Codex

People with no money have one big problem, people with money have many small problems.

I first heard of it from Joel Spolsky’s blog and wikipedia also credits that article with popularizing the concept. In it’s original formulation, it was based on remote procedure calls being hidden in APIs. Because a remote computer call has all these limits of latency, packet/info loss, and possible connection loss, it is impossible to make a perfect abstraction that allows the programmer to treat the remote call as though it were local. The reality the abstraction tries to hide “leaks” in those fundamental limits.

All of contemporary global society is such an abstraction; that’s one of the principles of post-modernism. When you buy clothes online an entire invisible work force of shippers, manufacturers, resource procurerers, and more lies beind each article of fabric.

Pressure from climate change, tariffs, global war, and more are straining the foundations of society and the comfortable abstraction is starting to crack.

The dip in usage comes just as Microsoft has been forcing full-screen ads onto the machines of customers running Windows 10 to encourage them to upgrade.

Yeah no shit! When my computer does full-screen, disruptive things that I didn’t tell it to do, I figure out how to remove that malware. I’ve been off Windows at home for about a month now, thanks Linux Mint! Getting some games to work has been challenging, but most things have just worked and quite a few work much better!

Performance is up overall, and my confidence that my computer isn’t running a bunch of secret ad and spy ware is way up. Hardware like my gamepad and microphone would randomly disconnect and have issues on Windows, all working perfectly now.

Unfortunately I’m still deep in MS land for work, but there’s almost a comedic quality to it. Everything’s very slow, everyone has constant issues with Teams, or Office online, or Dynamics, or copilot shoving it’s tendrils into everything. Watching businesses struggle to keep operating in the face of Microsoft’s inadequacy is like being a mechanic watching a motor grind to a halt because the owner/manufacturer replaced all the oil with syrup.

Like yes, it’s my problem to fix, but I’m just glad it’s not my car.

I had in some ways the opposite 23&Me experience and goals. My parents told me growing up that I had some small native ancestry. This is actually a common myth many Americans have either been told or somehow deluded themselves into believing.

So I did the DNA testing (which I now regret from all the obvious enshittification and privacy reasons) to prove that my ancestry was boring and predictable. Which it was, no indigenous ancestry, just the expected European countries that my great grandparents came from.

They also do a lot of nice health screening things and I think that’s probably the much more valuable aspect of it. It really is very American that people are so much more concerned with what DNA says about one’s race or ethnicity than about their health and wellbeing.

Every 5 minutes, at max volume:

YOUR CALL IS IMPORTANT TO US. ALL AVAILABLE OPERATORS ARE HELPING OTHER CUSTOMERS. PLEASE STAY ON THE LINE.

2 minutes later:

DID YOU KNOW <COMPANY> IS WORKING TO SAVE CUSTOMERS LIKE YOU MONEY? UPGRADE YOUR PLAN TO ULTIMATE TODAY AND SAVE! YOU CAN ADD BASIC CABLE TO YOUR INTERNET PLAN FOR FREE FOR 3 MONTHS. MAKE ANY SOUND AT ALL TO LEAVE THE SUPPORT QUEUE AND SPEAK WITH A NEW ACCOUNT SPECIALIST RIGHT AWAY.

returns to playing compressed elevator music through an old can

Ah, the WSJ, bastion of level-headed reporting. Since I clicked through to the article and read the one paragraph us free-tier losers get (one more than the rest of you read) I know that it was Huawei trying to recruit semi-conductor manufacturing engineers from Germany.

So settle down, China isn’t trying to pay you $240K a year to make wordpress sites for them, it’s just another front in the ongoing microchip wars.

As a tall man who likes to walk at night, I have long understood that women alone at night do not wish to encounter me. So when I happen to find myself following a woman down the street, I will either slow down, cross the street, or stop and look at a sign or something for a minute to give her some space.

In a dangerous and shitty world, a person has to find subtle and quiet ways to express care, compassion, and solidarity. It costs me nothing to make a woman feel safer.

I also got randomly sent this image from a matrix on the technics.de server. Aside from all the antisemitism and nazi stuff, I admit I was a little charmed by it. Reminded me of timecube and the good old days of how the Internet used to be a place for nerds, outcasts, and complete fucking psychopaths.

