catskull
Joined 12 years ago
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Member since
Sep 2
catskull.net
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Comment · 24 days ago
She did! A few years ago I actually tracked down the source of that, which was an interview done for an obscure textbook and republished it on my blog if you are interested in learning more: https://catskull.net/interview-with-margaret-h-hamilton.html
Comment · 26 days ago
I think I basically agree. Kind of two steps forward, one step back. Also random one off personal projects has been fun. Feels like I can get more to show for the same small time investment.
But like, why aren't the major tech companies shipping incredible stuff? I assume Apple has always been several orders of magnitude better at software than I as an individual can be, but yet I don't see much if any improvement to what they're able to ship. Not to single Apple out here, it's just that I use their software more than any of the other FAANGs.
Comment · 26 days ago
Author here! I'd love to hear your thoughts about software quality in general and how you think LLM tools have impacted it either positively or negatively.
Comment · 2 months ago
Thanks for checking it out!
Comment · 2 months ago
I once heard a story about an old Logitech webcam driver in windows. Once it was installed, it would always scan for the webcam and if it wasn’t detected it would write to an error log. So if you set up the webcam once and then got rid of it without uninstalling the driver it would always dump logs upon logs. Eventually a user had their entire disk space filled and when they dug into it they found a single tens or hundreds of GB log file. Uninstalling the driver fixed it.
Comment · 6 months ago
I like https://dnscheck.tools/ for this.
Comment · 7 months ago
Plug for feeeed: https://feeeed.nateparrott.com
It’s my primary hn reader now.
Comment · 8 months ago
So glad they finally mainlined apk. opkg is so janky.
Comment · 8 months ago
Microsoft dumped $100 million on this huge marketing campaign with a simple question:
“Where do you want to go today?”
I love it. It really captures the seemingly endless new digital world that was emerging in the 90’s and in many ways is still evolving 30 years later.
I love the promo video they made too: https://youtu.be/KNLDLVJZx0o
I love it so much I wrote a blog post inspired by it: https://catskull.net/where-do-you-want-to-go-today.html
Where do you want to go today?
Comment · 8 months ago
I've written quite a few web components that were more or less standalone. I've looked at lit quite a bit but never fully understood the "why". Could someone share their own personal experience with why they needed lit? What does it offer that can't be done with standard spec web components?
For me, a big draw of web components is that there's no `npm install` needed. I prefer to ship my components as plain JS files that can either be hot linked from a CDN or downloaded and served locally. Call me paranoid but I just don't fully trust node modules to be clean of bloat and spyware and I just don't want to have to regularly deal with updating them. I'd prefer to download a web component's static JS file a single time, read through it, and forget it. Maybe down the line I might revisit the source for the component as part of standard maintenance.
For example, I made a simple like button component[1]. Later, my friend made a cool component for showing a burst of emoji confetti[2]. I decided to optionally pull it in if an attribute was set on the like component. I downloaded his source and hosted from my own domain. However, there was actually a bug in his code that caused the confetti to "rain" if you spammed the like button a few times quickly. He fixed that, but I actually kind of liked it so I just didn't update the source for the confetti component.
[1]: https://catskull.net/likes [2]: https://github.com/samwarnick/confetti-drop
Comment · 8 months ago
Whenever I have an Apple platform issue, I simply write up a detailed complaint and then send it via iMessage to one of my friends. I know that it's all supposedly e2ee but I swear it's a lot more constructive than firing it into Apple's feedback black hole. So far, it's worked pretty well.
On macOS (26.2), if you have a game controller that has been connected over bluetooth but is not currently connected, if you go into the bluetooth device list in System Settings then click the circled "i" icon, it opens an information modal. This modal incorrectly lists the device type (my controller right now says it's AirPods 4). It also has a button for "Game Controller Settings...". If you click this button, it opens Find My. If the controller is connected, it opens the "Game Controllers" pane where you can adjust the settings. I'm not sure if this is just my specific controller (Nintendo Switch N64 Controller), but it seems like a pretty obvious bug. And while you're at it, why don't you just go ahead and roll back the entire System Preferences app UI to what it used to be?