jadero @ jadero @programming.dev

Fully retired now and one of the things I'd like to do is get back into hob

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2 yr. ago

Oops! I guess I wasn't paying close enough attention.

Oops! I guess I wasn't paying close enough attention.

Edit: the bits barely had a chance to dry on my comment when I came across https://rss-parrot.net/

This is a way of integrating RSS feeds into your personal timeline on Mastodon. I don't know how this affects the work I describe at the bottom of this comment, but I bet it has a role to play.

I find it hard to believe that people would like to browse to x different websites to see if an artist has new works, only to find out that they don’t.

RSS FTW!

Every site I've ever created or been involved with in even the tiniest capacity has supported RSS. Sometimes it was enabled just to shut me up.

I'm not sure how to better promote the use of RSS and get people to use feed readers, but I think it is the answer to at least that particular issue.

My personal opinion is that a "platform" should really be just a collection of searchable and categorized feeds with it's own feed. That way there is both discoverability and the ability for individuals to construct their own personal feed on their own personal device (no server required!) while staying abreast of new feeds on the master feed aggregation "platform."

There are innumerable ways for people to get their own content into something that supports RSS and that feed could be easily submitted to the master feed aggregation "platform" to deal with the discoverability issue. For example, Mastodon and most compatible systems support RSS and registration is child's play on any server that allows public registration.

In fact, the "platform" could set up a crawler to automatically discover RSS feeds. If the author has done the metadata right, the results would even be automatically categorized.

Done right, the "platform" might actually run on a pretty small server, because it would be linking to sites, and only pulling summaries from them.

Even comments could be supported with a little creativity. As I said, there are innumerable ways for people to get their own content out there. If there were a standard metadata tag "comment:

<link to article or another comment>

Side note: I acquired a domain explicitly for the purpose of setting up such a feed aggregation "platform." Now that I'm retired, I'm slowly working on creating it. Everything is highly experimental at this point and, to be honest, shows no visible progress to that end, but that is my ultimate goal.

There was a thread elsewhere asking whether a toggle should show current state or the state desired. There was enough disagreement that it quickly became apparent that, whatever else the toggle does, there should be something external to the toggle showing the possible states, indicating which way to move the toggle regardless of toggle appearance.

Hey, me too! Although I took a transition job in between as public works foreman for a small village. (Single person doing everything from water treatment to sewer cleanouts, snow clearing to cutting grass.)

Sewing for sure, especially machine sewing. I feel like I've got as much time invested in fighting and maintaining our sewing machines as in our Windows machines. 😛

And then there's that whole transition between pattern (spec) and outcome that is oddly reminiscent of far too many of my software projects!

Knowing how a switch works in a circuit and how it's typically represented in schematics, I would guess that moving the switch toward the body of the gun should be off.

But if actually placing a bet, I'd put my money on it being the other way.

You've just described my 50 years in the workforce, jumping from job to job, only just barely anything resembling an actual career.

I haven't yet started blacksmithing, but it's the next logical progression. Other than a (very!) occasional boat and the odd bit of furniture or cabinetry, I seem to spend most of my time making tools, jigs, and fixtures.

#5? (Me): pronounced S.Q.L. except for Microsoft's product which is pronounced "sequel server".

I call that the "nerd equivalency problem". I think it's the source of much (most? all?) of the problems with software that comes out of organizations that are not programming shops by nature.

"We're not moving fast enough (or, "I have this great idea!"), hire another nerd!"

The problem also exists within individual programmers ("sure, I can do that UX/UI thingy, just let me finish building this ray-tracing thingy"), but that's just an ordinary cognitive weakness that affects us all (thinking that being expert in one field makes one expert in all). It's the job of proper leadership to resist that, not act as though it's true.

That's very closely related to something I've come to think about tech: nerd equivalency. If there is a computer involved, then a nerd is required and they are all interchangeable.

Basically, someone says "we're not moving fast enough, hire another nerd!" and nobody in the chain of command or in the hiring process has a clue which particular skills are required, assuming that everyone can do everything.

That's why so many corporate projects have what amounts to random people doing randomly assigned work producing insecure, unreliable products with obscure and even hostile UIs.

AI is cool technology (imo), but currently it's just the latest bait for CEOs, managers, etc. Somehow these kinda people are just so vulnerable for hype words without ever thinking more than as second about how to use it or whether it's even useful.

I think that's a general problem with most technology that is fundamentally about computing.

