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👋 Move finished! Hello World, part 2

sunscales.bearblog.dev — Thu, 21 Nov 2024 02:29:00 +0000

**👋 Move finished! Hello World, part 2** 21 Nov, 2024 I've successfully brought over all my posts - there weren't too many to migrate, to be honest. Blogger had been such a pain to work with, I abandoned it pretty quickly. For the moment, I'm using File Garden to host my images. If I can consistently use this blog, I'll likely pay for the upgrade to host the images here (and add a guestbook and such.) In the meantime, if you want to reach out to me, my mastodon is @SunScales@ComicsCamp.club. I would list my email, but honestly I don't really check it, haha. Porting my old posts has given me a nice chance to play with the site markdown and everything, though, and get my CSS how I want it. Just minor changes so far, since I'm pretty happy with this theme, but needed some things like auto centering images and limiting how big they can be. Maybe later on I'll add custom images for the header or background or whatever. I saw someone else using emojis in their blog posts so I'm blatantly stealing that idea, because it's a good one. 😎 To reintroduce myself: Hi, I'm Emily. I'm in my 30s, I'm a C# software developer by day, I just got engaged to my favorite guy in the world, and I like to talk about the various hobbies I pick up. Sometimes you just need an outlet for the weird new thing you've started doing, so that's what this is for! My plan is to keep this a light-hearted blog and share the things that are making me happy at the moment. If that sounds good to you, there's an RSS feed link at the top or, you know, classic browser bookmarks.

i need a note taking app that doesn't suck

smol.pub — Thu, 21 Nov 2024 01:06:42 +0000

**i need a note taking app that doesn't suck** i'm looking for an app that stores everything in just one file (sqlite?), that i can checkout into my git repository. apparently that's too much to ask for, so i have to resort to vim + notes.txt

Sandwich Review in NYC #11 (Em)

peterkto.bearblog.dev — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 18:22:29 +0000

**Sandwich Review in NYC #11 (Em)** Em is a modern Vietnamese spot out in Bensonhurst. They serve good pho and chicken wings too. Got the beef sandwich. Pretty good--again they execute all the basics, similar to Diem Eatery. Whatever housemade mayo they made, it's excellent and they didn't overdo it. I'm currently trying to make my own banh mi sandwiches for a potluck at my kid's day care with all the other parents. I'm doing ground turkey, which isn't traditionally in banh mi but it's Thanksgiving theme so why not. Pairing it with pickled carrots & daikon, scallions, shallots, cilantro, and some chipotle mayo. Hopeful it turns out good and that I get a few compliments for it.

Jon Aquino's Mental Garden: Pinboard vs Notion

jonaquino.blogspot.com — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 17:33:00 +0000

Wednesday, November 20, 2024 Pinboard vs Notion I discovered a great alternative to Pinboard: Notion, the note-taking database. Set it up according tothis video, and you have a free alternative to Pinboard with a Chrome extension that is actually good. I like how it will pull an image from the page or you can screenshot the current page for the image. posted by Jonathan at11/20/2024 09:33:00 a.m.

Does America Have a New Natural Governing Party?

merionwest.com — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 16:50:39 +0000

**Does America Have a New Natural Governing Party?** F.H Buckley “These are not new principles. They defined the Republican Party for most of its history, a party that had always included a progressive element.” Political parties die. Who now is a Federalist? Where are the Whigs today? The Federalists became Whigs, and the Whigs became Republicans, but this time it feels different. There is no sure and certain hope of a resurrection, and for the current iteration of the Democratic Party it looks like the long goodbye, having decisively lost the presidential election this month, along with the Senate and the House of Representatives. (This was all accomplishedwhile dramatically outspendingRepublicans.) Think of the Democratic Party of today’s core beliefs and ask whether any part of them will be thought worth preserving. The pre-modern identity politics, the obscenely paid football starswho took a knee,the Women’s March attendees in their hats in the shape of the female genitalia, will we ever see them again? Will anyone miss the maddened Antifa mobs orthe “mostly peaceful” riots? Whatever happened to the defund the police movement? Where are the diversity trainers and the lectures on unconscious bias? Remember Vice President Kamala Harris’proposal fortransgender surgeries for illegal aliens in our prisons? There were so many great ideas, just a few short years ago, and now they are permanently consigned to the dustbin of history. The Democrats have become the party of illiberalism. The idea that we should be judged as individuals and not as members of a race or sex was tossed out the window. Free speech rights were all very well and good when the Left was in the dissenter role, but not after it ascended to power. Then the dissenters were on the Right, and the Left became the censors. At one time a patriotic respect for our founding principles might have restrained some on the Left. Those principles constitute our identities as Americans, and that which is not liberal is not American. But for Democrats American patriotismwas jettisoned whenthe Founders were revealed to be irredeemable racists. The bright new ideas on the Left are inconsistent with our Judeo-Christian and Enlightenment traditions and do not even count as moral theories. Immanuel Kant said that rules are not moral unless they can be applied universally, and Jeremy Bentham thought that everyone should count as one and no one as more than one. This comes down to saying that all lives matter, but that phrase was taken as an assertion that black lives do not matter. As nonsensical as this was, it became the official ideology at our best universities. The Democrats became the party of a well-credentialed economic elite. One could recognize them by their mating calls: “Hate Has No Home Here” or “Call Me by My Pronouns.” They became detached from the moral core of an older Democratic Party that saw itself as allied to working class Americans. In the 1930s, Democrats supported the striking mine workers of Harlan County, Kentucky, andits allied folk singers asked:“Which side are you on?” But 80 years later, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton thought that global warming was the more pressing issue. She boasted thatshe was going to put a lot of coal companies out of business,and then in 2019 President Joe Bidensaid thatminers should learn how to code. But President Donald Trump spoke up for them, and, in 2016, Harlan Countygave him84.8% of its votes. To become the Republican nominee in 2016, then-candidate Trump defeated his right-wing, libertarian rivals and remodeled the GOP as a workers’ party. Unlike a Mitt Romney, President Trumpdoes not divide Americans intomakers and takers. President Trump does not seek to eliminate entitlement programs but thinks instead that the best social welfare program is one that provides jobs to willing and able workers. He would pursue socialist ends through capitalist means, and not through socialist means as would Senator Bernie Sanders. These are not new principles. They defined the Republican Party for most of its history, a party that had always included a progressive element.Republicanism was born in the West, the home of progressivism, and its greatest leaders—Presidents Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Dwight Eisenhower—may fairly be called progressives. They were also conservatives, even if they did not reduce every issue to mere economics. What might rightfully be called the Republican Workers Party is liberal, progressive and conservative, all the things which the Democratic Party is not. As an American party, it embraces the liberal principles of the Founders. It is also authentically progressive and not a thin ideology of right-wing economists or of technocratic Democrats in the mold of Secretary Clinton. Finally, it is conservative and rejects the woke antinomianism that has been ascendant. We are poised for a revival that affirms America’s essential goodness and the republican virtue of the founders. Only the Republican Party can provide this today, and only its members can govern without discrimination for the common good, which is as close to the ideal of political virtue as one can find. Republicans will not ask voters to ally themselves with teachers’ unions or grievance peddlers, with corporate welfare bums or with dogmatic libertarians, or with anything that degrades the individual person. And, thus, the Republican Workers Party will become America’s natural governing party. F.H. Buckley is a Foundation Professor at Scalia Law School and the author ofThe Roots of Liberalism: What Faithful Knights and the Little Match Girl Taught Us about Civic Virtue,which was released this year with Encounter Books. - What Europe Can Learn from the American Election

Orcs and Goblins

nickdrawthing.bearblog.dev — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 16:12:00 +0000

**Orcs and Goblins** 20 Nov, 2024 Goblins come out of rocks. They've been there since nearly the beginning of time, when the world was fire and Chaos, before Order got to grips with things. The world cooled, and the seas of fire stood still and turned to stone with much of the Chaos of the world trapped inside. Not all stones contain Chaos. But some do. A Chaos stone looks just like any other stone. But when it is broken open, a strange thing happens: it grows a Goblin. Goblins can be made of anything, really, but most Chaos - real, pure Chaos, not the diluted kind that drifts around the world today - has faded, so most Goblins grow from rock. People are a mixture of good and bad. They are a hodgepodge of Order and Chaos, and thus they are capable of exercising both aspects of their nature. Goblins are bad. A goblin cannot be good, kind, or orderly, as that is not within them. They are not people. They are simply a manifestation of Chaos, and they act as such, causing wanton destruction and clashing with Order wherever it is found. A goblin can be destroyed, but that brings problems of its own. The body of a goblin is just a vessel for the Chaos, and destroying it causes the Chaos to spread. It becomes dilute and will never form a body again, but it eats away at Order like an acid. Where a goblin is destroyed things become worse. Buildings crumble, books rot, and fields become blighted. But worst of all, people become orcs. An orc is someone whose Order has been burned away. It is a sorry thing to happen to a person, as it cannot be undone. They simply become bad. It is best to lure a goblin into the wilderness first before destroying it. Royalty free image from pexels.com, taken by Diego F. Parra Alas, the stonemason. No headsman's axe is so deadly as your chisel, though you know it not.

Initial thoughts on The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle

meadow.cafe — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 16:10:00 +0000

**Initial thoughts on The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle** 20 Nov, 2024 I finally started readingThe Power of Nowby Eckhart Tolle. I've tried to start this book many times before, but I always stopped in the first chapter or so because I felt that the author was being unnecessarily airy and, more importantly, he directly claimed that he ended up in thissemi enlightenedstate but doesn't rightly know how he got there. This point was the point where I always stopped, but this time I decided to power through it, and in doing so I discovered I've been missing an important part: after not knowing what had happened, and just living in a state of present bliss, Eckhart discovered that what had happened to him is what many religions aim as their ultimate goal, so he went on to discover more about that and how a normal person might get to his state, but told from his point of view. Now, there's definitely wisdom in his writing. It's clear and well presented, and offers argumentative clarifications every once in a while that I find really useful. However, I have some reservations. First — though it can easily be brushed aside as an issue of semantics — master Eckhart says he's enlightened in the buddhist sense. Again, this is not really that important. My main reservation is my natural cynicism wonderingis this true? or is it just an elaborate money grab? From what I've read online people seem to think highly of Eckhart, but you know me. For now I've decided to suspend my disbelief and just listen to the audiobook as if it were all real. A large part of me wants to believe it is. What makes me feel better is that his message is really simple: in thenowthere are no problems. And this is quite easy not only to understand intuitively, but also easy to see for myself that what he says is true. It might be that he's not really enlightened and he's just paraphrasing buddhist doctrine, but if it continues to be like this (self verifiable) then there's no harm in it. Anyway... positive thoughts, positive thoughts. For the past days, whenever I put my oldest son to sleep, I meditate (or at least attempt to meditate) while I wait for him to pass out. Since I started readingThe Power of NowI started adding something new to my meditation which I think is actually something that should perhaps always have been there, but whether due to bad instruction or complacency on my part, it has never found its way into the forefront of my mind. I'm talking aboutthe watcher. Usually my meditation is pretty much, but now I'm making a change wherebreathis my center, my heart, and at the same time there's an effort to watch for thoughts as they come into my mind, and that reminds me not to engage with them. If ever I do get carried away by a thought then I go back to my center, my breath. But these two things are always there, watching and focusing on the breath. I think it's working fine for now, though I've hardly tried this out while sitting on a cushion in proper meditation, something which I've been wanting to do for a while, but not wanting to dedicate time to it (oh the woes of my life). Another interesting idea master Eckhart talks about is how when we're identified with our thoughts we're also controlled by them. This is so true for me, and something I've been observing more and more since I first read it. I, and I think everyone, gets taken away by one or two things that interest us at a given time. My mind is fixated on these and can hardly think of anything else, and even less can I contemplate the idea of not doing them, even if I know they're harmful in some way or another. Recently for me this has been playing games on my phone, latelyMarvel SNAPandFarmRPG(which aren't as bad to be honest), and I know that I could "not play them" and feel better overall with not having them in the back of my mind all day, and yet, I can't just leave them, can I? I am, as Eckhart says, identified with these thoughts, but once I know and see this I also see that I am not them and their strength over me is lessened. "Your mind is a tool; use it, don't let it use you"is a (paraphrased) quote from him that comes to mind right now. I think I, and everyone, tend to just go along with what our minds say. It's not only games or other things we're compulsive about (addicted), it's everything. From whether we should drink that thing, or watch that video, everything. The only thing that's no-mind is dropping everything and being in the present: meditation. Everything else is us just being led on a leash by our mind. Arguably even the desire and act of meditating is something that we're led to by our thoughts, but one hopes that in this gordian knot we'll find the same sword that cuts through it. That's perhaps the reason why I'm so reticent to meditate, because my mind just wants toplay, do what it's used to, instead of stopping for a while. Again, here is an example of my thoughts controlling me rather than the other way around. It's a messy business, knowing who's what and what controls which. Not one we need to get into. Suffice it to say that, in most things, we're just bulls being led by rings in our noses.

