Earlier this month I was exploring Devine’s public wiki, XXIIVV, and I landed on the entry about time. This page contains a mesmerizing clock displaying time as a grid of lines scanning across the screen. Figure 1. Screenshot of Devine's Arvelie-Neralie grid clock. I was unfamiliar with the format of this clock, shown in figure 1 as “18T03...
Post, Repository Clock representing time as a grid of lines sweeping across the screen. Inspired by Devine’s Arvelie-Neralie clock.
We currently find ourselves in something of a series, working our way from private lines to large private line systems like the four-wire private-line national warning system. Let's continue to build on the concept of the private line into large corporate systems. In principle, a large organization in want of a private telephone system could...
Turns out randomizing the MAC address on boot is a bad idea
Earlier today I saw a post from someone who has had their iPhone stop charging at 80% for the past year and they didn’t see much, if any difference in battery health than their coworkers who didn’t do anything, and let the iPhone do its “
I am sure that Post Secret is one of the best things on the internet. I think I’ve been following this project for over 10 years, and I still love it.… Continue reading → The post Post Secret appeared first on Sergey Kaplich.
In the middle of the night, 41 years ago, Stanislav Petrov did absolutely nothing at the most important time to do so. This is an invitation to find an opportunity today to use one of Deming’s favourite exhortations: Don’t just do something; stand there! Sometimes disobeying orders and thinking for oneself is what...
Recently, I published The Monospace Web, a minimalist design exploration. It all started with this innocent post, yearning for a simpler web. Perhaps too typewriter-nostalgic, but it was an interesting starting point. After some hacking and sharing early screenshots, @noteed asked for vertical alignment, and down the rabbit hole I went.
The FIPS compliance of HKDF is a somewhat confusing and controversial topic, partially because the normative reference is split over at least four separate documents, but in practice it’s approved for almost any purpose.
In the software design literature, cohesion is often referred to by a different name: single responsibility. As Sandi Metz explains it: When everything in a class is related to its central purpose, the class is said to be highly cohesive or to have a single responsibility.1 To determine if a method belongs inside a class, Metz suggests posing it...
Rollo May shares a story from Jules Henri Poincaré, writing in his autobiography. In it, Poincaré describes many long days trying to sort out some mathematical question and finding no solution.
I have been tasked with the fascinating and somewhat-overwhelming project of migrating pigweed.dev's build system from GN to Bazel. These are my notes on the project.
Chapter 6 of the Designing Data Intensive Applications (DDIA) book discusses partitioning, a key technique for scaling large datasets and high query throughput in distributed databases. By breaking data into smaller partitions, it can be distributed across multiple nodes in a shared-nothing cluster. This allows the storage and processing load to...
Elecrow responded, apologized for AI voice cloning AI voice cloning is a tool. It can be used, and it can be abused. Your browser does not support the video tag. Last week I was made aware that Elecrow, an electronics manufacturer and distributor, was using an unauthorized clone of my voice in some of their YouTube tutorials. I...
If you’ve spent plenty of time wading through modern JavaScript, odds are you’ve seen enough ellipses (...) to put even the most brooding 90s role-playing game protagonist to shame. I wouldn’t fault you for finding them a little confusing. Granted, I wouldn’t fault you for finding anything about JavaScript confusing, but I’ve always thought those...
Last January I wrote about the Raspberry Pi Camera that I had set-up to take hourly pictures of my garden which I then turned in to a time lapse video. You can read about that and see the resulting videos and code here: One of the things that I said at the time I wanted […]
The man and a woman lead you around a corner into a sort of tunnel that seems to be made by a bunch of plywood flats leaning up against the...
The man and a woman lead you around a corner into a sort of tunnel that seems to be made by a bunch of plywood flats leaning up against the wall. “We have to show you something,” one of them tells you. It’s dark but then you can see light up ahead. It seems warm and inviting. The three of you exit into a hallway that seems like it’s being spruced...
Note: this is a personal opinion piece for my blog. It is not an official statement coming from We Distribute,... The post Something About The SWF Makes Me Feel Icky appeared first on deadsuperhero.