Edit: Link to proof ཚྒྷཚྒྷ

As a person who occasionally makes confessional asides “to the camera” I find it amusing to rhetorically ask “Chat” about things. “Ugh, I don’t wanna cook tonight. How about it Chat, we ordering pizza?”

Found a few things:

A carved and polished table, shows color and cross section well.

A wiki for a minecraft clone that already has baobob wood.

Following another poster’s advice, here’s a cross section of one cut down.

In other depictions it often has little holes in it, which seems like a thing that happens to some baobob wood, otherwise it kind of just looks like medium color wood with some dark bands.

This is why you should never allow your terminal to execute news headlines directly. You’re definitely going to want to sandbox your RSS autoexecutor.

I don’t know who really got that trend going. I’ve enjoyed up to hour-ish long videos on more or less anything, but a few years back the first truly excessively long video I remember is Whitelight’s 7 hour long overview/miniseries on Death Stranding. And to be fair, I did find that faster and more enjoyable than playing Death Stranding.

(Also I get why folks make them: more ads plus having that much watch time heavily biases the algorithm towards you so it’s more money overall. And the kind of person that watches 7 hour long reviews in the background (or while sleeping), aka me, certainly help weigh the scales for super long videos.)

But also, I kind of like when shorts are like a minute long or less so I can watch one when I’m like, on the shitter and not accidentally end up with a video essay. I mean 10 minutes used to be the limit of every youtube video! Will they introduce a new, even shorter format? Bring vines or blips back?

Alright, I split the differance, I think that should make everyone happy.

Can’t wait for 10 hour long reviews of Elden Ring, BUT VERTICALE AND LOOPS NOW!?!

I made a little “reverse regex” library for fun ages ago. You give it a regex and it generates text from it. I thought of it as a toy, but people found use for it in unit testing. Eventually, someone forked it and added better test support because I am the world’s worst maintainer.

Anyway, I only say this because I learned that it is shockingly easy for some throw away idea you put up on GitHub to suddenly become the unpaid backbone of somebody else’s CI pipeline. Then, you’re getting angry PR’s and tickets about how a security issue or an unpatched dependency in your toy library NEEDS to be fixed and now you’ve got a new unpaid job!

Or you do what I did and abandon the project so one of the poor fools actually using it in production needs to maintain it. Us programmers though, we like when our code is being used, we like to help people, we want the work we put out there with our name on it to be a good representative of us, to show us as helpful, hard-working, and dependable. It can be so easy to fall into this feeling that because you wrote it, you “owe” your users some ongoing commitment.

And those users are often themselves beholden to their bosses, just trying to find the least-effort solution to get back to what they wanted to be working on. The shit all rolls down hill and ultimately I think our industry needs massive structural changes to thrive. I honestly sometimes muse about a return to the guild system. All feature requests and bug reports (and I mean like, globally, ALL tickets) come to the Guild and we shall assign them out under the principle of mutual aid (from each member according to ability, to each member according to their needs). In this way, the Guild will carefully train the next generation of holy adeptus mechanicus and make broad decisions on how technology can best serve the people.

Visit your nearest aquarium! They often have a petting tank where you can touch rays and small sharks. And if not, hey, at least the aquarium is still great!

Some alcohol cooks off when used this way, but not all. Be cautious when cooking for others to mention this so non-drinkers can make an informed choice.

It can be a delicious addition though: alcohol dissolves flavor and aromatic compounds that water and fat cannot, so you get a lot of unique flavors especially from barrel-aged drinks like whisky and wine.

Sounds like the octopus wrangler knows how to leverage the behaviors of the various animals around it towards it’s own ends. Pretty interesting! I’m also curious about their potential follow ups to see if they have memory for and can recognize previous group members.

Wow, hadn’t thought about that one in a long time. I thought it was an old Scott Hanselman blog and I was correct! I’ll have to reread it, been years now.

I’m not sure there’s much why to it exactly. I feel like a small fraction of people I’ve met in life were truly passionate and excited about the work they did. Most had some passion for an art, or a hobby, or for their kids very commonly, but people who really want to grow and master their craft are somewhat rare generally. Most folks just want to do well enough to keep their jobs and then go home to whatever they actually care about.

Consider that to go on a site specifically for programming questions and then take a survey about it, you have to be the kind of person that cares about getting their code “right”. The majority of programmers I’ve met would only go there to copy-paste a quick answer, and those people have all moved to asking chat-gpt for code now.