People outside any field have only the barest grasp of that field, but the problems are so much worse as soon as computers are involved. They are so ubiquitous and so useful to so many people with little or no training or understanding that everyone just succumbs to a form of magical thinking.

Unless, of course, that programmer has any number of mobility issues that limit their use of the keyboard, in which case something like cursorless might be the only option.

I urge you to take a look at it. Some even claim that it's more productive than the keyboard. I don't know how the VSCode voice feature works, but if it makes integration of cursorless easier or better, then I'm all for it.

I'd be very interested in learning more about how Canada manages "software engineer." Because whatever is being done certainly doesn't seem to include mandating where regulated professionals must be employed or punishing failures.

Saskatchewan's electronic health records system (eHealth) has had a couple of egregious failures that it shouldn't have taken a "software engineer" to prevent.

Several 911 services became unavailable during an outage that happened to also disrupt point of sale payment systems nationwide.

Both of the relevant companies are telecommunications companies (Telus and Rogers, respectively), where one would expect "software engineering" to be conducted by "software engineers" regardless of regulation.

A quick search for breaches in critical personal information will show that Canada is performing about as well as the US. Which is to say, abysmally.

I've got just 2 now. Codium and Blackbox.ai. Not because they're the best, but because I'm a cheapskate hobbyist and they're free :)

I'm only just starting to play with AI tooling, so I don't have an opinion on which is better, but something about the way Blackbox worked within VSCode means I went through the hassle of getting it installed to vscodium when I switched.

I suspect that Codium might be better at oddball stuff, though, like OpenSCAD. Blackbox seems to just make bad guesses while trying to regurgitate code I've already written. Codium seems to have at least a primitive idea of what's going on with OpenSCAD. But Blackbox does a great job of cleaning up my comments and even generating decent comments for uncommented code.

FWIW, Codium actually labels OpenSCAD as "experimental", but I don't know if that's just boilerplate for something it's never been trained on or whether there is some training data in its system.

Blackbox is a pain to work with in other ways, though. It was like pulling teeth to get an account and I still can't find anything on their pricing--or any documentation, for that matter--despite language suggesting that there are different tiers and a chat UI that offers different settings (like web browsing mode and fun mode). And the Blackbox name isn't doing it any favours, given that "black box" is a generic term in the AI community and others. It's own chat doesn't seem to know that a question about the service might be about the service instead of the generic term.

There is an esolangs community on this instance: !esolangs@programming.dev

It doesn't have nearly the traffic that the comparable subreddit had, though. The last post was months ago.

Thanks, that time frame sounds right.

Man, I loved that magazine. Also a kind of newsletter or mini-magazine called "Algorithm" (or Algorithms). I think that's where I first came across Metaphone, which I implemented in several different languages just for fun. I also tweaked it to take account of the relatively high proportion of Ukrainian names in the region, mostly because my mom was of Ukrainian descent.

Ok, enough reminiscing. I've taken us way off topic! :)

I was subscribed to an actual paper magazine called Dr Dobb's Journal. I think it was there that a language called D was being described as it was being developed. Is this D the continuation of that one? (I suppose it's possible that it was Byte magazine, not DDJ.)

It's been so long since I first read that that I forgot about this section:

Operation activation

Another example that illustrates our strategy is the activation of operations. Programs are not executed in Oberon; instead, individual procedures are exported from modules. If a certain module M exports a procedure P, then P can be called (activated) by merely pointing at the string M.P appearing in any text visible on the display, that is, by moving the cursor to M.P and clicking a mouse but- ton. Such straightforward command activation opens the following possibilities:

1. Frequently used commands are listed in short pieces of text. These are called tool-texts and resemble customized menus, although no special menu software is required. They are typically displayed in small viewers (windows).

2. By extending the system with a simple graphics editor that provides captions based on Oberon texts, commands can be highlighted and otherwise decorated with boxes and shadings. This results in pop-up and/or pull-down menus, buttons, and icons that are “free” because the basic command activation mechanism is reused.

   3. A message received by e-mail can contain commands as well as text. Commands are executed by the recipient’s clicking into the message (without copying into a special command window). We use this feature, for example, when announcing new or updated module releases. The message typically contains receive commands followed by lists of module names to be downloaded from the network. The entire process requires only a few mouse clicks.

Anyone remember the Melissa worm? Or perhaps been negatively affected by clicking a link in an email?

Every convenience comes at a cost. I wonder if he ever revisited that concept with an eye to how similar capabilities became the bane of our existence.