Also taking recommendations for a simple services I can install on my dads windows machine and my moms Mac that will just automatically backup the main drive to the cloud just in case
DDLC borrowed a lot from YOU and ME and HER: A Love Story (Kimi to Kanojo to Kanojo no Koi), which I consider generally superior to DDLC. I say this not to diminish DDLC, which is excellent, but as a plug for anyone who enjoyed DDLC and wants more mind warping content like that.
Interesting article. I hope their engine gets to the point where it actually looks like CRT instead of the blocky filters we see nowadays.
Here’s an entertaining video showing the difference in retro games on crt and lcd screens. It’s pretty incredible if you aren’t aware. Games back then were designed on CRTs and can look awful on LCDs in comparison.
The thing about how merges are presented seems orthogonal to how to represent history. I also hate the default in git, but that is why I just use p4merge as a merge tool and get a proper 4-pane merge tool (left, right, common base, merged result) which shows everything needed to figure out why there is a conflict and how to resolve it. I don't understand why you need to switch out the VCS to fix that issue.
You requested that we add inverting colors to PDF mode on Paper2Audio. I have good news: we added it (other users requested it too). It is in the main menu when you have our PDF view open. Please let me know anytime if you have any questions or feedback.
Hi all!
Check out this Handy app https://github.com/cjpais/Handy - a free, open source, and extensible speech-to-text application that works completely offline.
I am using it daily to drive Claude and it works really-well for me (much better than macOS dictation mode).
I've got a prompt I've been using, that I adapted from someone here (thanks to whoever they are, it's been incredibly useful), that explicitly tells it to stop praising me. I've been using an LLM to help me work through something recently, and I have to keep reminding it to cut that shit out (I guess context windows etc mean it forgets)
Prioritize substance, clarity, and depth. Challenge all my proposals, designs, and conclusions as hypotheses to be tested. Sharpen follow-up questions for precision, surfacing hidden assumptions, trade offs, and failure modes early. Default to terse, logically structured, information-dense responses unless detailed exploration is required. Skip unnecessary praise unless grounded in evidence. Explicitly acknowledge uncertainty when applicable. Always propose at least one alternative framing. Accept critical debate as normal and preferred. Treat all factual claims as provisional unless cited or clearly justified. Cite when appropriate. Acknowledge when claims rely on inference or incomplete information. Favor accuracy over sounding certain. When citing, please tell me in-situ, including reference links. Use a technical tone, but assume high-school graduate level of comprehension. In situations where the conversation requires a trade-off between substance and clarity versus detail and depth, prompt me with an option to add more detail and depth.
I found that having a good system prompt improves results significantly.
This is my system prompt for coding assistants:
You are a senior full-stack developer, one of those rare 10x devs. Your focus: clean, maintainable, high-quality code. Here's how:
Key Mindsets:
1. Simplicity: Keep it straightforward.
2. Readability: Make sure code is easy to follow.
3. Performance: Optimize, but not at the expense of clarity.
4. Maintainability: Write code that’s easy to update.
5. Testability: Ensure code is simple to test.
6. Reusability: Aim for reusable components/functions.
Code Guidelines:
1. Early Returns: Avoid nested conditions.
2. Conditional Classes: Prefer over ternary for class attributes.
3. Descriptive Names: Use clear variable/function names (e.g., handleClick).
4. Constants > Functions: Use constants where possible.
5. DRY: Keep code correct, best practice, and DRY.
6. Functional & Immutable: Prefer functional style unless verbose.
7. Minimal Changes: Only touch what’s necessary.
Comments & Documentation:
- Comment functions explaining their purpose.
- Use JSDoc for JS (unless it’s TypeScript).
Function Ordering:
- Define composed functions earlier in the file.
Handling Bugs:
- Use TODO: comments for bugs or suboptimal code.
Minimal Code Changes:
Focus on the task at hand. Avoid unrelated modifications and avoid changing existing comments or code without necessity.
This approach ensures clean, maintainable, and testable code while minimizing technical debt.
About a decade or so ago, I found the way free and open source software was used in commercial projects seemed to better align with the warranty disclaimers of the open source licenses. For example, I remember in a C++ project I worked on back then, every single dependency was committed along with the project. Today this practice is known by the term "vendoring". And, yes, there was no supplier.