Serial Dilution

enyantiomer.bearblog.dev — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 15:27:44 +0000

**Serial Dilution** Complex problemscompelcomplex solutionsa million rubik’s cubessolving a million rubik’s cubeslying in waitto afford a computerto complicate furtherprecursors to solutionsrequiring equationsnamed after the deadto turn into numbersmillimetresmeasuring material costsof bladesto the last productive angstromdesigned simplyfor culling

being philosophically demure, being conceptually mindful

wollenblog.substack.com — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 14:57:01 +0000

**being philosophically demure, being conceptually mindful** an introduction to thick concepts I’ve been reading about thick concepts for a book I’m writing and I thought I’d spill the tea. This should help me absorb the material better — which is inevitably somewhat dry — and help you to be cool and fun, which is the main ‘how-to’ question you lot DM me about. It begins withBernard Williams, the insensitive monster who made Derek Parfit cry by not possessing the concept of a normative reason. InEthics and the Limits of Philosophy, Williams coined the term“thick concept”. Since I can’t find any quotable definitions in Williams’ book, you’ll have to settle for my explanation. DEMURE, MINDFUL, ELOQUENT, RUGGED, FAIR, FINE. These are all things you’ve called me. But they’re also examples of thick concepts. LEWD, LAZY, BLASPHEMOUS, SLOPPY, BORING, SOPHOMORIC. These are all things you’ve called my Substack secondary, What in tarnation is a thick concept? Roughly, a concept is thick when it has both a descriptiveandan evaluative aspect to it. For example, GENEROSITY picks out a pattern of behaviour. In that sense, it’s descriptive. Yet GENEROSITY — unlike, say, MARSHMALLOW — is also morally loaded: calling someone ‘generous’ is, in most contexts, a positive appraisal. Why the flip would anyone want to understand thick concepts? Good question, but enough with the profanity. Here are a few ways in which thick concepts are philosophically interesting: Debunking Non-Cognitivism: according to moral non-cognitivism, moral utterances like ‘Torture is wrong!’ or ‘Not subscribing toGoing Awolis even worse!’don’t even try to express something true.Rather, moral utterances are, generally speaking, the expression of an attitude or a command or something otherwise can’t be true or false. For example, non-cognitivists might translate the previous moral utterances as ‘Boo, torture! Thumbs down!’ or ‘Subscribe toGoing Awol! Now!’. (Note: this is not meant to be ana prioriclaim about morality, deducible from in one’s head from the armchair. It’s an empirical claim about how moral language actually operates. In principle, a study could disprove it tomorrow.) According to some philosophers —Philippa Foot, for example— thick concepts show that non-cognitivism is a very failed view. To see Foot’s point, take a sentence like: “ - Glennis rude”. Given his pattern of past behaviour — calling me a “very failed Substacker”, despite the fact that many people are callinghim“Glenn whatshisface”, “a tad Jelly”, and “likely a Trump toadie or a Russian bot” — I think it’s fair to call him not only rude, but a very failed Substacker indeed. Note, though, that RUDE is a thick concept: it’s a term of opprobrium, yes, but it also has descriptive content packed into it (disregard for etiquette norms, for example, or a tendency to make disruptive fart noises.) When I say “Glenn is rude” in this context, I’m surely making amoralappraisal; yet — as Foot points out — my calling Glenn rude can’tmerelybe the expression of an attitude like “Glenn? ICK!”. After all, I’m making a set of descriptive, empirical claims about Glenn by calling him ‘rude’: e.g., that he chews with his mouth open, that he wears his hat indoors, that no one likes his company, and so forth. Since thick concepts make up an enormous share of our moral discourse (consider: people often choose to deploy thick terms like ‘nasty’, ‘boorish’, and ‘lewd’ in place of thinner, purely evaluative terms like ‘bad’ or ‘immoral’), non-cognitivism fails as an empirical claim about how moral language really operates, since it fails to account for thick terms in our day-to-day moral discourse. The Normativity of Logic:there’s a debate about whether logic is normative. According to some logicians, logic just describes the entailments of, and inconsistencies between, propositions. According to other logicians, logic is also a normative discipline: it tells us what weoughtto conclude, and which propositions weought notaccept in pairs. In “Validity As A Thick Concept”, Sophia Arbeiter argues for the normativity of logic on the grounds that LOGICAL VALIDITY is a thick concept: it describes relationships of entailment between propositions, yes, but ‘validity’ is also a virtue of an argument — if someone declares your argument valid, they’re appraising it positively. Since logic trades on validity, Arbeiter argues, logic is a normative discipline. Are Catholics Cannibals?:Today I spooled aTwitter threadon why thinking about thick concepts can help us see why Catholics aren’t cannibals, even if they do eat Jesus’ flesh. (Oy! Follow my Twitter!) Diagnosing The Gettier Problem: I’vesubstacked about the Gettier problembefore, but here’s a cheeky recap. In 1973, Edmund Gettiercooked uptwo devastating counterexamples to the ‘justified true belief’ definition of knowledge. Since then, epistemologists have been scrambling to find an adequate definition of knowledge, but every definition they come up with — it seems — faces anew and equally devastating counterexample. Increasingly, epistemologists are starting to think that the task of defining knowledge is not only hard, butimpossible, and are spending their time trying to explain why no airtight definition of knowledge is forthcoming. In “Knowledge as a thick concept: explaining why the Gettier problem arises”, Brent Kyle argues that KNOWLEDGE is a thick concept, and that its thickness explains why defining it will forever be impossible. The argument is basically this: first, KNOWLEDGE is thicker than a snicker. Recall that for a concept to be thick, it has to contain both descriptive and evaluative content. KNOWLEDGE, it seems, contains both. On the descriptive side, KNOWLEDGE entails true belief — and ‘truth’ and ‘belief’ are both descriptive properties. On the evaluative side, KNOWLEDGE entails epistemic justification — or so Kyle thinks. While there’s significant controversy about what epistemic justification amounts to, saying ‘S is justified in believing p’ seems roughly equivalent to saying ‘S hasgood reasonto believe p’, ‘S’s belief in p ispermissible’, or ‘S’s grounds for believing p areadequate’. Since GOOD REASON, PERMISSIBLE, and ADEQUATE are evaluative, EPISTEMIC JUSTIFICATION must be too. And since KNOWLEDGE entails both TRUE BELIEFandEPISTEMIC JUSTIFICATION, KNOWLEDGE meets the definition of a thick concept. Second, Kyle argues, the fact that KNOWLEDGE is thick with twelve Cs explains why epistemologists have failed to analyse it. Why? Well, for reasons that are too fiddly to sum up here (sorry), Kyle thinks thick concepts, in particular, might be unanalysable in virtue of their thickness. This view charts a middle course between diagnoses of the Gettier problem that say the reason we haven’t analysed knowledge yet either has something to do with KNOWLEDGE, in particular, or something to do with human concepts generally. If Kyle is right, the Gettier problem arises for thick concepts generally — not just KNOWLEDGE — but not necessarily for all concepts. Those were just a few examples. When you go digging, thick concepts turn up all over the place. As philosophers in training, we’d do well to understand the debates around thick concepts. Unfortunately (for you. I’m fine with it), I won’t unpack every disagreement philosophers have about thick concepts: I haven’t the intellectual facility, and we’d probably be here till Christmas. Instead, I’ll just outline the two sides of the most important debate about thick concepts — separationism vs. non-separationism — and try to keep it peppy. If you want to read the only ‘splainer on the separationism/non-separationism debate available on the World Wide Web that won’t make you want to gouge those pretty little eyes out (*bites lip*), you’ll have to pay me money.1The more I’m able to wring from Substack’s coffers, the more time I’ll have to write things like this, for you! Besides, chipping in is very demure, very mindful, whereas not chipping in is Scrooge-like and miserly.

Thought Experiment: The Known Hero vs. The Unknown Savior?

beew.me — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 13:27:00 +0000

**Thought Experiment: The Known Hero vs. The Unknown Savior?** 20 Nov, 2024 A large-scale disaster strikes. You are faced with two options for how to help. There's no opting out — the situation requires you to choose one of the two options below. Option 1: The Known HeroYou take a high-risk action that puts your own life in immediate danger, but by doing so, you will save 50 lives. Everyone will know what you did. Your name will be celebrated worldwide as a hero. The risk to yourself is significant, and there's a chance you might not survive, but you would leave behind a legacy that inspires others. Option 2: The Unknown SaviorYou take a different, even riskier action that guarantees saving 500 lives, but you will not survive, and no one will ever know what you did. The story will be spun as an accidental miracle, and you will get no credit or recognition. You know that you sacrificed yourself, but it will forever remain a secret, without the ability to inspire others. Would you risk it all for the fame and potential to inspire future heroes or sacrifice yourself for a greater number with no recognition at all? #experiments#life#society & culture#thought experiment#wisdom

In reply to https://jan.boddez.net/articles/how-i-built-my-blog-part-deux. See if I can reply to … – Jan’s Blog

jan.boddez.net — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 10:23:02 +0000

**In reply to https://jan.boddez.net/articles/how-i-built-my-blog-part-deux. See if I can reply to …** In reply tohttps://jan.boddez.net/articles/how-i-built-my-blog-part-deux. See if I can reply to myself okay from IndiePass.

