Programming, Hacking, and Openwashing

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Oct 26, 2024

• Yordi Verkroost ☛ Conversations with a Duck | Yordi

  This kind of thing happens all the time in software development. So much so that there’s even a term for it: rubber duck debugging. The concept is simple: you explain a problem to a rubber duck (or any other lifeless object). Just by talking it through, you often gain new insights or even come up with a solution. Explaining something forces you to zoom out and look at the problem from different perspectives. And when you can explain something clearly—even to an object—you’ve usually reached a pretty good understanding of it.

• Trevor Morris ☛ Modelling User Settings

  I had done some research already and come up with a couple of options. There is Laravel Settings package by Spatie, which uses a JSON column to store data, but is aimed at application settings. An article by Geni Jaho also touted the JSON column approach in their article Adding user-specific settings in Laravel.

  The solutions I saw and that came up in discussion were; [...]

• Neil Macy ☛ Git Reflog To The Rescue

  I spent a lot of time hearing people talk about git reflog without actually knowing what it did or how to use it. It sounded advanced, and I didn't understand it well enough to know when it would be useful to me. So hopefully this article helps to explain when it can be useful, and how to use it.

  This isn't something that I use often, and when I do use it I refer back to a note which is the basis of this post. So I thought I'd share it in the hope that it helps others in the same scenario.

• Fabian “ryg” Giesen ☛ Inserting a 0 bit in the middle of a value | The ryg blog

  The actual point of this post is the second line. Adding a value to itself just gives two times that value, which is the same as left-shifting by 1; but in this case, we’re adding a copy of value that has its low bits masked off. The end result is that we add 0 to those low bits, i.e. they stay the same. At or above bit number pos, we do add the remaining bits of the value – which has the end consequence of shifting just those bits left and leaving the rest as it was. It only works for inserting exactly 1 bit, but it’s cute. (In the BC7 case with sometimes 2 or 3 anchors, we can just do it multiple times.)

• Tim Kellogg ☛ Cursor: How I rollback multi-file changes

  After New Years 2022 I spent a couple days building dura. The tool is real simple, it just makes Git commits in a background thread to a branch you never see unless you go looking for it. Every time a file changes, it’ll make a commit.

  So now, when I find myself wallowing in a Cursor-inflicted hell hole, I just pop open my git log (tig --all for those that partake), and roll back to the change just prior to my idiocy.

• Rlang ☛ Enhancing Time Series Analysis: RandomWalker 0.2.0 Release

  In the ever-evolving landscape of R programming, packages continually refine their capabilities to meet the growing demands of data analysts and researchers. Today, we’re excited to announce the release of RandomWalker version 0.2.0, a minor update that brings significant enhancements to time series analysis and random walk simulations.

  RandomWalker has been a go-to package for R users in finance, economics, and other fields dealing with time-dependent data. This latest release introduces new functions and improvements that promise to streamline workflows and provide deeper insights into time series data.

• Swift Forum ☛ Swift-Foundation 2024 Annual Update - Foundation

  I'd like to share the first-ever yearly update from Swift-Foundation workgroup.

  Let's review what we've accomplished in the last year and look to what's next.

• International Business Times ☛ 2024-10-22 [Older] 'Understanding Over Repetition': Amazon Engineer's 'Study Smarter, Not Harder' Tips For Conquering Coding Interviews

• Python

  • Simon Willison ☛ TIL: Using uv to develop Python command-line applications

    It turns out I was missing a few things - in particular the fact that there's no need to use uv pip at all when working with a local development environment, you can get by entirely on uv run (and maybe uv sync --extra test to install test dependencies) with no direct invocations of uv pip at all.

  • Simon Willison ☛ Using uv to develop Python command-line applications

    I finally figured out a process that works for me for hacking on Python CLI utilities using uv to manage my development environment, thanks to a little bit of help from Charlie Marsh.

  • Education

    • Sumana Harihareswara ☛ Untold stories from working on Python packaging [PDF]

      [This slide deck is annotated with the transcript of Sumana Harihareswara’s PyCon US 2024 closing keynote presentation, delivered May 19th, 2024; for links and references please see http://harihareswara.net/posts/2024/references-pycon-us-keynote/ .]

• Standards/Consortia

  • Rachel ☛ Friday night feed reader score report

    Oh no, look out, it's another list of feed reader behaviors. This is based on my observations for those test keys which have been active in the past few days. Anything that stops polling eventually ages out of the report and won't show up here.

    My thanks to those feed authors and contributors who have been cranking away to tweak things here and there. It's making a clear difference in the real world. I see more 304s and fewer 429s in general, and that makes me very happy.

    Here is what I have to say for this time around, with some amount of aggregation applied. Some entries cover multiple test keys if the behavior is the same.

  • Michał Sapka ☛ Moving pages in Hugo

    Now, moving pages will be invisible to RSS readers. But then we’ve got the old links. What we want is to have automatic redirects to new locations. Hugo has it built in as aliases. You can add aliases key in front matter of any page. Hugo will create an .html file with redirect in place of each alias you define.

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • SparkFun Electronics ☛ 2024-10-18 [Older] How Small Do You Need Your Speaker?

  • Hackaday ☛ Hackaday Podcast Episode 294: SAO Badge Reveal, Precision On A Shoestring, And The Saga Of Redbox

    With the 2024 Hackaday Supercon looming large on the horizon, Editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi start this episode off by talking about this year’s badge and its focus on modular add-ons. From there they’ll go over the results of a particularly challenging installment of What’s that Sound?, discuss a promising DIY lathe that utilizes 3D printed parts filled with concrete, and ponder what the implosion of Redbox means for all of their disc-dispensing machines that are still out in the wild.

• Openwashing

  • The Register UK ☛ The open secret of open washing

    If you believe Mark Zuckerberg, Meta's AI large language model (LLM) Llama 3 is open source.

    It's not, despite what he says. The Open Source Initiative (OSI) spells it out in the Open Source Definition, and Llama 3's license – with clauses on litigation and branding – flunks it on several grounds.

    Meta, unfortunately, is far from unique in wanting to claim that some of its software and models are open source. Indeed, the concept has its own name: open washing.