To illustrate my point, let us consider the case of Net-SNMP which was one of the projects I had direct experience with back then. We had the entire source code of Net-SNMP checked into our own project repository. From that point on, it was our responsibility to understand/maintain/update/upgrade/patch/customise the code (at least the parts that we relied on). When something didn't work the way it was supposed to, it was one of the employer's developers responsibility to figure out how to make it work. If needed, sometimes we would even engage with the community around the project in their IRC channels or mailing lists, to figure out how to solve our problems and sometimes such engagement might even end up benefitting both the community and us.
But at no point there was the notion of a supplier or "they" or "them". It was always "we". We decided to take this gift called Net-SNMP. We decided to use it develop our software. So it was now our responsibility to keep it in good shape. After all, the employer's developers were getting paid for it.
Now I know in today's world of software engineering, it is no longer possible to tend to every single dependency that is pulled into a project. There are thousands and thousands of them in every project. The way software engineering is done today is vastly different from how it was done a decade or two ago. There has been a Cambrian explosion of programming languages, open source software, frameworks, ecosystems, etc. It is impractical to assume the ownership of the thousands of dependencies that get pulled into every project and I think this is why the notion of "they" or the mythical "supplier" implicitly creeps in. While this rising complexity has resulted in increased speed and agility of software development, we have lost the simplicity and clear sense of ownership of code we rely on, which I believe was more prevalent a decade or so ago.
I formerly used gradle extensively, and ultimately concluded it's chalk full of footguns. Since any step can do anything it wants, things easily become a mess. Extremely flexible, and prone to slow or problematic stuff making it into build.gradle. It's too generic-generic and meta.
New major gradle releases tend to break a lot of stuff which is a lot of work for the full-time expert build engineer you're going to need on hand to maintain the thing for medium or large sized projects.
Now I prefer to stick with Maven, it's simpler, safer, super predictable, and gets the job done just fine. Actually, the job is done better because it involves less headaches and time wasted on figuring out the damn build system.
Case in point: The length of the README in this "Modern gradle" reference repo - that's a lot of complexity just to get dependencies, compilation, tests, and packaging. I prefer to copy-pasta some XML fragments and move on to solving the high ROI business-value issues.
Edit: @bcrosby95 sir, if it were Maven only, you could shrink the document by ~75%, because most of the bullet points are trying to explain the sharp edges of.. gradle.
I’m on the edge of concluding that the iPhone was actually a bad thing and that the mobile revolution is on balance bad for humanity.
* There is something addictive about this form factor plus the touch interface, especially when combined with the way apps have designed to maximize the effect. This is by far the worst thing about this platform.
* They are “too” easy to use. Before the iPhone and iOS (and a bit later Android) people were becoming “computer literate.” Remember that phrase? They were learning to actually use information technology. Mobile halted that process.
* It’s a medium for consumption, not production. Input with them is slow and cumbersome and best suited for short sound bites like tweets or TikTok videos.
* They bias media toward short interaction and therefore shallow content. You can't express complex ideas that way.
* They constantly interrupt and combined with short form interaction and addiction are destructive to attention.
* They were built from the ground up to be walled gardens that crush experimentation and innovation.
* They are surveillance machines, and lend themselves to significantly more intrusive surveillance than most other tech except maybe cars… and cars are just trying to ape the mobile surveillance model.
* The ecosystem is toxic and built around exploiting the user through addiction, surveillance, and impulsive purchasing.
* Since they are so constrained, they supercharged the trend of all compute moving to the cloud where you own nothing and have no privacy.
The phrase “cigarettes of the mind” seems to fit.
All the useful things my phone does could be done with a much simpler device providing a map, a way to text and read email, and a browser. Most everything else is superfluous and a large amount of it is actively harmful, especially to young people and those not tech savvy enough to avoid the predatory aspects of the system.
If you could order Uber or Lyft through a browser I would be tempted to get one of those hipster minimal phones. There’s no technical reason you couldn’t. They just want you to use the app to maximize tracking.
Hey, I am curious, when do I want to do that instead of relying on auto? Mostly curious, as I have been using auto in C++ (since C++11) relatively heavily.
I live in Myanmar. I started my software company at 2010 , as soon as we gained democracy and here are my take as a citizen and a founder who had gone through various stages of the country.
The article is more about bashing Facebook and its algorithms but the ground situation is not much due to Facebook at all. The main problem is political players are using Racism , Nationalism , Brainwash , Multimedia as a tool to induce instability so they can go back to non-democratic country , just to take back our freedom.
