brainbag

I've been using Choosy.app for easily managing different browsers for work and personal (and testing), and it works great. You set it to your default browser, and then anytime something opens a browser it pops up a picker. Lots of global and per-site configuration options like browser profile selection, private windows, etc.

Would you say more about your experience writing it in Rust? It worked well, what didn't, anywhere you found that you struggled unexpectedly or that was easier than you expected?

Even in the flood of terrible news about privacy and other things, this exposé stands out as especially disturbing. I was considering getting a new electric car to replace my combustion, but now I'm going to stretch it for as long as I can instead.

pry is what I miss most when using other languages. I've used all kinds of debuggers all kinds of hardware with many different languages, and pry is by far the best tool for development and debugging. People talk about the REPL in Lisp for good reason, but pry takes that concept to infinity and beyond. When I think about the future of AI assisted programming, it's something much more like the pry interactive development loop than a code editor's suggestions.

You do a great job explaining these concepts, better than most. I have appreciated all of your replies in this post. Do you have a blog or podcast or teach somewhere? I would tune in.

I like this take. I'd be interested to hear more what you gained from studying them. What ways do you model your companies after Valve and Wolfram?

Has anyone found or made a great set of tutorials for "Affinity for Photoshop Experts"? I've been using Photoshop for more than 30 years (now Photopea), and I don't think I've ever felt more like an alien than the two times I've tried in earnest to learn Affinity tools. A six month trial could be generous enough for me assimilate.

Thanks for this link. Firefox has been getting worse for me stability-wise on my Mac M1, even with tab discarding it consumes huge amounts of power, and at least two or three times a day it will just stop loading webpages and show errors in the network tab and need to be restarted. I spend a couple of hours every few weeks trying to track down the issues and Firefox and even in the bug tracker can't find answers.

I also have a bizarre problem where any Chromium-based browser (Chrome, Brave, Edge) are extremely slow to load any page since upgrading to Sonoma, where Firefox or Safari are near-instant - like taking 60 seconds to even start DNS lookup. After a couple of minutes it will eventually fully load a page. I've seen other people mention the same issue online, but no fixes. I have spent hours trying to debug and track down problems for that too.

It's discouraging how much it feels like every software tool I use on every device has gone to shit, especially things as fundamental as a web browser.

That's what I was expecting too. I was excited to see some kind of topographic map, or an open web map with pins for particularly good skating areas, etc. Could be a cool project.

Do you have any recommended resources on those topics? I'm coming from a strong ~30 year software engineering background which has been excellent, until now, as ML requires a completely different background. I'm trying to decide if I should start a new game+ with academic background, or get some expansion packs with what I already know and move into ML that way. I've found plenty of resources for the former and practically nothing for the latter.

I remember a sci-fi book where they were talking about one of the characters hacking on thousand-year-old code, but I could never remember what book it was from. Maybe this was it and it's time for a reread.

I am a longtime developer but I'm passionate about design and UX. I'm always on the lookout for materials that I can give my team and other developers to help them get better at design. It's not a course, but "The Non-Designer's Design Book" (ISBN 978-0133966152, Robin Williams) is the best material for design fundamentals I've found. It's very approachable for anyone and it's broadly applicable across all kinds of design. Everyone I have convinced to read it has loved it, and I've seen an improvement in output and understanding. I highly recommend this if you have an interest in design.

Refactoring UI is also valuable and can be impactful, though it's heavily web focused and is more like a Web Component Design Cookbook rather than foundational knowledge.