@asmund · textlog

Yesterday I with help from the clanker, as an experiment, ported a web app from go+postgres+svelte to ari+duckdb+htmx served locally by busybox httpd. It’s an analytics “dashboard” so the stack makes sense. So far looks good. Now I work on the code in vim to make it mine. I want fewer layers of abstraction and less complexity, and this is a learning experience to that end.

Woah, I never thought of duckdb as the database for an app. Using it for lite data analysis all the time.

Yeah - but as I wrote it’s mostly a (financial) analytics dashboard so duckdb makes sense. I’m considering to add SQLite if needed - but for now there isn’t a need.

I still don't get how now after AI coding there's people saying that contrary to common belief code wasn't a bottleneck and I realized that when I was starting to code at 10yrs ago when I was 15 and read it in a stackoverflow comment. I thought that was the common belief and still can't believe a lot of supposed senior programmers apparently believed so.

Yes, code was never the bottleneck and of course now it never will be either. Figuring out semantic modeling of data that makes sense across business domains and figuring out the right way to use digitalization to modernize processes, and the change cultures as become possible through such work - that’s much more bottlenecks! Code is easy; people and process is hard!

Super tired today. Must be the fall. Must be the rain. Must be the stretch of 5 meetings back to back the whole work day. Must be everything that’s on my mind. Tomorrow it’s a new day!

Ouch. Did you contribute in these meetings?

Sure, that’s what I do. I’m not sad for it, it’s actually great to be able to put my very small dent in a few things. But exhausting it is nevertheless.

…

Glad you're still a part of it, it's all performing, really. My meetings were useless. I was the youngest guy there, didn't have much to do but practise my doodling.

tell me if this makes sense to you: not all expensive chairs are worth a lot but the chairs that are worth a lot cost a lot of money

Maybe adjust the last part to “most Chairs that are worth a lot…” - because I guess there are chairs that are inexpensive but still good and thus could have cost a a lot?

…

my guess is the inexpensive chairs can be a good value for the price you pay but I doubt there are many of any chairs that are inexpensive and yet worth a lot

Good chairs are expensive, yes. Can’t find myself a good dining chair set for a year at €500/4 chairs budget.

Morning everyone, I've started a project to bring back "classic" era Instagram, from say the 2012 - 2013 time frame, long before it was ensh**ified. It's nowhere near ready for public consumption, so I've closed off registrations. Right now it's mainly for me to show my photography. halation.photos

I liked the old i*gram, and the old Flickr before that - a place to share simple genuine photos with friends and see theirs. I may consider joining such a site! I long ago left the others, even before AI killed them

That's very nice! I would love to run something similar for my photos, do you share the source somewhere?

Code is here: github.com/crustyrustacean/halation Feel free to beg, borrow, steal, whatever you need to do.

You are awesome! Thanks for sharing!

…

Looks really cool! Great photos as well!

I recently tried moments.im and fotoapp.co, it's refreshing

anyone know a good keyboard? specifically one that's quiet?

I lost you at quiet. I'm on a mech, one of the quieter vsrients but not so quiet. (Royal Kludge RK61)

I am on a Royal Kludge as well! Definitely not quiet, but damn if it isn't a joy to type in it.

Glad to meet a fellow Royal 😃. Also, what are the switches you went for? Brown for me.

…

Same! I like that it doesn't make the click sound and still give me the proper keystroke feedback :)

OK-M? I have the previous , 65%, and am very happy with it. I think it’s available both in quiet and noisy #versions (but the two I have are clicketyclicky). ducky ok-m

this is mainly a problem of switches. get a keyboard formfactor you like with a good body and replacable switches. thatll be the only keyboard you need for the rest of your life. if you want to change things up, buy new switches and caps. i personally use Outemu Silent Lime V3 Silent Tactile switches from aliexpress, and highly recommend them as they are cheap, feel awesome and are very quiet

OK-M? I have the previous , 65%, and am very happy with it. I think it’s available both in quiet and noisy #versions (but the two I have are clicketyclicky). ducky ok-m

…

I really enjoy low-profile keyboards for this very reason. Depending on your system of course, but the most silent keyboard I've used (and still use) is the Mac Magic Keyboard. But most low profile ones are in my experience pretty quiet.

This is really cool site but only drawback I see is 500 character per post limit. I think this should me more like 1500. or there is a limitations type something like I can do 3-4 long post per day credit. whom can i message for this feature request?

I am certain will get back to you on such matters - creator of this platform.

