Mark Tomczak @mtomczak@qoto.org

In which I beat up React to dynamically control (and make interactive) pieces of a statically-rendered SVG image.

https://blog.fixermark.com/posts/2023/beating-up-react-for-fun/

PROTIP for #frc volunteers:

Remember that the audio from the announcer's mike is piped out to Twitch, and it's a volunteer-best-effort to keep that mic cut.

Watch what you say when you don't think you have a mic on you! ❤️

"And constants aren't CAPITAL_CASE because that's already been reserved for macros, which we aren't supposed to use anyway because they're considered harmful" is the Charlie-Chaplin-complaining-Hitler-stole-his-moustache of my beefs with #cplusplus...

... but oh, *it's in there.*

I made a Python driver for a #Brilliant Labs #Monocle AR peripheral.

https://github.com/fixermark/brilliant-monocle-driver-python

https://pypi.org/project/brilliant-monocle-driver/

When I'm debugging.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkwmB6n3s_g

TFW you tell the #frc team you're "just going to clean up the code a bit" and you accidentally a 194-lines-in, 119-lines-out change.

... well, that's what pull requests are for.

Oh nooooooo is #openai gonna be upset that someone trained an AI without their consent off of the AI they trained on... Other people's online-accessible content, used for training without their consent?
Oh nooooooooo!

https://twitter.com/steventey/status/1641267979399704576

Really enjoyed the #lackadaisy pilot. Great work and a fun adventure.

https://youtu.be/vffu6FG4YP4

TBH, a lot of people in the "Don't use cloud analytics" camp are real, real naive about how hard it is to roll your own analytics.

This is a non-trivial problem. So you see the traffic to your site. Do you have the mappings set up to geo-locate IPs by country? Are they up-to-date? How much of that traffic is noise? Do you know? What is "noise?" Do you count hits from aggregator sites? Do you count crawlers? What do crawlers look like? How do you know if your content got re-hosted?

Analytics is not a technical problem; it's a social problem. Google and the other companies that do analytics solve it with people making decisions about definitions and enforcement, not just algorithms.

In which I use #python to push a demo program to a Brilliant Labs #monocle peripheral screen.

https://blog.fixermark.com/posts/2023/controlling-monocle-from-python-script/

Something that I've found useful when getting back into #cplusplus is learning #Rust at the same time.

A lot of the ideas in C++ are made explicit in Rust, so as I read, for example, how Rust treats string slices vs. strings, and then I see a lot of machinery around manipulation of a C++ string view, I can go "Oh, yes, this is attempting to minimize the need to copy strings."

C++ (for historical reasons mostly) has too many ideas jumbled together in too many ways to self-describe; Rust makes those ideas explicit, so they're easier to understand.

After wrestling for hours with bazel and intellisense, I have hashtag-given-up and configured etags, and auto-complete in #emacs .

Oh my God it's a night-and-day difference. Trying to program C++ with no assistance is like trying to write with my eyes closed. I'm going to get so much effin' *work done* this week.

This was my day.

Kingdom Hearts is C++ with Bazel.

Resident Evil is Typescript with NodeJS.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2s4OZcV-5fE