@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
@colby@kosmos.social avatar

Responding to a discussion where a typo or other error in some open source project's documentation is being discussed and telling a stranger to go file a bug report is pure /r/choosingbeggars-tier behavior, and too many programmers act like it's not.

colby,
@colby@kosmos.social avatar

Not everyone is "trying to get involved" or trying to learn how to "contribute to open source" (read: get paid in exposureโ€”with green boxes on their GitHub contribution graph).

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, (edited )
@colby@kosmos.social avatar

Dear tech reporters: please, please add the word "heuristic" to your vocabulary, and never, ever write another article where the word "algorithm" and mentions of social media both appear in the same piece.

(NB: adhering strictly to this will in theory lead to some false negatives, but that's vastly preferable to the status quo we're currently living with, where every dipshit who knows how to pronounce "Facebook" is yammering about The Algorithm. Knock it off already. Please.)

colby,
@colby@kosmos.social avatar

@mikebabcock you could do a dumb search-and-replace on every use of "algorithm" and swap in "heuristic" in articles where two or more of the keywords/phrases "social media", "platform", and "content" also appear, and upwards of like 80% of the resulting set would instantly be better/more correct (and of the ones left, most wouldn't be made worse).

jaffathecake, to random
@jaffathecake@mastodon.social avatar

We use self-closing syntax in HTML where it doesn't do anything. People see it and assume it does something.

Why do we keep doing this to ourselves?

https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/1cceb03/i_thought_i_knew_html_until_i_saw_this/

colby,
@colby@kosmos.social avatar

@jaffathecake because, while being much maligned in the last decade, XML got something right, and it's this part of the spec. HTML's self-closing behavior is obscure and confusing and hazardous.

Hixie should have fixed this in HTML5 to allow authors to opt in to the sane thing without going full-on XHTML (not that there's anything wrong with that; cf <https://www.nayuki.io/page/practical-guide-to-xhtml>).

jaffathecake, to random
@jaffathecake@mastodon.social avatar

๐Ÿ“ HTML attributes vs DOM properties.

They're completely different, but often coupled.

Here's the difference, and why it matters: https://jakearchibald.com/2024/attributes-vs-properties/

colby,
@colby@kosmos.social avatar

@jaffathecake "Initially, the value property defers to the defaultValue property" needs a re-read/correction.

colby,
@colby@kosmos.social avatar

@jaffathecake I don't have a recommendation for exact wording for you, but defining value in terms of defaultValue (rather than the other way around) is uncanny.

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, (edited )
@colby@kosmos.social avatar

Something to remember is that even though Jigar Kumar is probably a fake name/persona, it's a good mimic; GitHub and its environs are infested with people who think and act like the fictional Kumar. It's a weird mindset that has taken hold, with obvious downsides (exploitable ones, even), and yet this attitude has so much sway in the "social coding" sphere. This is nuts.

Is this supposed to be an industry of engineers or high school Mean Girls who win conflicts with bully tactics?

colby,
@colby@kosmos.social avatar

The creator of HTMX did an interview with InfoWorld recently. <https://www.infoworld.com/article/3713164/complexity-bad-an-interview-with-carson-gross.html>

It's interesting that so much attention is being paid to HTMX qua framework and almost nothing about Mr. Gross's commentary on the shitty social dynamics of modern software dev.

eb, to random
@eb@social.coop avatar

I like supporting indie services, but I think Iโ€™m going to need to migrate off migadu, as the 20 outbound emails limitation for my plan is arbitrary and insufficient (Iโ€™ve never once come close to exceeding it in years until today, and no tolerance was given).

Iโ€™m currently researching alternate providers, and please note that my email may be briefly unavailable as I migrate. LMK if you have a provider you like!

Oh and also thanks for giving me this problem :)

colby,
@colby@kosmos.social avatar

@eb I settled on <https://runbox.com/price-plans/> years ago after I decided to leave Fastmail.

