Every time I look at HN comments, I’m disappointed in humanity. Tech-oriented forums used to be where I went to refill my supply of hope.

General Ludd has a posse.

What a coincidence, capitalism’s (feigned) support for americans has declined as well.

Can’t answer for them, but I can explain a similar situation I ran into:

Large external RAID I was using for telescoping backups with a restic cron job. Didn’t want to have it on all the time cuz it was noisy, so I put it on a smart plug and had it turn on and off as part of the job.

I really wanted a set of backup rules that worked like… “always a full snapshot of current state, plus as much of the following as will fit into the destination: daily for the past 7 days, weekly for the past 4 weeks, monthly for the rest until full” …but restic doesn’t (or didn’t) support that kind of dynamic rule set.

I tried to estimate it programmatically, but it never worked 100% and I frequently ran into out of space errors.

But of course, I never saw the actual disk usage in my day-to-day, because the RAID was only on at like 4 AM.

So they basically want to make it legal for an employer to turn their 401k offering into a pyramid scheme. Cool.

And the agency in charge of prosecuting such cases right now has decided it’s unfair to second guess employers’ decisions. Cool cool cool.

What genius came up with that safety provision?

“Hey teacher, tell me whether my kid is trans so I know whether to abuse them.”

“You fool, you’re powerless here! I can issue a letter that says ‘If I answered that question then you would abuse them’ and so now you’ll never know!”

Agreed.

I’m also a fan of Kent Beck’s “make the change easy, then make the easy change”.

i.e. Do one PR that changes the code’s design but not its behavior, in order to make the next feature easier to implement. Then do another PR that changes just the behavior but not the design.

This way, you get earlier feedback on refactors and you keep behavior PRs small so you reduce the likelihood of the scenario where “we really need to ship this feature but it’s tied to this massive refactor that isn’t quite right”.

(Note that this is just for the case where a feature genuinely requires a refactor. If it’s just “boy-scouting”, then order shouldn’t matter but you should still keep them separate.)

I’ve seen that before. It’s a self-destructive policy.

Sometime they’re kids. Sometime they’re squids.

I’m disappointed by Linux on almost a daily basis. And MacOS. And iOS. And Android.

(I haven’t used Windows in a long time, so I guess it’s the only major OS I’m not routinely disappointed by? Whoa, that’s a realization…)

But this is just what happens when you’re constantly messing with stuff.

Since “do one thing principle” is pretty abstract, I’ll give you one example of a downstream consequence.

I wanted to set up a NixOS microVM using docker sbx. Turns out, it was basically impossible (nothing is actually impossible, it just depends how much you want to modify/rebuild things).

Much of NixOS depends on systemd to manage lifecycles of this or that, but systemd only works properly if it’s the first PID, and when it runs in that mode it also wants to initialize hardware.

But the hardware is all managed by the microVM, so systemd blows up. All it needs to do is nothing, but that turns out to be very difficult to achieve.

If these were like 3 or 4 distinct utilities, there would be obvious seams where I could separate them and only activate the stuff that’s relevant to my use case. But it’s all one big ball of mud.

Customer

We’re embarking on the information/communication equivalent to Kessler Syndrome.

I’ve been thinking, the next big personal electronics shift on the level of smartphones will probably be some kind of drone. I don’t think an umbrella will do the trick, but there’s definitely something to this general idea — something that automatically follows you and acts as an extra appendage.

Never mind that money ultimately belongs to the state anyway, and is only worth anything because if you don’t pay the state then it will do Bad Things™ to you.

Not only is it impossible to “run out” of a currency that you control, it’s also not “other people’s”. So the only correct term in the whole phrase is “money”.

peadophile

Ah yes, everyone knows how anti-AI China is.

They can’t afford food because they were born with silver spoons in their mouths. K.

I haven’t. But it has a 2.4GHz dongle too, so it should Just Work™ like a regular HID if you wanna use that instead of Bluetooth. I would recommend it over Bluetooth anyway, for a permanent wireless setup. BT is nice cuz it’s lower effort for a temp setup, but 2.4 is lower latency.

Linux and Mac. Corded most of the time. Bluetooth sometimes for my work Mac.

Their nuphy.io web app is pretty great btw. (Requires Chrome, but other than that.)