Short answer: This is a blip. Long answer:
I've moved away from doomscrolling and pretty much every social network out there. But I still like the idea of microblogging - that's what a blip is: my own little tweet, skeet, toot or however it is named out there.
philipp:
Its done - flenker.blog and philippflenker.com are now merged again. Youโre looking at the new shiny world right now.
All my bearblog.dev posts have also moved over. There are a few tidbits missing, but all in all I am ready to flip the switch and make this the main page.
All my old blog posts (before I used Bear Blog) are now migrated. I even restored some that I didn't migrate to Bear back in the day, and I re-added pictures I used for the blog posts back then.
Some of the articles are missing images, looks like the Digital Garden plugin I use for publishing has some issues when bulk-uploading hundreds of files. I will fix these manually.
OK, all my instagram and threads posts are now also part of my blips collection. The one thing that I didn't migrate are stories, because my setup doesn't currently support this. Maybe I am going to solve this at some point, maybe not. Let's see. But so far I am very pleased with the results.
I now moved all my Mastodon posts over to my Blips page and closed my accounts. I wanted to do the same for Bluesky, but then I realized I closed my account already a while ago. Next, I'm going to delete Instagram (and threads, if it's still active), and then all my social media accounts will be gone!
My wife and I are re-watching The White Lotus, Season 1 right now. I want to capture here a quote from the resort manager, Armond, who over the course of the season enters a downward spiral, after having been sober for five years. The quote seems like a good opening quote for a potential future blog post about my fear of becoming an addict, so I'm leaving it here:
Quote
I know youโre too intuitive for me to bullshit you. I fell off the wagon yesterday. The whole thing with Lani put me on edge, so I took a Xanax. But then I was dragging, so I took an upper. And then I took another and then another. Then I went down to the bar after work and had a few shots.
I recently heard the word "frupidity" in the context of Amazon: When Frugality borders into stupidity. Just leaving this as a blip for now so that I don't forget - once I find the time I'll turn this into an article.
Here's a Multi Line Regex for VSCode: [\s\S\n]+? (Source). It comes in handy e.g. when you want to move stuff around in a file, and I use this a lot when refactoring my notes. Let's say you want to use the title tag from your front matter as the first heading:
Example.md:
---
someprop: "foo"
title: "My Title"
someotherprop: "bar"
andanotherprop: "baz"
---
This is my note, it started out without a H1, it should end up with one.
Use the Search function in VSCode, enable regex and enter this in the search field:
---
([\s\S\n]+?)
title: "(.*)"
([\s\S\n]+?)
---
Then enter this as a replacement:
---
$1
title: "$2"
$3
---
# $2
This transforms our Example.md (and all other files) to this:
---
someprop: "foo"
title: "My Title"
someotherprop: "bar"
andanotherprop: "baz"
---
# My Title
This is my note, it started out without a H1, it should end up with one.
My new blog/web presence is coming along. Time to fill this with some info. I am considering importing my old posts from other social media platforms as well.
I wrote a new post, and it's surprisingly philosophical, about reality construction and conflict resolution. It's probably the most profound insight I ever had. At this rate, expect the next one in 2065. flenker.blog/convergent-realitโฆ
For a long time, I assumed that the Internet has only vanished into walled gardens, like Instagram, and that all the fun that used to be everywhere is happening there.
Now I took a closer look at these walled gardens again and found that they are also empty - the same 5 jokes repeated endlessly over and over again, hate speech and nothing else.
I am usually not someone to cling to the past, but I do miss the 'old internet'.
Small rant: My dryer has one button to start. You press it, it beeps once, it starts.
But if you press it not long enough, it doesn't start.
The infuriating thing is: It beeps twice. So it knows I pressed it. It knows I want to start drying. But it wants me to press again - but to do it right this time.
What a dick reincarnated as a dryer.
I don't get it. Todo Lists gotta be one of the top use cases to use AI for - to expand on existing Todos, to try and extract importance and to resurface tasks which might fall through the cracks otherwise.
But all the AI powered to do lists seem to be capable of is: finding an empty slot in my calendar and book it so that I can work on todos there.
The Motion Todo App is damning itself with faint praise. Most of the features they advertise pretty high up on their page are pretty much standard features for todo lists, IDK?
Endel is like those Nutri-Matics in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It checks your heart rate, the time, the weather, the light surround you just to produce the same thing as always: something that is almost, but not quite, music.
... and here is Chapter 7: Syntax Highlighting. This concludes the final chapter of #hecto. However, I still need to do some more proofreading and 'janitor work' until it can be considered final. flenker.blog/hecto-chapter-7/ #rust#rustlang
So nah und doch so weit daneben... Diese รuรerung ist, als wรผrde man sagen: 'Wahlen werden nicht durch Zeitungsartikel entschieden'. TikTok ist ein wichtiges Medium und wurde รผberwiegend von rechts bespielt und von links ignoriert - natรผrlich hat das einen Einfluss. tagesschau.de/inland/gesellschโฆ
Where are the progressive future visions? Why is it easier to find right-winged answers to questions than progressive, forward looking ones? What can we do to change, to get people to vote, and not vote the people on the right?
I wonder if a purely rss based social media platform would work. You follow rss feeds. Your interactions are an rss feed. Others who follow you follow your rss feed.
The tech is there.
I don't know, a quest line where the NPCs are super worried about being stuck in a mine because the lift broke doesn't catch me in a universe where Town Portals exist #diablo4
Chapter 4 of hecto: Build Your own Text Editor in #rust is now live: flenker.blog/hecto-chapter-4/
It's the longest chapter of the tutorial, full of learnings. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it! #rustlang
Even though people tend to look down on web development, I find it much harder to build a react app than to build a rust app. Browsers, and JavaScript, are full of footguns.
I used LLMs for a while, and I think their role in transforming our society can't be overstated. Here's my view on the topic: flenker.blog/the-new-digital-dโฆ
I have spent several weeks now asking ChatGPT instead of googling, falling back to google only rarely, and can tell you - google search as a product won't survive this. Microsoft's instinct to combine LLM with Bing is the right one.
Yesterday I constructed my first complex emoji in rust. Did you know, that this emoji here:๐งโ๐คโ๐ง is composed of ๐ง๐ค๐ง under the hood?
