Fully endorse this rant on USB-C. https://blog.doismellburning.co.uk/usb-c-a-rant/

I don’t know how more people aren’t running into the issues that I encounter with power negotiation in particular.

Dang, this is so true.

RE: https://circumstances.run/@hipsterelectron/112622973211647891

Bring Back the Corporate Death Penalty: https://neuburger.substack.com/p/bring-back-the-corporate-death-penalty

Charity Majors writes a lot of bangers, but I especially liked this one a lot on engineering experience and generative AI: https://stackoverflow.blog/2024/06/10/generative-ai-is-not-going-to-build-your-engineering-team-for-you/

Surprised a few of my coworkers last week when they found out I was 40 (from being grandmasters-eligible).

Perplexity AI Is Lying about Their User Agent https://rknight.me/blog/perplexity-ai-is-lying-about-its-user-agent/

Shocking absolutely no one an AI company, Perplexity AI, isn't sending the correct user agent string they say they will and they completely ignore robots.txt

When it comes to the efficiency-thoroughness trade off, we reward efficiency (ability to execute) and punish absence of thoroughness (post-incident: why didn’t you do more testing?) without explicitly acknowledging that the trade-off exists.

Have you ever had an experience like, you're walking down the street, there's a piece of litter, and you kind of like, kick it by accident, your foot grazes it, and suddenly you feel a compulsion to pick it up and put it in a trash can? This is litter, it wasn't your problem, but then you accidentally touched it and it Became your problem, somehow the act of touching it tagged it as "yours" and now the superego says you're obligated to deal with it?

That's what open source contribution is like

Turns out that Pentagon ran secret anti-vax campaign to undermine China during pandemic.

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-covid-propaganda/

git add -p

(this is #bonuscomic #4 for "How Git Works" https://wizardzines.com/zines/git, covering some topics that I didn't have space for in the zine)

https://wizardzines.com/comics/git-add-p/

Just imagine what the reaction would be if Copilot was named Clippy. I can't imagine a world where it would be seen as negatively as it is now.

Just imagine the clippy key. That would be 🔥

I've now worked in/on 3 "systems languages" (C++, Rust, Swift) that try to "move everything to the libraries" in a fairly thorough way, such that they try to express the language's containers and "smart pointers" in libraries also, not as "part of the language".

But then they also of course want to support all the usual "language-level" optimizations, special cases, idioms and integrations (auto ref/deref, pattern match/destructure, bit-stealing, refcount/CoW, copy/clone/modify/unwind/drop lifecycles, uninit/definite init, move in/out, pinning, type-directed overloading, etc. etc.) and invariably the resulting abstractions exposed to users are utterly mysterious, covered in sharp edges, only work correctly in specific combinations, can't be abstracted-over, and/or bottom out in different but equally-opaque compiler hooks as the original pointer and container types.

I think it would be a useful service to humanity if some PL student or researcher out there did a survey / SoK of this design-space, especially also relating it to the IRs or abstract machines underlying the languages. It's an absolute minefield for anyone doing a new PL and as far as I know everyone is quite dissatisfied with all the results so far.

modern programming is like,

"if you're using bongo.rs to parse http headers, you will need to also install bepis to get buffered read support. but please note that bepis switched to using sasquatch for parallel tokenization as of version 0.0.67, so you will need the bongo-sasquatch extension crate as well."

old-time programming is like,

"i made a typo in this function in 1993. theo de raadt got so angry he punched a wall when he saw it. for ABI compatibility reasons, we shan't fix the typo."

A brief history of Google Pay (which was just shut down on June 4th):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39474629

git worktree

(this is #bonuscomic #3 for "How Git Works" https://wizardzines.com/zines/git, covering some topics that I didn't talk about in the zine)

Also I don't use worktrees much, so please reply with gotchas/tips about worktrees if you use them more!

https://wizardzines.com/comics/git-worktree/

Most team culture comes out of a combination of what is tolerated and what is rewarded. If you legit want your culture to improve, change what you reward and rethink what you will tolerate.

I want to talk about what's really happening with chain retail stores, because there seems to be a lot of confusion about it in this world. It's easier for me to think in concrete terms, so imagine an Autozone in Los Angeles. First of all, the land it sits on is owned by someone else, who charges rent to the corporation but has no other role in the process. These charges are reflected in the prices of their products, which means that when you shop there you're paying a commercial real estate owner for nothing more than owning the land the store sits on.

#Capitalism #Anarchism #CorporateRetail #Autozone #Looting #InDefenseOfLooting #LosAngeles

1/8

Who would have ever guessed that this was the solution to unhappy workers?

I last updated my LinkedIn in 2014 and it continues to pay dividends.