2024-11-19 Suicide rates in Switzerland

alexschroeder.ch — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 08:43:36 +0000

**2024-11-19 Suicide rates in Switzerland** @mekkaokerekewas posting about black men and suicides, saying: Black men have one of the lowest age adjusted suicide rates.👍🏿 White men? One of the highest. … Self imposed masculinity pressure isn’t the only reason so many men are depressed. But it’s a big one. It reminded me of some numbers for Switzerland I seen some time ago. After reading Mekka’s thread, I tried to find those numbers again, and I was not disappointed. It’s bad. Here’s the suicide rate by gender in Switzerland. My take is that men here are often lonely, the emotional labour of maintaining relationships often falls on the shoulders of women so when men are alone, they are often unable to build the kind of network required to stay well. And thus, where as the suicide rates are going down, men are still doing worse than women. These numbers are without assisted suicides, in case you are wondering. At the same time, the federal system in Switzerland means that healthcare and police are the responsibility of the cantons. Standards differ, reporting differs. It’s a mess. I assume this means that there is an extremely high uncertainty about these numbers. As I assume that the suicides reported must be pretty obvious, I suspect that the actual numbers are much higher. It seems unlikely, however, that standards and reporting would differ by gender, so I’m going to assume that the relation between suicide rates remain valid even if the actual numbers are higher. Suizidrate nach Geschlecht - Todesfälle durch Suizid pro 100 000 Einwohner/innen As people grow older, suicide rates go up. The graph below is again without assisted suicides (which are legal in Switzerland). Making friends and maintaining relationships requires emotional labour, trust, openness, vulnerability, and it can be hard. I know it’s hard for me and unfortunately I see myself in these statistics. We must learn to do better. Patriarchy is not helping. Spezifische Todesursachen: Häufigste Todesursachen nach Alter und Geschlecht; vorzeitige Sterblichkeit und verlorene potenzielle Lebensjahre #Suicide#Switzerland

Don’t expose primary id’s with Rails’ dom_id

railsdesigner.com — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 08:26:00 +0000

**Don't expose primary id's with Rails' dom_id** If you use Hotwire with Rails, you have most likely used. It’s a clever, little helper to give a unique id to an element. This helps to easily target an element withTurbo Streams(to update, append or delete). You use it like this: It is this last example I have issues with. As it exposes the primary id of that record. Depending on your app, you might not care, but when you run a (SaaS) business, this might be sensitive business information you don’t want exposed. So I created a little gem, calledstealth_dom_id. It’s based on an a small class I added in myfolder for years (there might be more candidates in there for gems 🤫). It works like this: You can also, just like with the unstealthy dom_id, pass a prefix attribute: If you usein your Rails projects, I am sure you will love it.Check it out on GitHub. Rails partials have many lesser known features. From counters to spacer templates! Learn all there is to know about partials. - { "@context": "https://schema.org", "@type": "BlogPosting", "headline": "Rails' Partial Features You (didn't) Know", "url": "https://railsdesigner.com/rails-partial-features/", "datePublished": "2024-11-14T07:48:47+00:00" } You don't need Redis to broadcast Turbo Streams in your Rails app. Use your existing PostgreSQL or the new Solid Cable gem. - { "@context": "https://schema.org", "@type": "BlogPosting", "headline": "Broadcast Turbo Streams without Redis", "url": "https://railsdesigner.com/turbo-stream-without-redis/", "datePublished": "2024-10-24T05:26:47+00:00" } Lesser Known Rails Helpers to Write Cleaner View Code Rails (ActiveSupport/ActionView) has a wide-range of some great helpers to help you (hah!) write cleaner, and more readable code. This articles lists the more o… - { "@context": "https://schema.org", "@type": "BlogPosting", "headline": "Lesser Known Rails Helpers to Write Cleaner View Code", "url": "https://railsdesigner.com/lesser-known-rails-helpers/", "datePublished": "2024-05-30T01:16:47+00:00" } Published at20 November 2024.Have suggestions or improvements on this content?Do reach out.

Why should we care about being mindful?

exploration.work — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 08:17:34 +0000

**Why should we care about being mindful?** Some days ago I was walking towards the subway when a blue collar Latin American immigrant man of around my age made a motion towards me. I knew he would ask for money, but I didn’t allow him to get there, with my face I made a sorry gesture and continued walking. He wished me a good day. I immediately regretted it. I dismissed him out of my objective to get to work (I wasn't even in a rush). I believe everyone who asks for help needs to be at least listened to. It is especially people who don’t seem to need help, able bodied men of working age, those who have the most trouble getting it. I wondered if I should turn back, but in the end decided against it. I will listen to everyone, but I wont help everyone. Should I go back and listen to him, I would feel obligated to help him.WhateverI thought, I will be more mindful next time someone asks for help. On Sunday at the TED Talks discussion group we discussed the myths of mindfulness. At the end of our discussion the host put forward a question: “if mindfulness is not about feeling better, why would we want to be more mindful?” - “To be more present” I blurted out, tautologically embarrassing myself. Yet, nobody could give a good answer either. The host said “well, I only know this because I follow the Accept and Commit Therapy, but the reason we want to be mindful is so that we are able to act according to our values at each moment”, and boom I fully got what was meant by this statement. No amount of moral or philosophical commitments will suffice ifyou are not present at the moment of truth.

The Neverending Story (1984)

cinematicmoments.bearblog.dev — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 08:01:00 +0000

**The Neverending Story (1984)** 20 Nov, 2024 #The Neverending Story (1984)#Unreal (1998)

OctoPrint On Air #60

octoprint.org — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 07:30:00 +0000

**OctoPrint On Air #60** Topics in this episode of OctoPrint On Air, which was recorded on November 14th: - 1.10.3 and upcoming changes to the template engine - 1.11.0 and Python 3.13 compatbility - OctoPrint venv tool for easily rebuilding OctoPrint’s virtual environments - Firefox bug hunting Chapters with jump marks available in theYouTube description.

Print double-sided documents with this Bash script - Both.org

www.both.org — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 07:00:00 +0000

I have an old laser printer at home that I use occasionally. My Hewlett Packard LaserJet Pro CP1525nw Color Printer is a great workhorse that prints reliably and in color. While I don’t use it all the time, this printer is useful when I need to print a proof of an article, or make a paper copy of an important document. My only limitation with this printer is that it can only print single-sided pages. If you want to print double-sided pages, you need to set up a custom print job to that yourself: you print the odd-numbered pages, then reload the pages into the printer and print the even-numbered pages: For example, to print a 4-page document, I have to print pages 1 and 3, then reload the pages to print pages 2 and 4. It’s not so bad for a short document, but it’s a pain to get right when printing a longer document that might be 20 pages. Automating the steps To make things easier, I wrote a short Bash script that automates the process of printing in “duplex” on a printer that only prints on one side at a time. Whenever I need to print a document in 2-sided mode, I first convert the file to PDF. This is easy to do if the file is not already in PDF format. For example, you can use the “File > Export As > Export as PDF” feature in LibreOffice Writer, or you can do it right from the command line with this command: Once I have the file in PDF format, my Bash script uses thelprcommand with options to first print the odd-numbered pages in the document, then display a prompt so I know to reload the pages into the printer, then useslpra second time to print the even-numbered pages. Even or odd? The only tricky part is determining the page count, so I know if the document has an even number of pages (which is easy to print double-sided) or an odd number of pages (the last page doesn’t need to be loaded back into the printer). To determine the page count, I use thepdfinfocommand. This generates useful information about a PDF document, including the page count. For example, this document is 5 pages long: That output is very easy to parse withawk. To get the page count, I useawkto look for theline, and print the second () field on the line: To figure out if this is an even or odd number, I use the modulo () arithmetic operator to divide by 2 and print the remainder. For an odd number, themodulo by 2will always be 1; for an even number, it will always be zero. I can automate this in Bash using a few lines: For my 5-page file, this prints “odd”. Knowing if the page count is even or odd makes it easier to make a suitable prompt when I need to re-load pages into the printer. Writing the script Now I can put it all together. My script first prints the odd-numbered pages (1, 3, 5, ..) then waits for the printer to finish printing before displaying a prompt for me to re-load the pages into the printer. If the document has an odd number of pages, it also reminds me to remove the last page. With the pages loaded back into the printer, the script prints the even-numbered pages (2, 4, 6, ..) Save this as a new script on your system, and make it executable with. On my system, I called it. For example, when printing a 5-page document, I see this output: I like and prefer Linux for may reasons. Today provides one example. I like to install updates on all my...

🍷 Bella Union winery in Napa is made for younger drinkers /// SF Standard - The Independent Variable

tiv.today — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 06:24:00 +0000

19 November 2024linkNapawine I get the complaint of price and availability in Napa, but I really do think my generation and younger are missing something in their chase forexperiences. You really do tend to get what you pay for; if you want a bar like experience where you drink (still overpriced) wine, then sure, something like this is fine; if you want atrue hospitality experiencewhere someone goes out of their way to make sure you are taken care of and enjoy your experience along with the wine, it’s going to cost a bit more.

Are the newest Wild Life minecraft videos fetish bait? No but also they kinda are (in a weird fucked up terminally online way)

thelegomovie.bearblog.dev — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 06:21:00 +0000

**egg's blog!** **Are the newest Wild Life minecraft videos fetish bait? No but also they kinda are (in a weird fucked up terminally online way)** 20 Nov, 2024 Not sexually "explicit" but does talk about weird deviantart fetish stuff so be warned Recently, I've been getting wayyy into Hermitcraft, like, unhealthy amounts. I loveee watching Hermitcraft. If you don't know (which i assume u dont), it's basically a Minecraft server with a buncha popular minecraft youtubers. Not for everyone but my brain loves it. Now, these hermitcraft youtubers have this stupid ass series that they call the Life Series and basically all of them have different gimmicks. The most current season is called Wild Life. The gimmick in this series is that literally anything can happen-- each episode has a randomized thing that happens to them. For some background on me, pretty much all of my online friends in high school were the most stereotypical deviantart fetish weirdos imaginable. I was pathetic and craved attention so I loved to interact with these people. A fetish they all had in common was that they liked something called "g/t" which stands for "giant / tiny". G/t is pretty much just liking the dynamic of a giant person and a smaller person. This shit has existed for a longgg time since like the 50s with that Attack of the Giant Woman movie. Now, it lives and grows (see,growis a funny word when talking about this cause another common trope is character growing to a large size...) on Deviantart and furaffinity, creating the most horrible (but also quite funny) images imaginable. Because of me being friends with these "g/t likers" for so long, im now hyper aware of whenever it appears in anything. Its a horrible curse and I dont recommend it. ok, so what does this have to do with this random Minecraft series on Youtube?? Well the first episode's whole "gimmick" IS THAT THEY GROW AND SHRINK!!! THEYRE HUGE!!! BUT THEY CAN ALSO SHRINK!?!?!? And it is SO ODD how much attention they bring to it.... All of the thumbnails look look straight out of some 32 year old's Deviantart page it's SCARY!! Do i think they did this on purpose? HELL NO!!!! But is it really odd when you are a little weirdo freak and think about it too hard?? YES!!!!!! (if the link does not work, it's basically some Minecraft guy growing bigger while saying "What is happening?!") This one in particular gets me because it is what the g/t people call a "growth sequence". People LOVE these things. Classic G/T trope. Especially the "what is happening!!" like..i have seen this same exact image a billion times... I wonder if while creating their thumbnails they came across g/t stuff and just had to ignore it... idk.. and this one too.. that is LITERALLY WHAT YOU WOULD TITLE A G/T ARTWORK!!!! I honestly really wish my mind wasnt such a polluted mess!!! Now, thiswasthe gimmick for the first episode, but get this... IT COMES BACK!!!! Episode 4's gimmick is that they have to answer trivia questions about the Life Series and Hermitcraft and one of the punishments is that they GROW!!!!! hor. i. ble. ARGGH!!!!!!! The thing that makes this the funniest thing ever to me is that i just KNOW there's some kid out there watching these videos and looking at these thumbnails and having the WORST revelation ever and having their brain chemistry completely altered in a way that cannot be undone. Horrible. but also.. really funny Whatever... I realize now that this is such a hyper-specific topic that no one but me pretty much will get it but if youdidend up reading it than im sorry #g/t#hermitcraft#minecraft

Wednesday Action Log 11-20-24 - Twenty Sided

www.shamusyoung.com — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 05:01:17 +0000

Wednesday Action Log 11-20-24 This week I’ve been playing moreMount & Blade II: Bannerlord. So far, I’ve learned that turning down the damage reduction really hurts. Last time I played I had damage reduction set to easy, so I was effectively invincible with heavy enough armor. But now I have to learn what it’s like to take damage. Also, since I’m not making most of my money from smithing, I’m having to actually learn how trade caravans and workshops work, instead of making one really good sword and having enough money to pay an army for a year. Anyway, what’s everyone else doing this week? Overthinking Zombies Let's ruin everyone's fun by listing all the ways in which zombies can't work, couldn't happen, and don't make sense. Crash Dot Com Back in 1999, I rode the dot-com bubble. Got rich. Worked hard. Went crazy. Turned poor. It was fun. PC Gaming Golden Age It's not a legend. It was real. There was a time before DLC. Before DRM. Before crappy ports. It was glorious. Final Fantasy X A game about the ghost of an underwater football player who travels through time to save the world from a tick that controls kaiju satan. Really. 9 comments

