Tootfinder

"Bertrand Meyer is, hands down, the best writer in the computer field, because of a simple reason: his books have both great content and great prose. Not all authors of computer books (and certainly not the one you are reading now) can make the same claim."
https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/bertrand-meyer/

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…

"Of course, not everything made with Python was successful. Suffice to mention the GadflyB5 SQL relational database, or Mercurial; excellent tools in their own right, but shadowed by much more popular options. reStructuredText also is generally dismissed, developers usually prefering Markdown or Asciidoc."
https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/the-state-of-python-in-2021/

uspolitics, trump
I keep seeing smart people writing stuff like
> [the US] kept peace through strength balanced with restraint, and wielded influence through culture, values, and diplomacy
I understand that #Trump is terrible and some people feel tempted to idealize what they had before him, but we should be more discerning, or otherwise it becomes impossible to understand how this happened in the first place.
Let's start with some questions:
- peace where? and for who? was it true peace, or "Pax Romana"?
- are we going to take seriously that statement on "restraint"? after all the lies, internal witch hunting, sanctions, coups, wars, invasions, genocides, and last but not least, 2 unnecessary nuclear strikes on Japan?
Now, on "culture, values, and diplomacy". Sure. Why not. Not everything was going to be bad, right?
But the thing is, abusive husbands aren't bad all the time either. From time to time they know how to be sweet and seem to care: one present here, flowers the next day, a little bit of gaslighting, and fake apologies after that "accidental" slap.
Given enough time (if the wife is still alive), at some point the victim decides to leave, and then all hell breaks loose. Trump is the manifestation of that moment. He does not represent a change in #USA's nature, but a hidden side that was "always" there, just waiting to play its role.
Others believe this is because #US citizens have been intentionally dumbed down by a combination of propaganda and a disfunctional education system, and I'm sure it's partly true... But let's see what many of their most brilliant and educated citizens are choosing to do with their lives today: https://sfstandard.com/2025/03/12/stanford-students-want-in-on-the-military-tech-gold-rush/
So, all I'm asking is: please drop the act. It was always a clusterfuck.

"Quite simply, if you have not read this book yet, read it. If you have a colleague who has yet to read it, get them a copy. If someone asks you what one book to read about software engineering, it is this one. It is not Code Complete, Second Edition, nor is it Clean Code, nor any other book that claims to teach you how to get software right the first time around (you will not)."
https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/michael-feathers/

David Brooks: "What’s Happening Is Not Normal. America Needs an Uprising That Is Not Normal"
- -
It’s time for a comprehensive national civic uprising. It’s time for Americans in universities, law, business, nonprofits and the scientific community, and civil servants and beyond to form one coordinated mass movement. Trump is about power. The only way he’s going to be stopped is if he’s confronted by some movement that possesses rival power."
--

Opinion | What’s Happening Is Not Normal. America Needs an Uprising That Is Not Normal.
It will take a concerted effort by every sector of our society to respond to Trumpism’s threat.

Don't forget! In vulnerability-lookup, you can quickly identify sighted vulnerabilities that are not yet published or are scheduled for publication soon (highlighted in yellow in the screenshot).
This example is interesting, a pre-publication on GitHub Gist before the official CVE release.
https://

CVE-2024-42844 public reference
CVE-2024-42844 public reference. GitHub Gist: instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

@… is wondering how much trouble a skipped heading level is for screen reader users. Three users have replied but it'd be great to see more feedback. Anyone else willing to reply to Manuel's post? Here is the link:
h…

Found this: #serverless tools and their consequences.
We're going to see many more of these in the comming years thanks to #vibecoding .
#BigTech companies love these synergies between #CloudComputing, #generativeAI businesses and occasional incompetence (NOTE: not saying that all these horror stories are tied to incompetence, many times is due to malice on the services provider side).

For 5 years now I've been learning about web accessibility and reviewing websites. But I'm not a native screen reader user, and my mobile app experience is lacking.
This month I learned about "Accessibility Actions" or "actions available" for VoiceOver and TalkBack. I shoulda known about it for years-- it makes navigation by swiping potentially much quicker.
Would you be willing to share your thoughts and experiences with this feature?

#Mexico forbids killing bulls and subjecting them to the most extreme forms of torture.
#Spain is, sadly, still far behind... but I suspect that Mexico's precedent will help, not just as a good example, but also because it will severely decrease the income of many of those bullfighters (toreros).
Toreros usually travel through many countries to participate in these bloody spectacles and make a living out of it. Removing Mexico from their list will be a big thing, so it is likely that many of them will have to do something else with their lives.

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.

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.

"In this particular case, it is not uncommon for software developers to not only ignore, but even dismiss the required understanding of design language and primitives. At the same time, designers often lack the knowledge required to understand the various constraints imposed by software and hardware platforms."
https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/the-impossible-dialogue-revisited/

"Where will the von Neumanns, the Einsteins, and the Gödels of our age migrate after the SCOTUS overrules democracy in 2024 and Gödel’s Loophole is proven to exist? (…) Maybe this is the chance of a lifetime for the European continent; if not for all, at least for some countries therein: Portugal, Scandinavia, The Netherlands, and Switzerland, for example."
https://www.404media.co/nasa-yale-and-stanford-scientists-consider-scientific-exile-french-university-says/
https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/william-aspray/

I have a relatively new #ASUS ProArt13 laptop where I still have a #Microsoft #Windows installation so I can keep upgrading its firmware (I planned removing it once I have a stable #Linux distro with kernel >= 6.14).
I'm surprised by how unstable it is. Just leaving it doing nothing for more than 10 minutes is enough to trigger a #BlueScreenOfDeath (I can reproduce the issue). If I keep doing stuff, it does not crash.
At this point I'm not sure if it's Microsoft's fault or ASUS'... but I suspect the blame falls on Windows side (nothing like that happens on my Linux installation).
#Windows11

WTF #LLM #LLMs #AI #UK #UKPolitics