I saw a post on Threads recently that is of a general genre of conversation I see on a regular basis. The first post was:Just going on purely laptop tech reviews you would think 90% of the US population were employed as video editors.Which got the reply:You
A notebook serving itself and an API from fly.io using Jupyter Kernel Gateway notebook-http mode.
Solopreneur by Iron Man Mode This week I was listening to a podcast called The Bootstrapped Founder by Arvid Kahl, creator of PodScan and author of the bestseller Zero to Sold. In the episode titled “The AI-Powered Solopreneur”, he talks about his experience using AI in his daily life as a software entrepreneur, working on various issues. I have...
The members of the Haskell.org Committee (the Committee) and the directors of the Haskell Foundation (the Foundation) are pleased to announce that we have joined forces, with the aim (subject to regulatory approval) of merging Haskell.org, Inc. and Haskell Foundation, Inc. into a single not-for-profit corporation. Together we continue our common...
I knew that mruby existed for a long time. I knew it’s a lightweight version of Ruby, designed mostly to be embedded in other programs. I knew that DragonRuby has some kind of relation to mruby - be it written in it or using some kind of fork of it. But that’s pretty much it. Prompted by a few discussions here and there lately, I decided to take...
Does the fediverse have a vibe? I think that yes, there’s a flave, and with reason: we have things in common. We all left Twitter, or refused to join in the first place. Many of us are technologists or tech-adjacent, but generally not startuppy. There is a pervasive do-it-yourself ethos. This last point often expresses itself as a reaction: if you don’t like it, then do it yourself, a different way. Make your...
Some folks have gotten themselves together as something they’re calling the Social Web Foundation, and I’ll cut to the chase: this is an attempt by ActivityPub partisans to rebrand the...
(Feeling a little sick so this one will be short.) I'm often asked by clients to review their (usually TLA+) formal specifications. These specs are generally slower and more convoluted than an expert would write. I want to fix them up without changing the overall behavior of the spec or introducing subtle bugs. To do this, I use a rather lovely...
Some folks have gotten themselves together as something they’re calling the Social Web Foundation, and I’ll cut to the chase: this is an attempt by ActivityPub partisans to rebrand the confusing “fediverse” terminology, and in the process, regardless of intent, shit on everything else that’s been the social web going back twenty-five years....
Continuing with our HPTS series. This is now the afternoon of second day.The first session was on HTAP and streaming, and the second one on caching. Session 7: HTAP and Streaming Who cares about HTAP? - Tianyu Li (MIT)Tianyu argued that while Hybrid Transactional/Analytical Processing (HTAP) showed great promise in 2014, it has failed to make a...
Time flies when you’re having fun. Before you know it, your little babies have started school, you celebrate the 30th anniversary of Jurassic Park, and that little blog you started have now been going for 15 years. 15 years is a long time; longer than I’ve been waiting for Winds of Winter, and that wait has felt like an eternity. How did I—who...
As I added a /now page to the site I also decided to refresh my /about page and I figured it would be neat to have timeline element where I could list some of the larger events in my life. To my surprise it wasn’t too difficult to create one that looks pretty clean—the flexbox feature in CSS is really good. In this post I’ll walk you through how...
While watching this video about making wine from Monster[1] this morning and thinking about how I want nothing more than to try it, I wondered how this would do as a replacement for the energy drink portion of The Robb Jobb. What is the Robb Jobb? Good question, smart reader. The Robb Jobb is a punch of my own design that I have made on a handful...
Since my last essay touched on writing processes and note-taking, I figured it might be useful for me to outline my current process. Mostly for myself since you can only really track how your process evolves if you actually document your process. It always starts with plain text notes. Sometimes they have markdown formatting. Occasionally they’re...
YouTuber MKBHD has just released a premium wallpaper app which is, apparently, something we’ve ‘all been asking for’. According to the App Store description, you will get access to: “… hundreds of high-quality, full resolution art pieces for your smartphone” By paying the MKBHD team the low, low price of...
Kids get excited about things that are very different from those of adults.You probably remember your kid's first birthday. The members of the extended family all wanted to spoil her. They brought fun gifts. Useful and useless ones. They brought toys recommended by the best parent influencers.They looked at your child with excitement, as she was unwrapping the gifts with you. But she didn't seem to... care? "No, no don't play with the wrapping paper!...
