miniblog.

I like Discord's model of usernames, where I can be wilfred#12345 even if other people have the same name. Perhaps package managers could do the same thing? It'd save the hassle with name collisions that many systems have. You could also compare download numbers if unsure.

I'm beginning to suspect that the act of writing a blogging engine is just to trick yourself into writing a few blog posts.

Difftastic works really hard to find similarities between the before and after file. Sometimes this works wonderfully (see first screenshot) and sometimes it goes way too far (see second screenshot). It's matched up a few variables and semicolons from adjacent functions!

On writing small, personal apps:

I've released difftastic 0.35! In this release: * Basic support for Makefile syntax * Support for UTF-16 files (helpful on Windows) * Several quality of life improvements, including the ability to see what languages are currently supported

Today I learnt that you can simulate a command being run in a TTY with `script`, e.g. $ script --return --quiet --command "ls" Unfortunately it generates output files called "typescript", which is a little confusing!

I had the pleasure of attending the Making Smalltalk event at the @ComputerHistory today! Adele Goldberg and Dan Ingalls were there, plus some videos from Alan Kay. "One of the tests of a programming language: can you write a debugger in it?"

@janriemer@mastodon.technology That's a valid use of dbg! as far as I can see, what's stopping you doing that?

One interesting feature of Rust: it has both print and dbg, so you don't need to use print for debugging very often. I don't even use print that often.

Given the number of game companies that have re-released old games by bundling an OSS emulator, perhaps it's only a matter of time before Microsoft includes Wine in something!

Apparently eBay decided to change their background colour gradually, to avoid user backlash! https://kulor.medium.com/how-ebay-secretly-changed-their-background-colour-from-yellow-to-white-ffd9718e7bb

One nice thing about quadratic algorithms: if you can reduce your N, you get a really nice speedup.

I think I've used fewer third party libraries in bash scripts than in any other language. I just use the built-ins and invoke binaries. I can't think of any other programming language where the stdlib felt like it was sufficient.

YAML is a funny language: it's not Turing complete, but it can have arbitrary code execution bugs.

On the limits and perils of being data driven: https://twitchard.github.io/posts/2022-08-26-metrics-schmetrics.html (Worthwhile improvements are often not amenable to A/B testing, and metrics can harm intrinsic motivation.)