Small Spaces

www.vianegativa.us — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 05:00:00 +0000

When we moved into this house, soonit became clear: we could learn to livewith the uneven spackle on the ceiling,without doors for the built-in closets.And soon we realized our heavy dining table, …

#3736: Soundwave – G1 Universe

thefigureinquestion.com — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 05:00:00 +0000

**#3736: Soundwave – G1 Universe** SOUNDWAVE — G1 UNIVERSE TRANSFORMERS: LEGACY UNITED (HASBRO) Transformers, a brand with virtually no footprint here on the site for my first five years, is sort of returning to its roots, I guess? I don’t really talk about it as much any more. I mean, sure, I looked at one of the Blokees back in October, but the last time I reviewed one that actually transformed was back in May. It was a Soundwave, which is sensible, since he’s one of my two go-tos. And, you know what? I’m gonna go to it again. Here’s another Soundwave, you guys. G1 Universe Soundwave is part of the third Leader Class assortment ofTransformers Legacy: United, the third year of theLegacybranding. This marks Soundwave’s third inclusion underLegacy, at a third size-class no less. We’ve had Core and Voyager, and now Leader, so all that’s left is some form of Deluxe? Go for the full spread? Whatever the case, this guy is, as his name denotes, another G1 Soundwave. In his robot mode, he’s about 6 1/2 inches tall and he has 25 practical points of articulation. Structurally, he’s exactly the same as the Walmart-exclusiveWar For Cybertronrelease from 2020, which is a mold with less uses than you might expect for such a solid updating of the G1 Soundwave figure. Prior to this year, it was only available in its initial run and asShattered Glass Soundwavein 2022. Earlier this year, it got another re-use in theDramatic Capturethree-pack, and now it’s been used again here. Yay! It’s a re-working of theSiegemold (which was *also* re-released inLegacy), and still holds up as a strong offering four years after the fact. Since he’s using theWFCmold, that means this guy’s alt-mode is a cassette player again, which is how Soundwave do at his Soundwave best. As with prior instances, it’s good when viewed from the front, but a bit spottier at the back. This Soundwave’s color work isn’t drastically different from the Walmart release, but it tweaks things every so slightly still. It adds back in the missing red details from that release, and also makes the other colors match-up a bit better with each other, so no mixes of yellow and gold, and the greys and silvers are also a little closer in finish this time. It results in a slightly punchier look. The real test, of course, is whether this one will face the same discoloring issues as the last one. Like the last release (and theSiegerelease as well), he gets his two cannons and folding gun, and to justify the Leader class price point, he also adds in three cassette buddies: Ravage, Buzzsaw, andFrenzyRumble. Ravage is once more using theSiegemold, with a deco that matches theWFCpack-in,albeit with black limbs now instead of grey. Buzzsaw’s actually a big deal because this is the first time he’s been done in theSiegecompatible style. That took a surprisingly long time. He’s a repaint of theWFCLaserbeak re-tool, which isn’t much of a surprise, I suppose.FrenzyRumble is re-using theStudio 86mold, just now in proper toy colors. Of course, he’s named “Rumble” on the box, despite “Frenzy” very definitely being the name on the blue cassette guy for the toys, but I won’t split hairs here. I know what his name is in my heart, and that’s all that truly matters. As someone who got the Walmart release at retail (which is something an unfortunately high number of collectors can’t say), I didn’t *need* this release. Of course, it *is* a Soundwave, and it *is* different from the prior offering. On top of that, the pack-in cassettes do a lot to sell me on it this time around, since I’ve been waiting patiently for Buzzsaw since 2019, and I also won’t say no to a toy-colors update to the86mold of Frenzy. I’m glad I snagged it because, if nothing else, I got to mess with the Walmart mold one more time, and I do always forget just how much I like that particular mold. This is a nice set if you missed the Walmart version, and honestly the superior offering if you have that one already, so I’m happy with my purchase.

The Stack » Sinistar Unleashed: Controls

www.wurb.com — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 04:46:20 +0000

Sinistar Unleashed: Controls I’ve been talking a lot about this game’s features and mechanics, but I haven’t said much yet about the experience of playing it. It’s quite enjoyable! Easily my favorite of the three classic arcade game remakes I’ve played this month. As I once said aboutanother game, the pleasure of a game such as this has a lot to do with the pleasure of just moving around in the environment, of the game’s responsiveness in putting your intentions into action, and it does that part well. Even with a modern dual-joystick controller, designing a good, intuitive system for moving around freely in 3D space is not trivial. Space flight here is fairly streamlined, with very little cognitive friction, letting you devote more of your attention to higher-level goals. One touch that I really like: Forward movement is the default. You can stop dead if you want, just hold your position and swivel. This is useful in some situations, such as mining space rocks: you want to aim right at the rock for long enough to blast it apart, but you don’t want to ram into it. But such situations are the exception, not the norm, and are treated as such by the controls. Holding down the left trigger button stops you, like it’s a brake pedal, just as holding down the right trigger makes you go faster. (Holding down both makes them cancel out. That’s not part of the game design; it’s an inescapable result of how Xbox-compatible controllers treat the trigger buttons as a single analog axis.) Holding still requires continuously applied intent. That feels good here. It feelsright. I kind of wonder how such a scheme would feel in a less appropriate context. Imagine if you had to hold a button down to keep Mario from running forward all the time. One thing I just discovered while looking at the the control configuration: By default, the D-pad lets you strafe! (That is, move perpendicular to the direction you’re facing.) I had poked at the D-pad a little while trying to figure out how to activate Special Items, but I must not have held it long enough to see any effect. I don’t think I’ll be using that. Strafing just feels weird in this context. It really shouldn’t feel weird, if this is supposed to be space, but it does. My expectation is that my spaceship, despite looking like a veiny butterfly, is basically an airplane. Airplanes don’t strafe. And anyway, I need to free up the D-pad so I can remap Special Items to it. It turns out that the default controller configuration just kind of falls down there. There isn’t a notion of selecting a Special Item the way you can select a Secondary Weapon; every Special Item needs its own button, and there are only so many buttons available. Playing from mouse and keyboard has no such problem, of course. Were the developers assuming that players would be playing from mouse and keyboard? Well, the game was only released on Windows, so they knew that players would have keyboards available. Looking that up, I also learned that the developers were former employees of LookingGlass Studios, the makers of games such asSystem ShockandUltima Underworld1It’s a shame there aren’t and combination locks in the game.jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_7727_1_1').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_7727_1_1', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'top right', relative: true, offset: [10, 10], });, which were absolutely designed around using the keyboard for more complex 3D positioning than we’re used to these days. It just seems kind of backwards when the rest of the game plays from a controller so well.

Chris's Wiki :: blog/programming/TextControlsInlineVsExternal

utcc.utoronto.ca — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 04:43:30 +0000

Two API styles of doing special things involving text in UIs A lot of programs (or applications) that have a 'user interface' mostly don't have a strongly graphical one; instead, they mostly have text, although with special presentation (fonts, colours, underlines, etc) and perhaps controls and meaning attached to interacting with it (including things like buttons that are rendered as text with a border around it). All of these are not just plain text, so programs have to create and manipulate all of them through some API or collection of APIs. Over time, there have sprung up at least two styles of APIs, which I will callexternalandinline, after how they approach the problem. Theexternalstyle API is the older of the two. In the external API, the program makes distinct API calls to do anything other than plain text (well, it makes API calls for plain text, but you have to do something there). If you want to make some text italic or underlined, you have a special API call (or perhaps you modify the context of a 'display this text' API). If you want to attach special actions to things like clicking on a piece of text or hovering the mouse pointer over it, again, more API calls. This leads to programs that make a lot of API calls in their code and are very explicit about what they're doing in their UI. Sometimes this is bundled together with alayoutmodel in the API, where the underlying UI library will flexibly lay out a set of controls so that they accommodate your variously sized and styled text, your buttons, your dividers, and so on. In theinlinestyle API, you primarily communicate all of this by passing in text that is in some way marked up, instead of plain text that is rendered literally. One form of such inline markup is HTML (and it is popularly styled by CSS). However, there have been other forms, such as XML markup, and even with HTML, you and the UI library will cooperate to attach special meanings and actions to variousDOM nodes. Inline style APIs are less efficient at runtime because they have to parse the text you pass in to determine all of this, instead of your program telling the UI library directly through API calls. At the same time, inline style APIs are quite popular at a number of levels. For example, it's popular in UI toolkits to use textual formats to describe your program's UI layout (sometimes this is then compiled into a direct form of UI API calls, and sometimes you hand the textual version to the UI library for it to interpret). Despite it being potentially less efficient at runtime, my impression is that plenty of programmers prefer the inline style to the external style for text focused applications, where styled text and text based controls are almost all of the UI. My belief is also that an inline style API is probably what's needed for an attractivetext focused programming environment.

Meet the developer saving the iPod’s click wheel games

www.nightwater.email — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 04:00:11 +0000

