My "production stuff" is listed at https://github.com/alexpdp7/alexpdp7/blob/master/README.md#other-usable-projects-of-mine
@leah I read much less than I used to, so I've been mulling having a book on me at all times to read on public transport and that kind of thing instead of using the Internet.
My main issue is that stuff I'd like to read is not pocketable and that sourcing books for electronic paper devices legally sounds troublesome.
Perhaps I should just focus first on reading public domain books first.
@datarama hmm, I wouldn't be so sure. And if they requested to be removed, I would say they should be removed. But I'm not sure they wouldn't shrug it off, own what they said, or even be proud of being listed there. Many sources in the list are primary!
It makes me uncomfortable too, though. I wouldn't publish that myself. Also I don't like using links from the Wayback Archive- people have a right to change their views (although I doubt that's the case there).
Nice, "nano --modernbindings" uses shortcuts more similar to common editors on Windows and macOS. Even Debian stable has a nano with support for this option!
@datarama maybe the difference lies in whether the person wants to be taken off the list?
https://neil.fraser.name/news/2026/09/03/
Shocking. I always said "DNS is not so bad, I'm not aware of ICANN doing crazy shit."
If I understand correctly, ICANN in fact now has done insanely crazy shit in a way that breaks my trust significantly.
Luckily the only two "important" domains that I use personally are both .net, and they are much bigger than .name so I doubt they're going to pull something like that, but it's annoying to have to watch your back for ICANN.
Perchance anyone with personal experiences with external USB enclosures for 4-5 drives? My Proliant Microserver might be edging closer to a much needed retirement after perhaps 10 years of service.
But in today's day and age, it seems difficult to get reliable information on noise and heat from those enclosures.
@david_chisnall I have to say that there's always a convenient excuse to jack prices up. This has happened with many natural disasters- maybe some caused supply chain issues, but I'm... suspicious.
@david_chisnall yep, I have 2x4Tb drives in my "NAS" and one of them started giving out NAS errors.
One of the 4tb drives costed me 123€ in 2013. I've spent 223€ in the replacement.
HECK, a 2.5" external USB 4Tb drive in 2019 cost me 112€!
This is insane. I got lucky with RAM and bought a 32gb desktop *and* expanded my other desktop to 32gb before prices started going up, but my NAS situation is pretty dire...
@david_chisnall my pet peeve is name pronunciations. I have a recording that I enter on all systems that allow it. Not because I needed to hear my name correctly (lost cause) but because I want to try to pronounce well others'
For the diet, would stating "I follow a Halal diet" skirt regulations? There's a strong correlation with religion, but AFAIK Muslims would not have an issue with others eating Halal?
This seems (contradictorily) good general advice, but I just added it to my list of basic links:
https://earthly.dev/blog/thought-leaders/
"Don't Feed the Thought Leaders" explains that contingent advice (that depends on the situation) is in general better than generic advice. In my experience, one of the most difficult parts is knowning when you have to deviate from common practices.
I used an answer from softwareengineering.stackexchange when explaining London/Chicago [or Detroit] testing styles, but it started giving me bot countermeasures. I also had a few scattered links about testing, so I decided to write a short article to connect everything and serve as a nice link reference for myself:
I wrote on why we should be skeptical that "how can we scale-up X?" (be that our open knowledge #commons or "how can we get a European Google", …) is a reasonable framing.
As biologist JBS Haldane (and many planners inspired by him) point out, 'being the right size' does not just apply to animals, but also human organizations. You can't just 'scale' it without dramatically altering its shape and dynamics.
On 'scaling up' and being the right size
@datarama @david_chisnall my perception is that around the turn of the century we got usable Linux and Windows XP and macOS X. And then "workstation-class" computers became available to all.
The Amiga was quite close to that and that's why I loved our Amiga, but it was always doomed.
