hallettj @ hallettj @leminal.space

Just a basic programmer living in California

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1 yr. ago

I raised my kids using metric temperature for weather. Now that they're older they hold me to it!

1 cm is about the width of the tip of your pinky finger.

1 m is about the distance from your nose to your fingertips if you hold your arm out, and extend your fingers.

100 m is the length of the straight section of an athletic track, which is about the same length as a football field.

1 mL is about the volume of the tip of your pinky finger.

1 L is about 1 quart, which is half a carton of milk (unless you get milk in the smaller 1 quart size).

The mile-to-km conversion is pretty close to 1½.

The kg-to-pound conversion is two-and-a-bit.

A difference of 1°C is close to a difference of 2°F.

Edit: My milk comparison was wrong - I've corrected it.

Edit: Of course by "m" I meant "mile"

This advice is also golden!

I'm not sure if I've used more in the last 25 years. And when I did I think it was in MS-DOS.

For the sake of benefit of the doubt, it's possible to simultaneously understand the thesis of the article, and to hold the opinion that AI doesn't lead to higher-quality products. That would likely involve agreeing with the premise that laying off workers is a bad idea, but disagreeing (at least partially) with the reasoning why it's a bad idea.

Yeah, the article seems to assume AI is the cause without attempting to rule out other factors. Plus the graph shows a steady decline starting years before ChatGPT appeared.

Here's a thread with basically the same question that has references to some specific laws: https://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/1cbyw91/can_my_employer_mandate_where_i_shop_as_a/

That thread is in reference to Ohio. Replies call out Ohio labor provisions, and laws regarding rebate.

Here's someone on Bluesky who does regular "three wins today" posts. But those are mixed with less positive news. https://bsky.app/profile/ariellaelm.bsky.social

I'm not a lawyer either. But going off the company store insight, maybe we can look to the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. It prohibits paying wages in scrip, or "similar devices". Scrip can take a couple of forms; one is an internal company currency that can only be spent at the company store. That provision in the FLSA was specifically intended to shut down company store scams.

It seems that an implied condition of your work is spending some portion of your wages at certain stores. Since scrip is money that can only be spent in certain places, it might be argued that if you are required to spend a portion of your wages in certain places, that has the same effect as paying a portion of your wages in scrip.

Unfortunately after a bit of searching I haven't seen this specific argument made. But again, I'm not a lawyer, and I don't know how to research case law. It sounds like they're trying to claim this program in optional, so it might be challenging to prove that participation is de facto mandatory. I'm guessing if you could get someone to tell you a number for how much they expect you to spend in this program that would help with such an argument. On second thought, I don't actually know how helpful a number would be, and I don't want to get you in trouble.

The article doesn't suggest using Control+C. It talks about dedicated copy and paste key codes, and you can program your keyboard to map those codes to whatever keys you like. They suggest Fn+C.

I was also thinking Nestlé before I clicked through. They want to corner the market on water. WTF!

Less is not an editor, it's a "pager" which is a read-only viewer for files, or for command output that doesn't fit in a single screen, or whatever. Generally to control which you want programs use you set the PAGER environment variable.

The old grandaddy pager was called "more", as in "there's more text than fits on the screen". The successor is called "less". For most purposes, less is more.

I heard Superman gained the ability to fly during the first TV series because doing the special effects for flying was easier than for jumping.

It sounds like you're including NixOS in this category so I guess I have switched.

I also tried Fedora Silverblue a bit, and it seemed to me that ostree distros are built on a cool idea supported by compromises I didn't like:

Some stuff doesn't work in Flatpak sandboxing - at least not yet. One example that comes to mind is Firefox integration with the desktop 1Password app. Maybe I could make this work by tinkering with Flatseal, but when install the native packages in NixOS this interaction just works.

I don't want my CLI tools in a container running a different distro. For example if I'm using Distrobox to set up a dev environment that's installing a distro with traditional package management to get around not being able to install packages natively in the host OS. I get that Distrobox enables isolated dev environments for different projects. But for that use case I think Nix devshells are more flexible, robust, and performant.

Nix also has its problems - in particular the usual complaint that the documentation is not comprehensive enough to match the complexity of the system.

It comes down to, what can be done or pre-generated at build or publish time versus what must be done at runtime (such as when a viewer accesses a post)? Stuff that must be done at runtime is stuff you don't have the necessary information to do at publish time. For example you can't pre-generate a comments section because you don't know what the comments will be before a post is published.

For stuff like email digests and social media posts I might set up a CI/CD system (likely using Github Actions) that publishes static content, and does those other tasks at the same time. Or if I want email digests delivered on a set schedule instead of at publish time I might set a scheduled workflow in the same CI/CD system. Either way you can have automation that is associated with your website that isn't directly integrated with your web server.

As you suggest some stuff that must be done at runtime can be done with frontend Javascript. That's how I implement comments on my static site. I have Javascript that fetches a Mastodon thread that I set up for the purpose, and displays replies under the post.

I don't exactly follow your first and fourth requirements so it's hard for me to comment more specifically. Transforming information from CSVs to HTML sounds like something that could naturally be done at build time if you have the CSVs at build time. But I'm not clear if that's the case in your situation.

This is a big reason for me. Also because if anything breaks - even if my system becomes unbootable - I can select the previous generation from the boot menu, and everything is back to working.

It's very empowering, the combination of knowing that I won't irrevocably break things, and that I won't build up cruft from old packages and hand-edited config files. It's given me confidence to tinker more than I did in other distros.

This is a lovely write-up! I have one nit to pick: I think "Mary was fucked by John" is a passive-voice use of the transitive verb. OTOH "This guy fucks." is unambiguously intransitive.

Thinking out loud, I think the reason those salons became famous is because the participants published, and their publications got a lot of attention. An example that springs to my mind is the Vienna Circle. But maybe a better example is Madame Geoffrin's salon which hosted French nobles and Enlightenment thinkers. In that case too the attendees either published, or were powerful figures in society.

The format is a smallish group of people discussing ideas, probably with some connecting theme. It seems like historically those themes were broad, like "philosophy", with a focus on debate. If some of the people involved turn out to be important to society you've got yourself a historically-significant organization. If not then hopefully everyone had a good time.

"By and large" is a weird one. It's meaning is along the same lines as "all other things being equal." Is it a reference to large sample sizes?

It's made weirder by the fictional corporation name in Wall-E, "Buy 'n Large"

My wife has worked with lots of people who are not native English speakers who are sometimes taken aback by the idioms. One colleague flat out refused to accept that "FOMO" is a word.

I suggested that she is in a position to make some up, like "Let's not put fish in the milk bucket." But she didn't go for it. I guess she's not an agent of chaos after all :/