@ovid@fosstodon.org
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ovid

@ovid@fosstodon.org

Well-known software developer. American living in France.

I have a poetic license to kill.

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ovid, to random
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Genie: I’ll give you one billion dollars if you can spend 100M in a month. There are 3 rules: No gifting, no gambling, no throwing it away.

SRE: Can I use AWS?

Genie: There are 4 rules.

ovid, to opensource
@ovid@fosstodon.org avatar

Since I've been using heavily the past week or so, I thought it was time to write up my experience. You might find it surprising.

https://ovid.github.io/articles/using-github-copilot-with-vim.html

ovid, to random
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The next time you feel imposter syndrome and are convinced that everyone is better than you, just remember that someone got paid for this hospital design.

ovid, to random
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OK, now I'm totally sold. Turns out that because of my history of building open source projects, I get to use for free. Kind of hard to beat that deal. I am definitely going to hype this project, even though I know some are not happy with it.

I can't believe how easy it is to get stuff done.

ovid, to iPhone
@ovid@fosstodon.org avatar

I got tired of using my Notes app for shopping. I wanted to be able to sort items by name, or purchase frequency, and not add duplicate items. That would make it much easier for me to do my shopping.

I created an iPhone app to do this in about two hours. Note that I said "Created" and not "Wrote." I used . I don't know programming, nor do I know the programming language. I'll write more about this later.

You can judge the code for yourself: https://github.com/Ovid/chatgpt-shopping

ovid, to random
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We just bumped a client from version 5.16 to Perl version 5.32.

It feels great to be updating things to a modern Perl.

ovid, to ai
@ovid@fosstodon.org avatar

I have to admit a grudging admiration for a small bot scam. Not one that hurts me, but takes money from advertisers. 1/12

ovid, to random
@ovid@fosstodon.org avatar

My unpopular opinion: I remember when I was first introduced to . My first thought was "this is conceptually similar to (extreme programming), but with best practices removed."

Two decades later and my views have evolved considerably, but I still see that projects developed under Scrum often fail, hard, at the technical best practices.

ovid, to linux
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I keep telling myself that I will never break down and add the following to my .bash_aliases file

alias mdkir=mkdir

But it's so, so tempting.

ovid, to ai
@ovid@fosstodon.org avatar

What is fascinating about the new revolution is that a storm is coming, the experts are telling us, we can see it, and it will be fascinating to see how industry reacts.

In short, as a profession is going to largely die. I hear numbers like "in ten years" being bandied about, though I'm skeptical of the timeframe.

Developers are the 21st century version of the well-paid textile workers, except we have years of advance warning,.

What are your plans?

ovid, to space
@ovid@fosstodon.org avatar

has sworn in Charity Weeden as associate administrator for NASA’s Office of Technology, Policy, and Strategy.

Look very closely at the book she's swearing in on.

https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-names-new-head-of-technology-policy-strategy

ovid, to random
@ovid@fosstodon.org avatar

If you really want to be scared about AI, it's not that it's taking away the jobs (which it is), it's that it's being heavily pushed by Accelerationists. Many of them cite Nick Land, a British philosopher who argues for eugenics, "hyper-racism," and authoritarianism.

There are also tons of accelerationist neo-Nazi groups around the world.

These groups assume everything is failing and we need to accelerate the collapse and get it over with.

And they love AI. Scary rabbit-hole to go down.

ovid, to science
@ovid@fosstodon.org avatar

I've just submitted my talk, "The Search for Extraterrestrial Life
(in our solar system)" to a conference.

It's an "off-topic" talk, so it probably won't be accepted, but I've been constantly updating it with the latest scientific information I can find.

Did you know that Venus may have had an Earth-like climate for three billion years? And those "unknown absorbers" in the Venusian clouds are fascinating.

https://www.sci.news/space/planetaryscience/habitable-venus-07619.html

ovid, to random
@ovid@fosstodon.org avatar

If you're not part of the community, you probably don't know me. I'm well-known in Perl for my contributions to the language and the community. This makes me, if you will, a big fish in a small pond. This creates a rather unique problem. It's a problem that I have to address every time a client calls me in for . 1/9

ovid, to random
@ovid@fosstodon.org avatar

A mini-rant about IT project management and those who approve IT projects.

