TIL I can just view markdown in okular directly instead of using a script that converts markdown to html, then converts html to pdf, then opens that pdf in okular.
I derailed after this sentence. I searched for more uses of "rats" in the article, then looked in the HN comments to see if it was a bit of jargon that I was unaware of. I read "Lessons from the art of juggling" years ago, but despite the primer, I couldn't get past the unanswerable question of whether I was, in fact, a "rat".
so far, I've used it to kill a bunch of time trying to get it to respond to "Hi @Kirk" in a private Slack channel.
...and to laugh a little every time it calls me "commander" or asks "What's the next mission?" or (and this is the best one) it uses the catchphrase I gave it which is "it's probably fine" (and it uses it entirely appropriately...I think there must have been a lot of sarcasm in qwen 3.5's training data)
and I've treated it like it's already been compromised the whole time.
It would make sense that the holes were a convenient way of thinking and speaking about large quantities of goods such that tribes of people might want to exchange. It would be a very visual way of comparing dissimilar goods, like "1 hole has 50 alpaca skins and I need 200 for the shelter I'm planning to build, so I need 4" and "1 hole has 8 baskets of dried fish which can last 3 families thru the winter, so I need 3 for the nine families on the farm", etc.
And I bet they paid a bit of rent for the privilege. Pretty cool.
This all makes a lot of sense. It is worth pointing out that AI isn't terrible at cleaning up tech debt. I've absolutely used it cleanup code sprawl and to correct design missteps. It gets a lot of well-deserved blame for generating way too much code that's a lot more complicated than it needs to be, but probably not enough credit for making a lot of the cleanup effort around that sort of code a lot more tractable.
I've been using the "Zim desktop wiki" like this for years. I do recommend it as well...super handy to be able to go looking for my thoughts or snippets from 6 months ago. I can also use git to sync between my desktop and laptop because it's all text.
In a very real way, a codebase is a conversation among developers. There's every chance the next guy will be less familiar with the code than you, who just did a deep dive and arrived at some critical, poorly documented line of code. There's an even better chance that person will be you, 6 months from now.
as a nearly perfectly uninformed occasional consumer of space-related articles, I can say it makes a lot of sense (to me) why we'd use something like that to move things around the solar system.
To all the commenters who asked if it's worth it? IMO it's super worth it if you have more than one wifi access point and it gets more and more worth it as your network gets more complicated.
I upgraded to homogenous ubiquiti/unifi when I set up a point to multi-point on my farm because I thought it would make that part easier. Surprisingly, those links aren't really baked in to the rest of it, but the router and wifi antennas that I've installed around those links "just work" with a private, protected, and guest network.
I used to have to update two different routers with the same SSID, username and password to make "hopping" from one to the next "seamless" and, now that I've got 8 wifi antennas in a mesh with a single UI to configure them all, I can't even imagine how I'd do it with the hodge-podge of gear I used to work with.
And I'm probably going to buy a travel router, but I'm wondering, if I use it connect to the hotel wifi, will I be able to use the thing as a wifi hotspot as well or do I have to use an ethernet point because the wifi is "taken"?
Same. I once registered bithole.com because I wanted a better email address then what I had at yahoo.com...and I realized my mistake as I was typing it on my resume. This feels like a similar mistake.
I agree with some of the article. I agree that code is a liability that's distinct from the asset that the code is part of. It's like tires on a car, they're liability-like whereas the car can be thought of as an asset.
But AI can do some architecting. It's just not really the sort of thing where an unskilled person with a highly proficient LLM is going to be producing a distributed system that does anything useful.
It seems to me that the net effect of AI will be to increase the output of developers without increasing the cost per developer. Effectively, this will make software development cheaper. I suppose it's possible that there is some sort of peak demand for software that will require less developers over time to meet, but, generally, when something becomes cheaper, the demand for that thing will tend to increase.
I have to admit, I'm not up to speed on anything he's been up to lately, but I absolutely read and enjoyed Dilbert way back when. I'm sorry to hear he's not long for the world.
Every time I see someone kitted out in VR gear, I think about his prediction that the Star Trek holodeck will be humanity's last invention and I'm very glad they don't have a button that can beam the next person waiting for their turn into a concrete wall.
I'm actually super-interested to see the next post.
TBH, if you would've asked me yesterday if I'm the sort of person who might get sucked in by a cliffhanger story about a numpy replacement, I'm pretty sure I would've been an emphatic no.
But I have, in fact, just tried random things in numpy until something worked...so, you know...tell me more...
I love this line in the post: "The next time you use something that works so well you barely notice it, remember that somewhere, a designer solved a problem so thoroughly that both the problem and its solution became invisible."
There a things that I immediately replace when they break or get lost: bolt cutters, dremel, leatherman. There's software like IDEs, Zim, Inkscape.
It's very much like losing a limb when any of it is unavailable and it's absolutely true that there are folks out there who did their job so well as to make them indispensable.
That's a long read, but it is an awkward thing tbh.
My take on it is that, if you're going to write a decorator, make sure you test it thoroughly and be sure to cover the ways that it will actually be used.
To properly handle a decorator that needed to be called both with and without arguments, I ended up writing a function decorator that returned a wrapped function when there were no parameters provided for the decorator (*args param to the decorator function undefined) and, otherwise, returned an instance of a class that defined __call__ and __init__ methods.
I'm still a bit surprised that I had to do it that way, but that's how it shook out.
I use solaar with a mx master 3s and it's great (thumbscrolling works as it should) except the mouse battery level indicator is uncalibrated...20% at the highest, then it's quickly at 5% where it stays for-e-ver.
I gas-up my car when my tank is below 1/4, so it's a little disconcerting to have a red battery indicator with an exclamation point on it...not enough to actually want to use it with the cable plugged in, but still...