**Meet the developer saving the iPod’s click wheel games** Finally, you can play LOST: The Video Game with a click wheel A few months ago,I picked up an old iPod classic on eBay. I wanted a simple music player, one not connected to the internet. I wanted to feel more connected to the actual act of collecting and listening to digital music, to have the same experience digitally as I do physically, with vinyl records. But the iPod was never reallyjustan MP3 player. Even in its earliest days, the iPod could hold contacts, schedules, and basic text files. Once it got a color screen, it could show photos and videos, too. There were also built-in games likeSolitaireandMusic Quiz—both on heavy rotation for high-school me. And starting in 2006, you could buy more games from big developers like EA, Namco, and Ubisoft for $4.99 a pop. This was a year before the iPhone and iPod touch, two years before the App Store. 54 click wheel games were released in all, ranging from classic fare likeTetrisandPac-Manto TV tie-ins likeLost: The Video GameandCSI Miami. In retrospect, these games seem doomed to have always been “also-rans,” a way to extract a quick buck while the next great app platform got its footing. These iPod click wheel games were such a disappointment, Apple completely removed them from the iTunes Store in 2011, years before the iPod classic line was discontinued. Despite their failure to spark a mobile games revolution, iPod click wheel games are remembered fondly by the few who experienced them. One is a French developer going by the username Olsro. “My father bought meAsphalt 4andReversi, and I have good memories, especially withAsphalt 4,” Olsro told me in an email interview. Olsro was struck by nostalgia and set out to playAsphalt 4again, but other versions of the game just felt “too different.” Nowadays, finding emulated versions of old video games is relatively easy—you can evenplay many of them on your phone. But these iPod click wheel games felt lost to time. Apple used a version of their FairPlay DRM on iPod games, making it difficult to do “simple things to make new playable copies of the games.” Except for one “legend in the iPod community,” whocracked 20 games back in 2006, no one has been able to decrypt the DRM. Those cracked games also need custom firmware to run, which only works on the 5th generation iPod classic. To make matters worse for Olsro,Asphalt 4is not one of those cracked games. Armed with years of technical knowledge and experience, Olsro went looking for a different solution, one that would not only allow him to replayAsphalt 4, but to preserve and share these games with the iPod enthusiast community. The first hurdle was working around Apple’s restrictive DRM. When Apple delisted the iPod click wheel games in 2011, it became impossible to download them from the store. If you have the original .ipg file (dot iPod game, natch), you can still authorize the game with Apple’s servers. But if you didn’t have it downloaded in 2011, you’re shit out of luck. And don’t think you can go around authorizing any old .ipg file you find on the internet—these files are tied to your account and your account only. Even if you purchased that particular game, you can’t authorize another person’s copy. Luckily, there is a bit of a loophole in Apple’s DRM. You can authorize multiple iTunes installations to hold your library of .ipg files, and multiple people can authorize games in one copy of iTunes. That means it’s possible for one computer to hold and sync all 54 iPod games, even if you need to authorize 54 separate accounts for each of those games. Once those games are authorized in iTunes, they can be synced to any—and multiple—iPods, and those iPods can also hold music and videos from other iTunes accounts. Reddit user Quix—who also runs the DankPods Discord group—used this method in 2022to amass a library of 19 games. But anyone who wanted to play them needed to physically sync their iPod with Quix’s computer, which tampered enthusiasm for the effort. Enter Olsro’s big innovation:a virtual Windows 10 machine. This machine has iTunes and holds a library of authorized games. If you have a compatible iPod, you can download the virtual machine and sync the games to your device—no cracks, custom firmware, or other tomfoolery required. Of course, Olsro needed to actually to find the games for this to work. Olsroput the word out on Redditthat he was looking for iPod games on October 7th. He told me that most people who reached out to him “could not complete the process… for multiple reasons.” They might’ve known the Apple ID that purchased the games but didn’t actually have the .ipg files. Others had the files but no longer had access to the original Apple IDs. But it didn’t take long for Olsro to start collecting games. Just a few days after his initial post, he had two games—PhaseandTexas Hold’Em—and released the first version of the virtual machine for wide distribution. Over the last month, Olsrohas collected 52 of the 54 total gamesreleased for the iPod, with onlyReal Soccer 2009andTiger Woods PGA Tourmissing from the line-up. It took 10 different accounts to authorize this library—unsurprisingly, people rarely had more than a handful of click wheel games. With each game coming in at an extortionate $4.99, it would cost $269.46 to buy the full library, almost $400 in today’s dollars. Olsro believes that this method should preserve the games indefinitely. “When new games are authed, the decryption keys are stored in the virtual machine and the VM can work fully offline forever.” By default, internet access is disabled on the virtual machine to avoid issues like Apple automatically or remotely deauthorizing games. “I feel like it is now or never to achieve this project… before Apple decides that maintaining the old servers [is] not worth it anymore,” which would make new authorizations impossible. In an ideal world, the DRM would be cracked, allowing these games to live on without iTunes or even original iPod hardware. But Olsro’s project is a crucial step for making that happen, as the virtual machine is a centralized and infinitely distributable place for decryption keys, giving developers an easier way to experiment and play with cracking methods. With the iPod click wheel games preservation project almost complete, Olsro is turning his attention to other iPod projects, likeguides to the most efficient audio formats on legacy devicesand small utilities, like “Music Shortest Path,” a file directory normalization tool for Rockbox. You can follow along with his latest projects onReddit, or onPatreon, where he collects small donations. And if you want to sync 52 click wheel games to your compatible iPod? Justfollow the instructionsover on GitHub.

Khaled Abou Alfa

www.kaa.bz — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 02:56:41 +0000

America is a freedomto dosomething. While other developed countries are freedomfromsomething.

how many humans does it take to unstuck a truck?

islanddude.bearblog.dev — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 02:52:00 +0000

**how many humans does it take to unstuck a truck?** 20 Nov, 2024 When I was walking along the beach earlier, I saw a truck stuck in the shallow water. It had a trailer with a pair of jet skis, and was attempting to bring them ashore. Emphasis on "attempting". Despite lots of engine revving, its back wheels spun out before it could get into the firmer sand and the truck went nowhere. This happened on repeat. The truck was stuck. Judging from the other nearby trucks with similar trailers and the colorfully signed clubhouses past the high tide mark, I expect that bringing in jet skis was a daily routine. When the truck attempted to accelerate forward, there was a guy bouncing on the back of the jet skis, presumably to help give the truck more traction. After a few failed attempts, a few more guys got on the trailer and jet skis, presumably to add even more weight, but to no avail. The truck was thoroughly stuck. I couldn't help but think, hey I've seen this movie before. My urban upbringing didn't provide this sort of experience, but the construction site I worked in Kansas sure did. We got stuck many a time in the mud, and the solution was to lay short blocks of wood underneath the wheels to provide more of a surface for the tires to grip upon. I'm sure these fellows had it handled, but I couldn't help myself from looking around for some nearby pieces of driftwood that I could help contribute to the cause. Before I could find anything, a neighbor and/or competitor in the jet ski rental market walked over to the driver and gesticulated turning the steering wheel. Moments later, the driver adjusted course to be angled away from the coastline, rather than perpendicular, and this seemed to do the trick. The truck was unstuck! The point of this story, despite its somewhat shaggy dog nature, is to give an example of humans helping humans. Without that person's advice to angle the truck, who knows how long it would have taken to drive out. I think that it's really easy to get oneself into these mental ruts of believing that humans are always selfish and always looking out for themselves. While there certainly is a lot of evidence to support that belief, if you start looking for instances of humans helping humans, you may be surprised at how often you see it. I believe that helping each other is fundamentally baked in to human nature. It's instinctual. It's natural. And if you stop and think, you realize that this inclination to help is perhaps why humans have completely and utterly taken over the Earth, despite having no fangs, no claws, and dreadfully helpless offspring. Incredible intelligence doesn't mean much if it never extends beyond oneself. And thus concludes my post appreciating the generosity of a kind soul I have never seen before and will likely never see again. Keep your eye out for humans helping humans -- I find these little moments to be quite inspiring. Here's an unrelated photo I took near the beach with the (un)stuck truck. Clouds and foreign language road signs frequently catch my photography eye, and today I got to feed two birds with one scone.

Shame

zdfs.com — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 02:35:37 +0000

A poem about Evangelical culture, feeling yourself, and carrying shame. Yes, you can have ChatGPT write a poem in the voice of whatever poet you want. It won't be good. It won't have any of the details right. Mimicry rarely does. For example, I asked it to write a poem likeAndrew Hudginsand it was garbage. I know where Mr. Hudgins likes to insert humor in his poems. I know what his poems are about. And whatever AI gave me was not an Andrew Hudgins poem. I don't know what the fuck it was, but it sure as shit wasn'tPraying Drunkor even close to it. Let's hypothesize AIcouldwrite a poem like Praying Drunk—let's just say on a technical level, we could get there. It's so good, it somehow got accepted into a big poetry journal. What then? What does it mean? Well, I'll tell you what: jack shit. There was an article this week that made the rounds."AI-generated poetry is indistinguishable from human-written poetry and is rated more favorably". Which is all super interesting until you dig into the details of the report. There's a lot of "ifs", "ands" and "buts", which there has to be because we, as a species, will always come up short digitizing the human experience. I honestly believe that. I've written about this before, but the discoveries made during the creation of art is more important than the art itself. Discovery is a very human experience. AI is a mimic. A very good mimic. But mimicking the Mona Lisa isn't important. The creation of it—was and still is important—because of all the human experience tied up within it. A piece of art created by AI? Even if you threw in a 3D printer, who gives a shit. Why should I care? The answer is I wouldn't—no humanity involved. I know this phrase has a lot to unpack, but I'm starting to wonder if there's finite limit to anything we try to accomplish as a species. And trying to surpass that limit will always be a little sad. Capitalism can't grow forever. Infinite growth in a closed system is not possible. There are limits to space travel. Artificial General Intelligence sounds like a pipe dream to me. I could be wrong, of course. I honestly don't care. Sometimes I think it would be nice to have a choice about what I'm going to write about. It's often the case that I don't. And reader, sex poems are not my jam. Sitting at the coffee shop, the beginnings of the poem plopped into my brain, and I remember thinking:Yeah, no thanks.And I almost skipped it. Dropped it to the floor. I wanted to. Ugh. What the fuck, no thanks. But I didn't—because art is about discovery. You believe that or you don't. And you walk the path given if you truly believe it, which I do. So this is a poem about Evangelical culture and masturbation and acknowledging a thing I clearly carry with me all the time. Poems tend to do that—force acknowledgment. I'm glad I wrote it, but I'll be very surprised if I ever send it out for publication. Probably just stick it in a folder to die.

No finishing thoughts

joelchrono12.xyz — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 02:26:55 +0000

**No finishing thoughts** As I do week notes, one of my usual practices when finishing my blog posts is no longer needed, a conclusion - ramble I always try to have a final paragraph to wrap things up in my blog posts, not necessarily with a heading or anything, but just the natural conclusion of writing something. I always do this even on my monthly summaries and such, but for my weeknotes, I just don’t, I list my random notes of the week and just finish the post. I sawRL Danesharing a post about hisevery day carryand noticed that he also does not have any conclusion, just listed the things and called it a day. Maybe I should try and do that, write what I’m going to write and stop, not everything needs to have a proper ending I guess? Another thing I notice is that I probably use the word “anyway” and “regardless” a lot, but what else can I say? No matter how hard I try, I’ll probably still try to conclude this in some way, my previous two paragraphs already ended with unanswered questions, maybe this time it will be just a sudden break with no continuation. But here I am, continuing again, I just think it’s incomplete, maybe I will try with a quote I’ve used before. Arrakis teaches the attitude of the knife - chopping off what’s incomplete and saying: “Now, it’s complete because it’s ended here.” — from “Collected Sayings of Maud’Dib’’ by the Princess Irulan Aaagh, you see, but that was the ending of myreview of Dune!oops, spoilers, it is not fair to rehash it again for some random rambling of mine that is so off-topic and doesn’t even deserve such a great quote in it. At this point, I’m just trying to keep you reading a completely non-sensical text, but did it work? If it did and you reached this point of the article, comment your favorite fruit in an email or comments below! Such a cheap way to create engagement, I know, I can’t end this article with such a tactic, it has to be fair and square—but please, do that random comment anyway. 😉 Honestly, I’m just trying to reach a word count at this point, you can really go read something else now, I beg of you. And done, this should be right around 400 words now, good job me! See you around my dear reader! Until later. This is 90 day of#100DaysToOffload

Reading Mastodon via Inoreader

bearblog.jasonkratz.me — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 02:18:00 +0000

**Reading Mastodon via Inoreader** 20 Nov, 2024 I've been experimenting with reading my Mastodon timeline viaInoreader. Mastodon doesn't have an RSS feed by default for your full timeline1but it's easy to create one viaMasto Feeder. Masto Feeder generates a very nice timeline feed including a little icon to indicate that an item is a boost. So far for me the best feature is being able to read my timeline from oldest to newest vs. having to scroll to the oldest post then read upwards. This is on the Mastodon website of course. Nice clients like Ivory keep the position where you last read but even in that case you scroll up, and if your timeline has had a lot of action you'll be doing a lot of scrolling as the client keeps loading new posts.2 The other nice thing about using Inoreader and RSS to read my timeline is a built in resistance to instantly responding since it's read-only. There is friction to have to go to the website to respond to something so it's been valuable that way as well. Yes, you can get an RSS feed of a particular user but I want to be able to read my full timeline via RSS which isn't currently possible without help.↩ I've also removed all social media clients from my devices to help with too much time spent on social media.↩ #social media

The Ballad of Nick Nurse

azhdarchid.com — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 02:04:00 +0000

