downsplat

Does anyone know which IRC group this descends from, if any? Back when IRC was the thing it was split into rival networks, there was EFnet and IRCNet - I still remember when they split from each other, rather acrimoniously, over questions of governance and network protocol. And then there were the alternative networks, Undernet and DALnet and possibly a few more.

I was involved in server-to-server protocol design for a while, and each network had very specific ideas of how they wanted it. IIRC Undernet pioneered the use of timestamps to keep track of channel membership priority, EFnet came up with a v2 twist on the same idea, while IRCNet rejected the approach in favor of some kind of limited server-side persistence. Heady times!

Saml serializing to XML is not a problem at all, the problem is then including the signature within the XML, which Saml idiotically does. They could just as well have appended it to the xml with a separator. There's nothing about that that couldn't have been understood in 1995 or so.

If you want to own your computer, linux is where it's at. Windows is rusty iron chains and MacOS's are gold-plated silver pretending to be gold, but they're still chains.

So what does this one offer on top? All they're saying is "here's our FTS offering".

I suppose it all depends on the scale of your project, but I've had pretty good luck using both MySQL's and SQLite's FTS capabilities. Surprised to hear that Open Source champion Postgres didn't have up-to-snuff FTS up to now...?

How often do you reboot your laptop anyway? It takes a couple seconds to type in a well-rehearsed passphrase.

When I reboot mine it's actually three passwords that I need to put in: disk encryption, linux login, and firefox master key.

The point is not about what it means exactly to "own" something, you'll get plenty of noise discussion around that one.

But if I care about some piece of digital art enough to pay for it, I sure want a non-DRM copy to sit on my hd at the end of the transaction. If the store won't supply, the pirate sites will.

Redis is a great piece of tech but it suffers from trying to be good at two different jobs (persistent data structures, volatile cache) which should not be combined. And indeed in Redis itself they don't combine well - persistence is globally on or off.

Personally I'd use memcached or some equivalent for strictly cacheing, and then bring on Redis with persistence if you need its data structures for e.g scoreboards.

At $WORK we never imported either, our cache layer for slow operations keeps its data in both the filesystem and a db table (used as a k/v store). The database helps coordinate thundering herd problems - this operation is being calculated by another thread, so just wait for it. Reads from the same server just hit the filesystem, and reads from another server hit the db once and then keep it in the filesystem. We could change the fs layer to memcached but so far it's working great.

Search around, there's surely a way to break the drm. When theres no better way that's what I do too: pay for the book, convert to plain epub.

The publishing industry never got its head out of... some dark place. We've been able to buy mp3s without drm for ages, but somehow books are different.

Yep, if you haven't lost the will to put a bit of curation work upfront, RSS never stopped being the right answer. Substack has been a pretty good addition to the landscape, bringing lots of people into blogging (without calling it that). But for the skimming/reading interface, RSS beats the app.

I've been using Claude to work on a medium-sized (100+kLoc) codebase, and it's a great productivity multiplier. Putting hours into creating a good AGENTS file is more improved results a lot. I find that over time it picks up the codebase quite well. Tedious tasks that would take a day are now a matter of a few prompts.

Still... I'm not ready to give it more autonomy. Even as it gets high-level things quite well, I still look at the code, give feedback, and have 3-4 rounds of tweaks until I'm happy with it, and also happy that I stil feel I have a good handle on the codebase.

I basically skipped React. I went from jquery to Vue3, and use even that sparingly. When React got really popular, I read the docs and played with it, but I prefer the Vue model where the component runs once and sets up its reactive tree. Why would you want to recreate the component's inner functions every time it renders? And manually declare dependencies, when every other framework is doing them automatically?

My favourite front-end architecture is MPA actually mostly server-rendered, with Vue only on the pages that need high interactivity, and vanilla JS on the others.

If postgres is too heavyweight for you but you still want client-server, I'd consider MySql. It's an old classic, pretty fast and scalable, and has much better mainstream support and a bigger ecosystem than Firebird.

I'm not really sure what Firebird is for at this point in life really. It was pretty exciting when it was open sourced in the early 2000s, before postgres became the mature beast it is, before mysql acquired something as basic as transactions, and before sqlite became the default embedded db. But then it never really went anywhere.

Well-researched article on the relative safety of acetaminophen and ibuprofen.