Polymaths.social

RE: https://mastodon.social/@evilmartians/116642095752504760

I am really baffled by the state of things in today's LLM-infested IT if posts like this one even need to exist. "Here's a life hack: Use a feature that's been there forever, for this exact purpose!"

I'm not trying to criticise the Martians or the author here; the article just highlights the downgrade that coding and learning to code had experienced.

In the old days, one would search the web for solutions; for easy steps to "do the thing". Not anymore; And it's not because of the web searches collectively becoming enshittified. I guess people just don't need to search anymore: Just tell the clanker what you want and it will do it for you.

I'm already in anticipation for the next stage. "If you keep telling Claude to add spaces inside your angle brackets, here's a life hack for you: Use a formatter to save tokens!"

Reading #Deno v2.8 release notes:

deno pack [...] builds a Deno or JSR project into an npm-publishable tarball. Given a deno.json, running deno pack produces a [tgz file] that’s ready for npm publish.

Deno 2.8 drops the npm: prefix requirement at the CLI: deno add and deno install now treat unprefixed names as npm packages by default. [...] JSR packages keep the jsr: prefix.

If that's not a eulogy for #JSR, I don't know what is.

https://deno.com/blog/v2.8

Es ist sehr cool, das Deutschland Google Street View hat, aber ich finde es schade, dass das Auto meistens während der Bundestagswahl-(oder war's Europawahl?)-Kampagne gefahren ist. Egal wo man "hingeht" trifft man immer wieder auf die Parteiwerbung — und das blau sticht besonders schlimm ins Auge 🙄

GitHub has become plain unusable for me. I use it mostly to read other's code, and the search has been broken for weeks now:

1. Go to any repo
2. Search for a piece of code
3. In the results page, click a result
4. Click browser's "Back" button
5. You land on the repo page, not in the search, and you have to retype your query.

This also happens on other pages; in some cases, GitHub just rewrites the previous history entry instead of adding a new one.

JS was a mistake. Something like this would never happen on an HTML-only site. Use the platform!

So far in my life, I've been told I have

• a German accent, while speaking English
• an English accent, while speaking German
• a Serbian accent, while trying to speak Macedonian
• Pardon ? Je suis désolé, je ne comprends pas, while speaking French

I need to learn more languages and emigrate to more countries so that my accent becomes an even more confusing amalgamation of everything but my native language :P

Looking at the diff between two minor versions of a GitHub Action for installing Node.js. Not many changes: Just a few dependency version updates and a few CI changes. The source of the action itself is unchanged.

And yet, the files that run in CI have 95k additions and 124k deletions. Two hundred and nineteen thousand modified lines. There is no way anyone will ever look at and audit those changes. And all that in an action whose only task is to download and unpack Node.js. How have we become okay with running this much obfuscated code as part of our critical supply chain?

#GitHubActions #NodeJS

TFW my website is prettier during the #CSSNakedDay than with styles 🥲

Krass, der Zoll hantiert immer noch mit D-Mark

Hab in mein #travelynx geschaut, und die Statistik ist schon deprimierend.

Ich habe in den letzten drei Monaten mittlerweile mehr Verspätung angesammelt, als im letzten Jahr. Und das bei 50% weniger Fahrzeit und 60% weniger Entfernung …

Die absoluten Zahlen will ich nicht nennen, weil die es nur schlimmer machen 🫠

I'm sorry???? Is this really how you delete a #Cloudflare Pages project?

I wish websites would reward me for being security conscious. "You enabled 2FA? Good job, we will keep you logged-in for longer".

This usually does not happen, but PayPal is the worst offender. "Oh, you enabled 2FA via the security token? We'll still log you out after 5 minutes. Fuck you. Oh, and we still want 2FA via your phone, in addition to your token. Fuck you. Oh, yes, you can add a passkey! We will ask you for it instead of the password, then your token, then your phone app. Fuck you. Oh, you want to use the app? Well, where's your token? Fuck you. You can't use a security token on your phone because our app literally doesn't support it? We'll still ask for it every time instead of just asking for the TOTP code. Fuck you."

There are many reasons to hate Substack, but leaving all those aside: Why the hell can't I zoom into pictures in posts on my mobile phone? I can't zoom in on the page, and when I click on it, it opens a lightbox view, in which I can't zoom either.

I DON'T WANT TO DOWNLOAD PICTURES TO MY PHONE JUST TO BE ABLE TO ZOOM INTO THEM

One thing I like about NPM/JSR, but miss in #PyPI, are namespaces. This basically solves the problem of the package name being taken, and it can also be a clear indicator of the source of the project. NPM goes even further and allows one to assign different namespaces to different registries (indexes).

But #Python also has namespaces! Moreover, the Zen of Python even says: "Namespaces are one honking great idea". I wonder why almost nobody is seriously using them, except for maybe Anthon aka ruamel, and Zope.

And, because I feel like nobody's using them, I wonder if I should start using them, or if I should just start thinking of better names for my packages

I've watched the #ChatControl session live, which was the first #EUParliament plenary session I've ever watched, and I have questions.

1. If every MEP has a digital voting device, why do some votes happen by show of hands?
2. For both types of votes: Why the hell is it so fast?
3. Why are all proposals worded so badly, with layers upon layers of negation? "Ah yes, I vote against the amendment that would remove a paragraph from a motion to discard a paragraph from an act that forbids Foo" how do you even parse this?

Or, generally speaking: Are we sure that, even if the elected MEPs are the ones we voted for, they actually submit correct votes? Not because they're secretly evil, but because the whole voting process seems so confusing and user-hostile.

I really need to learn more about it all works

#TIL (+): You can use env -C foo to run commands in a different workdir. Basically like git -C foo, but for every command; or a shorter pushd foo && command && popd, if you wish

#TIL (-): It's not a part of POSIX (not even 1-2024), so you can't rely on it being everywhere T_T GNU and BSDs seem to have it, though

TIL: TSLint was developed by... Palantir??? Thank God it got deprecated, and we're not using it any more 😮‍💨

I have over 70 blog post ideas that I could write!

The majority of those consist of just a vague title without explanation of what I actually meant by it...

PSA: #Bitwarden had doubled its prices, and hasn't really told anyone.

https://www.fastcompany.com/91483458/bitwarden-price-increase

IDK about you, but I found out from a group chat that Bitwarden Personal tier now costs $20/year as opposed to $10/year. I was about to get angry that I wasn't notified, and it seems like @bitwarden will only notify you 15 days before renewal, giving one very little time to migrate away if one desires to do so.

It seems that it's legal? I still consider this a malpractice.