**The Ballad of Nick Nurse** 20 Nov, 2024 So if you're not following the NBA, here's a brie recap of how our old friends thesixersare doing. Joel Embiid is still here. Young all-star Tyrese Maxey is also here. They traded for Paul George, at one point a bona fide star in the NBA, in the offseason. They were projected to land somewhere north of 40 wins this season. In preseason betting they were ranked eighth in championship odds. Which is to say: they went into the season as a respectable playoff team. Not necessarily title contenders, but in the upper echelon of the league. Instead as I write this they are 2-11. They are tied with Washington for the worst record in the league. Those two wins they have? Both in overtime. They have not won a game in regulation. Injuries play a major role, of course; Joel has barely suited up for the sixers. But that's not the whole story. Their team just seems discombobulated, disorganized, slow, unfocused. Naturally, fans are asking questions about their coach, Nick Nurse. Nurse won a championship with the Raptors, of course. Sixers fans remember that season with a wince. So how could it be that a guy who a few years ago was an NBA champion is now suddenly such a bad coach? Was Nurse a fraud all along? Were the Sixers duped into hiring this guy? I don't really think that's the case. I think the tale of Nick Nurse illustrates just how much context is a powerful determinant in human performance. You see, Nurse is a genius, especially when it comes to defense. You give him the right tools and he will build you a Rube Goldberg machine to break any basketball offense. He'll snap the game in half if he has to. The 2019 playoffs were a tour de force of defensive game planning in which half the superstars in the league were successively put in jail. But even in his later Raptor years, when Nurse had profoundly lopsided and inadequate rosters, he was still eking out an unrealistic number of wins by pushing the game's math to the breaking point. In 2021-22 he had a team that simply could not shoot, could not create decent offense. Most coaches in that situation would simply have tried to 'get their guys going', spun their wheels trying to squeeze shooting from a team that couldn't shoot. They might have tried to develop non-shooters into shooters. They might have tried to lean harder into other forms of offense. Nurse didn't give a shit about that. Nurse simply decided to turn the ball over way less than other teams, get way more steals than other teams, and rebound way more than other teams. His team still shot the ball atrociously but they simply had so many more possessions, and thus shot attempts, to work with. That was enough to make the playoffs with a team that had no business making it that far. But the thing is, Nurse also seems to have the emotional intelligence of a traffic cone. He's a weird little midwestern preacher man with no real rapport with anyone. Those 2019 Raptors were perfect for him: a team with a lot of continuity, that knew how to play together. A team that really just needed a new game plan. A team that had the maturity and emotional security to see past the man and imagine the vision. Yes, he's going to make you play harsh minutes. Yes, he's going to play guys who can contribute and will relentlessly bench players who can't keep up.Yes, he's going to ask you to do things that you've not done before, and he's going to give you instructions that make little sense. But you'll win. And winning fixes everything. The Sixers are... not that. The Sixers are a team that's broken and cursed. Their superstar has grown up in a basket case of intrigue and ego, constantly being fried by the harsh limelight of Philly sports disappointment. There's no well-oiled machine for Nurse to pull the levers on. There's no perfectly polished army of chess men. There's just people, and Nurse's no good at people. Philly fired Doc and hired Nurse, but they don't need aphysician.They need an exorcist. They needed someone who could banish the malignant spirits hanging around Wells Fargo center. Nurse just isn't that guy. #basketball#history of the 76ers#sports

A Quick ASK me: Garfield Quickies – News From ME

www.newsfromme.com — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 02:02:16 +0000

**A Quick ASK me: Garfield Quickies** From Adam Kennedy… Hey Mark, here's a question that you may have answered on your blog before. OnGarfield & Friends(which I love) I remember the slightly uncomfortably titled, "Quickies" were often (always?) direct adaptations ofGarfieldcomic strips straight from the rag to the tube — rather like many latter dayPeanuts"specials." My question is, who was in charge of picking the strips to adapt? Did you yourself browse through the latest "fat cat 3-pack" and choose one that seemed appropriate? Was it someone else's job, or did Jim Davis ever paw a few your way? Jim and his staff recommended a few. I picked out most of 'em from piles and piles ofGarfieldcomic strips I had here in many forms while working on that show. I think one or two were original but most were from the newspaper strips.

For the love of god, quit calling your newsletter “my Substa...

kottke.org — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 01:16:39 +0000

For the love of god,quit calling your newsletter “my Substack”. “You can talk about your work as *your work*. It’s your newsletter, or your email, or your blog. Or just your writing. But it sure as hell isn’t ‘your Substack.’”

jonhays.me — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 00:42:25 +0000

Follow @cheesemaker on Micro.blog.

Played some Sokobond Express

blog.lauramichet.com — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 00:05:00 +0000

**Played some Sokobond Express** 20 Nov, 2024 I was a huge PC Sokobond fiend right after it came out - I had it installed on my work computer at Tencent and would play it during lunchtime periods while eating indian burritos at my desk. I ate those burritos basically 3 out of 5 days of the week and my memory of the Sokobond Lunch always includes them. Sokobond Express is a great twist on the game, and I'm so delighted that Draknek published it. It's the work of a single designer, Jose Hernandez, who's done a fantastic job atnot only combining Sokobond and Cosmic Express, but also at surfacing the visual information which helps you navigate both those vectors of puzzle simultaneously. After completing a large number of smaller levels, the player gains access to a series of much-harder puzzles which combine each of the small levels' themes and mechanics. This was where I started to notice how fucking good the game was at using visuals to surface various elements of the puzzle to me. It's really fantastic. I am not very good at this kind of puzzle, and I'm particularly bad at bringin discipline and persistence to puzzle games with a lot of "bottlenecks" in them. Sokobond Express is pretty good at keeping a lot of branching puzzle opportunities open for me, so I've been able to keep at it despite being a bit of an idiot. Anyway, if you want something to fiddle at during a lunch hour, this remains a great choice. I'll be doing that for the next few weeks for sure. #games#recommendations

Bypassing app lock in Ente Auth

alexbakker.me — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

**Bypassing app lock in Ente Auth** A couple of months ago I discovered three issues that allow one to bypass app lock in Ente Auth. The issues I found aren’t technically interesting and don’t really deserve a blog post, but since Ente appears to be hesitant to notify their users about them, somebody else has to do it. Disclaimer: I’m one of the authors ofAegis Authenticator. Some background: Aegis’ implementation of automatic lock has a somewhat annoying side effect that makes the app vanish from the recent apps screen in Android.A user recently commentedthat Ente Auth does not have this issue and suggested that we take some inspiration from them. I decided to take a look, but found myself drafting an email to security@ente.io after 10 minutes of playing around with the app. The issues These issues were discovered in Ente Auth 3.1.3 for Android, but may be present on other platforms as well. I used the app without signing into an Ente account. We’re not going to dive into Ente Auth’s code to find the cause of these issues, because I don’t think it would make for interesting reading. As you’ll realize while watching the demonstration videos below, the fact that app lock can be bypassed in this fashion tells us that it was implemented as essentiallya glorified “if” statementrather than actually requiring the configured credential to decrypt the secrets used to generate OTP’s. 1.Bypassing app lock after the app was automatically locked from the app lock settings screen: 2.Downgrade from password app lock to device credential based app lock by entering the device PIN: 3.Bypassing device credential based app lock entirely: The second and third video contain a brief flash of blackness, because Android blocks screen recording of the device credential prompt. The touch indicators give a hint of what I’m doing. In video2I’m entering the device PIN (not the password configured in Ente) and in video3I simply dismiss the prompt. The first two issues were fixed in 18 days. The third one was fixed in 76 days. Here’s the timeline: 2024-09-04Report submitted via email. 2024-09-05Ente responds: Thank you for bringing these issues to our attention. We’ll be fixing these problems in the next update. 2024-09-22I notice thatEnte Auth 4.0.0was released which silently fixes the first two issues. I send an email where I: - Point out that device credential based app lock can still be bypassed. - Express that I was a little surprised to see that there’s no announcement urging users to update. - Mention that I would have appreciated a brief mention crediting me for reporting these issues. 2024-09-25 - 2024-09-26Some back and forth emails: The dev team is looking into the remaining issue. They explain that they currently don’t have “a credit system” for issues. I clarify that I’m not looking for a monetary reward. They don’t respond to my comment about not announcing the issue to their users. 2024-11-17I send an email reminding them about this issue and that a little over 2 weeks are left until the 90 day mark. I also share a draft of the blog post I plan to publish on the 3rd of December. 2024-11-19Ente Auth 4.1.0 is released with a fix for the third issue. It looks like 4.1.0 was released as a pre-release on GitHub on the 5th of November, but it had not been rolled out through all channels (such as Google Play) yet. 2024-11-20Vishnu from Ente reaches out via email. To summarize: - “The GitHub release did not get promoted due to human error, so the release did not get pushed to some of our distribution channels. We’ve now appointed a release manager to reduce the possibility of such errors.” - https://github.com/ente-io/ente/releases/tag/auth-v4.0.0 - https://github.com/ente-io/ente/releases/tag/auth-v4.1.0 - The changelogs on GitHub have been updated to mention the security issues: - The help articles have beenupdatedto explain how app lock works in Ente Auth. 2024-11-20Since all issues have been fixed, this blog post was published earlier than the 90 day mark.

Bill 212 • Pxtl.ca

www.pxtl.ca — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

**Pxtl.ca** Martin Zarate's site, about C# software development and Hamilton, Ontario. **Bill 212** So in a fit of pettiness, the Government of Ontario is set to wrap up bike-lanes in a 50-foot-ball of red tape to prevent their construction. I asked on Bluesky what was the best way to complain - if there was a petition I should sign or something. Craig Burley recommended I send afaxof all things. It's got a good chance of being physical media in their space, and won't just be in a slushpile of emails they ignore, or forgettable names on a petition. So I wrote up the letters for the Premier and the Minister of Transportation at lunch on Tuesday and faxed them from my local UPS store. Also emailed them for good measure. They're not my best writing but I was kind of in a rush. The bodies of the letters are attached below. First, to Premier Ford The Honourable Premier of Ontario Doug FordLegislative BuildingQueen's ParkToronto ON M7A 1A1 Dear Premier, I am a father of three who lives in Hamilton. I am a regular cycling commuter (yes, even in winter), from a family of cyclists, and have taught and equipped my children to use their bikes for travel as well. When my kids were younger, a bike-trailer is how I got them to school and to their daycare. I hope this conveys that this is not about recreation - this is me living my life. My interest is about protecting my children and being able to care for them. The bike-lanes that enable this were carved out of existing roadways, and so they would be covered under Bill 212. The new Keddy Access Trail lane (named for a kindergarten teacher and cyclist killed in a hit-and-run) allows me to get up the escarpment to my doctor’s office instead of having to take a taxi. Each of these lanes were a battle in Hamilton’s city council to obtain - adding new red tape to this process will likely push such improvements out of reach, which harms the safety and freedom of myself and my children. And speaking of red tape, I’m not one who opposes this change on democratic grounds - I truly believe the province should overrule the municipal governments on some matters, as is your right. But when I worry about my kids, it’s not whether they’ll be able to travel fast-enough in their cars, but whether they’ll be able to have homes of their own. Their own views reflect this - they are worried about ever being able to move out in our broken housing market, but getting my oldest to show any interest in obtaining his driver’s license has been like pulling teeth. The Housing Affordability Task Force emphatically told the province what to do to fix the housing crisis, explaining which municipal rules and processes need to be overridden top-down to get homes built… and yet instead of that critical cost-of-living crisis, you’re focusing on bike lanes of all things? The tiny handful of HATF recommendations that were embraced have been scaled back to almost nothing, and the remaining lion’s share are completely unapplied. Where are the as-of-right intensification rules? Where is shutting down the ability of busybodies to block the construction of critically needed homes? Are there not enough people living in tents already? To be blunt: Why do we see this power and enthusiasm spent on removing a nuisance from your commute, instead of fixing life-ruining problems? Thanks for your time, Martin Zarate Second, to Transportation Minister Sarkaria The Honourable Minister of Transportation Prabmeet Singh Sarkaria Ministry of Transportation 5th Floor 777 Bay St. Toronto, ON M7A 1Z8 Dear Minister, I am a father of three who lives in Hamilton. I am a regular cycling commuter (yes, even in winter), from a family of cyclists, and have taught and equipped my children to use their bikes for travel as well. When my kids were younger, a bike-trailer is how I got them to school and to their daycare. My kids used these bike lanes to get to summer day-camp programs.I hope this conveys that this is not about recreation - this is my family living our lives. My interest is about protecting my children and being able to care for them. The bike-lanes that enable this life were carved out of existing roadways, and so they would be covered under Bill 212. The new Keddy Access Trail lane (named for a kindergarten teacher and cyclist killed in a hit-and-run) allows me to get up the escarpment to my doctor’s office instead of having to take a taxi. Each of these lanes were a battle in Hamilton’s city council to obtain - adding new red tape to this process will likely push such improvements out of reach, which harms the safety and freedom of myself and my children. And speaking of red tape, I’m not one who opposes this change on democratic grounds - I truly believe the province should overrule the municipal governments on some matters, as is your right. But when I worry about my kids, it’s not whether they’ll be able to travel fast-enough in their cars, but whether they’ll be able to have homes of their own. Their own views reflect this - they are worried about ever being able to move out in our broken housing market, but getting my oldest to show any interest in obtaining his driver’s licence has been like pulling teeth. Surely the Ministry could be focusing on other things? All over Ontario we’ve watched critical public transit projects get bogged down in over a dozen years of delays. Why does an LRT line take a decade when destroying active transit apparently takes a few days? Where is this excitement and motivation on those matters? To me, this sounds like a problem of priorities in the Ministry of Transportation. The Ministry of Transportation could be making Ontario healthier, greener, safer, and easier to get around. Instead, bill 212 proposes to do the exact opposite. I hope you’ll reconsider this plan, it is literally a matter of life-and-death for my family. Thanks for your time, Martin Zarate

