TomNomNom

The difference is that despite the fact that I will never use this, I am nonetheless here to celebrate the effort. What difference does it make if someone runs a marathon or takes an uber given they may arrive at the same location?

Cool tool! Really appreciate the shoutout to gron in the readme, thanks! :)

I tried the oracle and got this:

> Your accent is Dutch, my friend. I identified your accent based on subtle details in your pronunciation. Want to sound like a native English speaker?

I'm British; from Yorkshire.

When letting it know how it got it wrong there's no option more specific than "English - United Kingdom". That's kind of funny, if not absurd, to anyone who knows anything of the incredible range of accents across the UK.

I also think the question "Do you have an accent when speaking English?" is an odd one. Everyone has an accent when speaking any language.

Not directly relevant to the post, but seems like a good place to share.

My team and I once took on a very tricky automation project. At the time we had a complex software deployment done about once per month that involved a team of about a dozen people showing up at 4am to do it while traffic was low.

The deployment involved many manual steps and coordination of everybody involved. The person leading each deployment followed the documented list of steps and got each person to do their bit at the right time; people to run database migrations, people to install RPMs on particular servers, people to test and verify functionality. Mistakes and missed steps were not uncommon.

The very first thing we did was take the documentation and write a Jenkins job to post each step into a Slack channel specifically for coordinating the deployments. Someone clicked "go" and each step was posted as a message in that channel with a 'done' button to be clicked when that step was done. Clicking the button caused the next step to be posted.

The next release we did used that instead of one person reading the steps out of confluence. Everyone involved in the release could always see what step we were at, and when it was their turn to do their bit. This helped ensure no steps were ever missed too.

Over the following months we chipped away at that job a bit at a time. We'd pick a step in the process and automate just that step, starting with the low-hanging fruit first. The Slack message for that step went from "click to confirm you've done it" to "click to do it", with the result posted once it was done; followed by the next step to perform.

It was a long process, but it allowed the rest of the business (and us!) to gradually gain confidence in the automation, and lowered the risk of the project dramatically. Once several steps had been automated and battle-tested we removed the 'click to do' bits in between and the whole release became a couple of clicks followed by the odd bit of manual QA.

A ~20 minute video on a particular number cropping up all over the place and not one mention of the frequency illusion / Baader–Meinhof phenomenon feels at least a little bit disingenuous.

I don't doubt that it crops up a lot when people are asked for a random number between 1 and 100 (especially if, as per the video, you ignore 1, 2, 7, 42, 69, 73, and 77, and sometimes 99 and 100), but it's pretty disappointing for a big channel based around science like Veritasium to not even mention that if you became obsessed with and went hunting for special properties of a different number between 1 and 100 you'd almost certainly find them.

A bug in the spec doesn't necessarily mean there will be a noticeable bug in the browsers; e.g. a crash.

The browsers may have been written to "work" / not crash over adhering strictly to the spec.

Super, thank you! I look forward to it :)

I've worked on similar problems recently so I'm well aware of how difficult this is. An example I've given people is in automatically detecting base64-encoded data. It seems easy at first, but any four, eight, or twelve (etc) letter word is technically valid base64, so you need to decide if and how those things should be excluded.

It provided the wrong file-types for some files, so I cannot rely on its output to be correct.

If you wanted to, for example, use this tool to route different files to different format-specific handlers it would sometimes send files to the wrong handlers.

This looks cool. I ran this on some web crawl data I have locally, so: all files you'd find on regular websites; HTML, CSS, JavaScript, fonts etc.

It identified some simple HTML files (html, head, title, body, p tags and not much else) as "MS Visual Basic source (VBA)", "ASP source (code)", and "Generic text document" where the `file` utility correctly identified all such examples as "HTML document text".

Some woff and woff2 files it identified as "TrueType Font Data", others are "Unknown binary data (unknown)" with low confidence guesses ranging from FLAC audio to ISO 9660. Again, the `file` utility correctly identifies these files as "Web Open Font Format".

I like the idea, but the current implementation can't be relied on IMO; especially not for automation.

A minor pet peeve also: it doesn't seem to detect when its output is a pipe and strip the shell colour escapes resulting in `^[[1;37` and `^[[0;39m` wrapping every line if you pipe the output into a vim buffer or similar.

Thanks for the shout-out :)

I like the idea! I'll see if I get a chance to play around with it at work next week.