Programmers love programming for other programmers. We most respect the writers of operating systems and languages. We hold them as having the deepest wisdom. But really, it's just because their target audience is us.
Doing stuff for actual customers is seen as grunt work. Their interests aren't ours, and we can't share what we learn with our peers.
So we end up reinventing the wheel just because it's more fun. And it is fun, and that's ok. Sometimes it's even useful. You just have to figure out what your real goal is, and not spend your whole life polishing your craft for its own sake.
I think their intention is to be an alternative to OEDIV [0] (Oetker* Daten- und Informationsverarbeitung KG), targeting European companies and governments.
If you understand German and want to take a look at OEDIV's remarkable datacenter, der8auer posted a video [1] around two years ago giving a tour through their datacenter. Small but high-quality. This is what Schwarz Gruppe is after, though not as closed as OEDIV.
Today I'd add to the list the discussion on Israel using AI to decide who to bomb. AI isn't smart enough to understand that people who just bought a washing machine shouldn't be shown ads for washing machines, but apparently it's good enough for deciding who's a terrorist.
Having said that, I personally know someone who was arrested and mistreated by police forces for being related to a criminal, and yet I've never managed to convince them that maybe the police shouldn't have that kind of power. In those cases I typically consider that the person discussing probably won't change their view, but maybe I can still reach those listening to the conversation.
The reason I like it is that he’s unified tabs and bookmarks almost, it’s a great UX that looks like some things you might have seen but still feels different.
He’s also got wicked design sense — but I’m biased so. I also feel like I’m doing him a disservice — he’s got one of those silly lifetime deals going right now.
I'd still pick Unpoly over it. Seems far more high level, feature rich and easier to use although less popular. And if I wanted a popular approach I'd pick Hotwire which can be used with any backend framework anyways.
If you’re interested in purchasing the shorts that have been released on physical home media (nearly half of episodes have not been) I made this outline of the differences between the various sets and recommended purchasing order: https://frdmtoplay.com/maximizing-bugs-bunny/
> When I copy the DB over to another system, I don't need that table. So it would be nice to have like primary.db and secondary.db. With 'details' in secondary.db. Any downside to this approach? Are JOINS slower across two files than across two tables in the same file?
I'm in the middle of refactoring my personal project such that "shared" data is in one database, and "personal" data is in a separate database; the idea being that every user will have a separate SQLite "connection", with their own "personal" data ATTACHed. I had reasonably extensive functional testing before the refactor, and after the refactor I didn't have any issues from a functional perspective.
Potential advantages:
- Each user can download their own "personal" database whenever they want
- This is essentially a form of "sharding", which should go a long way towards mitigating the "single writer" bottleneck; as the "shared data" will change much less frequently than the "personal" data. It should also make it fairly straightforward to distribute the workload across multiple servers / regions, should my project ever get that big.
Haven't done any performance testing yet.
Main issues I've encountered so far:
- Foreign key constraints across the databases is missing; that's just a reduction in safety, however.
- Golang's "automatic connection management" doesn't play well with SQLite's "ATTACH" command: it expect to automatically open new connections, but the secondary connections won't have the ATTACHed databases. This is solvable, but something to watch out for.
As implied, I'm still in the middle of changing things over, so it's early days; but so far things seem positive.
The chart is interesting because it misses the important part - it covers time, but not adoption.
For example, adoption of GIMP has not likely materially increased over time (as a relative percent of total addressable market)
IMHO, what the author gets wrong what so many people who claim this (they are not the first, or the last) get wrong - open source as a whole sucks at building products, but is great at building infrastructure.
(and pretty good at infrastructure products).
If you go look at areas where an open source thing is a de-facto market-leader, they are mostly infrastructure. Not all, but the ones that aren't have clear product management of some sort.
That is - the good open source products are often built/driven either by extremely product focused people (This is rare), or by companies driving them with PMs.
Not that the engineering doesn't matter - of course it does, but if you want a good and successful product, engineering is just a part of what is needed. Sometimes not even the main part!
Open source focuses mainly on the engineering part, often creating technical meritocracies that focus on making "The technically best software".
This is totally cool, but also totally orthogonal to building "a good product that people want to use".
Secondarily, you have the issue of survival in marketplace (IE There are a rash of OSS companies achieving near 100% of total addressable market share, and still going bankrupt due to inability to monetize). This, however, is not as big an issue as the first (as people can always still pick it all up when that happens)
Open source could always get better at products, but its historical development models were geared towards exactly the above (IE it does what it says on the tin)
Everything you do is ultimately pointless. You feel that becoming a particular type of engineer you aspire to is meaningful, but once you get there you’ll realize you’re still yourself and you didn’t ascend to some higher level of being. Probably the most meaningful thing we can do is through social interactions. Your time in WoW must have incorporated social interactions. Be proud of those experiences - they’re in no way worse than others. Enjoy who you are and where you’ve been, avoid hurting people directly or indirectly, and you’ll be fine. If now you value your work with computers more then pursue that with the same vigor - but realize it’s not more meaningful than playing WoW, because meaning is what you make of it. Our culture will tell you productive activities that create capital and productivity are meaningful, but they only are if you find meaning and purpose in them for yourself without regard to the monetary necessities. I’m certain you felt purpose and meaning in your WoW playing at the time, and maybe you’ve just grown and changed. That’s ok too. Just because you wouldn’t spend your time doing WoW now doesn’t change you were driven to then, and the fact you could have “leap frogged” your current skill doesn’t matter one little bit. It’s not a race.