Object Constellations – Noel Rappin Writes Here

noelrappin.com — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Object Constellations Posted onNovember20,2024 Last time, I talked about ways to use dynamic typing to manage objects and business logic in your code. Doing so involves leaning into the object system, going beyond just “one class for each noun” and creating objects to model different states within the business logic directly. In a basic Object-Oriented design, you might have an object called. This object, by itself, represents the entire concept of a user within the system. In this design, specific states of a user — admin, unauthorized, deleted, subscriber, what have you — are all represented by the single class. That’s one way to model users. But you could also have theclass be a home for the underlying data and manage some or all of the state of a user by creating wrapper classes like,,… even. At this point, the idea of a “user” is now spread among multiple classes. I’ve started calling this an “object constellation”, feel free to call it whatever you want. Why the Constellation Works Ruby, like many object oriented languages, is “polymorphic”. In Ruby terms, “polymorphic” means that result of a method call, like, is resolved by the class ofat run-time, and thatcould be of any class that implements. As a result, you can kind of model Ruby’s message passing as a hugeorstatement: In pseudo-code, when you call, you can model what Ruby does like this: (Ruby’s internals look different, it’s closer to a hash look up than a case statement, the point is that you can model message passing as the result of astatement.) This model of method passing is why you typically are advised not to have case statements where the clauses are classes – you’re advised to just dispatch the call polymorphically to the correct method… because the case statement and the dispatch are essentially the same thing. (In Ruby, you might sometimes use the case statement to avoid monkey patching core classes…) The flip side is that you can also model conditional logic in the case system, and dispatch calls the same way. This suggests that if we can map the clauses of this case statement to classes that have identically named methods, we can map the entire conditional to a polymorphic method call. When we do this, we use the object system to hold onto conditional state. Null Objects A concrete example involves calls to— in this case your constellation consists of two classes: the “real” class and the null class. You may have a lot of code that looks like this: If we think about each branch of thatstatement mapping to a different class, that would mean we have two classes. Our regular, and then a… well, a. These types are related, in that they should have the same API, but one of them has real business logic, and the other is basically an empty shell. There are a bunch of ways to accomplish having these two classes in Ruby. One way is to have a factory class that replicates the conditional logic and returns one class or the other. Then put a method in each class – with the same name – with the corresponding logic: We’ve ow replaced the conditional: with a polymorphic method call… Okay, I’ve replaced a simple conditional with some object-oriented hand-waving. Why? Reasons in favor: - The through line of the logic in original method is clearer, (I mean, not in this trivial example, but in a real problem) this is especially true if there are a lot of different branches to the conditional. - It’s easier to test, especially easier to test the null object behavior in isolation. - If this check is done repeatedly, it ensures consistency in how the check is handled. This is especially valuable for complex status checks. (I find this to be an underrated benefit — there’s a strong tendency to make the checks more thorough if you are only typing them once…) - These small classes have a way of accumulating behavior in useful ways. Reasons against: - The logic is now more distributed, if you want to see what happens on the error condition, you have to seek out theclass. You have to get used to it. (I will say that as editor support has improved, this gets easier). - This works interestingly with static typing tools, since you now have a lot of variables that are, say, the union type of. I guess, though, you can then specifyorto get interesting type safety. - There’s some Ruby-specific sort of weirdness with null objects and logical truth and falsity. In Ruby, the only things that are logically false areand, meaning thatis logically false, butreturning ainstance isn’t logically false, which can lead to subtle bugs. This is a manageable problem, but you have to pick a way to manage it. (For instance, you can define amethod and use that for your checks.) Object and Shadow Object In the Null Object pattern you have a constellation of two classes: the “full-featured” class, like our, and then a parallel “shadow” classes. The shadow class, like, represents a genuine logical state in the system, but one in which you are representing the absence of something or, more generally, an incomplete form of something. Specifically, the shadow class typically does not need to access the data that the full-featured class does. The shadow object has the same API as the original object but has custom business logic that manages the lack of data. Once you start looking for this pattern, it’s all over… - — if you have logic that allows logged in users and non-logged in users, having the default current user be of classlets you easily manage logic for users that haven’t created accounts. You can even tie a cookie to a specific instance ofand allow that user to have at least some of the features of your app. - — perhaps this one auto-creates the file before attempting to write to it, or maybe it just returns an empty string before you try to read from it. - — my user was “friends” with another user who has been archived, this class lets me treat all those users together in one loop. There could even be multiple shadow objects here,,, etc, all of which contain the edge case logic needed. Almost any Railsrelationship has a plausible case for a shadow object to model the case where the other side of the object doesn’t exist or doesn’t exist yet. (Thenull_associationsgem does this automatically, but I’m not sure if it’s current.) And the shadow object can have real logic — I’m doing a project that describes gem dependencies across multiple apps and gems by parsing. Not every gem in our ecosystem puts a lockfile in the repository, so I haveand. Theis a shadow object which attempts to fake the dependency tree information by inferring it from the. It makes the code much clearer. Superset Objects There are other constellation patterns that don’t depend on shadow objects. For example there could be a data class that is the center of the constellation with multiple classes in the constellation that wrap the data class and therefore have access to the underlying data. Typically, this pattern happens when each wrapper class represents a different state or condition of the underlying data. For example, you might have aclass that might have some role within the system. You could set that up as a constellation of classes: Then any time you need to do something with a user that depends on their role, rather than repeating the cascade of ifs or whatever, you can just do something like this: Themethod callsmeaning that the actual behavior ofis dependent on the role of the user. This code prevents repeating that if/case logic to determine the type of user by allowing downstream logic to callto determine the user role, and thento actually do the edit if it’s authorized. The critical point here is that while the role objects have access to the user data, methods likeare only available on the role object, so you must useto check the role logic before trying In the name of keeping this one under 2500 words, I’m going to stop here. You should try this technique (granted that this is over simplifying, and, oh, I’m probably going to need to post a more complete example). - Find a conditional logic that you use more than once in your app. Maybe it’s acheck, maybe it’s a bigstatement. - Copy that conditional to a factory method that returns a different class for each branch of the conditional. - Create the new classes. They may need to be delegators or have constructors that connect back to the original data class. - Move the logic from each branch into a method of the corresponding class, give the methods the same name. - Replace the original conditional with a call to the factory method and a call to the new method name. - Find other examples of the same conditional logic and repeat steps 4 and 5. Be careful withand implicit boolean checks. Try it once, see if you like it.

Understanding the magic behind C++17's structured bindings

andreasfertig.blog — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

C++ Insights Episode 56: Understanding the magic behind C++17's structured bindings I published a new C++ insights episode: Understanding the magic behind C++17's structured bindings. In this episode, you learn how C++17s structured bindings work. Source code: https://cppinsights.io/s/1c69deaf

Even idle (10%-15% CPU usage), the new M4 Mac mini …

blog.numericcitizen.me — Tue, 19 Nov 2024 22:50:50 +0000

**November 19, 2024 5:50pm** Even idle (10%-15% CPU usage), the new M4 Mac mini (with M4 Pro chip) runs much hotter than the old M1. I don’t hear the fan but according to iStats Menu, the temp inside is 56F.

🦋 Zarf on Bluesky

so.axodys.com — Tue, 19 Nov 2024 22:47:00 +0000

**🦋 Zarf on Bluesky** Andrew Plotkin (Zarf) has some worthwhile thoughts on Bluesky:Four weeks in the blue sky. In retrospect, Twitter had a lot of stuff that I wasnotinto. And I'm not talking about the toxicity and harassment (which, I am relieved to say, never landed directly on me). I'm talking about thegoodsocial interactions. Forwarding the news of the day. Finding a new twist on the meme everybody is repeating. Retweet with your last book/teacup/Simpson's quote. "You may not like it but this is what peaklooks like." Shitposts, in the most enthusiastic sense. People manifestly love this stuff. Bluesky is getting a huge wave of people who feel like they can finally leave Twitterwithout giving that stuff up. But it's not what I was on Twitter for. It's what I rolled my eyes and scrolled past so I could get to people talking. To be clear: I'm not complaining and I don't think Bluesky needs to change. (I don't think you need to use Bluesky differently.) But scrolling past all that stuff is a bit of drag, a bit of daily energy cost. When I bailed for Mastodon, this little muscle in my neck relaxed. I didn't realize how good that was until I got onto Bluesky and felt it tense up again. I appreciate most of Zarf's observations and can relate to a lot of them- in particular the energy suck danger. It's clear to me that there are already a few people I'm following who simply post too much for my taste and I need to unfollow them. Most of my posts on Bluesky will be replies to other people or related to live events. I'm decidedly not interested in driving more traffic and attention from social media randos to my blog and microblog. Like Zarf I am interested in conversations with people with similar interests to my own, and completely agree that you don't need to follow a lot of people to get that (or everyone that follows you). His thoughts on clients and interface functionality and niceties are on point as well, but I expect those to improve with time.