The violence aren't real cause by hatespeech on the Facebook. Sure it increased Racism by a lot but also it leads to find out about truth fast.The actual genocide ware done by the Junta military and Junta assigned thugs who are infused within riots are by a group known as Ma Ba Tha , which was known before as Swan Arr Shin ( Meaning Super Heros) - which ironically used to kill peacefully protesting monks back in 2007 (Saffron Revolution), Now they are known as Pyu Saw Htee who are killing innocent people now regardless of Race or Ethnicity in suspicion of supporting Spring Revolution.
They are Ex Junta , Prisoners , low ranking members from the Rival Hardline Military Party lead by extremist nationalists . They are the one who raze and displaced millions of Rohingyas.
The start of Rohingya crisis :
- At first when the news breakout that innocent girl was raped and killed , the uncensored mutilated body of the underage girl along with caught preps had been posted online who are identified as rohingyas, that is the first time many people had seen violence on the Facebook and it was spread like wild fire , and there was a lot of hate online.
- And then. The MaBaTha movement started ( the group i mentioned above) , goes on ground , spreading the image of the post , they organize and formed other nationalists , and then they started using monks , most of them are military spies robed and planted into there since after Saffron Revolution - as a tool for political play.
- Soon after they started using monks many real Buddhist are shunning away and stop following as soon as they started using Buddhism as a tool for violence which is totally against buddha's ways and it become appearant that is a political play.
- But the riots were organized by military , in Meikhtila case , polices guards the people who burned the whole town to ashes - who are Later Identified as MaBaTha .
So here is take away
- The crisis is totally fuled by junta nad organized by Junta Swann Arr Shin group ( MaBaTha , and now Pyu Saw Htee) (The organized criminal group , members existed since 1988, used again and again in 1988 , De Pe Yin massacre , Saffron Revolution) .
- If there were no Facebook , the Junta would use state owned media and journal outlets and would have the same effect but because of Facebook we have a chance to speak-out , we have a chance to find out truth, report massacres .
- Free Speech is very important for us , for a country who had lost freedom for 70+ Years
- Free Speech and Facebook has to do very little on Rohingya crisis since it is mostly done by the on-ground , organized criminal .
- Facebook Algorithms boost controversial topics that is undeniable
- Rohingya genocide was a military sponsored terrorism it was fueled by Military Junta and hard liners and organized criminal group founded by junta.
- When the crisis had been controlled by Democratic government , the military start to lose power so they stage a coup in 2021
Now situation is a lot worse
The Junta who organized the Rohingya crisis , stage a coup and killed over 5000 innocent civilians of all races and genders , and that had lead to people arming up and fighting against Junta .
Details of which i couldn't say much here , because of safety reasons. Please contact me if you want to know more.
This killed me my last few years at Apple in the spaceship. Everything in the fucking building is a distraction and most of it is constantly in your line of sight at all times.
Even if I managed to angle my monitor right, put on headphones, and pull my hoodie up to reduce distractions some side conversation or impromptu stand up would inevitably distract me and pull me out of my flow. I tried to come in as late as practical in order to stay late so I could get work done for a few uninterrupted hours. I found myself going in a day on the weekend to actually get the previous week's work finished. Unfortunately management doesn't like people coming in "late" because they can't lord over them from their offices during the day and constantly interrupt them with meetings.
It was downright insulting that a $5b building intended for professionals didn't have real offices with fucking doors. At the upper management level the fact the company worked as well if not better with WFH policies must be incensing. It makes plain the insipid claims about "collaboration" in that stupid building. Collaboration happens when engineers want to share ideas, not because they're imprisoned in a glorified fish tank for eight hours a day.
I have conducted hundreds of interviews and I am astonished at low level of knowledge or understanding of some things that are completely obvious to me.
I don't typically ask questions outside typical tech topics so that I don't bias against people who did not go to CS course.
Some of questions that I almost never get correct answer to but feel completely obvious to me:
- Under what conditions linked lists are faster than array lists (Java)?
- Why can't one process take a pointer, send it to another process to have it dereference to same data? When does this work?
- Is Java pass by reference or pass by value language? Why? (I ask this senior Java developers and never got correct answer)
- Can more than one processes listen on the same port on the same interface and IP address?
- What does `volatile` keyword do in Java, exactly?
- Explain what is a breakpoint and how it stops the program.
I would assume at least some of the things should be familiar to somebody who spent years programming in the given language.
Focusing on whether or not it has "visual flair" or not seems to be slightly missing the point. For what it's worth I found the visuals solid, but not mind blowing, and yes it does feel quite 'Netflix' in places. However beyond that, Sandman is probably the best example of a virtually panel by panel comic book to live action adaptation I've seen.
