gorgoiler

I don’t really like the keep-a-changelog idea. Most changelogs get rewritten on release anyway so the main branch’s changelog becomes its own meta-branch of half-baked language that only reaches production state when the release is finalized. Something about that doesn’t sit well with a codebase where everything else has to be production ready all of the time. Where else do you accumulate temporary code/code-like features that need editing and annealing before the code is production ready?

If you have a part of your codebase that’s constantly suffering from merge conflicts then for me that’s a sign that something more fundamental isn’t working. Throwing more code at the problem feels like a hack.

Would you block a change that looked good but had the wrong language for the release notes that was rejected by the person responsible for the release? If one person writes the code and another person releases it, shouldn’t these be two commits anyway?

Perhaps your changelog is for internal use to explain why the codebase changed and when? Why is that not documented in your commit history and instead kept in a mutable part of the codebase?

If you kept each log entry in a file (do people do changelog.d and treat release notes as a compilation step?) then new log entries never conflict and a commit that edits an existing log entry will correctly flag as a conflict with anyone else who made an edit. No tool needed.

I think though, in all honesty, these kinds of ideas are hard to land well. I’m wary of dogmatic advice that — by definition as being a do-this-thing.com — is broadcast-only with a lack of any local context.

(To the author, given that this appears to be a Show HN: although I don’t think this stands up as a general purpose tool, it’s a nice solution and a good example for what a automated merge tool can look like.)

Gaming used to be done in arcades for 25c a play*.

Over time NeoGeo realized they could sell you the hardware to play at home (“on-prem”) at arcade quality albeit at a price out of reach to most people. Alongside them, Nintendo and Atari gave you 80% of the fun at 20% of the cost. History will view games arcades as a flash in the pan compared to gaming at home.

Namco, Capcom, and Konami went into selling software instead of hardware but it feels hard to imagine buying a home copy of Fable** for $X,000 any time soon.

⸻

* That’s for video games. In fairground arcades you’d literally pay for tokens then use tokens for play. The analogy almost writes itself.

** The model, not the video game.

It’s a nice argument but there’s another axis: fatigue. Leading takes its toll. To be charitable it’s not plausible that you can run a country, with all the stress that entails, and out compete everyone not at the apex of the front line.

I check my brake pads every year. Eventually the incumbent pads lose out to some whipper-snapper from the new pads box. I might vote red again or I might switch to blue. It depends how muddy it is. Either way, it’s both a new/old choice as well as a red/blue choice.

Time-in-office is also a major contributor to corruption. Lukashenko has been winning the same election for 30+ years!

It’s a tough position to fight for: “Lula only won because too many people voted for him!”.

I think you are equivocating. Denying people their vote indeed counts as election tampering but that doesn’t mean giving more people the vote is also bad.

It’s lways worth considering the impact of AI through two lenses.

Is it a magic external power amplifier controlled by a handful of powerful companies? Like giant social networks for example, where the most successful network wins due to literal network effects coupled with the ability (capital, income) to pay for the technology and staff to run it. Or Big Oil who needs capital to exploit an oil field and ongoing money to pay their expert staff to work for them. Or Big Pharma, or Big Ag.

The alternate lens is that AI is like a dictionary or medicine reference or some other keystone textbook. Very expensive and time consuming to compile, but after that it requires little to no cost to duplicate and every copy helps a new person be better.

Unfortunately for the trillion dollar “labs”, I can’t see how AI is going to be the next Standard Oil, Meta, Pfizer, or John Deere. Unless the labs can somehow capture the market, destroy or outlaw the competition, or in some way cripple the general public’s ability to run their own models, then they are doomed to failure.

In the long run, Standard Oil will lose out to me hanging a solar panel off my balcony. Facebook is losing out to self organised networks using commodity chat apps (ahem, owned by whom? -all). The Labs will lose out to ollama.cpp running on my own hardware.

Now, one thing The Labs could do of course to defend against me running my own stuff, is to buy up all the VRAM so there’s none left for me! It’s as if my local inference was powered by milkshake, and they drank my milkshake, they drank it up!

Brilliant project. The face looks good. The code looks good. It’s nice to see it in Python too. I don’t especially love the language but I have a great fondness for seeing life things codified with a standard API in a typed (or at least, type-able) language. Needing to draw an “A” in something without having to pull in font libraries (that is to say passing a compatible draw context to this project’s LowercaseAGlyph.draw) sounds nice.

Extinction will come not with a bang but with a whimper. The boundary of the burgeoning poor — already at two nines — will expand to include pretty much everyone, and that underclass will dominate society to the detriment of everything in the commons: culture, civility, affordable food, education, thinking.

Western culture devolves into poor, corrupt, violent, petty criminality. Welcome to Mega Cairo.

There are a few Unix command patterns I type out quite a lot more than any others. Every time I do so I wonder “isn’t there a better way of doing this?”. I know I could do better or use better tools but also, meh, who cares? It’s more important to be productive than to be right, right?

The classics, of course:

  ls -larth
  … | awk ‘{print $…}’
  for f in … ; echo foo $f ; end | sh -x

(Weird to mix fish and sh, I know. Sue me!)

Another one though is if I need some kind of random-ish seed for something like a cache key, or a hidden URL path directory, or the password for the bitcoin wallet I keep publicly online to taunt others:

  date | md5sum

Glad to hear I’m not alone!

NOC / BOFH is a good analogy. These people are highly technical guardians of their commons, who see each others as peers, and pull the plug / Halon drench anyone caught mucking up those commons. Hackers might build a spark gap to send Morse across campus just they might fire up nmap for a laugh to scan their buddy’s dorm connection, or run a fork bomb on the central Unix service. The Network Operstions / Operators / HAMs are the ones that find these hackers and drop one ton(ne) of bricks upon them.

The golden, underlying rule of Amateur Radio is to respect and protect the bands with which we have been trusted.

Did anyone else feel like Elon and the execs just didn’t really even bother trying with the presentation? The car is a unique and incredible achievement so on the one hand, they’ve earned the right to embarrassing-divorced-dad gas-station-flowers it during the reveal presentation. Maybe they could have been even sloppier, and literally just a-whooped and a-hollered and shouted “this is cool as fuck!” and it would’ve been just as fine.

Part of me though wonders what this would have been like if it had been a slick sciencey presentation that paid real tribute to the talent below the smug denim C-suite. A bit more Engelbart or Feynman or Sagan and a bit less Balmer, Bezos, and Bozo the clown.

Showing the world your flying car is a moment to shine as a serious person. These men seem to be actively trying to not do that!

The Witness was repetitive? Every puzzle set had a lesson, and every set of sets had a gag / out of the box puzzle at the end where something was fundamentally different (a crack or flicker, or an interaction with the environment, or a reference back to something else on the island.)

What I suppose was repetitive though — and where you might be coming from — is the formula itself. The entire island was the same episode format, even if the plot was different each time. Like Knight Rider — formulaic, but I loved the formula!

I saw RMS give a talk once on Free Software. He wore three quarter length cargo pants and sandals with no socks, and spent a good amount of the talk picking a scab off his shin to the point where he started bleeding. It got on his fingers. No one said anything.

There are things in this world that people can and should be stopped from doing, and there which anyone can do unhindered if they so wish. In between those two boundaries there’s a standard of decent behavior that one should strive for in order to be considered a good person.

Giving credit isn’t required, but many consider it basic decency.