Chapter 4 of hecto will be long. Very long. I decided to add a ton of extra stuff in there, from how utf8 works to building up your own emoji to a deep dive into buffers in various text editors. It's worth the wait!
I'm using Gemini as a sparring partner for my work on hecto, just to see what it can do. The results range from impressive explanations to dumb rookie mistakes.
Love Beyoncรฉ's new version of Jolene. I love the sound of the original, but the helpless plea to prevent a clueless husband from being u faithful has always rubbed me the wrong way.
The new version of the hecto tutorial will be much more in-depth about #rustlang . Given that in the meantime another tutorial was created which is basically the same but with way less in-depth description I think it's warranted.
if you want to get to the goal quick, use the other tutorial. If you want to stop and smell the roses, come with me.
๐ช๏ธ [banging noises]
[the sound of something heavy sliding over the ground, then stopping]
ME (yelling): Everything alright?!
MY KIDS (in sweet innocent angle voices and in unison): Yes dad! Don't come up!
I better check upstairs.
The new Setup section for hecto is online here: flenker.blog/hecto-chapter-1/
It revolves around installing Rust, and the updated version explains more about the compliation procedure and build targets. #rustlang
4 out of 10 pages released.
My wife encouraged me to add a small link to my page asking people who like my work to buy me a coffee or something. Turns out those pages are all designed to lure people into monthly memberships, which is not really what I want. That's mildly disappointing.
It took me 5 years to mention the author of the original tutorial for hecto by name, which is embarrassing. Gotta repeat the Fight Club mantra: Her name is Paige Ruten. Her name is Paige Ruten. Her name is Paige Ruten.
The Introduction, the Changelog and the Appendices of the new tutorial are already live, but no actual #rustlang code in sight yet. Chapters 1 and 2 are pretty much already done, though, I hope to release them soon (need more polishing)
๐ This morning, my train to work was delayed by one hour. But so was the previous train, so I took that one and arrived on time. Task failed successfully.
I've decided to start publishing pieces of the updated version of hecto as I go along. Here's the changelog to follow me on my quest for the rewrite: flenker.blog/hecto-change-log/ #rustlang#rust
๐โโ๏ธ Swimming with the kids. My eldest only recently learned it and fearlessly jumps into the deep end whenever she can. I'm proud, but I'm dying a little inside every time she disappears under the surface.
All relevant posts have been moved to flenker.bearblog.dev .
Next I need to do the actual migration:
flenker.blog -> archive.flenker.blog
bearblog -> flenker.blog
and ensure that the Hecto tutorial can still be reached via the old URLs.
๐ซข While migrating my blog I realized that in around five years I managed to not blog about personal anecdotes even once. What gives?! Stuff like this was literally all I was writing in the 00s!
Looking back at this article from 2019, I wonder why Blockchain was ineffective against Blockchain? Maybe AI will fix it? technologyreview.com/2019/07/2โฆ
I just ditched the plan to meticulously keep all old URLs alive upon migrating my blog. According to the few analytics that I have (Google's search performance) I have no traffic besides my hecto tutorial, so I guess it's fine to skip this part.
Old stuff incoming! I am migrating my old blog over to flenker.bearblog.dev , but I won't migrate all tiny microblogging posts. Instead I will post interesting stuff here.
Damit impliziert Wissing, dass es an den Gehรคltern und Boni der Vorstรคnde nichts auszusetzen gibt, und damit auch, dass deren Management-Leistungen ok sind. tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/verbrโฆ
๐ I told this anecdote so many times, it's about time I wrote it down. How I tried to evade Computer Science and failed: flenker.bearblog.dev/not-a-strโฆ
Reading through the /now garden on omg.lol I get the feeling that many people miss a core idea: think about what you would say to a friend you haven't seen in a year.
I do enjoy seeing what everyone is reading or watching, but I'd love to see more what you are all up to right /now!
See also nownownow.com/about
Die Schlussfolgerung, dass 50% retouren auch 50% falsche Grรถรen bedeuten ist falsch. Sehr viele Kunden bestellen sich schlicht eine Auswahl und behalten das hรผbscheste/beste/coolste Teil. Technologie zur Vorhersage von Size and Fit ist nur ein Puzzleteil von vielen. nzz.ch/technologie/kopie-von-kโฆ
I can't decide between bearblog.dev and weblog.lol. The former is more mature and not in beta, the latter part of my omg.lol account. The features on both are sufficient for me.
๐ Either Google and Spotify are getting less and less useful every day, or I'm turning into a grumpy old man, yelling at things he doesn't understand.
I now hooked up my status log with my now page and mastodon. Whenever I post a new status it shows up on the now page and over here. Neat! status.lol/philipp
Seit ich Kinder habe, ist einer meiner weirderen Pet Peeves die Rutsche auf dem Spielplatz , die dank Kletterwรคnde nur fรผr Kinder zugรคnglich ist, denen die Rutsche im Grunde schon zu langweilig ist.
I'm currently bringing my web presence up to date. First change: philippflenker.com is now a simple profile page instead of directly linking to the blog. Powered by omg.lol, of course.
Vielleicht einfach auch mal die Bahnreise weniger stressig machen und zur Weiรglut bringende und verzweifelnde Momente reduzieren, liebe Bahn? Dann springen auch bei wenigen Leuten die Sicherungen raus. tagesschau.de/inland/gesellschโฆ
Hab vor 2 Wochen Threads (und vor wut auch Bluesky, Mastodon und Instagram) von meinem Handy gelรถscht und heute mal wieder reingeschaut. Und was soll ich sagen: Es war die richtige Entscheidung.
By sheer coincidence I stayed at an inclusive hotel last night - I didnโt even know this was a thing! I can really recommend the Grenzfall if you need a place to stay in Berlin and donโt want to visit the typical hotel chains.
Found a cool low-tech solution for letting the kids roam freely while still being a helicopter parent: my wifeโs and my phone number on bracelets. Now when the kids get lost they just need to show their bracelet e.g. to a shop owner or other trustworthy people and they can call us
I don't know, Mastodon really doesn't work well for me. The fact that it's so difficult to look up contacts, follow discussions and follow threads is just too limiting.
