data and then 'painting' it once they get the reply for that request.

This is nuts. This is a micro optimization. 95% of the users won't ever notice, and those who do (people using extremely bad connections) would be much better if the site wasn't using React at all. At the same time, I'm sure half of the websites in the World who currently uses react will jump to implement this, making their code way more complex, brittle, sucking their productivity down, and in the long term, being worse for the users. Just for absolutely not even a short-term gain at all in their products.

Then why these kind of things keep happening? Because Facebook is too big. And somehow they ended being the ones in control of the most popular web-app framework used by most of the sites nowadays.

The state of the current Javascript ecosystem is what happens when you get companies with hundreds, thousands of engineers, to build sites that 15 years ago would have been built by 1/10th of that number of people. What you get is a lot of people working on a product that's actually mature already, and whose job end being going after that extra 1%, that last micro optimization that could make your site better in a very narrow set of cases. And they don't care about the complexity, because they are part of an engineering organization with literally thousands of hands to throw at any problem. Setting up your code bundler now takes hundreds of lines of code that need constant maintenance to achieve just a 5% improvement over gzipped plain JavaScript? No big deal, they have 6 people working full time on that. React switching to a different programming paradigm each two versions? Nice, now the 900 devs working in the web version has something to do for a few months.

But then small to medium teams adopt these tools. And suddenly you have a 5, 20, 50 devs team having to do the same work the Facebook web team does. Without any of the problems Facebook has to solve.

What's worse: a big share of the current JavaScript ecosystem exists just to solve problems introduced by the previous iterations. Think about it from a user perspective: does the web work any better, does Netflix, Facebook, twitter, tumblr, etc load faster, perform better than they did ten years ago? On the contrary, most of us have more powerful computers, phones. We have significantly faster internet connections. But sites are, at best, as fast as they used to ten years ago. In most cases they are even slower.

And from the engineer perspective it's not better: web development is significantly harder, more complex, slower nowadays that what it was ten years ago. Things that were trivial are now complex. Things that were complex still are. Product-wise, we are not doing anything more complex than what we were doing in early to mid 10s. But somehow now everything is harder, involves more code, everything is now orders of magnitude more complex. And it's not even making the web a better experience.

We made this mess. We made the web worse for everyone. We made our jobs harder for ourselves. It's so stupid.

RE: https://goblin.band/notes/9qyaoxpilruusopk

harshad,
@harshad@sharma.io avatar

@econads @javi use human scale technologies that several people have been working on quietly. Specifics depends on your needs, but there's enough good work out there to choose from.

harshad, to Cats
@harshad@sharma.io avatar

How it started / How it's going

Looking down from my perspective in bed, there are 11 cats sleeping next to me.

harshad,
@harshad@sharma.io avatar

@msquebanh ♥️, also a snore fest!

harshad,
@harshad@sharma.io avatar

@msquebanh yes!

(except for occasional the body ache from heavy cats sleeping on me all night 😂)

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • JUstTest
  • kavyap
  • DreamBathrooms
  • thenastyranch
  • ngwrru68w68
  • tacticalgear
  • magazineikmin
  • Youngstown
  • khanakhh
  • rosin
  • slotface
  • InstantRegret
  • everett
  • mdbf
  • Leos
  • cisconetworking
  • cubers
  • modclub
  • GTA5RPClips
  • ethstaker
  • osvaldo12
  • Durango
  • provamag3
  • normalnudes
  • tester
  • anitta
  • megavids
  • lostlight
  • All magazines
    •