owen

owen, 11 months ago to random

Something to keep in mind when hearing about hydrogen as a renewable or green fuel is that nearly half of hydrogen production, worldwide, comes from natural gas. Another 45% or so come from coal and oil sources. Renewable hydrogen - electrolysis, generally - is basically a blip.

Hydrogen is, in many cases, an attempt by the fossil fuels industry to carry on business as usual in the face of carbon-reduction initiatives by putting the carbonaceous parts out of sight.

owen, 10 months ago to random

You ever think about how Google de-spined - destroyed - literal tonnes of books donated by university libraries, with the intention of scanning them into a digital free library, and how none of that ever materialized?

Those books are just gone now, instead.

owen, 6 months ago to random

Question for the managers in my follower list: how much time do you budget for in your head for your employees to read Slack/Teams/etc?

That is, suppose you expect your team to work 40-50 hours a week (white collar job with some on-call). How many of those hours do you write off when figuring out capacity, to account for the time they are spending reading Slack/Teams messages?

owen, 1 month ago to random

gripe: the AWS terraform provider reports space utilization for EFS (NFS-as-a-service) volumes as attributes, so the resulting state file is always, permanently, out of date

this has no practical consequences, but if you're storing state locally via git, it produces a lot of spurious diffs

owen, 1 month ago to random

What do you even mean by "searching the web," anyways?

owen, 1 month ago to random

I think we'll likely be a decade or two reckoning with the consequences that businesses were largely sold on "devops" as a way to cut headcount.

owen, 2 months ago to random

With respect to the person who proposed them, the whole "abusive user stories" idea is predicated on developers having enough agency to resist business decisions. That may at one point have been true, but the lived reality for a lot of developers today is "we'll find someone who will, do you want to get paid or not?" We're no longer so specialized that individual resistance means much, and we still culturally haven't accepted labour organization.

owen, 1 year ago to random

Damn, pour one out for a real one.

owen, 1 month ago to random

My day job, many years ago now, adopted a language developed by a Fortune 50 company as an open-source project. We did not negotiate any kind of long-term support agreements with the vendor, and they have since shuttered the team that was working on the language.

This sucks, frankly. My org made the decisions it made for reasons I recognize, but they also adopted some very foreseeable risks, which are now coming home to roost.

owen, 7 months ago to random

And you may tell yourself, "This is not my rough beast."
And you may tell yourself, "This is not my hour, come at last."

owen, 10 months ago to random

You tell people that oral health is important and they all smile and nod along but as soon as you tell them to use plenty of teeth soap they look at you like you’re the weird one.

owen, 10 months ago to random

I don't think I'm ever going to forgive the early - now long-defunct - rails community generation for popularizing Git submodules.

"Wait, what? Don't use that! Use gems!"

I realize that that decision has long been reversed. The impact continues nonetheless, because of the hysteresis of platforms and ecosystems.

owen, 1 month ago to random

The actual fuck if IBM acquires Hashicorp is that so much of Hashicorp's value as a maker of development tooling is tied up in free contributions. Some of those are from large organizations who made a considered decision to support Hashicorp (eg. Amazon, who write their own providers for Packer and Terraform), but many are from individual devs or small shops who are just trying to get their own jobs done.

None of those people will see any compensation for the value they added to this deal.

owen, 9 months ago to random

I amn’t sure whether I (a) want developers to use desktop UI instead of embedding a browser in everything, (b) want desktop UI to take some lessons from the web about API accessibility, (c) both, or (d) computer in lake

owen, 7 months ago to random

Current semver tries to define a canonical ordering for version idents that include affixes like -rc.

I think that's a mistake. An understandable and well-intentioned one - the goal is clearly to faciliate moving from -beta to -rc to release - but it ends up saying things that developers aren't actually doing, and that semver-the-project doesn't have the mandate to decide.

owen, 1 month ago to random

I'm particularly frustrated right now because I tried to search "OC Transpo fines" and got nothing but news articles about their fare-enforcement practices.

That's search failing to meet the (underspecified) needs I have, but it's also in part because OC Transpo does not publish that information in the first place.

owen, 1 month ago to random

Direnv has been a great help for me in getting out of the habit of storing creds in dotfiles. I wrote up some patterns I've found useful: https://grimoire.ca/code/direnv-patterns/

owen, 9 months ago to random

I wish every developer who picks json-without-comments as a developer-facing interface to something a very I hope your dinner turns out badly.

owen, 4 months ago to random

The degree to which your workplace may have communities, and to which you may be part of those communities, is likely in spite of - and not because of - your employer's efforts to create community.

owen, 8 months ago to random

Two little encounters at a distance:

• The “BELIEVE!” guy is once again on his station at Yonge and Dundas. I’m glad he’s okay, as alarming as he can be the first time you encounter his particular brand of personal evangelism.

• “I Hate Rubber Boots” is once again taking his evening constitutionals in my neighbourhood. In rubber boots, of course. He makes people smile just by doing his thing - the couple after he passed were joking about it with each other.

owen, 2 months ago to random

https://hachyderm.io/@hrefna/112197328066578215

You don't. We accept these risks on a daily basis, in service of getting useful work done. The observed reality is that that trust is violated only rarely (or, if you're of a more particular frame of mind, only violated in ways we discover rarely).

Computers as modernly constructed mediate relationships, and the security of the computer is only as good as the trust in those relationships.

owen, 9 months ago to random

You, sobbing: you can't just point at something and call it a directory service!

Me, checking a YAML file into Git: directory service

owen, 1 month ago to random

Open Source was a reaction, kicked off by a libertarian and a would-be venture capitalist, against the restrictions of the Free Software movement.

The Free Software movement was started by academics, whose money came from grants and subsidies and not from their work as programmers.

It's no surprise to me that neither movement adequately accommodates the needs of the median programmer today.

owen, 9 months ago to random

Canada has a surprisingly long legislative history of recognizing human rights for children on the same basis as human rights for adults, and of moderating those rights in the interests of parental care very carefully. For example, Canada near-universally recognizes the "mature minor" doctrine for medical self-determination, and children are considered to have the right to freedom of expression on the same basis as adults even on sensitive subjects such as sexual self-expression.

owen, 9 months ago to random

I don't know how to make it any clearer that I'm completely serious:

We need homeless legislators. We need legislators who are minors. We need legislators who are refugees. We need legislators who are disabled.

We need legislators from EVERY walk of life that gets structurally excluded from how law and policy get made.