Viewing profile — daotoad

I think the home automation market is waiting on things that most people really want and a lower barrier to entry. Alfred North Whitehead famously noted that "Civilization advances…

1. Starting from scratch is rarely a good idea. 2. It always sounds like a better idea than it actually is. 3. Item 2 is true even if you think you've accounted for item 1. Is ther…

The gap between quality work and baseline LLM output is precisely the understanding. If it can be validated by automation, the bot will do it. But no automation suite is complete o…

RFC 3514 perhaps? https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3514.txt

I really, really want that to be true, but my experience trying to adopt it has been really painful. Even selecting things in the UI has sucked. I went in and increased the selecti…

It's a kind of crappy slide deck, not a proper home page. Even worse, the link drops you into the middle of the deck. (TBF, it wouldn't be so bad if you know that it's a slide deck…

I lost a nuke to a phalanx in Civ 1. Still salty about that _decades_ later.

Anecdata: I'm a Civ3 hater, give me 2 or 4 any day. 3 is my least favorite version of the game. But, OTOH, my wife is ride or die for Civ3.

What I really want to know is, is it mighty mighty? And does it let it all hang out?

The problem is most people won't take that attitude. For most homeowners, the home is the largest asset. This is a Catch 22 for elected officials. We must reduce housing costs dram…

For a motivated learner with access to good materials, schools provide two important things besides that very important piece of paper: 1. contacts - these come in the form of peer…

Naming comments are useful when someone catches something like: 1. you are violating a previously agreed upon standard for naming things 2. inconsistent naming, eg some places you …

US states are, in some ways, less independent than UK countries. Wales can no more disavow the PM than California can disavow POTUS. So this separate status is limited. The big cou…

Do you like your cursor at the beginning or end of words? Most of the time it doesn't really matter. But if you know you want to append to a word you can hit that target immediatel…

Motions can be inclusive or exclusive. It works like the different ways of annotating ranges: [0,1] and (0,1). Consider the command `d` (delete) combined with the motions for `"`. …

This usage is a double misunderstanding, it gets both the phonetics of homing and the mechanics of sharpening a blade wrong. It’s like calling someone a “stropping young lad”.

Off topic and doesn't impact the validity (or lack thereof) of the post. Just reactionary whining really... For the love of all that is good, "exacerbated" and "exasperated" are di…

In my experience, what works best is having QA and a tech writer assigned to a few teams. That way there is an ongoing, close relationship that makes interactions go smoothly. In a…

That's because we don't value QA in the way that matters. If you're a talented SDET, you're probably also, at least, a good SDE. If you'll make more money and have more opportunity…

I was about to say "Obsidian is free as long as you don't use it for work." But it turns out that that is no longer the case. https://obsidian.md/blog/free-for-work/ Obsidian is no…

Rereading TFM can be quite illuminating.

Robert Preston, is that you?

The real trick is getting just enough meaning into the name to be helpful, while keeping it distinct. SQLAlchemy is a great example. I called by zsh bookmark tool `tutu`, my idea w…

> whereas all humans typically use the standard hyphen-minus character (U+002D). I made it a point to learn to type the em dash—only to have it stolen by the bots; it's forced me t…

Between perlbrew and cpanm it's pretty easy to have multiple perl installs with different versions and quite simple to manage your dependencies. Carton (manage and bundle your perl…