Let me tell you youngsters a bit about home screens. When the first #Xbox launched, it booted directly to the game that was in the disc drive - as did all the consoles back then. The Home Screen was completely useless (And also had some eerie music in it, wtf). The 360 started out with the same, but at some point extended the experience massively from the snappy Blades design to an ever-loading more bloated view. Since online gaming was rare, streaming not a thing and the Xbox unusable as a dvd drive unless you bought an extra piece of hardware, the dashboard was mostly annoying. These days elaborate dashboards are everywhere, shoving ads down our throats, but also looking much nicer than they used to. I feel todayโs Xbox dashboard is much closer to the initial one or the blades - staying out of the way unless needed - thanany of the intermediate steps.
The demo for the vision pro from Apple has, for the first time ever, shown me a use case for which I can see myself buying this thing (not the first iteration though): as a monitor replacement.
Mir ist heute ein kulturelles Relikt wieder eingefallen: Das Anklingeln.
Ohne Internet und mit Tarifen, bei denen Anrufe und SMS Geld kosten, stellt sich das Problem, wie man gรผnstig einfache Nachrichten รผbermittelt.
Die Lรถsung: Das Anklingeln. Telefonate waren (und sind) nรคmlich kostenlos, solange das Gegenรผber nicht annimmt. Also spricht man sich ab: 'Wenn ich da bin, klingle ich Dich an'. Man ruft dabei die andere Person an, legt aber nach dem ersten Klingeln sofort wieder auf.
Ich habe gerade #LOL Staffel 4 auf #PrimeVideo gesehen und ich verstehe einfach nicht, was am Konzept 'Comedians bringen sich gegenseitig zum Lachen' so schwer zu verstehen ist, lieber #bully! Die paar echten Comedians, die neben einfachen Schauspielern mitmachen, werden teilweise von Bully unterbrochen, um unlustige Ideen von Auรen einzubringen. Schade.
Die #bahn ist Langstrecke sehr kinderfreundlich. Es gibt in jedem ICE eine spezielle kinderfahrkarte, die extra abgestempelt wird. Im bordbistro kriegt man dafรผr dann ein Spielzeug. Alles kostenlos. Auch fรผr Kinder unter 6, die ohnehin gratis fahren.
Yo recruiters,
with a team of 8 people, you're not looking for a 'VP of Engineering'. You're looking for an Engineering Manager. Stop inflating job titles.
And also, read my CV, jeez. My Rust knowledge is practically zero.
The description, the name and the art style of Night in the Woods is very misleading. It's a deep study of growing up in a dying small town, family life close to poverty and the stigma of mental health issues especially on the countryside. Very highly recommended. apps.apple.com/de/app/night-inโฆ
Watched Ron's Gone Wrong today with my elder kid. We both liked it, though my daughter had zero understanding why the social media nightmare depicted in the movie should be a Bad Thing.
Kid's diseases can be pretty badass. The recent ones my kids brought home for me sent me from โhuh it's a bit coldโ to violent shivers within 45 seconds.
Here is a list of dark patterns you should know about. My nemesis now also got a name: 'Confirm Shaming'. This means that the responses you can give to some prompt are phrased in a way to entice shame when you click on something the website owner does not want you to click on.
My prime example are the options 'Yes' and 'Maybe later' instead of 'Yes' and 'No'. Hate it. uxpin.com/studio/blog/dark-patโฆ
One of my all-time favourites, ever, is Illusion of Time (Released as Illusion of Gaia in the US). It's comparatively easy, which made it very accessible to me when I was a kid.
What makes this game remarkable is just how much effort it dedicates to telling its story. Sure, it's got lots of awesome fantastic stuff going on - but it's also incredibly strong in telling stories about relationship among the main characters.
Okay, a lot of ambitious arc welding going on in the current episode of #picard. Can't say I like that they brought back the crap from seasons 1&2 now.
It just occurred to me how dumb it is to save for a driver's license for my kids and nephews. Not because it's not useful, but because it underlinies how 'special' driving is, even though it's not good for the climate.
So here is my change of plans:
The money they will get does not come with the expectation to buy a driver's license, they can buy anything they like from it
Additionally, I will save up some more money to buy them an interrail ticket each.
A good reminder why the concept of Bloatware or the 80/20 principle is overrated ๐ I, for one, am increasingly suffering from stuff that barely works in their 20% realm, and not at all in the 80% realm (Siri, Alexa, I am looking at you) joelonsoftware.com/2001/03/23/โฆ
Just finished Return of the Obra Dinn. What an awesome game!
(It served also as a reminder for me that I am very susceptible to develop a gaming addition. Good thing that I am too dumb for most games)
Seit einiger Zeit helfe ich einer Familie mit ihren Hartz 4 Antrรคgen und hatte vergessen wie scheisse das alles ist. Aktueller Hรถhepunkt: ein globalantrag, mit dem man beantragt spรคter was beantragen zu dรผrfen.
Das #Autoland ist menschenfeindlich: hier im
Ort sind mehrwre groรe Einkaufslรคden praktisch direkt nebeneinander. Alle mit eigenem Parkplatz. Alles so gebaut, dass man von Parkplatz zu Parkplatz fahren muss, will man mehr als 1 Geschรคft besuchen. Radfahrer und Fuรgรคnger mรผssen groรe Umwege in Kauf nehmen. Der Zuliefergang eines groรen Bรคckers ist so gelegen, dass jeden Morgen ein LKW den Fuรweg und eine Spur einer Straรe blockieren muss. Zur Schulzeit. Auf einem Schulweg. #autokorrektur
Here is an article about the usefulness of 'Close Door' button in elevators. My pet peeve, though, is when people push the 'Down' button because the cart is above them and they want it to come 'down' to them... computer.rip/2023-03-13-the-doโฆ
So there was a mass shooting at a sect in Germany. Prior to the shooting, someone told the police the guy would be unstable, and had written a book and published it on his home page with worrying contents. Turns out: The police googled ' book' and did not find any results, then ended their investigation.