There is this pernicious belief that being a PM is about delivering a project on time and on budget. The people who believe this often also naïvely believe that being a manager is about giving orders. They're dead wrong on both.

The dirty secret: costs and deadlines are not the droids you are looking for. 1/11

ovid, to random
@ovid@fosstodon.org avatar

One of the many things I hate about :

sqlite> select typeof(created_at) from customers;
real
text
null
text
text
integer

For a given column, you have no guarantees about its type at all.

ovid, to random
@ovid@fosstodon.org avatar

A security researcher I know was traveling to Japan for a conference. He decided to research ways of removing fingerprints. The only reliable way he found was pressing them in burning oil in a hot skillet. Yes, he did this. He's a bit crazy.

When he got to Japan, he found himself in an entire line of people who had no fingerprints. Most, he said, were old Chinese women who worked in agriculture and had their fingerprints abraded away over the years.

ovid, to random
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Hey, developers. I just visited https://pkg.go.dev/ and my antivirus blocked it with "Threat: URL:Phishing"

Is there a known issue?

ovid, to science
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Bacteria which eat plastic sounds like something we desperately need.

But what happens when it invetably escapes into the wild and starts eating the plastic we currently use?

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/sep/28/plastic-eating-bacteria-enzyme-recycling-waste

ovid, to Toyota
@ovid@fosstodon.org avatar

's claims for their new solid state-battery technology are stunning. 1,200 km range (~745 miles) on a full charge. Lighter and less expensive than lithium-ion batteries. And the icing on the cake? 10 minutes or less to fully charge.

Vehicles with these should start in 2027. If this holds up, EVs will start being more convenient than traditional engines and could be in serious trouble.

https://www.topspeed.com/everything-to-know-toyota-solid-state-battery/#decoding-toyota-39-s-potentially-game-changing-solid-state-battery-breakthrough

ovid, to France
@ovid@fosstodon.org avatar

Ah, , I love you.

Went to a children's bookstore a few years ago. There was a book by the cash register whose title, translated into English, was "Why the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer."

I asked the lady behind the counter (in French) "Isn't this a children's bookstore?"

"Yes, it is," she replied.

"That doesn't seem like a children's book."

"It's a special edition edited for children."

ovid, to random
@ovid@fosstodon.org avatar

Due to a screw up, my « mutuelle » (French health insurance) wasn't paid. As a result, a particular expensive medication that I needed wasn't fully covered by taxes. It's 956€, but 608€ was covered, so I paid 348€ out of pocket.

For reference, the supplemental health insurance that would have covered the entire thing is usually between 30€ and 100€ a month.

Without medical insurance, the average French person has 500€ a year in medical bills.

https://www.thelocal.fr/20191014/the-feelings-mutuelle-six-things-to-know-about-top-up-health-insurance-in-france

1/2

ovid, to space
@ovid@fosstodon.org avatar

"Before this, NASA had last tested a nuclear thermal rocket engine in the mid-19th century, some 50 years back."

ಠ_ಠ

https://www.wionews.com/technology/nasa-darpa-collaborate-to-test-draco-a-rocket-engine-thatll-send-humans-to-mars-faster-than-ever-555781

ovid, to ai
@ovid@fosstodon.org avatar

IT people: want to keep your job safe from ? Fight to keep our profession licensed. We've fought against that for years, but if you fight for it, you'll have a license that can't be legally automated.

It won't protect all IT jobs, but it will protect some.

However, I suspect that we won't bother. As jobs gradually slide away, we'll argue and dither and ultimately do nothing.

ovid, to debian
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Happily installing on an old and replacing . My current M1 is awesome, but any time I need to deal with anything touching the amd64 architecture, it slows to a crawl and is unuseable.

Edit: and I can't find a mouse with a cable, so now my new install is useless because Plasma requires the mouse in order to set up Bluetooth :(

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