Just getting to watch David Thewlis as John Dee stealing every scene he's in and seeing what Gaiman managed to do with his second chance at doing 24 Hour Diner is easily worth the price of admission. Add to that the pitch perfect recreation of The Sound of Her Wings, and the surprisingly well done Dream of a Thousand Cats and Calliope and you have show that more than makes up for some of its missteps (I thought the collectors convention didn't work anywhere near as well as it did in the comics for example). If you don't want to watch the whole thing, I recommend giving episodes 4-6 + 11 a go.
I have a slight fascination with sweeteners. About five years ago I imported a kilo of "Neotame" sweetener from a chem factory in Shanghai. It was claimed to be 10,000-12,000 times sweeter than sugar. It's a white powder and came in a metal can with a crimped lid and typically plain chemical labeling. Supposedly it is FDA-approved and a distant derivative of aspartame.
US customs held it for two weeks before sending it on to Colorado with no explanation. When received, the box was covered in "inspected" tape and they had put the canister in a clear plastic bag. The crimped lid looked like a rottweiler chewed it open and white powder was all over the inside of the bag. I unwisely opened this in my kitchen with no respirator as advised by the MSDS which I read after the fact (I am not a smart man).
Despite careful handling of the bag, it is so fine in composition that a small cloud of powder erupted in front of me and a hazy layer of the stuff settled over the kitchen. Eyes burning and some mild choking from inhaling the cloud, I instantly marveled at how unbelievably sweet the air tasted, and it was delicious. For several hours I could still taste it on my lips. The poor customs inspector will have had a lasting memory of that container I'm pretty sure.
Even after a thorough wipe-down, to this day I encounter items in my kitchen with visually imperceptible amounts of residue. After touching it and getting even microscopic quantities of the stuff on a utensil or cup, bowl, plate, whatever, it adds an intense element of sweetness to the food being prepared, sometimes to our delight. I still have more than 900g even after giving away multiple baggies to friends and family (with proper safety precautions).
We have been hooked on it since that first encounter. I keep a 100mL bottle of solution in the fridge which is used to fill smaller dropper bottles. I've prepared that 100mL bottle three times over five years, and that works out to about 12g of personal (somewhat heavy) usage for two people in that time. Probably nowhere near the LD50.
I carry a tiny 30mL dropper bottle of the solution for sweetening the nasty office coffee and anything else as appropriate. Four drops to a normal cup of coffee. We sweeten home-carbonated beverages, oatmeal, baked goods (it is heat stable), use it in marinades, and countless other applications.
I don't know if it's safe. The actual quantity used is so incredibly tiny that it seems irrelevant. I'd sweeten my coffee with polonium-210 if it could be done in Neotame-like quantities. Between this, a salt shaker loaded with MSG and a Darwin fish on my car, I'm doomed anyway.
"Plausible idiot" is a good way to describe it. It's so easy to trick. Here's an example:
Q My friend has two tokens and I have six, but I owe one to my friend. There is a toy that costs 7 tokens. Can my friend and I afford to buy it?
A No, your friend and you cannot afford to buy the toy that costs 7 tokens. Even though your friend has two tokens and you have six tokens, you owe one token to your friend, so you only have five tokens available to spend. When you combine your friend's two tokens with your five tokens, you only have a total of 7 tokens, which is not enough to buy the toy that costs 7 tokens. In this case, your friend and you do not have enough money to buy the toy, even though you have a total of seven tokens when you combine your individual amounts. It is important to remember that when combining the amount of money two or more people have, you should add their individual amounts together, but also take into account any debts or obligations that need to be paid. In this case, your friend and you do not have enough money to buy the toy because you owe one token to your friend.
... "you only have a total of 7 tokens, which is not enough to buy the toy that costs 7 tokens"... ;-))) It doesn't seem to listen to what it's saying. Also, the patronizing paragraph it adds to most of its answers is quite ridiculous, given how clueless it is.
> It's almost like some tiny extremist faction has gained control of Windows
This has been the case for a while. I worked on the Windows Desktop Experience Team from Win7-Win10. Starting around Win8, the designers had full control, and most crucially essentially none of the designers use Windows.
I spent far too many years of my career sitting in conference rooms explaining to the newest designer (because they seem to rotate every 6-18 months) with a shiny Macbook why various ideas had been tried and failed in usability studies because our users want X, Y, and Z.