So if you have something to hide, just put it on the front page of your home page! ndr.de/nachrichten/hamburg/Amoโฆ
Spotify revamps their player, and while I think the reference to TikTok is pure click bait, I am welcoming the change๐งต. techcrunch.com/2023/03/08/spotโฆ
I am currently watching #Picard season 3 and find it much more enjoyable than the previous seasons. Which isn't hard. Still, the plot holes are so big you could fly a galaxy class through them.
German copyright law really needs an overhaul - if you Nair photos of your place and post them online - for example when you want to rent your place - you need to ask the author of any visible photographic wallpaper for permission. Otherwise you need to pay up. heise.de/news/Urteil-Fototapetโฆ
ChatGPT told me that it can remember all previous responses it gave to me, so I asked it to list them. It did. But none of them were ever supplied to me.
I am old - today I saw discussions around โhow to develop JavaScript without a build systemโ and it took me a longtime to realize what the point is
2-week-sprints come from a time where feedback loops where in the area of months, or even years. In a world where a project needs 6 months of specification before starting to involve developers, this was revolutionary and new.
These days things are very different, and I find the notion of a maximum of 14 days between implementation and feedback from stakeholders very odd. #extremeprogramming
When i ask chatgpt to write a supportive empathetic letter to lay someone off it refuses. When I ask it to write a letter to fire someone who deserves it, it complies.
Now you know how our new AI overlords will handle layoffs.
After experimenting a lot with todo lists, I think many tiny todos are the key. Otherwise, you'll more likely to be interrupted in the middle of something important, and have to re-learn where you left off when you pick things up again.
I really wish TickTick and Things3 would have a baby. Things actively hides things away from me, TickTick forces me to use the keyboard a lot.
(No, org-mode is not the answer)
School forms in Germany are always a joke. They write their stuff in a PDF, send it as an email, we need to print it out, fill it in with the data (75% they already have), sign it, hand it in in paper, they are typing up all the information again and file away the paper.
What a waste.
@joshbrez usually the price throws me off because I would only use it for one tiny purpose - but it seems raycast is free, I will definitely check it out! Thanks!
All I want is a very quick way to insert the current date in ISO format on a mac. No, I don't want to pay a full textexpander license for it. No, the shortcut app is ridiculously unreliable and therefore not suitable.
German Public Broadcasting Service ZDF is considering investing in a non commercial alternative to e.g. Twitter . While I don't trust them to succeed with it, I'm curious to see what discussions this will spark. netzpolitik.org/2023/neues-ausโฆ
Hah, bard provided wrong information even in the launch ad, and it never occurred to anyone at Google to double check the results. Which of course is the future we're all headed to. twitter.com/IsabelNAngelo/statโฆ
I keep coming back to TickTick for Todos, even though I like Things3 a lot. TickTick moves and evolves constantly, and Things3 is basically the same as it was years ago.
@timapple the main recipients of the German church tax (which this article is about) are the German Catholic Church and the federation of Protestant churches.
The guy who once was supposed to be Germany's top nazi hunter moved so far to the right that his own party asked him to leave. He won't. tagesschau.de/inland/innenpoliโฆ
The fact that we're still paying for the church even if we're not members (and mainly the Christian church) is something that has been bugging me for years. Good that the government considers abolishing this practice. tagesschau.de/regional/nordrheโฆ
I never noticed, but the German 80s star Herbert Grรถnemeyer already did a song about Toxic Masculinity in 1984! Seems like he was woke before 'woke' was even a concept. youtube.com/watch?v=UnHRR_AFm1โฆ
The US of A are more often than not a strange dystopia. Newest idea: Inmate can get a shorter sentence if they donate organs: theguardian.com/us-news/2023/fโฆ .
I have read multiple times now that people ask #ChatGPT to fix grammar mistakes and make their texts sound nicer. I tried it, too - and holy crap, the results are amazing.
One of the greatest experiments by the German government becomes a permanent thing - a ticket which is valid in all local trains and buses everywhere kn Germany. tagesschau.de/inland/innenpoliโฆ
Newest addition to my #superfamicom collection: looney tunes road runner. A game which unsuccessfully mixes the speed of sonic with the need of precision jumps in regular platformers.
We're only beginning to understand the things where ChatGPT will become useful and indispensable. Case in point: You can deobfuscate code with ChatGPT. twitter.com/AlexAlexandrius/stโฆ
ISO certifications and so on is useless if your subcontractor simply puts critical data (from ALL OF AUSTRIA) on an unsecured server: heise.de/news/Krankenakten-undโฆ
Wonders of street view: neal.fun/wonders-of-street-vieโฆ
There are not too many entries there (yet?), but it's fun to browse and click through anyways.
About the disappearance of the ash tray. I remember how ash trays were the first thing to put on the table and the last thing to remove. clivethompson.medium.com/the-dโฆ
My wife and I are thoroughly enjoying #that90sshow. We're young enough to relate to growing up in the 90s, and old enough to relate to the adults.
Also, Red is my soul mate.
So my daughter, whom I read to every evening, loves fantasy but hates all-male heroes, which is why I started gender-flipping some books (at least partly). We just finished The Hobbit featuring Bella Baggins, but now she asked me to read Lord of the Rings to her because my wife mentioned Bella's niece, Frieda Baggins. Not long now until this house of cards collapsesโฆ
Google is concerned about chatgpt. And it should be - because chatgpt could completely upend the way we search the web. theverge.com/2023/1/20/2356385โฆ
Good overview over trade offs when choosing the right tool for the job. It also discusses circumstances which might lead the โrightโ tool to still be the wrong tool. buttondown.email/hillelwayne/aโฆ
Amazon smile is canceled. That was always a weird one - poorly communicated, awkward to use on mobile and more. I for one no longer mix buying and donating. These two do not go well together.
More interesting thoughts: seths.blog/2023/01/amazon-smilโฆ
I finally got around to updating my only windows machine to windows 11. it failed multiple times, took around 8 hours and now everything is slow.
But now I have a teams account and that'sโฆ something?!
