rlamacraft @rlamacraft@qoto.org

Some hard-hitting reporting from the New York Times on the inequality of vaccine distribution. Such is the world we live in. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/03/19/world/covid-vaccine-inequality.html?action=click&module=Spotlight&pgtype=Homepage

@swiley PureScript and Elm, languages heavily inspired by Haskell, that compile to JavaScript are honestly a joy to work with. It’s just a shame they’re another level of abstraction. I’m holding out hope for wasm to go mainstream so I can write in languages like Go, Swift, and Rust. I’m not hopeful though when obvious technologies like Web Workers are yet to do so.

I’ve just spent 2 hours debugging an issue which turns out to be because JavaScript was silently converting my integer to a string… Not even quotes around it when printing out… just great.

The fact that we as an industry decided to take a programming language designed for normal folk to add a little bit of interactivity to the personal websites and use it to build commercial grade applications is honestly one of the worst decisions of the 21st century. Pure stupidity.

“Several years ago, I was chatting with another engineer from a close competitor. He told me about how they'd set up a system to run hundreds of data processing jobs a day over a dozen machines, using docker, load balancing, a bunch of AWS stuff. I knew these jobs very well, they were basically identical for any company in the space.
He then mentioned that he'd noticed that somehow my employer had been processing thousands of jobs, much faster than his, and asked how many machines we were using.
I didn't have the heart to tell him we were running everything manually on my two-year-old macbook air.” — just amazing! 😂https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26473388

“Fixed width typeface with ligatures” is a bit of an oxymoron really

Why is billing address even a thing? Why is providing my physical address necessary for me to purchase an entirely digital good?

I just don’t understand what can drive someone to such monstrous behaviour. Calling them “dogs” just doesn’t do it justice https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/mar/15/the-death-of-zaw-myat-lynn-allegations-torture-used-on-opposition-activist-in-myanmar

@trinsec evidently not :( was using Kodex but somehow a whole hour’s changes weren’t saved. Don’t know if it’s my fault or the app’s but a lack of an explicit save button without closing the document is clearly a problem. If I had the time I’d be very tempted to write my own…

@swiley you know what, I think you’re right. Looks like I can even mount the existing file providers I’m using with iSH

Just when I think I’ve found an actually usable text editor on iOS it mysteriously looses my changes to a file. Worse than useless.

Ok, Planet Money has convinced me NFTs are maybe not entirely crazy. I guess the real crazy thing is the art market in general. My ultimate opinion will probably fall on who ultimately benefits. If digital artists end up making their worth compared with more traditional art forms then good. But if big business and rich investors end up making the most then what have we really gained (other than a whole bunch more carbon emissions). https://pca.st/episode/9798a8d4-d004-4252-be89-e8e3d1a0d685

Why does there even need to be separate music awards for different genders? I get there’s a biological difference in most sports, but music? Seems needlessly divisive. The Nobel prizes aren’t gendered, why is music?

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2021/mar/12/sam-smith-gender-2021-brit-awards

NFTs are nothing short of completely and utterly crazy. Ignoring the suckers who spending their money in such a way (who am I to tell them what to do with their money), NFTs are antithetical to the philosophical founding of the Web; that data and information should be free and open to the world. NFTs sure seem like an attempt for the elites of the world to claw back some control over what are otherwise identical bits on disk…

@freemo @Electronics no, it’s the oscilloscopes and multimeters and other bits to actually be able to debug when stuff inevitably doesn’t work that’s begins to add up — breadboards, logic chips, and a few wires aren’t much but trying to figure out why something isn’t working with LEDs alone is very frustrating!