Slightly unrelated, but I love to link:
https://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Eternal_Mainframe.html
Which said in 2013 (not 2003) that microcomputers are doomed too :(
@alexhall yeah, that's completely fine. Rust has many niceties that are uncommon in other languages, so Rust fans reach for it even when they don't need low-level features... but it's still a bit painful if you're not very good with it.
Most software I work with is better done in Java/Python/etc.
@alexhall bizarre fact I always love to mention. In C, a[b] is nearly exactly the same as b[a], because indexing into an array is adding the index to the memory address, and addition is conmutative.
C is raw in most regards. Rust adds bounds checks. Which means by default array access is a tad slower in Rust. But what might cause a problem in C will halt a Rust program instead of doing bizarre, possibly harmful stuff.
@alexhall I just tried a quick program with gcc/Linux and reading out of bounds of an array returned a 0 without any error. (I guess that's uninitialized memory or something.)
Rust will panic, which by default will halt the program. The Rust book is comparing with C (many would say because Rust targets programs where traditionally C would be used), so it's quite different in that regard. Although this is the behavior in many other programming languages.
Huh, a Git remote can have multiple URLs. This does not affect fetching/pulling, but pushes will push to all URLs.
I had been doing this manually like a barbarian.
https://git-scm.com/docs/git-config#Documentation/git-config.txt-remotenameurl
This week I realised that #git bundles are even more awesome than I thought. And I was a fan of them already!
git bundles are my favourite way to receive patches by email. They're very small; a single file can contain a whole series of commits, instead of having to cat-herd one attachment per patch (or worse, one _email_ per patch); they're so obviously binary that not even a really bad MUA is likely to "helpfully" do text processing on them, and a user isn't tempted to paste them into the message body instead of making them a proper attachment. Also, they explicitly state which existing commit the changes started from, which is helpful for handling conflicts, and for knowing what you expect the sender to have taken account of.
But this week I realised there's one more advantage: if the same commit appears in more than one bundle, it will be reliably recognised as identical. This is helpful when you're the one _sending_ the bundle.
Suppose I send someone 3 patches. Half an hour later I smite my forehead and realise I need to send one more. With 'git format-patch' I probably send just the extra patch, so that the recipient has to extract attachments from two emails and apply them in the right order. Or I send all 4 patches in email #2, and the recipient gets errors if they do the obvious thing with that email after they've already applied the patches from #1.
But with git bundles, I can send a bundle of all 4 commits in email #2, and it will do the right thing _regardless_ of whether the recipient had already pulled from the previous bundle in email #1!
@firepoet surprisingly enough, if you work on the JVM at Oracle, you are not allowed to use LLMs (!!)
So far I've found few organizations like this. https://nlnetlabs.nl/ who develops a few projects also seems to have a no LLMs policy, but I believe they only hire in the Netherlands.
There are a few lists of projects that have no LLM policies, but so far I know none about organizations that hire people. That would be great!
Just got a year minimal subscription to sourcehut. Mostly to support their recent policy changes (totally unsurprising changes).
But also, because I have been toying with their excellent mailing list implementation for a small project.
sourcehut is an interesting project. Some stuff about it gives me pause, but on the whole it gets so many things right in surprising, daring and elegant ways.
@josh hah, I also handed my resignation today, hopefully for similar purposes. (Although I need to get certified and get a master's first :)
@datarama (in a company I worked for, I decided to use celebrity names- I wanted to use Spanish folklore singers, but chickened out and toned it down- so for instance we had a generic "paris", but it was for Paris Hilton.
Pantoja, Lola, Rocio... although it would have been a bit dark to say "Lola Flores is dead"...
@datarama for physical computers I use Neuromancer character names. This is armitage, laptop is molly, small workstation hideo, julius/dixie/maelcum are servers...
(Non-physical [to me] computers get location [h1, nc1 for servers on Hetzner and Netcup] or function names [nextcloud, pg, etc.].)
Huh, I just saw that Fulham (English football team) has ClickHouse in their shirts.
@david_chisnall and much of the rest of software is solutions in search of a problem or people not bothering to check prior art