Twitteriffic dies due to twitter closing down their APIs without notice. Twitterriffic was more than a 3rd Party App, their symbiotic relationship with twitter helped shape it. blog.iconfactory.com/2023/01/tโฆ
Lots of flight related PII found on an unsecured Jenkins server. Some things never change, 20 years ago there were servers with admin/admin credentials, these days it's Jenkins. maia.crimew.gay/posts/how-to-hโฆ
Funny programming languages: this article is a deep dive into obscure and satirical programming languages - starting with the mandatory description of Shakespeare. buttondown.email/hillelwayne/aโฆ
Since the 2 years are up, Facebook considers unblocking #Trump again. Why not, Facebook is a place of hate and rage anyways these days. spiegel.de/netzwelt/web/donaldโฆ
The right-winged H.G. #maassen will no longer officially comment on the German constitution, as the publisher does not want to be entangled in day-to-day politics.
Given how far to the right Maaรen has moved, this makes total sense. faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/bueโฆ
Most of the of the carbon offset projects are worthless. From my point of view, we just care too little about the impact and sustainability of these projects. We are satisfied when trees are planted on our behalf, but don't care whether or not they grow or wither. theguardian.com/environment/20โฆ
#samsung tvs come with instructions on how to turn parts of the package into toys. This is somewhat greenwashing though, since it's not really sustainable. It merely delays the act of throwing away by a few weeks.
Interesting read on why #alexa isn't enabled by advertisements. This is a real problem for the company - there have been cases where multiple Alexas have ordered something thanks to an anchorman on tv using the key phrase. amazon.science/blog/why-alexa-โฆ
Here is a mystery unsolved which was bugging me for decades - it's about the iconic white railway clocks that used to be on all railway stations at least in Germany. The thing with these clocks is, that once every minute, the hand for the seconds stops for a period of time which is noticeable longer than one second, and I always wondered why this is the case. My most favorite explanation (they do that so that they can fake that their trains are on time) doesn't hold after even the slightest of thinking it through.
Nice write-up of an obscure bug which rendered Sierra games nigh-useless in 1993 and again in 2007. The fact that this bug resurfaced was due to the fact that the "fix" only moved the issue exactly 5000 days (>13 years) in the future.
Here's a nice write up about how the iPhone keyboard was designed. It's hard to imagine these days, but typing on touch screens back then was simply impossible. Touch screens were essentially merely more than left-click input devices, multi touch was unsupported, and the touch screens back then were really bad at handling hit zones close to one another.
I am wondering what were the reasons to not explore T9 like input systems more. T9 was well established back then, and you could achieve insane typing speeds with it. I'd guess that this would also hold true on touch screens since the buttons can be much bigger, and there are far less rows/columns to account for than on a QWERTY keyboard.
The article mentions a similar approach and its main drawback - the fact that when you pause in the middle of a word, you have to memorize where you left off and are confronted with a word that might be very far off from what you'd intended to type. However, I have the feeling that this limitation alone could have been overcome with software alone.
ChatGPT and the like produce stuff that is plausible, but it might not be true, as illustrated in this article. I think the distinction between plausibility and truth is long overdue as this lies at the heart of fake news: Stuff that sounds plausible is taken for being true. Hopefully, AI sparks broad discussions about this topic.
Here are a couple of "extreme questions", designed to change the way you look at your work or product and to spark new ideas. Well worth a read. Many of them are really not trivial to answer, such as: "If our biggest competitor copied every single feature we have, how would we still win?"
genders.wtf, a collection of failures when asking people for their gender in online forms. I'd claim that 99% of the gender prompts are simply used for addressing you in their unwanted spam newsletter.
While they do look nice: The most hearted pen has around 3500 hearts, and an individual can heart pens up to 3 times, so between 1200 and 3500 people have voted for it. That's not much.
Interesting Twitter thread around the Stockholm Syndrome. In summary, the thread claims that the incident that coined the name Stockholm Syndrome was mostly a situation where incompetent people used this made-up condition to put blame for their incompetence on the victims. It's worth a read, though it skips over the claim Wikipedia makes that the term was coined after victims refused to testify against their captors in court and started raising money for their defense. And while we're at it, the "Criticism" section of the same article is also well-worth a read.
Threema has some severe issues with their security. In their response to this, Threema downplays the findings and generally sounds pretty irritated. Their main argument - that not many people where affected because they coincidentally released a protocol that fixed the things - is not very reassuring.
Addendum: The FAA now blames contractors for the outage. If contractors can bring down your system, then they're not the cause, you (and your system design, and the way you work with externals) are.
It's an old saying that whenever you are not paying for it, you are the product. I don't think that this is true in most cases - instead, I think if you are not paying for it, someone else is the customer (which is a bit of a truism, but bear with me for a second). The classical example for people being the product would be Social Media, where people, or their interactions with ads, are the actual product the companies are selling.
An example where people are neither the customer nor the product is B2B software, where the user interface is, sometimes hilariously, sometimes unbearably, horrible to use - SAP software being the canonical example.
The reason for that is that the goals of the person buying the software does not always align with the goals or wishes of the actual users - ease of use vs. price, for example. Concur, the tool discussed in the link above, is actually a good example where this tradeoff kind of makes sense: In many companies, the tool is crucial to have, but rarely used, and a shoddy UX would be worth the cost savings.
Often, though, this phenomenon is due to misaligned goals, because of course does the UX have an effect on the efficiency of the people using it, especially when they rely on the tool for their day to day work. If cost saving is more important than mid term efficiency, then a poor UX is acceptable.
As a side note, I have done my fair share of last-minute preparation of half-assed features just to get the software through a sales pitch, and I, too, have heard the lie of "fixing it later" once the contract is finalized. Typically, the presentation in the sales pitch is tailored around the capabilities of the software, and the minute someone asks the presenter to click somewhere outside of their script, things start to fall apart. Consequently, handwaving was a crucial skill for our sales colleagues.
I once worked with a company that was developing call center software: The software on the client PCs that shows information about the calling customer. Quickly I discovered that the protocol between the client and the server was not encrypted at all, passwords were transmitted in clear text and there was no server-side validation to access any customer records: Essentially, the server did whatever the client ask for, and inversely, all the server could do was to ask the client nicely.
For example, if the server wanted to shut down a client remotely (for instance because the shift of the person on that computer has ended and they should no longer receive any data), all it did was sending what we dubbed a would-you-kindly request to the client to shut down, which the client could potentially ignore without any consequences at all. The session would stay active if the client dropped the request.
