Tuesday, November 29, 2022

Protect me from what I want




With the advent of the Fediverse generally and Mastodon specifically, for the first time we have a large-scale opportunity to experiment with algorithms who are written for people by people just because they're cool, or because they produce feeds that the programmer likes for herself, or that her Dad likes, or that she notices causes her kids to be less obsessive about screen time.

So let's stop saying "No algorithms!" because that's just wrong, and figure out how to get nice algorithms built, ones that primarily are there to serve humanity's best interests.

Sunday, November 27, 2022

Cryptboard.io – Anonymous encrypted web clipboard and chat



Why would I need it?

  • To copy and paste text/files between Host and Virtual machine where clipboard not supported
  • To copy and paste text/files into Remote Desktop, such as VMWare Horizon, RDP, and others where clipboard doesn't work or disabled
  • To send valuable data such as passwords or some security keys and tokens without danger of it being intercepted
  • To exchange information in a hostile environment where the server could be evil and yet not giving it a chance to decrypt messages
  • Doing all this stuff without the need for registration

Thursday, November 24, 2022

The Art of Command Line




Fluency on the command line is a skill often neglected or considered arcane, but it improves your flexibility and productivity as an engineer in both obvious and subtle ways. This is a selection of notes and tips on using the command-line that we've found useful when working on Linux. Some tips are elementary, and some are fairly specific, sophisticated, or obscure. This page is not long, but if you can use and recall all the items here, you know a lot.

Wednesday, November 23, 2022

Bullshit Software Projects


https://earthly.dev/blog/bullshit-software-projects/

Bullshit Jobs: A Theory is a 2018 book by David Graeber investigating the strange phenomenon of pointless jobs. Graeber's book even features interviews with some software developers. Once I started reading it, I felt compelled to test out his theory of BS jobs by asking around1: Did any software developers I knew, or on Lobsters, or Hacker News, have bullshit jobs?

And sure enough, it didn't take me long to hear from people who found their jobs to be pointless, and for the majority of them, it wasn't a specific task, like mopping an already mopped floor, that was useless but an entire software development project. The world is apparently rife with pointless programming projects.

UV Devices Could Keep Indoor Air Free of Viruses


https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-03360-w

Far UV is an emerging form of germicidal UV (GUV) irradiation, a well-established disinfection technology and growing resource in the battle against the virus SARS-CoV-2 and other pathogens that can spread easily through the air in enclosed spaces.

How not to think about cells

https://www.subanima.org/veritasium/

Monday, November 21, 2022

Computer Latency: 1977-2017


https://danluu.com/input-lag/


Almost every computer and mobile device that people buy today is slower than common models of computers from the 70s and 80s. Low-latency gaming desktops and the ipad pro can get into the same range as quick machines from thirty to forty years ago, but most off-the-shelf devices aren't even close.

If we had to pick one root cause of latency bloat, we might say that it's because of "complexity".


Saturday, November 19, 2022

The Mythical Man-Month - Wikipedia


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month

The Mythical Man-Month 
Mythical man-month (book cover).jpg
First edition
AuthorFred Brooks
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
SubjectSoftware project management
PublisherAddison-Wesley
Publication date
1975
ISBN978-0-201-00650-6 (1975 ed.), 978-0-201-83595-3 (1995 ed.)
001.6/425
LC ClassQA76.6 .B75

The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering is a book on software engineering and project management by Fred Brooks first published in 1975, with subsequent editions in 1982 and 1995. Its central theme is that adding manpower to software project that is behind schedule delays it even longer. This idea is known as Brooks's law, and is presented along with the second-system effect and advocacy of prototyping.

Thursday, November 17, 2022

Entropy of Big Distributed Systems


https://mjtsai.com/blog/2022/11/16/entropy-of-big-distributed-systems/


Joshua Koudys:

Leave something poorly architected, and it can give you a hundred easy-to-fix issues a month. You fix those, you have great velocity, everyone celebrates the 10x engineer. Fix the fundamental problem, you get 1 ticket closed, they fire the low-velocity engineer.


Thursday, November 10, 2022

The Email Caste's Last Stand


https://compactmag.com/article/the-email-caste-s-last-stand


Now that times are turning bad, tech companies can no longer afford to sustain a massive "court" of professional-class nobility, paying sinecures to sons and daughters of the good and the great who don't know how to code or crunch numbers, but know how to write emails, hold useless meetings, and talk about diversity and inclusion.

Saturday, November 05, 2022

Thursday, November 03, 2022

I Wish I Discovered RSS Sooner...

> https://stacker.news/items/88706


Er staan wat handige tips over hoe je RSS feeds voor Medium en YouTube kunt gebruiken in de commentaren hier.

Tuesday, November 01, 2022

Free PDF, Video, Image & Other Online Tools - TinyWow


This site has free tools for pretty much anything you need to do online. tinywow.com

https://tinywow.com/


Open Source Alternatives to Proprietary Software

https://www.opensourcealternative.to/