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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Imo, the term “buy” for all goods should pass some sort of litmus test. Eg:

    does the product being sold have the same properties as a brick?

    • can the product be resold privately?
    • can the product be lent to another user temporarily?
    • would the product still perform its function when the manufacturer stops supporting it?
    • would the product still perform its function if the manufacturer ceased to exist.

    if the product does not pass all these tests, the customer is not buying. Consider using terms such as ‘rent’ or ‘lease’ or ‘subscription’




  • I used to love ‘the cloud’. Rather, a specific slice of it.

    I worked almost exclusively on AppEngine, it was simple. You uploaded a zip of your code to appengine and it ran it at near infinite scale. They gave you a queue, a database, a volatile cache, and some other gizmos. It was so simple you’d struggle to fuck it up really.

    It was easy, it was simple, and it worked for my clients who had 10 DAU, and my clients who had 5 million DAU. Costs scaled nearly linearly, and for my hobby projects that had 0 DAU, the costs were comparable.

    Then something happened and it slowly became complicated. The rest of the GCP cloud crept in and after spending a term with a client who didn’t use “the cloud” I came back to it and had to relearn nearly everything.

    Pretty much all of the companies I’ve worked for could be run on early AppEngine. Nobody has needed anything more than it, and I’m confident the only reason they had more was because tech is like water. You need to put it in a bucket or it goes everywhere.

    Give me my AppEngine back. It allowed me to focus on my (or my clients) problems. Not the ones that come with the platform.








  • My brother behaves weird with Linux (fedora 39 silverblue).

    When doing multiple copies of double sided printing, it’ll print [1|2] [1|1] [2|2] [1|1] [2|2] and then repeat until you realise you now have onen copy of what you want and 10 pages of one side, and 10 pages of the other side.

    It’ll also randomly refuse jobs, and then print them 30 minutes later (lmao if you printed multiple copies, gave up and went for a walk)

    My Panasonic I replaced it with was better, but you had to download binary blobs to make it work.

    But, Linux has gotten more and more complicated in the last 20 years I really can’t be fucked working out if it’s the printer, cups, flatpacks, the app that’s printing, or all of the above.

    Now I just email myself a PDF and print from my phone. Fucking stupid but it works.










  • Ditto… ish.

    In my dream I mixed up some constraints of the real-world system. I still came up with an elegant solution that would have worked if the dreams constraints were true. Except they weren’t and the solution was useless.

    Bonus was the dream-solution exposed a “front door” so to speak on the real problem and I felt dumb that I even spent 5 minutes thinking about it.