Not sure if you use webmail (I don't), but their webmail client is here <https://github.com/runbox/runbox7> if there's something about it that bugs you.

Not a fly-by-night operation. They've been around for years.

Every now and then they'll run some crazy pricing special.

colby, to random
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@jwz this somehow seems familiar. Help me out here.

b0rk, (edited ) to random
@b0rk@jvns.ca avatar

what's your favourite way to simplify your life with git? mostly interested in slightly unusual tricks to reduce the number of git features you're using, like:

  • never using the stash, just creating temporary branches instead
  • deleting your main branch so that you can never accidentally commit to it
colby, (edited )
@colby@kosmos.social avatar

@melix @b0rk the whole benefit to git-stash is that it keeps you from having to stop and think of a name for something. If git-worktree had a switch to atomically 1) generate a name for the new worktree 2) set up the worktree there, and 2) change your shell's CWD to the new worktree, immediately teleporting you there to start working, that would be swell. Plus a --kill switch when you're done to clean it all up.

colby, to random
@colby@kosmos.social avatar

Groundhog Day, but whatever is locked in the safe in the hotel room at the time of the reset is still there whenever you wake up.

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, to random
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How good is Google at organizing the world's information, really? Where's the confluence of Google products/services that lets me point my reader at a few paragraphs of text containing an unattributed direct quote and it links the quote to its source?

(Not only does this not exist, but currently Google Search is in such poor shape that even manually copying and pasting a quote in to try to search for it often turns up no resultsโ€”even when it's from a page we already know Google knows about.)

colby, (edited )
@colby@kosmos.social avatar

@raucao no. (Alternatively: "no?")

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,
@colby@kosmos.social avatar

@jimmyhmiller @spiralganglion I'm saying it's not the defining characteristic. When people talk about von Neumann machines, they're talking about the now-familiar stored program computer where program instructions and the data that programs operate on (incl. produce) both reside in the same read/write store (a la Turing's tape), and all the power and limitations that come from this.

colby, (edited ) to random
@colby@kosmos.social avatar

Sometime around Firefox 3, the default settings changed from keeping 9 days of browsing history to 90 days. You could override this with a number of your choosing or change it to just never purge history, and it was awesome.

At some point that changedโ€”you can no longer configure Firefox through its settings page to keep history indefinitely. Eventually it'll just quietly start deleting your data. The worst is the "quietly" partโ€”you're never alerted that this is happening. Very lame.

colby, (edited )
@colby@kosmos.social avatar

Context: I just went to back up a 1.5 year old profile only to realize that there's less than year's worth of entries retained in the history.

There's a lot wrong with the way software is made, but Don't Lose User Data is like the one tenet that you should be able to reasonably expect an average modern app to adhere to, and yet something seems to have changed with standards where PMs are letting it be treated with NBD/IDGAF priority. What the hell.

colby, to random
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I wonder how many people share the quiet disdain I have for people naming things "Standard <whatever>".

colby, (edited )
@colby@kosmos.social avatar

It's not the unimaginative aspect that's so bad*. It's the self-anointing.

  • being blocked on something because you have to give it a name is a plight that everyone should empathize with
dabeaz, to random
@dabeaz@mastodon.social avatar

Thought: I'd bet a lot of projects would have fewer dependencies if pip was 100x slower. Maybe we should try to do that.

colby,
@colby@kosmos.social avatar

@robpike a thought: if people can't demonstrate a test that fails and is subsequently fixed by updating to a newer version of the dependency in question, they shouldn't be updating the dependency in question. @akkartik is right that there's plenty of code re-use in modern software development, verging on if not past the point of "too much", but not nearly enough interest in sharing tests, but there really should be.

@rhempel @dabeaz

colby, (edited )
@colby@kosmos.social avatar

@dabeaz the fact that using a dependency with the help of its associated package manager requires contorting your project's files into a particular shape (instead of just being able to copy the routine into an existing file or arbitrary subdirectory of your project) demonstrates how deficient our package managers are.

@robpike @rhempel

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