rlamacraft @rlamacraft@qoto.org

TIL That the symbol inserted by pressing alt+0 on a mac (U+00BA) is not the unicode symbol for degrees (U+00B0)

What a pointless article from the guardian on how to get off Russian gas: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/feb/25/how-can-europe-wean-itself-off-russian-gas

All of the suggestions given require years or decades… We should be instigating policies of nationalisation and rationing across the continent. Who gives a damn if shutting down some gas-hungry industries will send economies into recession when Ukrainians are being bombed in their beds‽‽ People are saying this is the largest war in Europe since the second world war -- let's start acting like it

A website that only works when you're offline. Neat.

https://chris.bolin.co/offline/

Why isn't there a DNS record type for physical addresses? Why can't I have people send me mail to home.rlamacraft.uk and then when I move I just update my DNS record?

Am writing a gemlog post about a BBS documentary using my raspberry pi -- perfect way to spend a saturday evening

I’m actually quite sympathetic to Russian stance on NATO; the US and U.K. governments sure wouldn’t like it if there was talk of Mexico or Ireland joining CSTO. Very reminiscent of the Cuban missile crisis, really

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

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).