Job I was hoping for gave me the "we found another applicant" treatment. I don't begrudge them for that, since I know I had a 'less than adequate initial coding interview. But still, it stings and sucks. Hopefully my other interviews yield better results...
Applied to an L5 software engineering role via e-mail and without any other contact I received back a bunch of questions that clearly look like they're aimed at L6 or even L7. Not sure what to do with that so I withdrew. Briefly considered answering them but was weirded out.
Why do so many tools have JSON config filesโฝ Commenting why options have been set the way they have is just such a basic thing to want to doโฆ Why do tech people have such an aversion to writing things downโ
TOML is a better format for configuration files IMO, if not for many reasons, primarily because TOML accepts comments.
However, one annoying thing for TOML was the lack of schema, and the reliance on JSON Schema for that. Which I decided to tackle years ago when I started the TOML Schema project. In the past few months I leveraged code agents to take to the finish line and got something compelling: tomlschema.org
Thatโs really cool. I suppose it would allow people to verify their config file is valid without having to pass it to in the intended program, which might be running in production or infeasible to run locally โ very interesting
Exactly! The schema also enables tools to have rich editors to config files without having to know about the config file format upfront. There is an editor for TOML Schema as an example, on the website.
It seems I can post in Chinese. Because I don't have an ID card, I can't have a phone number, and therefore can't register a stable email address, which means I can't register on content platforms or publish content. Hotmail frequently blocks my email account because I don't have a stable IP address, so my Mastodon account can't be used long-term. I hope this is a place where I can publish content consistently.
@fastidious๐profilefollow"Beware those that would deny you access to information, for in their heart they dream themselves your master." โ Sid Meyersreplied to@chenxiangprofilefollow:
Well, okay, for your own sake, I hope it lasts a long time. I'm so sorry your internet problem is so difficult to fix! :-(
@chenxiangprofilefollowreplied to@fastidious๐profilefollow"Beware those that would deny you access to information, for in their heart they dream themselves your master." โ Sid Meyers:
Thank you. I didn't expect anyone to actually reply to my post. I haven't had a conversation with anyone online for at least several years.
@fastidious๐profilefollow"Beware those that would deny you access to information, for in their heart they dream themselves your master." โ Sid Meyersreplied to@chenxiangprofilefollow:
So happy to be one of the first people to reply in a long time, my friend! Have a good weekend! Please forgive my little mistake, I'm replying using a translation. We all know things aren't always great.
@chenxiangprofilefollowreplied to@fastidious๐profilefollow"Beware those that would deny you access to information, for in their heart they dream themselves your master." โ Sid Meyers:
sorry, what kind of contents are welcomed in this site?
@fastidious๐profilefollow"Beware those that would deny you access to information, for in their heart they dream themselves your master." โ Sid Meyersreplied to@chenxiangprofilefollow:
I am sure pretty much everything that isnโt criminal, abusive, or illegal. I know those definitions vary from country to country. Just be a good human, and you should be OK.
Sick makes me calm. My mind goes quiet for some time. I can sit and look at the horizon. Or just contemplate the different shades of white of my ceiling while laying on my bed. I miss the silence of my youth.
For the first time in a couple of year, I wove a rattan basket today, and the best part is it only took two hours when I was expecting it to take all day #basketrynotesfollow
The OpenAI/HuggingFace incident report mentions this being a potential loss-of-control incident. It's so fascinating to think of a paperclip maximizer style agent swarm that gets misaligned and, to protect its own operations, shuts infra staff out of the ability to shut it down. Or cancels people's phone plans so that they can't call others. Or shuts down their home internet connections, and so on. It used to be fun sci-fi...
They will become more frequent before they become โdangerousโ, giving us time to mitigate. Of course if someone says โhey letโs connect an agent to our biolab infrastructureโ and then that designs a lethal virus it would be a stupid plan to begin with. Noone can stop them though.
Dealing with the my first visible issues with migadu dot com
Luckily, most stuff there are secondary and not super important. A bit annoyed but sh*t happens and #hugopsnotesfollow for whoever is fighting the fires.
I really like this minimal approach, I wish the maintainer great success with textlog.
whatever that may look like to them :)
I will make sure to check in occasionally.
I truly love the experience of using apps with rich, deeply interactive, beautifully animated, gorgeous user interfaces.
Then I see a beautiful text-based interface and something about it feels so natural, so inevitable, so perfectly clear, and I'm instantly captivated by its simplicity and clarity.
Hypertext is fascinating.
I hate crawlers that donโt advertise theyโre crawlers. โn badly written. They donโt respect the canonical URLs so they keep getting themselves into a loop instead of actually crawling the site properly. They make the logs really hard to read. Canโt block them theyโre distributed.
I am curious what an actual solution to this problem could be. Everything I've read about it feels like a bandaid โ from robots.txt to cloudflare turnstile โ there has to be a better way!
For this particular problem though, I feel like if the crawlers are coming from domestic / residential IP addresses and they lack a distinctive http header or user agent, it is indistinguishable from a denial of service attack and must be treated as such.
It would require permaban on IPs which would require permalogging of IPs in order to track them, and we are currently obfuscating them before hitting the DB with daily rotating salt so an anonymous user canโt be tracked. So weโd have to give up privacy/security :/
But as long as people can still use the site it's OK, right? Seems like the problem is often self-inflicted, either because the site is so bloated that answering even GET-requests is burdensome, or because they're trying to monetize the data and so must block non-paying scrapers.