rlamacraft @rlamacraft@qoto.org

Here’s a thought: could we make programming more accessible by merging the power of the command line with the approachability of virtual assistants?

With Labour taking control of Westminster does that mean we can finally see the pedestrianisation of Oxford Street and the passage of the city-wide cycle lanes through the borough?

TIL that readline, the text editor used by the bash shell, has some really quite powerful features like recording macros

I absolutely despise homebrew. Worst piece of software I’ve ever used. Will this be the last straw for me using Mac OS?

Here's a fun way to spend an hour: try re-creating this nomogram using nothing but a compass and a straight edge. I found it really quite satisfying to reverse the addition and multiplication that falls out of the quadratic equations the nomogram can be used to solve. https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/8AECE3C0A20A8D993501D2E59349168C/S1757748900001523a.pdf/a-simple-nomogram-for-the-solution-of-quadratic-equations.pdf

TIL there's an easy way to scroll back through vi's registers

"Being poisoned to death will kinda disrupt any plans you might have had for the afternoon" https://youtu.be/cNJZrHd39ag

I've really taken to property-based testing recently and this quote just really helped me crystallise why property testing is worth the extra effort over example-based unit testing: "Instead of thinking about whether my code worked I began to think about whether it’s correct." https://jrsinclair.com/articles/2021/how-not-to-write-property-tests-in-javascript

I'm really starting to think that anything short of a WW2-scale government-led mobilisation effort to fight climate change is just a bit of window dressing. Individual actions like flying less or going vegan, or corporate actions like carbon offsetting are just not going to scale fast enough and are probably just a distraction from meaningful change. The technology is there and the transition will (probably) happen eventually at this point, we just need the political action to drastically reduce the timeframe.

The BBC trying to promote their Sounds app by delaying the publication of a topical news show to their RSS feed by several weeks is just completely absurd. The jokes aren't going to be funny over a month after the story left the news cycle. Just be done with it and kill the feed if you're going to be so anti-RSS. Seriously tempted to listen to the radio broadcast instead, like it's the 20th century. The centralisation of online audio content should be opposed on all fronts, be it from Spotify, the BBC, or anyone else. How long before we need different apps/subscriptions to listen to different music artists, as we do for online video streaming? Ridiculous.

In the same way that a foot soldier is not going to respect a general whose never been in the trenches; whose never so much as fired their gun at the enemy, I really struggle to believe people who talk about data pipelines and synchronised metadata who have never made a cURL request against a Web API, never committed and pushed to a distributed VCS, who don't understand the need for simplicity above all else.

Why are we not instigating gas and oil rationing across the continent? This is insane. We'll do everything we can for the Ukrainian people except anything that might have the slightest impact on our lives

Are there more wheels or doors in the world?

https://reddit.com/r/CasualConversation/comments/tax32c/are_there_more_wheels_or_doors_in_the_world/

For some daft reason my wife thought it was *more* energy efficient to boil the kettle full than with just water she needs… 😒