"Some web services therefore use the TLS handshake to fingerprint which HTTP client is accessing them. Notably, some bot protection platforms use this to identify curl and block it."
As a user of non-browser clients (not curl though) I have not run into this in the wild.^1
Anyone have an example of a site that blocks non-browser clients based on TLS fingerprint.
1. As far as I know. The only site I know of today that is blocking non-browser clients appears to be www.startpage.com. Perhaps this is the heuristic they are using. More likely it is something simpler I have not figured out yet.
About 10 years ago, IBM used to use the 9.0.0.0/8 space in basically exactly the same way as one would use 10.0.0.0/8, for internal-only networking. Each workstation got its own 9.x.x.x IP, but it wasn't routable from outside.
Maybe I'm the odd one out, but apart from the new cloud stuff 've had nothing but bad experiences.
Many years ago: HDDs died like I've never seen it before, one every few months with just a couple of servers.
ca. late 2013: We had some production systems running on Hetzner hardware, we regularly! called their support to tell them the DC lost connection because our monitoring apparently was better than theirs and they acted surprised for not hearing something yet.
Only like 2-3 years ago: Got a new server, had SMART issues and had to have the disk replaced before the first 24h after ordering were up.
An ex-coworker of mine joked they must have added the "please change the disk" option in the support form just for him because he was running 20+ servers and actually had to call them every week to replace a dying disk.
Yes, this was all years ago - but I'd rather pay servers out of my own pocket than be oncall for production servers there, ever again.
This is a terrible idea - the data isn’t yours until it’s been explicitly given.
A few years ago I was the UX lead at a big uk website. At the time, the commercial team were wanting to steal unsubmitted personal data from forms and just couldn’t grasp why it was so wrong.
I’d been fighting them on it for ages, but thankfully a few other large sites got into trouble for doing it and I was able to convince the business that the reputational damage wasn’t worth whatever value we might glean from it. Our users were savvy, privacy conscious and extremely vocal and would have gone mental if it came out we were doing it too.
Couldn’t believe it was even a conversation I needed to have.
This is how the narrative of Facebook looks to me:
Zuckerberg got lucky and then executed brilliantly, transitioned from nerd hacker to CEO amazingly well. He deserves a lot of credit for that.
Since then, Facebook have innovated very little. Zuckerberg recognised this, and bought Instagram and Whatsapp in lieu of building an innovative company. The latter is clearly really difficult to do.
Without a stream of new ideas and products (unlike, say, Apple) Facebook double-downed on maximising revenue growth from their core advertising business. This led to all the scandals and disasters they have brought us, including destabilising societies.
Inevitably, this led to the core product becoming less attractive, and people were also turned off by the negative press. Zuckerberg's rigid control of the company has led to him being a lightening rod for the backlash against big tech and especially adtech. His media skills are awful, so insisting on control and making himself a figurehead has further damaged the business.
Zuckerberg knows the only way out is another home run. He's a super smart and prescient thinker, so he can see VR is a good play. It looks like the timeline for VR won't be short enough to save FB, but even if it were arriving soon enough he must know that FB probably isn't capable of delivering a truly new thing.
This then marks the beginning of the end for the company, as it continues to bring in revenue from Instagram and monetises Whatsapp. Its sheer size means decline is going to take decades.
I wouldn't be surprised if Zuckerberg leaves in the next few years, before the failure of Meta strategy becomes apparent.
What they _should_ have done is debatable, but developing some sense of ethics might have helped. I think they could have focused on building Whatsapp into a payments (etc) app, which would have created an enduring product, and then used the time that bought them to rebuild the company.
Microsoft are showing that it can be done, but I wonder if Facebook has the capacity to do great things. Perhaps the lesson from MS is that only a new leader can rescue such a mired company.
I love using Jadx (https://github.com/skylot/jadx) to get a better understanding of the code in Java and then use APKTool to reverse engineer, decompile and recompile the app
Reverse engineering is a very exciting field and the moment you learn and figure out one concept you realize there is a lot more out there for you to figure out.
> SectorLISP uses what we call an ABC garbage collector and it took only 40 bytes of assembly.
> [...]
> Fast immediate garbage collection with zero memory overhead and perfect heap defragmentation is as easy as ABC when your language guarantees data structures are acyclic.
Neat, but my understanding was that even pure functional languages can't generally make this guarantee, because things like letrec complicate matters. If SectorLISP can take this approach, why doesn't Haskell? (Or does it?)
