Thought Bricks

This article on the metric system in the US is great. I’ve read a lot of history but I’d never heard the story about pirates capturing a French scientist who was on his way to bring a meter and a kilogram to the US at the request of Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson was a very interested in a new system of measures to replace the crazy quilt of measures we inherited from the UK but the scientist never got there.

Some languages, like Python, have named arguments that make it easy to provide defaults and put arguments in any order. JavaScript doesn’t have this sort of thing. Modern JavaScript for the Impatient shows an interesting way to do this using object literals. The idea is that you specify your default args in a structure. That allows the function caller to override the arguments by name. If no argument value is passed in, the defaults are used.

LastPass was bought by a private equity company. As is often the case, that change of ownership heralded a change in the business model. Usually, these changes are not beneficial to customers. Since the acquisition, LastPass has raised prices and had a very significant security breach. I dropped it early last year after they changed the subscription plan and switched to Bitwarden. Bitwarden has worked really well for me and I would recommend it to anyone looking for a cross-platform password solution.

37Signals has a large AWS bill. About $3.2M USD last year. It sounds like they have been proactive at managing the bill and that’s just what it costs to run their business on AWS. They are an interesting and smart company and it seems they are going to try to move some/most of that out of AWS. Dell will be happy to hear that but I don’t know if it will result in significant savings because you now have to hire and manage people to run the show robustly (especially the 8PB of storage).

I was curious to see how well ChatGPT could solve a simple programming problem, so I asked: Write a JavaScript function to return the prime factors of a number in an array. A few seconds later, it came back with a pretty good answer: function primeFactors(num) { const factors = []; // check if number is prime function isPrime(n) { if(n<2) return false; for (let i = 2; i <= Math.

One of the JavaScript golden rules is to use strict mode. It does tighten things up compared to the so-called “sloppy mode” and seems to generally be a good idea. Strict mode has been around for a while (since 2009) and does a bit more than just throw more errors. In the docs, the impacts of strict mode are listed out: * changes converting mistakes into errors (as syntax errors or at runtime) * changes simplifying how variable references are resolved * changes simplifying eval and arguments * changes making it easier to write "secure" JavaScript * changes anticipating future ECMAScript evolution.

Three years ago, scientists identified the first strain of covid-19 in China. I remember hearing vague rumors of a new virus going around in China starting around late January 2020. It seemed bad, but there were other viruses like the avian flu and swine flu that also seemed like they were going to spread but never got going. It’s almost unbelievable how much change was wrought by one tiny virus. Just about everyone I know has had it.

The FTC has proposed a rule to ban non-compete agreements. This is great. A employer shouldn’t be able to prohibit people from pursuing their career wherever they want. Non-competes give employers way too much leverage over their employees. The evidence is clear that it suppresses wages and working conditions. Trade secrets and the like can still be protected. That’s company property and should not be abused by ex-employees. But, it’s un-American to deprive someone of their pursue Happiness and switch to any other job they might prefer for any reason.

As part of my exploration into JavaScript, I was looking into how I might display some charts and ran across Mermaid.js. Mermaid is an interesting project that uses a simple Markdown-like language to define diagrams and charts. It’s got a long list of integrations so you can use the charts in various blogging, CMS and other tools. It’s definitely something I will be exploring more as I can see some interesting use cases for my professional work as well as hobby stuff.

Sometimes you just dodge a bullet. A little over a year ago, I congratulated Hashicorp on going public and mused a little about buying shares. However, I did not because the valuation seemed a little high. Based on this chart, I would say that’s a correct assessment. I’ve missed on my share of stocks. The one I really blew was Coupang. I fell for that one hook line and sinker. Part of my problem there was that I’ve been to Seoul a couple of times in the past five years or so and really like it.