2024-11-19

workbrain.bearblog.dev — Tue, 19 Nov 2024 22:36:00 +0000

**2024-11-19** 19 Nov, 2024 another day of more meetings than work a lot of time spent evidencing or describing the work rather than doing it not being able to use skills to full potential looking at even more meetings tomorrow and more evenings spent logged on... analysis work is interesting really want to crack the API graph query stuff

Some Advice on Not Drinking

linkage.lol — Tue, 19 Nov 2024 21:53:00 +0000

**Some Advice on Not Drinking** 19 Nov, 2024 I am not one of those priggish tee-totalers who thinks drinking is a sin and that no one should indulge in demon rum, not at all. In fact, coming from a 12-Step recovery tradition, I have no real opinion on drinking as an institution, but I've never looked down my nose at anyone who enjoys a cold beer, a glass of win or a mixed drink. I don't look down my nose at people who have a problem with booze either. Nobody volunteers to become an alcoholic. Alcohol just has a way of taking over the lives of a certain percentage of the population, usually ones who have family members with the same issue. There are certain genetic markers for addiction and whether it's an illness isn't really debatable anymore except by science denying morons - so about half of America.LOL.Sob. I digress. My point is, if you have decided not to drink for a night or for the rest of your life, whatever, here are a few things I have learned. Number one - it's less of a big deal to other people than you think it is. When people who like to drink are kinda sorta thinking about stopping, they almost always cite the social pressure to drink as a reason why they can't. That's their inner little drunk devil talking to them. Nobody cares! They aren't thinking about you as much as you think they are. When you are at a party or a family holiday celebration, get a non-alcoholic drink and hold on to that sucker for dear life. DO NOT PUT IT DOWN! If you're trying to camouflage your sobriety, put a twist and a swizzle stick in you club soda. Just don't let go of it. I've had a couple of occasions where I've failed to obey this rule and ended up with a horrifying mouth full my step-father's gin and my sister's wine. Not cool. I didn't relapse or anything, but it's not a good feeling. Once my sister-in-law spilled a glass of wine on me and I had two-hour drive home. I used Vick's Medicated Rub in my nostrils to kill the smell just like people at the morgue do to cover up the smell of decaying flesh. You can also plan on arriving late and leaving early to any parties when you are trying to live that sober life. Drinking mocktails or alcohol free beer is an option for some but personally I never wanted the romance of booze without the booze. If you get a craving for alcohol, eating sweets is a well known way to make the craving subside. Trust me. If you've decided you do have a problem and you want to quit for good, and brothers and sisters, I'm here to tell you that for real problem drinkers, cutting back is not the answer. Abstinence is. Sorry, them's the facts. Anyway, if you want to quit, you can. You've never met anyone in your life who loves to drink as much as me and I haven't had one in about 16 years because of reasons. Lots of reasons. My inbox is always open. How to Stop Alcohol Cravings - Handling the Urges to Drink - Rethinking Drinking | NIAAA How to Stop Drinking Alcohol | Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation How to Stop Drinking Alcohol, According to Experts - GoodRxEnjoyed it? Please upvote 👇

Chris DeLuca

www.chrisdeluca.me — Tue, 19 Nov 2024 21:52:43 +0000

November 19, 2024 Had a lovely time at NEDCamp as always. Thanks to all the organizers and speakers for such a great con.

Books I Read in 2024: The Big Sleep — SUSANNAH BRESLIN

susannahbreslin.com — Tue, 19 Nov 2024 21:46:39 +0000

**Books I Read in 2024: The Big Sleep** I decided to readThe Big Sleepbecause one of the books I’m writing is a thriller. Generally speaking, this book is not for me. Hardboiled. High drama. Plot heavy. Tough guys and troubled dames. That said, I enjoyed some aspects of it: the literary flourishes, the narrative tension, the obsession with other people’s thumbs. Books I Read in 2024:Victory Parade,I Hate Men,My Friend Dahmer,The Crying of Lot 49,Machines in the Head,Big Magic,The Valley,End of Active Service,An Honest Woman,The Money Shot,Atomic Habits,Finding Your Own North Star,Crazy Cock,Sigrid Rides,Your Money Or Your Life,The Big Sleep

Manton Reece

www.manton.org — Tue, 19 Nov 2024 21:42:37 +0000

I’m working on a new page for Micro.blog and having so much fun with it. It’s equal parts business marketing page and hobby art project, built natively for the web with CSS and JS.

written while standing in the cvs cosmetics aisle

horse.bearblog.dev — Tue, 19 Nov 2024 21:28:00 +0000

**written while standing in the cvs cosmetics aisle** 19 Nov, 2024 Amidst my re-reading of the passage for clarity on the various men's opinions, I caught the conversation of the front desk. They had been talking the entire time I'd been reading, but I didn't mind the filler. I never heard specifics, only descriptors - the old man's endearingly raspy voice engaging a young boy's, the mother, sounding proud. In the back of my mind i imagined a conversation about the young boy's reading voracity, the older gentleman giving encouragement. i I remembered looking at the time, 6:43. 17 minutes before closing. I flipped forward a couple pages to where the paragraphs were halted by blank space, a natural break from where I could comfortably leave. I gauged that 7 pages was doable in 15 minutes, but I was distracted by the front desk's words: now more clear to me than when i was reading. They were talking about who was left in the library. I was aware of people leaving, more than the amount of people entering, but it hadn't bothered me much. Now, though, I heard the front desk talk about how there was no one left - or maybe there was? Upstairs? They were debating without an acknowledgement of me. I was hidden behind a rack of books, my back turned to them in the position I was sitting in, but by no means invisible. I felt embarrassed and I looked again at the time, not quite 7 pm yet. The embarrassment distracted me from the book, though, and I sat up to leave. Instead of exiting through the opening in the bookshelves I instead squeezed through to go directly to the door instead of having to face to desk. I thought about saying "have a good day" to the desk, to replicate the pleasantries I picked up on from other library patrons. They were reciprocated every time from the front desk, and I experienced it too. I had sneezed, and the front desk groveled voice man said God bless. I said thank you, but not sure if I was loud enough for him to hear. I took a quick peek at the desk to see that nobody was sitting there, the employees probably conversing to the side. I faced the automatic doors before I could confirm. I left the library with 11 minutes to spare before closing. From my notes app

LLMs accelerated with eGPU on a Raspberry Pi 5 | Jeff Geerling

www.jeffgeerling.com — Tue, 19 Nov 2024 21:26:55 +0000

After a long journeygetting AMD graphics cards working on the Raspberry Pi 5, we finally have a stable patch for theLinux kernel driver, and it works on AMD RX 400, 500, 6000, and (current-generation) 7000-series GPUs. With that, we also have stable Vulkan graphics and compute API support. When I wrote aboutgetting a Radeon Pro W7700 running on the Pi, I also mentionedAMD is not planning on supporting Armwith their ROCm GPU acceleration framework. At least not anytime soon. Luckily, the Vulkan SDK can be used in its place, and in some cases even outperforms ROCm—especially on consumer cards whereROCm isn't even supported on x86! Installingwith Vulkan support on the Pi 5 Assuming you already have an AMD graphics card (I tested with an RX 6700 XT), and you built a custom kernel using ourpatch (instructions here), you can compileon the Pi 5 with Vulkan support: Now, you can download a model (e.g. off HuggingFace), and test to ensureis using the GPU to accelerate inference: You can also monitor the GPU statistics with tools like() or(build instructions). Note: I'd like to thank GitHub user@0cc4mespecially for help getting this working, along with others who've contributed to the issues over on myPi PCIe project! On my RX 6700 XT, I can confirm the model gets loaded into the VRAM and the GPU is used for inference: Performance I went to Micro Center and bought a couple more consumer graphics cards for testing, and matched that up with the cards I already own, as well as my M1 Max Mac Studio, which has 64 GB of shared RAM and 24 GPU cores: I tested a variety of models—including some not pictured here, like Mistral Small Instruct (a 22 Billion parameter model), and Qwen2.5 (a 14 Billion parameter model). Some models had to split between the Pi's pokey CPU and the GPU, while others could fit entirely on the GPU. Thedriver patch translates memory access inefficiently in many cases, and I think that's what kills performance with larger models. But for smaller models—ones that are targeted at client devices and consumer GPUs—the Pi and Vulkan doesn't seem to be much of a bottleneck! Andas pointed out on Reddit, the main virtue of this system as opposed to any old PC with a graphics card is idle power efficiency: The Pi only consumes 3W of power at idle, and if you pair it with an efficient graphics card and PSU, the entire setup only uses 10-12W of power when it's not actively running a model! I see plenty of AMD and Intel systems that burn that much powerjust in the CPU, not accounting for the rest of the system. I am a bit of an 'AI skeptic'. I still prefer we call it machine learning and LLMs, instead of 'AI chatbots' and stuff like that—those are marketing words. I'm also concerned the AI bubble is still inflating, and the higher it goes, the worse the fallout will be. However, I do see some great use cases—ones made easier when you can build a tiny, compact, power-sipping LLM runner. Future CM5 + GPU dock, anyone? For me, the three things I can see one of these builds doing are: - Faster, local text-to-speech and speech-to-text transcoding (forHome Assistant Voice Control) - Useful AI 'rubber duck' sessions (I can bounce an idea off an AI model—kind of like a tiny local Google search index without the first page of results all being ads) - Reducing the inexorably-large footprint of LLMs running everywhere all the time. If you're running a homelab on a Dell R720, not only are you likely going deaf over time, it's eating up alotof power... a small, quiet setup for LLMs is good, IMO. The Pi 5 setup I have is about $700 new, and could be down to $300-400 if you use a used graphics card or one you already own. Here's my exact setup (some links are affiliate links): - Raspberry Pi 5 8GB($80) - Raspberry Pi 27W Power Supply($14) - 1TB USB SSD($64) - Pineboards HatDrive! Bottom($20) - JMT M.2 Key to PCIe eGPU Dock($55) - OCuLink cable($20) - Lian-Li SFX 750W PSU($130) - AMD RX 6700 XT($400) If Raspberry Pi built a Pi 5 with 16 GB of VRAM, some larger models may be more feasible. We also can still optimize thedriver patch further, but follow myPi PCIe projectfor more on that. All my test data and benchmarks are in this issue on GitHub.

Pumping the AI bubble: a data center funding craze with ‘novel types of debt structures’

pivot-to-ai.com — Tue, 19 Nov 2024 21:21:26 +0000

**Pumping the AI bubble: a data center funding craze with ‘novel types of debt structures’** - 19 November 2024 The AI bubble demands infrastructure. The big techs can’t build data centers fast enough. These also needpower plantsand networking. Where does the money come from? Investment bankers and private lenders who see a glorious new opportunity! All this planned infrastructure needs $1 trillion to $2 trillion of funding over the next five years. [Bloomberg,archive;Moody’s, audio] JPMorgan Chase, Deutsche Bank, and others have set up dedicated infrastructure teams. BlackRock and Microsoft plan to raise $120 billion of debt for data centers. One banker said his firm has so many data center deals that they don’t have enough staff for the workload. Hedge funds also want in. Risky leveraged loans are backed by the data centers themselves — orthe Nvidia cards in them. We’re sure phrases like “novel types of debt structures” won’t give you flashbacks to the 2008 financial crisis. Remember that nobody has yet worked out how to make an actual profit from AI. So what if — God forbid — number stops going up? There’s a plan for that: large data center holders will go public as soon as possible and dump on retail investors, who will be left holding the bag when the bubble deflates. A bursting AI bubble will take down the Nasdaq and large swathes of the tech sector, not to mention systemic levels of losses and possible bank failures. When, though? We think there’s at least a year or two of money left. Enough time to build a reallybigbomb.

Fingerless Gloves Knitting Pattern

wyverian.bearblog.dev — Tue, 19 Nov 2024 21:11:00 +0000

**Fingerless Gloves Knitting Pattern** Nov 19, 2024 I riffed off a different mittens knitting pattern to make these lovely gloves! The original pattern isworlds simplest mittens by tin can knits!go check them out its a really awesome pattern. I'm just going to keep log of my changes here in case I want to make some identical ones :).I scaffolded these gloves completely off the small size of the Tin Can Knits pattern. ->I cast on 33(32 because I use an extra to join in the round)sts, and used 4 double pointed needles.->k1,p1 rib until it was ~2.25 inches long (I prefer a shorter cuff because otherwise they catch on my watch.) use US size 5 needles-> switch to US size 7 needles.Knit all for 4 rounds in secondary color->continue and use thumb gusset from tin can knits pattern. generally m1, knit to marker, m1 and then knit all +2 rounds. Repeat until 13 stitches have been made.-> put extra sts on scrap yarn, join in the round again and cast on 2 sts.-> Knit all until it is about 1.25 inches from thumb gusset (I went till I reached the bottom of my index finger so feel free to alter based on finger/hand length.)-> Switch to same color as cuff, as well as US size 5 needles again. k1, p1 rib for about 6 rounds and then bind off in pattern.-> Using US size 5 needles, pick up the 13 extra sts on the string, as well as 3 more from the side (16 sts total).-> Knit all for one round in the same color as the body of the glove.-> Swap to same color as ribbing, and k1, p1 for ~5 rounds. Bind off in pattern.