There’s two kinds of crypto scams: Ones that actually involve crypto and ones that don’t.

Vague, possibly impossible to implement promises about proposed future functionality are an integral part of the crypto sphere!

Damn, OneCoin was bad. Ruja Ignatova was the first crypto scammer I’ve seen talked about in national news and she was also made fun of in a news comedy show over here. A true scam pioneer.

Brief history of YAML:

“Oh no! All of these configuration file formats are complicated. I want to make things simpler!”

(Years go by)

“…I have made things more complicated, haven’t I?”

YAML is generally good if it’s used for what it was originally designed for (relatively short data files, e.g. configuration data). Problem is, people use it for so much more. (My personal favourite pain example: i18n stuff in Ruby on Rails. YAML language files work for small apps, but when the app grows, so does the pain.)

I’m using Finnish keyboard layout (same as Swedish basically).

I like how AltGr+7/8/9/0 gives me { [ ] }, it’s a very nice grouping. The key next to Z is < > and you get | with AltGr, which is very handy.

Only thing that’s mildy annoying from programming viewpoint is that for tilde and backtick, the keys do diacritics - you need to press the diacritic key and space. Backtick is especially fun, because it’s shift+acute, space. Meanwhile, the key next to 1 does § ½, which aren’t that handy most of the time. I often just stick backtick on that key if I’m particularly assed to customise keyboard keyouts. Similarly, shift+4 is ¤, which is another not a particularly useful character (but I don’t mind that, because £ $ € all need to be produced with AltGr, which is at least consistent).

Oh content from this blog has been popping up in random places. Methinks it’s le epic trole.

So yeah, Xfce looks the same as it did 10 years ago.

And?

Desktop environment is meant to launch apps and give me windows and maybe have a file manager. Xfce does that. It’s a desktop environment.

Hey, “modern” desktop environment enthusiasts, if you bring Compiz back from the dead, give us luddites a call, will you? Ohhhh you kids should have seen it back in the day. Windows and Mac users saw Compiz in action and were, like, “wat.” You don’t get them to react that way to modern Linux desktops, no. And all that is lost now. Thanks Wayland.

Yeah, there’s an important distinction. Just because you could use Linux doesn’t mean you can at any particular moment.

I don’t really do music production; I’m more into writing and visual arts and photography. I could do all of those things on Linux and be perfectly productive. But there’s a difference between being productive and being optimal. My current process happens to be based on software that runs on Windows. (Heck, a lot of the software I use already runs on both Windows and Linux, anyways.)

The key here being that you shouldn’t lock yourself too much to just one tool and one approach, and that actually goes both ways.

Yeah, the thing is, “a monad is a monoid in the category of endofunctors” is kind of a meme among non-Haskell developers. Personally, I think Haskell is a very interesting language. The mathematical jargon, however, is impenetrable, and this particular expression is kind of the poster child. I’mma go look at Erlang if I want my functional language fix without making my head hurt, thank ye very much.

It’s a thing! Sadly it won’t rewrite Haskell codebases for you, though.

Error in Moderation

Could have been worse. Could have been an Error in Excess.

I was about to say “this reminds me of the Hot Dog Stand”.

…but someone actually made Hot Dog Stand. Shit.

Look, I’m a Linux nerd, and there are very few things that scare me. Linux Kernel programmers, maybe - you don’t meddle with them unless the hour is truly dire and we form a delegation to seek their aid after a complex debate as the world burns around us and we climb their mountain together. …And the other thing that scares me are some particular brands of Microsoft ultra fans, for thereover lies madness like we have not seen before.

Oh you fancy PC people and your fancy syscall instruction.

I still don’t know why I could remember jsr $ab1e. I didn’t even write that much assembly.

Technically, SQL is case-insensitive.

Practically, you want to capitalise the commands anyway.

It gives your code some gravitas. Always remember that when you’re writing SQL statements you’re speaking Ancient Words of Power.

Does that JavaScript framework that got invented 2 weeks ago by some snot-nosed kid need Words of Power? No. Does the database that has been chugging on for decades upon decades need Words of Power? Yes. Words of Power and all the due respect.

Well, Google Photos shouldn’t be considered a “backup” solution to begin with. Never mind that both Google and Apple scan the content in their respective services, but there’s just no guarantee that they don’t modify the data on cloud. “Oooh guys, we just invented a revolutionary new photo compression algorithm! Also hosting data is kinda expensive! So pay up if you want your originals.” …and there’s occasional reports that these services just straight up corrupted some old files while no one was looking at them. Good going.

I just treat my Android phone like any other camera I own and use. Copy the files from phone to PC and from there to my NAS, and I use ACDSee’s DAM functionality.

I use Debian because it runs on everything, and XFCE because it runs on everything and I’ve never wanted to waste much of the oomph on the GUI anyway. Looks and feels and works well enough, and that’s all I care.

In Ruby, the convention is usually that things are duck-typed (the actual types of your inputs don’t matter as long as they implement whatever you’re expecting of them, if not, we throw an exception). Type hinting could be possible, but it basically runs contrary to the idea.

Now, Ruby on Rails developers are expecting some kind of magic conversion happening at the interfaces. For example, ActiveRecord maps the database datatypes to Ruby classes and will perform automated conversions on, say, date/time values. But from the developer perspective it doesn’t generally matter how this conversion actually happens, as long as there’s something between the layers to do the thing.

Ah ! TP-Link! Or, as I’ve always said, Toilet Paper Link.

Brave as a whole? Brendan Eich is the next Elon Musk. Not in wealth, mind you, but dude’s got the antics, is all I’m saying. (Not a good look. Look just what’s going on with Reddit.) Also, a dipshit of EPIC proportions.

Brave Browser? Hell no. The whole marketing point is “oh, it’s a web browser, but with ad blocker”. …installing uBlock Origin is a 2 minute job on Firefox and even on Edge. Have literally walked elderly people through the process. (It got even weirder when they talked about replacing ads with approved ones. I don’t know if they still do that.)

I do draw the line on the whole BAT nonsense. “Oh, you can use cryptocurrencies to support your fave content creators? Even if they didn’t opt in to the program in the first place, and you still make it seem like the donations go to them? And then say ‘oh yeah the donations will eventually go to them IF they sign up for the program’ oh FUCK YOU you’re just deceiving fans aren’t you.”

/serious Well, yes, most APIs are meant for system-to-system interaction, that’s kind of a given. But since this particular API is clearly meant for human-to-system interaction, returning a human-readable response is adequate. Yes, a better design would probably allow the client to specify additional parameters about the desired response.

/back-to-jokes Yeah, well this kind of sums up most of my job applications. I send an application and the recruiting people are all like “OK”.

I have a Zyxel NAS server that just offers a SMB share. I’m just dumping my photos there under YYYY/MM/DD scheme, and converting all of my Nikon NEF files to DNG. (For importing photos to the NAS and generating backups, I have a PowerShell script and a PowerAutomate action. Also mild usage of Dropbox to transfer files from my cellphone.)

For actual management of photos, I use ACDSee Photo Studio Professional, and it just writes all tag information to the files themselves, so I can basically use any other software for photo management. For actual photo editing, I use DXO PhotoLab and Affinity Photo most of the time.