On some Mastodon instances, they post whole blog posts or massive threads and I feel this type of platform is not the place for such content. But this is clearly personal taste.

anybody got some recent software recommendations that you cant live without anymore?

uBlock Origin on Mozilla Firefox

as well as rethink DNS on mobile

I’m not supposed to take that literally of course, but I don’t think software has such an important role in our lives, for most of us. Water, food, air. Those you can’t live without. When it comes to software, I spend most of my workdays in the shell (vim, git, grep,…) and if $place allows in mutt+weechat (although that’s mostly outlook and teams). Nothing particularly new!

Nextcloud with Files, Talk, Calendar, Memories and more is damn useful for family life though 🙂

mise-en-place

…

I'm just now playing around with Qwen 3.5 0.8B on Off Grid AI which is local for mobile.

considering the replies, i think the "recent" flag got overlooked

So we can't use em dash anymore — lest we anger the mob. Truth be told though, English teachers have always discouraged em dash overuse because it is a subtle art and very easy to get wrong.

The funny thing is that in the UK, we don't really use the em dash anyway. We use the hyphen (I guess en dash?) with a space each side. So the em dash has always looked a bit odd to us... 😊

There are dashes (-), as well as en dashes (–), and there are em dashes (—), not to miss the mighty center dot (•) that looks like a perky boob when surrounded by brackets haha

Just get and read Chicago Manual of Style, or Oxford Style Manual if you so prefer, and you’re all set to use the various dash’es (and many other things).

There’s other dashes to pick if you want to steer clear of the almighty em dash!

…

The anti-slop mob is tiresome. With a careful and appropiate use of ai it is possible to make a lot of interesting stuff. And I hate even more when the mob "profs" that the text is ai using those ai detectros that can't detect ai.

Got the from so now you can: $ curl -s https://textlog.cc | less defaults to /new and also works with /hot /any and /all

Wonderful! Maybe slightly against the design principles you follow for textlog, but may I suggest adding a possible query parameter for last post I saw to only fetch those newer? I don’t know if the id just count up, but if it does it should be possible?

Hallo! Can i get Hello back from Every Side in Earth? please tell me where are you fromm , im just little curious (Countries only)

🙋‍♂️Norway

…

It is rather odd asking the question without volunteering first where are you from, isn’t it?

…

+62

im from this earth , especially Indonesia

We are neighbours. Apa khabar? 👋

…

Alhamdulillah baik, are you from Malaysia,PNG , East Timor , Brunei , Philippines, or Singapore?hehe

I was followed by here and wonder if this the one of ari fame? If so, I’m thankful for their work. Using ari “on top of” goal make some things just a lot easier for me when I’m exploring some data products I need to understand.

Hi, yes, I develop ari. I'm so glad it's proven useful for you! Any feature requests or changes you'd like to see? I'm curious what bits of ari have made it easier for you to explore data, too. UI or additions keep tempting me, but I haven't settled on what I want there. If you have thoughts on that front, I welcome them.

…

The two main things I use are the duckdb support and of course the built-in resty client. Not needing to shell out to curl just makes life easier. I should probably add that I’m mainly prototyping and explore things that later eventually will be developed further by others in our organization, so using array langs where I don’t need to type a lot is a big plus for me:) I’ll let you know if I need anything!

Thanks, that’s helpful. Those are the two things I use the most, too. One development tool I use frequently is the util.ac function (for “auto-complete”) that takes a glob pattern and returns all the globals whose names match. I didn’t want to make people have to define or update their Goal lib path, so in recent versions of ari I’ve been packaging all of the Goal libs and ari's into a libs FS that you can use with import.

cool new for ! autotag action will enrich your post with relevant hashtags so you don’t have to do it manually. It uses an to do it so it is quite good. Try it!

I will try it out, but it wasn’t super-easy to find. Maybe it’s just me, but I was looking in the first, and later I hit “more” and only saw all the other . Until I suddenly saw “” in fine print at the top of the “more” for the . Probably it’s just I who need sharper glasses:)

Cool. If you run every post via this auto tag feature, then the process is vulnerable to prompt injection attack. Isn’t it? Do you have any special protection in place? I guess yes. Curious.

It doesn’t run on every post, you run it yourself via more → autotag, and it’s safe, it doesn’t have access to anything other than the post content and we simply use its response. Or do you have any other case in mind?

I just tried and i do believe it is possible to craft malicious prompts. I can share an example. How do i DM you?

Check the IRC at the footer or you can send to ‘abuse@textlog.cc’ so I find it.

Sent email. .

…

Thanks! Fixed it by passing it through OpenAI’s moderation endpoint first, so it now blocks at least the problematic/illicit ones now before reaching autotag.

Makes sense. Cool.

Which do you think is ?

Microservices. Not really programming, as this is more on the architectural level. Microservices is a valid approach when you need to address massive scale. The thing is, I have seen it applied to things that could realistically serve its audience in a handful of modest servers with a less fashionable approach. It was done under the guise of simplification; each individual microservice was in fact very small. But this at the cost of absolute spaghetti architecture.

