samir

samir, 1 year ago to random

Well, this is beautiful. Scroll up.

https://neal.fun/space-elevator/

Via @adactio.

samir, 4 months ago to random

You know it's web scale when your tarball is base64-encoded and embedded in a JSON string.

samir, 3 months ago to random

It took me a long time but I finally figured out that Copilot and friends are not meant for me, they’re meant for JavaScript programmers.

One of the reasons I’m enjoying Rust is because there’s a culture of being very thoughtful about every line of code you write, and every dependency you add.

Conversely, in JS land, “just add this dependency” is now a meme.

In a land where you’re encouraged to “just” add more boilerplate (thanks, create-react-app), why wouldn’t you outsource that?

samir, 9 months ago to random

STOP DOING APPS

• SITES were not supposed to be given apps
• YEARS OF UPDATING yet no real-world use found for putting websites on your COMPUTER
• "Yes, I want to download 200 MB of code and pictures every week for a thing I use ONCE A YEAR" – statements dreamed up by the utterly deranged

"Hello I would like you to bother me at random intervals by buzzing my phone"

They have played us for absolute fools

samir, 5 months ago to random

No, I will not subscribe to your mailing list. Get an RSS/Atom feed.

samir, 6 months ago to random

We need universal basic income so that tech bros can just stop.

samir, 4 months ago to random

Lukewarm take: internet search is terrible because it’s too complicated. It’s doing too much.

The purpose of search should not be to answer your questions. The purpose of search is to find cool blogs. If you subscribe to enough cool blogs, your questions will be answered before you’ve asked them.

(Newsletters are uncool blogs.)

samir, 4 months ago to random

The year is 2193.

Humanity, or what’s left of it, has completed the cyborg process, fusing their brains with the net to form a hive mind.

Humans understand the plight of their fellows, because they share a consciousness. They live as one with the earth, because they are one with the earth.

All have what they need, and none hoard.

There is peace.

There is almost no suffering. Only one holdout remains.

Academics still publish their work as PDFs.

samir, 9 months ago to random

Thanks to modern medicine and diets, some animals, such as humans, live far longer in captivity.

samir, 8 months ago to random

Does anyone on this here sleepyweb do calligraphy + drawing/painting on commission?

I've got one or two short sentences I would like calligraphified, paired with a cute picture, and framed, and before I reach for Etsy, I thought I'd check here.

RickiTarr, 4 months ago to random

The French will talk about how Americans eat unsophisticated and unhealthy food, and then eat a baguette with a chocolate bar stuffed in it.

samir, 8 months ago to random

HTTP headers are just environment variables for cowards.

samir, 6 months ago to random

My Linux desktop is connected to a 32” 4K monitor. I have Firefox set to a default zoom of 120% because otherwise I find it difficult to read text. (My eyesight is bad, even with glasses.)

I just realised that I never set Firefox on my Mac to the same zoom level; it’s at 100%. I keep the laptop connected to the same screen.

It’s entirely because fonts on macOS are rendered so much more smoothly that I can read smaller text.

Font smoothing is an accessibility feature, and I never noticed.

samir, 4 months ago to random

Ah, good, the Very Important Security Update for Docker includes a change that breaks Docker Compose.

It’s gonna be a fun week.

samir, 6 months ago to random

I DID NOT ASK FOR THIS, MICROSOFT.

samir, 7 months ago to random

Ah, screenshots of a Google spreadsheet, posted into Slack. I must be in the future.

samir, 2 months ago to random

If I could make one arbitrary, sweeping policy change, I would ban chairs in schools.

I’m completely serious. Chairs are terrible, and we teach children to use them way too early. And then we’re surprised when people grow up sedentary and with perennial backache.

Chairs are designed for a single, unchanging height. The result is people learn to sit very poorly. Too tall? You end up sitting cross-legged and destroying your ankles. Too short? Say goodbye to your posture.

samir, 5 months ago to random

Software isn’t going to improve until we, the people who care about it, stop taking large salaries for a little while.

I like my big salary. It pays my rent. It means my family and I can eat, travel, and be extremely comfortable.

But I’m never going to create something fundamentally groundbreaking if I keep taking it.

Silicon Valley doesn’t make groundbreaking things any more.

samir, 4 months ago to random

The current wave of terrible chatbots is both a justification of modern IT practices and an indictment of them.

Most large companies that have deployed (and often subsequently undeployed) a terrible LLM-based chatbot did not go through their IT department. They just put it on their website, which is controlled by Marketing.

A justification, because perhaps their IT department would have actually tested it.

An indictment, because we are so slow that they would never have asked us.

samir, 4 months ago to random

<subtoot>You can really like Apple’s products, consider them worth the price, say as much, and also consider their corporate practices harmful.</subtoot>

samir, 1 month ago to random

Two-year-old saw a sticker with a cassette tape.

“It’s a lunchbox!”

Excuse me while I go pre-order my retirement home.