Viewing profile — downsplat

How often do you reboot your laptop anyway? It takes a couple seconds to type in a well-rehearsed passphrase. When I reboot mine it's actually three passwords that I need to put in…

Cool article, but the one it acknowledges and riffs off of, at https://lr0.org/blog/p/arabic/ , is much more informative, and tells all about how we got decent Arabic script render…

The point is not about what it means exactly to "own" something, you'll get plenty of noise discussion around that one. But if I care about some piece of digital art enough to pay …

Redis is a great piece of tech but it suffers from trying to be good at two different jobs (persistent data structures, volatile cache) which should not be combined. And indeed in …

Search around, there's surely a way to break the drm. When theres no better way that's what I do too: pay for the book, convert to plain epub. The publishing industry never got its…

Yep, if you haven't lost the will to put a bit of curation work upfront, RSS never stopped being the right answer. Substack has been a pretty good addition to the landscape, bringi…

I've been using Claude to work on a medium-sized (100+kLoc) codebase, and it's a great productivity multiplier. Putting hours into creating a good AGENTS file is more improved resu…

I basically skipped React. I went from jquery to Vue3, and use even that sparingly. When React got really popular, I read the docs and played with it, but I prefer the Vue model wh…

If postgres is too heavyweight for you but you still want client-server, I'd consider MySql. It's an old classic, pretty fast and scalable, and has much better mainstream support a…

Well-researched article on the relative safety of acetaminophen and ibuprofen.

It's called euthanasia. You can ask the medical system for an assisted suicide if your life situation is extra painful with no hope for recovery. This case got heaps of media popul…

https://www.boe.es/diario_boe/txt.php?id=BOE-A-2021-4628

What kind of context has you deploying into old systems that don't ship a recent perl? If that is a legacy requirement for whatever reason, then at least I'd use docker or podman t…

What are you using for parameter type checking? I switched to native function signatures, native try/catch and might look into the new class system soon, but I don't recall native …

This looks like a huge project, even with AI help... I have a sweet spot for perl but I'm honestly not sure if the current community has the bandwidth and interest to sustain an al…

Alcohol has been deeply embedded in human culture for thousands+ years, that's why prohibition is a bad idea. Loot boxes are a new invention, if they're deemed too harmful we can j…

It's amazing how people will jump to something new just because it's there and it's being promoted. When wireless headphones came out, I looked at my wired ones and asked the simpl…

I guess it's really not for me though. First thing I do is turn autoplay off, and I'd refuse to use a service that doesn't give me that option. OTOH, I do sometimes find it fun to …

You've probably already done this, but first thing, turn off autoplay and make sure it stays off. Much easier to not get sucked into things when you have to actively click on them.…

Why would you want to do that? I'm so happy I can search exactly what I want among heaps of long tail stuff, I would never want to go back to a "live tv" interaction model.

For most situations, I deal with this by keeping dates as strings throughout the app, not objects. They get read from the db as strings, passed around as strings. If I need datetim…

It's not really a Linux vs MS thing though. When Unicode first came out, it was 16-bit, so all the early adopters went with that. That includes Java, Windows, JavaScript, the ICU l…

The old defense of 16-bit chars, popping up in 2026 still! Utf8 is efficient enough for all general purpose uses. If you're storing gigabytes of non-latin-alphabet text, and your s…

Did this post come out of a freezer from 1998? Who on earth creates databases in Latin1 in 2026? Nevermind, looks like Sql Server didn't add utf8 collations until 2019 (!) and for …