…

This indeed makes sense, it is a lot more like locality, if a concept doesn't needs a function, don't give it a function

Clean Code

I had so much pointless discussions about this ... but when you say "Clean Code" , do you mean the book or the general idea that such a thing exists?

The book, but actually ideas, like tiny functions and names. Aposd is much deeper book. Hilarious read

To never use single character variable names. I think a variable name’s length should reflect its scope — a function that’s only a few lines long can use single letters no problem.

Fully agree - if you have the full function or scope of the variable in sight, keeping the variable short make it easy to read and quick to type. Of course if you program in something like k or goal, almost everything is single letter (:

I assume this is not original at all at this point - but (extreme) DRY is not a good practice. My experience is that a bit of copying yourself and your colleagues in the code base often make maintenance of the code base easier.

Many have adopted the term WET (write everything twice)

Getters and setters for everything. Certainly, if you want an object to be doing more than just getting and setting a value right now, get them in there! Planning to add functionality later without breaking code? Stop it! That should break code! If I'm consuming a library and have been using this setter method for 2 years, I don't want it to suddenly introduce brand new validation, caching, or logging behavior!

Are getters and setters on everything even considered a good practice? To me it screams junior developer who hasn’t yet fully understood encapsulation and abstraction — if you’re just exposing getters and setters as the interface then what is the class/module/etc providing beyond what a standard variable does…?

At a philosophical level, can we have nice things?

in before 101 takes: are "nice" things only nice in contrast? can "we" have them equitably without energy abundance? in a universe with heat death? can we "have" things at all?

I want this expanded and enacted by one of those guys doing Jordan Peterson impersonations :D

And kermit the frog sardonically

I think yes, but precisely NOT "at a philosophical level". You can have it only if you get your hands dirty and build it yourself. I think already proved this, just as a close example.

entropy says no

…

If speaking on a philosophical level, then first we have to ask: what’s “nice” and what’s “to have” 👀

If you consider what you have nice, you can have nice things. If your expectations to your surroundings are very very low, you will be amazed with all the nice things you get from people you meet through your day. My personal approach.

Made another important decision to remove all counters — notes, replies, following, followers — from both people and hashtags, so you focus on the content not the numbers. It was creating competition which feeds the dopamine system, which we have exhausted and try to avoid.

Thank for keeping it cool . Unfortunately this is a message that doesn’t add much to the conversation, but I still want to express my appreciation for avoiding things that leads to a strive for more, more, more.

As others have said, this made me join (textlog has been open in a tab for weeks now without my creating an account). I'm on the fence about timestamps but everything else is great. The lack of dopamine from not being able to like or get liked is both painful and incredibly freeing. Also, I LOVE the design of this site.

The lack of dopamine from not being able to like or get liked is both painful and incredibly freeing. It feels impressively like actually just talking to people.

The best analogy I have is it feels like a dinner party with no social contract to join or leave evergreen conversations. Removing likes and timestamps made me rely on notifications as a proxy. As a result, I've turned them all off and am trying to write and meander without external forces.

numbers In a past life, when I was a statistician, I often though that the primary goal of statistics was to communicate numerical ideas without actually using any numbers. Numbers make people anxious, manufacture false certainty, project false confidence. They invariably appear to say something that's related to but not quite exactly the truth. I love the experiment of just not having them. I also wonder about the experiment of: could something fuzzier, less fraught replace them?

…

Good decision

I’m sorry about the unsolicited email, but we really have done so much since that it warranted a recap, you can of course turn them off either from the email unsubscribe link or from your account settings. I promise to keep these very very sparse.

Don't worry, it went to junk. 😅

Haha, as always 🤣

No apology necessary. Seems like a legitimately useful update and a worthwhile nudge to reengage folks.

…

Mine went to the junk folder as well. I marked it as "not spam" FWIW, but I don't know if that actually does anything...

I used a new fresh email address for text log sign-up. This was the first legit email I got on that new address and I was happy!

…

😊

Team vim, team emacs, or team “my editor doesn’t start wars”? One line, no essays. Go!

Vim. Feels like forever now; I was introduced to vim in -96 if memory serves. Over the years I tested others from time to time - but always went back. Now I’m old and it will be hard to move me over to anything else.

Before vim, it was mostly emacs. And I kept using gnus for a long time - can’t remember now, but probably until the Gmail-age.

Started with vim but felt limited, especially when doing heavy Julia visualisation work. Now in emacs and it's been smooth-sailing. Also, emacs + typst is amazing.

Emacs is what I despise and love, the thing I can't work without now

…

mostly vs code now but team nvim.

$ nano hello.txt

…

what a classic

join the communityorbrowse more notes