I’ve only just mentioned that I’m pausing the imports but not pausing new posts, but I wanted to note that at this point I’m likely moving off of Pika, although...
This was originally written for Cohost.org I’ve not… really… spent a lot of energy thinking of a “my time on Cohost” retrospective post like some folks have done (which have all been a pleasure to read!) because I’m not sure I really can. I think it’s easy to pick apart the stuff that’s individually made Cohost such a wonderful place to exist on,...
If you've ever wondered why your carefully planned software architecture ends up looking suspiciously like your org chart, you're not alone. Welcome to the world of Conway's Law.
How Cloudflare's new AI management tools could revolutionize content creation, potentially reshaping the internet landscape for both website owners and AI companies.
In these two most excellent articles, https://without.boats/blog/let-futures-be-futures and https://without.boats/blog/futures-unordered, withoutboats introduces the concepts of multi-task and intra-task concurrency. I want to revisit this distinction --- while I agree that there are different classes of patterns of concurrency here, I am not...
I just had the pleasure (cough) to connect an MSSQL database to a Laravel application at work. Because the process was super tedious, I wanted to quickly jot this down so I will never have to go through this again. Our setup We're building a Laravel application with DDEV. DDEV essentially moves all development tools into Docker containers and...
Bluesky recently saw a massive spike in activity in response to Brazil’s ban of Twitter. As a result, the AT Proto event firehose provided by Bluesky’s Relay at bsky.network has increased in volume by a huge amount. The average event rate during this surge increased by ~1,300%. Before this new surge in activity, the firehose would produce around...
Our first child was born mere weeks before covid-19 came to our part of the world. As a result, they were effectively locked down for the first 1.5 years of their life until they started going to daycare. This had the effect that for those 1.5 years, they were not sick a single time. At some point they turned three, and in total, had been sick 22 times until then11 With an average duration of 4.4 days, meaning us...
The above screenshot is from my computer. There are 16 apps that have screen recording permissions, and each one of them not only needs that permission, I intentionally gave them that permission when I installed them. I've been carrying along with my life, happy with how these apps
I was recently asked to help resolve an escalation at work. It had already bounced around between a few people, and was very muddied with conflicting reports not to mention frustration that the issue existed in the first place. Apparently I am insane, because I like situations like this.
It’s been a harrowing couple of weeks. *Record Scratch* *Freeze Frame* Yep, that's me. Let me tell you... My return to work (such as it is) has had far too many ups and downs for me to enjoy (or even go into any real details), and although I probably shouldn’t really be as stressed as I am, the overall feeling is accurately depicted...
I’ve always loved Dieter Rams’ work and have been considering printing Scott Yu-Jan’s design for a couple of weeks now, but this is so much better–less bulky, more streamlined, more functional, and (a nice bonus for me) provides a nice little tray for me to put my glasses in during the night. The only question right now is what color to print it...
Hey-hey I’m currently looking for my next opportunity as a web developer / frontend engineer. I have 2 years of experience as a web developer at a fintech startup, combined with 7 years in marketing across startups and larger companies.… Continue reading → The post I am looking for a job as a frontend developer appeared first on Sergey Kaplich.
Art more like… no I got nothing. Long-time readers likely know that I have had a not so secret desire for a long time to draw my own comic. I have a few ideas for things like plot, visuals and...
I’ve only just mentioned that I’m pausing the imports but not pausing new posts, but I wanted to note that at this point I’m likely moving off of Pika, although I’ve no idea when or how that will happen. The circumstances very much are of an “it’s not them, it’s me” variety. What pulled me to Pika to begin with is its simplicity and the fact that...
There's a joke in my friend circle that asks "is it a database?" A startup, a program, a syscall, a person good with numbers, a person with a good memory. It's all very "is it a sandwich.” But it’s kind of true that it’s weird you can look at RocksDB and Snowflake and say “these are the same class of thing,” because they have very little...
There's a joke in my friend circle that asks "is it a database?" A startup, a program, a syscall, a person good with numbers, a person with a good memory. It's all very "is it a sandwich.” But it’s kind of true that it’s weird you can look at RocksDB and Snowflake and say “these are the same class of thing,” because they have very little...