Obviously, I raised this to both the lead architect and the lead product manager, and, equally obviously, they both already knew and told me that call center employees were too dumb to exploit this, because if they weren't, they wouldn't be working in a call center.
I am not sure if there is a better word for it, but I'd like to call this approach "Security by floccinaucinihilipilification".
It's been a while since I mentioned the Boring Phone, and I have to say that it really makes a difference to use the phone like this. Apart from the DnD-Settings, which I somehow have set to a laxer timeline (reverting it now to 18:00-8:00), I am still using all the settings I mentioned in the original post.
You're using Function Keys wrong: a proposal to use the F keys as shortcuts for day to day activities. Which is what they have been designed for, but they have been used for different purposes, and then we introduced another layer of FN keys on top of the existing ones, but the new layer also does not provide great value (apart form Media Controls maybe), so now we need a 3rd party app to use the FN keys for what they were intended to use.
omg.lol, a lovable web domain. Reminds me a bit of beepworld or similar pages in the early 2000s. I am not sure what to do with it yet, but this is mine. I am considering moving the blog there, or using their status update on this blog, but for the first variant the latency of the service is too bad, and for the other variant I would have to add JavaScript to this blog, which I'd like to avoid.
While moving my blog to its new domain, I was setting up URL records from my old domain to the new one. Under the hood, URL records are a convenience service by my hosting service: they create an A record to their own redirection server, which then redirects the users to the contents of the URL record.
Weirdly, it was not working. Now, I am used to weird intermediate states when it comes to DNS records, so I patiently waited, but this one was new: dig showed me the correct records, so did every DNS tool I could find, but still, the redirect did not work as expected, even after I flushed my browser's DNS cache.
Turns out that the browser caches more than just DNS: They also cache 301 redirects, which is exactly what the redirection server returned. So my browser was following the old redirect and never even hitting the redirection server, oblivious to the fact that the redirection URL had changed somewhere in between.
Here is the fix to an annoying issue I recently had.
The problem:
Alexa's volume is either too low or too loud relative to the media/music playback. So when you hear music at a regular volume and then ask Alexa something, either its feedback blasts holes in the nearest wall, or it is so low that you can barely hear it.
The solution:
I only tested this with the Spotify skill, but I assume that this also works with other skills where you remotely change the Echo's volume , e.g. without directly interacting with the Echo. Here is what happens: Suppose the Echo is set up correctly at Volume 3, Alexa's volume is just fine. Then you start playback via Spotify. You increase the volume using the Spotify app: the Echo changes its volume. However, Alexa's volume does not change with it, so if you set the volume to e.g. 6 while hearing Spotify, Alexa's volume would still be at 3. If you now change the volume on the echo directly, or asking Alexa to change the volume, you change both the Echo volume and Alexa's volume at the same time - no matter if you're still using Spotify or not. So if, for example, after the above change you change your volume from 6 to 5 on the Echo, you also change Alexa's volume from 3 to 2. And if you turn the echo's volume all the way back to 3, Alexa's volume would be on the lowest setting.
This also works the other way around.
The Fix:
You need to use the Spotify skill (or, as mentioned above, any other skill that allows remotely changing the volume).
Start playback.
Using the Echo controls or voice commands, change the Echo's volume so that Alexa's voice responses are at the right level for you.
Using Spotify's controls, change the volume to a level that matches Alexa's voice volume level.
Both volumes should now be in synch and change simultaneously using the device's controls or voice commands.
I know the general push for smaller teams - e.g. the Two Pizza Rule or the 7 +/- 2 Rule, but until now I assumed this was only to minimize communication paths within the team. Turns out there is another effect at play: The Ringelmann Effect:
The Ringelmann effect is the tendency for individual members of a group to become increasingly less productive as the size of their group increases. [...] As more people are involved in a task, their average performance decreases, each participant tending to feel that their own effort is not critical.
The weather is now too warm to operate the machinery for artificial snow. I used to work in the ski industry for a bit and can tell you that most resorts do not have a Plan B. Skiing is a luxury activity, you can't compensate this with summer activities such as climbing.
I just made some page changes, to make the blog overall more suitable for tiny, tweet-like posts like this one. They should now look much more compact and better. Under the hood, I also reduced the friction for me to post something on the page (it's still not as easy as tweeting though).
How to set a narrative without facts (all links in ๐ฉ๐ช, sorry!):
Part I: The police complains loudly about attacks on New Year's Eve, without providing any numbers at all. Basically, they are just complaining.
Part II: Jens Spahn claims that "unregulated migration" is to blame. Again, no proof. Which is ironic since he was part of the government that was in charge until very recently, and while migration to Germany was at an all-time high.
Part III: tagesschau takes the unfounded complaints and unproven statements and speculates about the reasons, even quoting psychologists that give their assessment based on assumptions on top of assumptions.
Addendum: Here's a much more nuanced article on that matter, which points out - among other things - that crimes committed by immigrants is on the decline, and that this whole thing might be due to toxic masculinity more than anything else.
Addendum:
The number went down again, now we're talking about 38 people, the majority of them German.. Seems like the police simply lied, and given how trustworthy the police is, most people, including Germans, believed this.
Great team event at Daniels Kleine Farm near Castrop Rauxel with my friends at zalando - At danielskleinefarm We were all having a blast, and some people even considered quitting software engineering and starting a life as an Alpaka farmer!
Currently, this post about how shoddy code causes 6 minute long loading times in a game is going around. I think this is an interesting case, because it underlines the fact that if you are selling goods which are exceptionally high in demand, and for which there is no competition, then you can drastically save on quality. And that includes customers having to suffer minute-long loading times, either because no one noticed, or, more likely, no one cared.
And there will be no consequences! It does not matter how annoyed people might have been with GTA Online, they will still buy GTA VI, because the mechanisms of capitalism don't really apply in this context.
Regina [the photographer] was interested in capturing images without the use of modern technology; in this case using a beer can lined with photographic paper as a pinhole camera. She placed a can on one of the Observatoryโs telescopes, which had been forgotten about until September this year when it was finally removed by the Observatoryโs Principal Technical officer.
Interesting article on reverse engineering the Biontech/Pfizer vaccine.
I have a background in Biology and Bioinformatics, so I feel quite at home in this article, and I appreciate how the author took their time to break this all down.