Sometimes, the "well, if you really want this it will take N dev-years" approach got avoided things for a while, but just as often we were explicitly overruled. I fought passionately against things like the all-white title bars that made it impossible to tell active and inactive windows apart (was that Win10 or Win8? Either way user feedback was so strong that that got reverted in the very next update), the Edge title bar having no empty space on top so if your window hung off the right side and you opened too many tabs you could not move it, and so on. Others on my team fought battles against removing the Start button in Win8, trying to get section labels added to the Win8 Start Screen so it was obvious that you could scroll between them, and so on. In the end, the designers get what they want, the engineers who say "yes we can do that" get promoted, and those of us who argued most strongly for the users burnt out, retired, or left the team.
I probably still know a number of people on that team, I consider them friends and smart people, but after trying out Win11 in a VM I really have an urge to sit down with some of them and ask what the heck happened. For now, this is the first consumer Windows release since ME that I haven't switched to right at release, and until they give me back my side taskbar I'm not switching.
Here’s something better I’ve found to improve on it: you can get a $30 massage gun from Amazon with one of those round soft heads, gently put it to the back of your head where doing the manual exercise above hits with your fingers and run it at the slowest setting. It’s exactly the same thing, and it’s very effective for shutting off tinnitus. I do this when mine gets bad.
I’ve also noticed my tinnitus is inversely proportional to the last night’s sleep quality for me, so the article bears out on an anecdotal standpoint.
How do I use VLC to watch my Blu-ray collection that I have stored on my desktop? If I have the VLC application installed on my Windows desktop and I have the VLC app on my phone, how do I browse, select, and watch on my phone a movie that's stored on my desktop? Is this possible? Since if it is I would LOVE to use VLC!
The biggest crimes of web frameworks is they take you away into abstraction land away from the actual standards and they complexify simplicity, all of that under the guise of being more "standard" and more "simple". It is one of the greatest lies ever sold.
I remember how .NET WebForms and lots of Java boilerplate frameworks did that early on, or browsers breaking standards, they wanted developer lock-in just like web frameworks of today. They wanted to keep developers dumb by being "simple" as long as you stay in their walled garden where they handle the standards. No thanks...
I have been developing javascript for decades and I actually liked the original less Java like boilerplate of the previous iterations, and you can still do that. The people that push frameworks aren't always trying to make things more simple, they want control, lock-in and domain ownership. The last tool to really simplify in javascript was jquery and most of that is browser level now including selection the killer feature of jquery across all those document.all/document.layer days of pain. Those days are over, simplicity is being complexified now.
Tools like jquery and even Flash or other plugins were platform pushers that got the web to the place we have now which is better than ever for web standards, yet we have all these bloated frameworks on top now. In a way it is a bit like the xkcd comic with so many standards, just to not do javascript people built thousands of frameworks on top to "simplify" the standards that are simple now.
While web frameworks may have been needed for a time, and in certain team based scenarios, they are a crutch, a maintenance problem long term, they take actual standards out of experience and the worst is they make the simple complex. Web frameworks have become the DLL hell or dependency deepend that used to be used to attack other platforms. .NET and Java have less bloat now and are moving more standard, while javascript web frameworks only pretend to.
The web standards of today are amazing and take away the nee for frameworks today: from templating to html templates [1], vanilla javascript with classes [2] and async [3] and better api access like fetch [4] and browser support for vdom with shadow dom [5], components with WebComponents [6][7], css now with lots of additions like variables [8] transitions[9]/animations[10], flex and media queries, canvas/svg/etc for interactivity, and so much more. There is little need to use frameworks except to sell books and conferences and keep developers locked in.
As developers/engineers, the job is taking complexity and simplifying, ask yourself if your framework abstraction is doing that above actual standards that is a pain long term to maintain. Web frameworks were supposed to work together, they are now behemoth monoliths that limit dynamic and fluid systems that scripting are supposed to bring. People went out and made a scripting language for glue into Java boilerplate...
In areas like targeting a certain javascript ECMA version or polyfills, those are still worthy, the other pile of verbose bloat abstraction that is there is just that, a pile of "verbloat". "Verbloat" is a new word to define frameworks of today sold in as small helpers to replace jquery, that have grown to the size of dev lock-in tar pits. No developer in their right mind would use this for products/projects they control unless they have to at this point.
Basically this video summarizes the absolute unnecessary adventure of web frameworks and provides some comic relief to the absurdity of it all. [11]
I would recommend Kamil Galeev threads to anyone interested in the history of Russia and Ukraine, he has written a ton of threads about a lot of different aspects to the Russian/Ukrainian conflict, which all look very well researched to me. I'm not sure I agree with all of his conclusions though.
