Tootfinder

I looked into buying a solar charged battery bank. This product category is completely dominated by no-name 3rd party sellers. 🚩
Charge time is key. No listing had even a rough estimate for solar charge time. 🚩
An example unit claims max solar power 1.13 w, with enough battery power to charge an iPhone 14 Pro twice. Working from that, you'd need ~25 hours of full sun to fully charge. I'd roughly estimate that means at least 3 days in summer. Not quite worthless, but close…

"Most importantly, she is the author of “Roads and Bridges: The Unseen Labor Behind Our Digital Infrastructure”, a freely available ground-breaking report published with support from the Ford Foundation in 2016, where Nadia proposes the notion that open-source code is akin to public infrastructure, highlighting the urgent need for creators to be supported in their work."
https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/nadia-asparouhova/

Rant about PHP
You know a technology is declining when the most basic questions about its most bizarre quirks are left completely unanswered for years.
#PHP is like that. Every day I have many of these questions. I look for them. No one asked them before, no one wrote about them before.
I'm baffled by the lack of curiosity and proactivity of its community.
I know it sounds like me piling up on people I don't know anything about, but I used to invest a lot of time programming in PHP. I went to conferences, I made some open source libraries for it, like a PHP kernel for Jupyter Notebooks, I even made a library to work with dataframes, tensors and matrices in PHP (although I lost this one because my laptop was stolen before I released... and I didn't had it in me to rewrite it again).
Then, the ones who I admired the most in that space, like Nikita Popov, started leaving it to work in more intellectually vibrant communities... and it shows.
I'm sure Nikita Popov would be much more gracious than me when talking about it. I can only speculate about his motivations, but at least I can tell you about mine: It was precisely about that same lack of curiosity and creativity that I mentioned before, it felt unbearably grey and sad.

techno-political rant
Say what you want about using the right tool for each problem, but there are tools that suck no matter what.
I'm tired of people portraying legit technical criticism as "biased" and "religious", while at the same time they present themselves as tolerant and open-minded (spoiler: for the most part, they aren't).
Almost every day of my life I have to deal with the nasty consequences of ultra-dumb decisions made by the very same people who are obsessed with productivity and criticise all day long whoever pushes for any design that shows any minim amount of care and/or deep thought (mostly via strawmen arguments).
And, of course, unironically: this has a lot to do with capitalism, as many of our other social and economic problems.
They arrive, have a strike of super-productivity for a few weeks/months and then use that as a trampoline to raise through the ranks or abandon ship before having to face the consequences of their technical crimes.
Then others arrive and are obviously slower at that same job... so the uneducated observers start believing that these newcomers aren't as good as the class traitors who wrote the initial nasty code.
To make things worse, if any of these newcomers dare to speak openly about introducing good practices... this ends up creating a new mental association (in the minds of uneducated observers) between "good engineering" and "lack of productivity".
The ones trying to fix the mess are indeed slower, not because they try to do things the right way though, but because they have to waste vasts amounts of time fixing what is objectively broken besides doing the "visible" work.
Most of today's established "super-productive" ones, if they were starting today, would be probably "vibe coders", certainly not what we commonly understand as a programmer. Not because AI-coding is the future, but because they never cared about the trade at all. They were here only for the grift.

Two years ago at #CSUN I learned about what became my favorite browser extension, BeeLine Reader. I've been a subscriber ever since.
It's easy to set up on desktop, but has been some struggle to get working on Android. But this week I discovered it works with Microsoft's Edge Canary mobile browser, which has experimental support for extensions. Instructions are here:

**[Цей і наступні пости викладаються тут для архівних цілей, майже в тому вигляді, який вони мали в оригіналі]**
Не знаю, на скільки мене вистачить, але тримайте.
Дрезден Кодак - "Темна Наука (https://dresdencodak.com/2010/06/03/dark-science-01/)"…

Dark Science #01 - The Collected Works of Shakespeare: the Movie - Dresden Codak
So this is page one of a new series that will be going on in Dresden Codak! Page 2 will be up next week.

Happy , today I deployed a #Forgejo instance to manage my private code projects. I won't be using #Github anymore for my stuff, only to contribute to 3rd party projects.
I still have some pending work to configure the CI workers, but I'll leave that for next week.
Along the way I've learnt some stuff about #OpenTofu and networking. Enough to know that I still prefer to be on the dev side of the "devops" .

"It is no secret that the latest SARS outbreak has reshaped the world of work. Particularly in software engineering: where the work can be done anywhere with an internet connection so codes can be pasted from Stack Overflow, and the practitioners generally have a dislike of meetings. Your average software engineer would rather build the wrong thing for eight hours in a flow state, than have a 15-minute conversation in which they find out what direction they should go."
https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/your-place-or-mine/

Can the ai components (NPU) of new processors be used for non-ai work?
What I'm thinking is along the lines that the vector-processing components of GPUs have also been used to speed up non-graphic mathematics on large arrays.
#NPUs #AIProcessor