This is not only true for personal success, but for teams in any #workplace. Start to make your work place fun and engaging. Start with yours, other people will soon follow your #lead. #worklife
โSpace is big. You just wonโt believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think itโs a long way down the road to the chemistโs, but thatโs just peanuts to space.โ
--Douglas Adams, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
No nerd shirt today, just a reminder that things are still bad in #belarus , even though the media coverage has switched to corona recently. All the best for my friends, the strong women and men of #belarus ! #minsk
Links, which is essentially a list of interesting links. Instead of opening a
new tab, you would place the existing one here.
Lists, which helps you grouping links.
I like the idea a lot and think that it has a lot of potential - I agree that
the idea of tabs needs overhauling. However, I disagree with the implementation
so far. Colibri lacks many basic features, which I would find acceptable in an
MVP.
But their key features, Links and Lists, are hard and not intuitive to use, and
the current feature set for these features are not very satisfying, considering
that this is supposed to be the unique selling point of this browser.
A father is about to bring his son to a job interview, applying for a position
at a large stockbrokers company in the city. Just as they arrive at the
company's parking lot, the son's phone rings. He looks at his father, who
says: "Go ahead, answer it."
The caller is the trading company's CEO who says: "Good luck son, you've got
this."
The son ends the call and once again looks at his father, who is still next to
him in their car.
The future is now: Nokia to build mobile network on the
moon. So the
moon will get fast mobile internet before some spots in Germany? That is not
quite the future I imagined!
Transforming to digital is more about doing than planning. Organizations can
get caught up in endless rounds of analysis paralysis, which slows the
transformation project. To combat this, organizations should institutionalize
lean startup thinking at every level.
I have moved the Product Owner Q&A to a separate space on this
page, where I will continue collecting questions and answers in
relation to Product Ownership.
The longer something has taken, the longer it will
take. This
effect has a significant impact on any estimate on when an overdue project will
finally be done - intuition and hope says it will be done soon, the math and
experience says it won't.
Related to that is the Lindy
Effect: The longer
a technology has been around, the longer it is likely to stay around. This has
implications on, among other things, architecture.
Should you re-estimate your work while you do it or
not?,
discussed in the context of agile estimation techniques. My stance is to never
re-estimate after work has been started, even if it's a huge outlier. Because we
tend to only re-estimate stuff where we have been too optimistic, and not items
where we have been too pessimistic - which would then skew the final result.
Also, even exceptional outliers are part of the usual business - they happen,
and if we take them out by re estimating them, we assume that they will not
happen in the future.
I think one of the reasons why Scrum (or agility in general) has such as bad
standing is because it tends to surface problems which are already there in the
company, and makes them transparent. Consequently, it's easier to shoot the
messenger than to acknowledge and work on the problems.
1985 interview with Steve
Jobs. A very
interesting read full of insights around the state of the computer industry in
the 80s and the mindset Jobs and his company.
My take on this is that it has grown organically. Imgur is not interested in
making the mobile experience (that's what this is about) great, they want you to
use the app instead. Coincidentally, the "Download the app" button is among the
first elements to be rendered. My best guess is that the current mobile page is
just something cobbled together on top of old software, with the business people
breathing down the developer's neck.
The future is now: Adobe deactivates subscriptions for Venezuela. Adobe is mainly offering subscription-only products, with very limited options in case you want to buy instead of subscribe to a product. Also, they are not giving refunds to the holders of the cancelled subscriptions.
Arvind Narayanan on why enterprise software sucks. His main example are baby clothes, where two different groups of stakeholders exist: People who want to buy a cute outfit, and people who actually want to quickly dress and undress their kids.
The fact that people who are buying the software are not always the people who are using the software is a fundamental truth that has a direct impact on the motivation of developers. I have seen many people run into a trap of developing a "user friendly software" without an understanding about who is actually buying the software. It can be very frustrating putting a lot of effort into a fancy dashboard no one uses as opposed to improving the parts of the software the users are frequently using.
Performance Metrics for fast web apps. This article handles lots of quirks of JavaScript in a browser. In conclusion, it's not obvious which metrics should be used, but once you know it, it's not too difficult:
Measure time starting at event.timeStamp
Measure time ending at performance.now() in a requestAnimationFrame()
Ignore anything that happened while the tab was not focused
Aggregate data using โ% of events that are under targetโ
I normally don't have the time to read long articles, especially since many texts seem to include a lot of unnecessary fluff or explanations which are not really necessary. I did, however, fully read Typing with pleasure, which explains a lot about typing in general - especially what happens between a single keypress and the finished rendering of the updated character on the screen. It even starts before that, explaining the human system and expectations before going into the technical details.
The limits are: 0.1 second keeps the user convinced that the system is reacting instantaniously. 1 second delay still lets the user work without interruption, and 10 second delay makes the user lose attention.
Boris Johnson is using SEO to bury unfavorable articles. In short, Johnson gave an interview where he described himself as a "role model" to make articles about this interview rank higher than an alledged affair with a model.
This is apparently not the first time he tried this: He once gave an interview where he explained how he likes to paint buses to make reports of that interview bury the story behind him and the bus he was using when lobbying against Brexit.
On March 14, 2015, while reading the book Creative Confidence, I stumbled on a single sentence that seemed to encapsulate the essence of the book in a powerful way.
As a blogger and design-driven individual, I wanted to capture the quote in a captivating way that would allow me to share it quickly online.
[...]
Then, one morning a few days after Snaplight became available in the iPhone and iPad App Store, I noticed a slight uptick in downloads for it. A friend messaged me on Facebook to let me know the app was not only trending, it was being featured on the App Store homepage.
Part of this article reads as an ad for this very app, but for me, the important bit is: Scratch your own itch. Write an app which solves your problem and nothing else, to avoid optimizing it for cases which will never come. And don't be afraid to ship as soon as you're done!
My personal stance is: If you have 100 users complaining about your app, then it's good news - it means that you have 100 users!
When you're operating on the maker's schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. Plus you have to remember to go to the meeting. That's no problem for someone on the manager's schedule. There's always something coming on the next hour; the only question is what. But when someone on the maker's schedule has a meeting, they have to think about it.
