rlamacraft @rlamacraft@qoto.org

Reactive programming is clever right up until you have to debug something. Stack traces are useless and things just happen for magical reasons.

My lamp doesn’t have a switch. To turn it on I have to use a chain of four computers, using three different networking technologies. The world is mad.

I don't want to start a debate on whether vaccine mandates are a good idea or not, but assuming that a government is committed to enforcing them for all medical personnel but is concerned that they will have to fire an untenably large proportion of the essential workforce, why don't they do as the roman legions did and draw lots?

Every day/week/month, everyone who isn't vaccinated gets put into a pot, some percentage of the names are drawn, and those that are lose their jobs. Would that have close to the same effect? Is it any less fair than firing them all on the first day?

You could say that it's not safe to have unvaccinated workers around the ill, but it's also not safe for hospitals to lose significant chunks of their workforce all at once. There must be some number between 0% and 100% of loses per unit of time that allows for a minimisation of the numbers of unvaccinated healthcare workers whilst maintaining adequate staffing numbers, given an institution's capacity for hiring and training.

Just an interesting optimisation problem

Controversial opinion: I don't think TDD makes sense for most CRUD software. It makes sense if you're writing software with a defined input domain and output codomain, like a database engine or a CLI utility, especially where a breaking change has a huge impact, but if your API has O(1) consumers then it's a very high cost to pay for little benefit.

When will British supermarkets realise that nobody here like bread with olives in it‽ It's just always left to be reduced…

TIL The least populous city in England is the City of London, as bizarre as that sounds. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/dec/08/marazion-cornish-town-with-1440-residents-seeks-to-become-the-uks-smallest-city

@trysdyn Oh right, so the question mark doesn't mean 0 or 1 of these here, instead it makes the plus lazy thereby ensuring it doesn't consume the period before the "md"? You're not wrong, regexs are really complex in subtle ways

@trysdyn What's the difference between '+?' and '*'?

I was taking with some people from outside the industry over the weekend, and it actually makes me angry that the only “tech” news that reaches normal folk is the corporate talking points; the headlines aimed to boost stock prices and parroted by journalists. They think that the innovative stuff happening in the industry is stuff like NFTs and whatever it is that the metaverse is meant to be (I’m actually yet to find an actual engineer who cares).

I'm not one to share (or even read) such things, but this is just such a beautiful sentiment and an acceptance of the end that is truly inspirational.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/oct/10/ask-philippa-i-am-dying-will-it-help-my-beloved-husband-cope-if-i-leave-notes

When it comes to “git push” why is the dangerous option (“-f”) so convenient and the safer option (“—force-with-lease”) so much more inconvenient?

Surely a better design would be for force to acquire the lease by default and to push without one should require “—force-without-lease”

Battersea Power Station Station. What a dumb name for a station. What’s wrong with just Battersea Station?