mjd

9 ms·

121.
by mjd 1y ago
“I spoke to a startup founder who raised $2 million in funding based on "user growth" metrics that he later discovered were 80% bots. He is now trapped, forced to pretend everything is fine because admitting the truth could jeopar
122.
by mjd 1y ago
Not a bad guess! According to this report on my desk, it is 61%±2% funny.
123.
by mjd 1y ago
Kissinger can take the blame for a great many things, but not for starting the US practice of overthrowing democratically elected regimes. He was still getting his Ph.D. when the CIA helped overthrow the Mossadegh government in Iran, prima
124.
by mjd 1y ago
I left out Aung San Suu Kyi because I don't think that failure can be blamed on the Prize committee. It didn't become clear until many years later that she had been a bad choice.
125.
by mjd 1y ago
That's impossible, the mirror wasn't invented until millennia later, so there's no way the sculptor would have known what a human face looked like. They must think we're stupid.
126.
by mjd 1y ago
Pretty sure they had already spoiled it by giving it to F.W. de Klerk, Yasser Arafat, and Henry Kissinger.
127.
by mjd 1y ago
I had one. It was a great product. I could never have afforded a flatbed, but I had an ImageWriter and plenty of time. Early on I used it to make a picture of Madonna with a fish stuck through her head.
128.
by mjd 1y ago
The article itself makes this point more than once.
129.
by mjd 1y ago
I've been using Motorola for years, for that reason.
130.
by mjd 1y ago
There were commits in the original log input for which 4 and 3 would have been ambiguous, and the abbreviations are already short enough.
131.
by mjd 1y ago
I usually do that too, but this seemed to me like it's not really a git utility. It's just a filter. I can see the argument in favor of `git-` also. But I think I'd prefer `git-changed-twice` to be a wrapper that takes a ref
132.
by mjd 1y ago
At the time I started writing the article, the utility was called `analyze-commits`. Hard to think of a worse name than that! By the time I finished writing it I had come up with a less crappy name, but I thought I'd leave the question
133.
by mjd 1y ago
I agree. I decided years ago that that was a lot of work for little or no benefit. It's enough for the tests to pass at each merge point.
134.
by mjd 1y ago
Now I think I'll start letters with “Dear Sir Oswald,” regardless of who they are to.
135.
by mjd 1y ago
I always feel funny starting letters with “dear”, but next time that happens I'm going to remember that this one started with “Dear Sir Oswald,”.
136.
by mjd 1y ago
I've been doing basically this for many years now. Each password file is AES-encrypted with my master password. I copy the whole vault around between machines with rsync. When I run 'password bank' a shell script searches ~&#
137.
by mjd 1y ago
Maybe the idea is: gain expertise in making, loading, flying, and landing 100m planes this year, and try 150m planes next year.
138.
by mjd 1y ago
This reminds me of an excellent series of lectures I once attended about how you can't have practical skyscrapers without inventing the elevator, you can't have practical automobiles without inventing the windshield wiper, and you
139.
by mjd 1y ago
I haven't read the article yet, but I do have something to contribute: several years ago I was ay PyCon and saw a talk in which someone mentioned async. I was interested and wanted to learn to use it. But I found there was no documen
140.
by mjd 1y ago
Sucher's substack is reliably interesting in that way, you should check out the back issues
141.
by mjd 1y ago
We already know the system is really bad at spelling. I have Claude configured to periodically remind me “By the way, I think there are ** n's in 'banana'”, so I don't forget what I am dealing with. It has never gotten t
142.
by mjd 1y ago
Closely related, from 2018: “What dead pigs can teach us about missing bodies in the Arizona desert” https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/politics/border-issues/...
143.
by mjd 1y ago
That's just the problem! It is better at the task. Until it isn't, and "isn't" comes much too soon.
144.
by mjd 1y ago
I've been writing scripts in Bourne shell since the 1980s and in Bash since whenever it came along, and I feel like the most important thing I've learned about it is: don't. Sure, it can be done, and even done well, but why?
145.
by mjd 1y ago
Ecch, you know who would be building them? Mark Andressen. No thanks.
146.
by mjd 1y ago
Eben Moglen observed that at one time people were building giant stone pyramids, then the social and technological conditions changed, and people stopped making new ones. That's OK, it's not a sad thing that there are no new pyram
147.
by mjd 1y ago
Thanks for saying all the stuff I was thinking in that other thread about Matt Trout. I have a policy of not replying to throwaway accounts, and decided it wasn't worth breaking in this case. But I was really tempted.
148.
by mjd 1y ago
In my life, I've only known one person who has called me a “cunt”. I'm sure Matt would have been happy to admit that he was that person. I'm sure he would have said that he had spoken his mind unvarnished, and maybe even that
149.
by mjd 1y ago
This is my all-time favorite paper. It's so easy to read, and there's so much to think about, so much that still applies to everyday programming and language dedign. Also there's Knuth admitting he avoids GO TO because he is
150.
by mjd 1y ago
This is definitely typo of the week.

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