This is why I usually recommend having meetings with developers next to the lunch break, shortly after work start or before the end of the work day. YMMV though, as different people prefer different times.
Software Architecture is overrated, clear and simple design is underrated. This article resonates with me because I have worked with multiple teams before, with different emphasis on architecture, and I - from my anecdotal experience at least - do not think that investing more in upfront architecture is really making the software better in the long run. If you are factoring in the time to refactor as you go, and are working with skilled engineers, minimizing the upfront architecture work and focussing on clear and simple design is the key.
Many people I know have observed the following effect: people are going through the motions of Agile, they do everything "by the book", yet they are struggeling. Or, they are doing the same work as before without any change other than renaming their meetings to use agile vocabulary, and call themselves agile. Or, my personal favorite, working in a chaotic and unpredictable way and justifying it with the word "agile"
I recently discovered that there is a word for it, and it has been around since 2016: Dark Scrum, or, more generally, "Dark Agile"!
A list of dumb password rules (with screenshots!). My personal favorite from the past was a password for a bank which could not contain special characters and no numbers and could not be longer than 8 characters.
Deep Fake with Will Smith in "The Matrix". I find this interesting because Will Smith turned down the role of Neo in the original films, and he looks nothing like Keanu Reeves, which makes this a very impressive demonstration of Deep Fakes.
Italians are some of the fastest speakers on the planet, chattering at up to nine syllables per second. Many Germans, on the other hand, are slow enunciators, delivering five to six syllables in the same amount of time. Yet in any given minute, Italians and Germans convey roughly the same amount of information [...]: they tend to transmit information at about the same rate: 39 bits per second.
This is extremely interesting, as it applies to written languages, where information density per syllable was investigated, as well as spoken languages. The conclusion is also fascinating:
But the โwhyโ is another question entirely. Pellegrino and his colleagues suspect that the answer has everything to do with the limits imposed by [...] how much information our brains can take inโor produceโat any one time. [...]
De Boer agrees that our brains are the bottleneck. But, he says, instead of being limited by how quickly we can process information by listening, weโre likely limited by how quickly we can gather our thoughts. Thatโs because, he says, the average person can listen to audio recordings sped up to about 120%โand still have no problems with comprehension. โIt really seems that the bottleneck is in putting the ideas together.โ
In Tetris, a randomizer is a function which returns a randomly chosen piece. Over the years, the rules of how pieces are chosen has evolved, affecting gameplay and actual randomness.
Everyone who has ever played around with random numbers has already met the concept of "floods" and "droughts", but possibly not with that name. It's interesting to see which solutions they came up with to strike the right balance between keeping the game unpredictable, but still beatable and fun.
The whole mess of Boing is going further than originally thought. This makes me deeply uncomfortable, as I always regarded aviation as the one sector where people have time and budget to thoroughly test their software. Aviation was even the example #1 when it came to formal proving of algorithms, back in university.
Nasa is reported to be investigating a claim that an astronaut accessed the bank account of her estranged spouse from the International Space Station, in what may be the first allegation of a crime committed in space.
โTech debtโ is a dirty word in the software engineering world. Itโs often said with an air of regret; a past mistake that will eventually need to be atoned for with refactoring.
Financial debt isnโt universally reviled in the same way. Your friend takes out a mortgage to buy a house and what do you say? Congratulations!
The debt metaphor should be taken literally. Taking a debt means taking money someone with the promise of paying back in the future, then using that money for your benefit (possibly generating even more money) and paying it back with benefits. It's a win-win situation - in theory, that is.
The other good point is this:
The key is to be intentional about what you invest time in and aware of the costs youโre taking on. [...] Good tech debt has clear, well-known limitations. Document these in code comments, READMEs, FAQs, and conversations with the people whoโd care.
Used carefully, good tech debt will help you build software faster by focusing your time on the things that matter most.
At the end of the day, it boils down to "Take a debt consciouisly, aware of the risks and with the intention of paying it back".
It looks like an Apple lightning cable. It works like an Apple lightning cable. But it will give an attacker a way to remotely tap into your computer.
It's annoyingly difficult to make sure that your phone is only loading via USB, without the data access. It's obvious that this type of attack is suitable for more high-profile targets, as long as the average joe keeps plugging his phone into every public USB hub to charge it.
Weโve passed a milestone in Googleโs evolution from search engine to walled-garden. In June of 2019, for the first time, a majority of all browser-based searches on Google.com resulted in zero-clicks.
Step by step, Google is taking over all the information from the web to their own page. I can see the benefit from the end user: They are searching for a specific bit of information and do not care about your website. So from a user's perspective, I applaud this trend. However, this is taking traffic and therefore money away from the websites, which means that Google is destroying business models all over the world.
Iโm going to limit my browsing today to 50 MB, which in Zimbabwe would cost around $3.67 on a mobile data tariff. That may not sound like much, but teachers in Zimbabwe were striking this year because their salaries had fallen to just $2.50 a day.
For comparison, $3.67 is around half the $7.25 minimum wage in the USA. As a Zimbabwean, Iโd have to work for around a day and a half to earn the money to buy this 50MB data, compared to just half an hour in the USA. Itโs not easy to compare cost of living between countries, but on wages alone the $3.67 cost of 50 MB of data in Zimbabwe would feel like $52 to an American on minimum wage.
The article comes with hands-on tips on how websites could improve and shows impressively just how unethical poor web performance is.
It's ironic, though, that the page where he posts his results is also guilty of transferring a lot of data - I measured a whooping 10 MB when accessing the page.
Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.
The article makes a great point of people not being able to grasp very large numbers:
I once taught a small beginning physics class on the thirteenth floor of Hunter College in New York City. From the window we had a magnificent view of the skyscrapers of midtown Manhattan. In one of the opening sessions, I wanted to teach my students about estimates and significant figures, so I asked them to estimate the height of the Empire State Building. In a class of ten students, not one came within a factor of two of the correct answer (1,472 feet with the television antenna, 1,250 without). Most of the estimates were between 300 and 500 feet. One person thought 50 feet was right-a truly amazing underestimate; another thought it was a mile.
Though the rest of the article focusses more on truly large numbers, like the difference between a million, a billion and a trillion, this quote shows that people have already difficulties with numbers which aren't that big.
