samdk

Joined 17 years ago

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2,399
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396
Member since
Nov 29
very outdated website: http://samdk.com

email name: sam, domain: defabbiakane.com

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Comment · 10 months ago
Most of that stuff isn't necessary just to replace Plex, the OP's saying them Jellyfin started them on a journey they're presumably enjoying, not that they needed everything there to replace it.

I think you're right the bar is still too high for most folks, although I will note that I think it's dramatically lower than it used to be. A lot of the tools are all-around way easier to deal with, tailscale makes a lot of "personal cloud" use-cases much more feasible, and then coding agents (I'm using claude code) dramatically reduce the labor costs of getting this stuff all working and fixing it when something goes wrong.

Comment · 3 years ago
It's not that postgres can't handle large tables, it's more that many of the ways it uses system tables aren't particularly optimized for them being large, so you're operating outside the territory the table/query design was probably built for.

Like most things postgres it'll probably still work better than it has any right to for a while, but it'd be extremely unsurprising if it caused you unexpected problems at some point. (And if it does, they'll likely excitingly novel and you'll probably have to dig pretty deep to understand what's going on.)

Comment · 4 years ago
The Little Schemer was what finally got me to internalize how to solve problems recursively. I'd taken a couple of college classes and could do it some already, but it took a lot more thought than solving those same problems in other ways.

About a third of the way through The Little Schemer, things just clicked, and what had been hard became pretty instantly easy.

Some of that was it building on existing knowledge, but I found the structure very helpful. The narrative is really just the glue around a well-designed series of incremental problems.

Comment · 6 years ago
Postgres doesn't natively support multi-master. (Although there are a variety of open source/proprietary offerings that add support for it to various degrees.)
Comment · 7 years ago
I think it's unfortunate the first/often only exposure people get to FP is a build-up-from-the-foundations approach that emphasizes recursion so much, I think it leaves most students with a poor understanding of why functional paradigms and practices are practical and useful.

I've written primarily in a functional language (OCaml) for a long time now, and it's very rare I write a recursive function. Definitely less than once a month.

In most domains, almost every high-level programming task involves operating on a collection. In the same way that you generally don't do that with a while loop in an imperative language, you generally don't do it with recursion in a functional one, because it's an overly-powerful and overly-clunky tool for the problem.

For me the real key to starting to be comfortable and productive working in a functional language was realizing that they do actually all have for-each loops all over the place: the "fold" function.

(Although actually it turns out you don't end up writing "fold"s all that often either, because most functional languages have lots of helper functions for common cases--map, filter, partition, etc. If you're solving a simpler problem, the simpler tool is more concise and easier to think about.)

Comment · 8 years ago
This is very reminiscent of Charlie Stross' Halting State/Rule 34
Comment · 9 years ago
This is not the same thing, but you might be interested in taking a look at the excellent online Terra Mystica implementation (https://terra.snellman.net/) if you haven't seen it already.

It's a web interface, but the underlying representation is text-based, and you can type in the commands directly if you want. This leads to some nice features--for example, you can plan your moves several steps ahead of time, and you get a game log for free.

There creator wrote a blog post about that particular design decision: https://www.snellman.net/blog/archive/2014-12-08-command-lan...

Comment · 9 years ago
Thanks for writing this!

One nitpick: the guide says "If you're curious why it's important to not have a phone number on your account, see the security key FAQ", but the linked security FAQ doesn't actually appear to say why it's important.

Comment · 9 years ago
I use it on my laptop and am generally very happy with it, although I don't do all that much technical work there and certainly wouldn't want it to replace my primary workstation. (I'd be dearly sad if I had to give up xmonad.)

But it's made my laptop a far more pleasant place to get work done if I need to do so, and generally works far better than I was expecting it would. I no longer feel compelled to run a VM on my laptop to get real work done.

Comment · 9 years ago
You can have Goodreads do something like this, in the newsletters and other mail section you can check the 'send me the monthly new releases email', 'only send this to me if it includes an author I've read', and click the customize button and deselect all of the genres.

And then you end up with an email which has new releases by authors you've read before.

I generally have no use for most of what Goodreads does, but this combined with the ability to pull my Kindle purchases in automatically is pretty useful.

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