Notices by mhoye (mhoye@mastodon.social), page 3

In 2011 after Dennis Ritchie died, I wondered if we should start retiring usernames on unix systems as an honorific, in the same way sports teams will retire the numbers of great players.

I frequently wonder what building a deeper cultural history into the functioning of the common codebase would look like, and what that would mean and maybe gain over time.

You can't wear 99 in the NHL now, or 6 in the NBA. Maybe you shouldn't be able to log in as dmr for the same reasons.

Kinda odd seeing people upset that a portable & wearable computer company might make a fashion product. Odd and sort of joyless.

Gentlemen if you - are at this exact second - dressed like you would blend invisibly into the Old Navy Kids' Department and you are reacting to a feminine-coded fashion product intruding into your precious computering like this maybe take a moment to look in the mirror and then much further inwards before the typing.

Like, "what if computer was also pleasing to carry around and appealing to look at" seems like a question we should have an answer for? And a variety of good and healthy answers to that question would be good? Maybe if computer can empower us it could also - at the same time, in no way diminishing the empowerment - express some sort of personal aesthetic choices in the process?

I mean, this industry is fast fashion all the way down, OOP, Extreme, TDD, Agile, React, DevOps, wait no DevSecOps, DORA, Crypto, Blockchain, AIOps, DevFooBarOps and, gentlemen, frankly most of you lived a career through that acronym salad and came out of it worse-dressed than a Victorian twelve year old.

FYI

This is interesting: https://askubuntu.com/questions/1559396/the-new-du-command-in-lib-cargo-bin-coreutils-outputs-wrong-sizes-in-ubun

… because I think the real question is, when it’s time to rewrite/rebuild, how do we approach (potentially) load-bearing mistakes?

I mean, at some point we need to make progress, but we also can’t keep pouring concrete over quicksand.

"You just point and click and drag everyone knows that" you spent hundreds of hours training to "just" point and click and drag, but you didn't call it training, you called it solitaire and minesweeper.

You practised.

Today, if we want a better user interface for any computing - and I think we do, and it's possible - we have two choices. Entirely 100% new - clean-break, fresh-start new - tech or to acknowledge and own that we're going to spend some time fighting reflexes honed over decades.

A little louder, a reminder:

"Good UX" mostly means "I've seen this before."

Have you ever seen an adult without your cultural baggage approach a doorknob for the first time? They'll start by pulling it, then pushing it. There's nothing "intuitive" about turning a round doorknob. But you've been trained, so you don't even notice.

"...but Apple, but the iphone", the iPhone was never "easy to use" or "intuitive". They bombarded TV with training videos disguised as ads for 6 months pre-release.

If we think of code as a tool for expressing a collective understanding of a shared problem in a way that’s culturally durable - and sure, maybe I’m the only person who does, fine - then containerization works against a collective social goal while accepting a dependency on corporate cloud provisioning.

Taking that argument a small step further gives me, at least, this observation: containerization counts as complying in advance.

https://mastodon.social/@benpocalypse/115486177681182527

@cks it’s fundamentally an argument that understanding is cheap enough to think of as disposable.

I have a version of this in a drawer somewhere that’s was always running and sat on a backpack strap.

Walking through public spaces like malls was always kind of great. It’s like projecting an ambient glitch field.

https://mastodon.social/@maltman23/115475706125937161

An interesting upcoming law in Canada (edit: Ontario) that will change the tone of the hiring process quite a bit on January 1st, including obligations to disclose the expected compensation range and inform interviewees of the job's vacancy status and interview results within 45 days.

https://devrylaw.ca/upcoming-requirements-for-job-postings-starting-january-1-2026/

@manualdousuario It is free to use, if you would like to make translations you are welcome to.

People used to argue, straight faced with sincerely held good intentions, that you couldn't trust free software or wikipedia, because who would you call if it breaks? You don't really know where it all comes from!

But the answer is "people". The answer was always people, and no matter what you've heard from governments, media outlets or corporations, people are far more trustworthy than the average government or the typical media outlet or any corporation.

Bet on people who bet on people.

"Hi, its me, Wikipedia, and I am ready for your apology."

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/hi-its-me-wikipedia-and-i-am-ready-for-your-apology

@whitequark Yeah, I'm just thinking that whatever can be made incremental should be. The first bite at the problem will have to be a big one.

@whitequark If you preload the remote with an rsync-type process, maybe you skip the "send everything over" part, or at least do it a bit at a time as you work?

@whitequark A friend of mine once described me as "occasionally useful, in the same way an occasional table is a table."

@whitequark Have you considered leveraging 304-not-modified to speed up incremental compilation?