rlamacraft @rlamacraft@qoto.org

Why doesn't Joe Manchin just deflect to the GOP already -- if you're not going to vote with the party why even be in one?

The Channel 4 series, Surviving the Stone Age, is one of the best things I've watched on broadcast TV in a very long time. Absolutely fascinating to think of the countless people throughout history that lived such lives

I'm seeing a consistent theme of documentaries including bits of drama (even sex scenes) and reality-style conflict amongst participating experts, presumably to make the genre more appealing to the masses. Not a fan.

Northern Irish politics is so confusing, and it’s absolutely shameful how little it is discussed/taught in schools here in England

A virtual DOM is essentially a data structure that abstracts over modifications to another data structure simply for performance reasons. It's just a way of modifying some data in memory and then committing all of those changes in a single transaction. The very fact that this is actually a reasonable solution given the tools available just goes to show how broken the tools are. The whole computational model exposed by browsers is completely out of touch with how it's being used. For example, why isn't there a language construct in JavaScript inside of which all DOM manipulation isn't propagated to the rendering engine? Instead we build a virtual system inside of a virtual machine to achieve the same, and then wonder why things are so clunky.

It could have a “talk” mode and a “command” mode so that typing “spell check my homework” into the talk mode would suggest that you could type “read homework.txt | spellcheck” into the command mode

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.