Thought Bricks

I’ve recently read and thought about The Brutalist Programming Manifesto. I love the directness: Keep it simple. Solve problems. Nobody is smarter. Do everything yourself. Strive for robustness. Security is an illusion. Use input devices sensibly. Avoid eye-candy. Don’t depend on tools. Be humble. Don’t work for free unless you like it. Don’t listen to others. Some of it is unrealistic in a professional environment where you have to go along to get along sometimes.

My old MacBook Pro had a serious case of screen mange. The anti-reflective coating had started to peel off, leaving the screen sort of mottled. They called it staining, but I thought it looked more mangey than stained. Anyway, after I got the battery replaced and started to use the MacBook again, the screen started to bother me. I found a couple of articles online about how to fix it and this one seemed to be pretty comprehensive, so I went ahead, got some baking soda and started scrubbing.

I love this AI rant from Ludicity. It’s over the top, but captures the essence of the nonsense that surrounds AI at present. I’m not going to piledrive anyone, but it does seem that the case for AI has been overstated as the technology currently stands. ChatGPT is a very impressive chatbot. If you need a very impressive chatbot, then it’s just the ticket. It will impact certain use cases in business dramatically (e.

I’ve written a couple of scripts to create servers on Hetzner over the years to facilitate small projects and experiementation. My older scripts used the Hetzner CLI which was fine but I wanted a version without that dependency or any other dependencies. So, I rewrote it in bash without the CLI by using curl to call the webservices. Initially, I had used jq to work with the returned JSON but since the requirements were pretty simple, I refactored that out.

Last week, I had a new battery installed in an old MacBook Pro. The battery was swollen and didn’t hold a charge so I took it over to Mr. Fix and they replaced it for $135. I probably could have done it with a kit, but it was much easier to have someone who does this all the time do it. My new MacBook Air M2 is great, but sometimes it’s nice to have a beater that can be used when you need a computer to use somewhere where it might get damaged (e.

Sometimes, the world seems to hang together with bailing wire and duct tape. Like today when a botched update by a key internet security provider caused Windows systems all over the world to go into a boot loop. Really fun stuff. The direct impacts to me are a cancelled code review meeting because Azure DevOps was unavailable and a flight delayed by a couple of hours. Not too bad in the scheme of things, but annoying nonetheless.

I installed OpenCore Legacy Patcher on my ancient MacBook. Updates to MacOS from Apple for that system had stopped some time ago and they were just doing the occasional security patch. I’d read about OpenCore before and thought it sounded interesting but until I got my new MacBook, I was a little hesitant to use it on something that was a daily driver. The installation process was as documented and went fairly smoothly.

I’m a big fan of Chelsea Troy. I watched a great presentation by her on O’Reilly the other day called Product Thinking for Engineers(need a subscription). The presentation was a bit different than I had anticipated. I was thinking it was going to be fairly tacitcal stuff about how to work within a product team as an sofware engineer, and there was that, but it was so much more. To me, the most interesting part was a wide ranging and insightful discussion about how we got to where we are with the current oligopolistic state of play in Big Internet.

This is a very nice write up about LXD and Multipass by Jon Seager. He’s not exactly neutral as a Canonical employee, but I agree with just about everything he says about LXD. It’s a really nice system for running containers and virtual machines. I haven’t used it much of late, but I found it to be a powerful and flexible. I was concerned that it would lose mometum when one of the principal developers left Canonical and forked the project, but LXD seems to be progressing quite well as does Incus.

This is the earliest solstice since 1796 according to WaPo. I was wondering that as I had assumed the solstice was always 21 June. I guess it drifts in the calendar which makes sense when you think about it. The calendar is just sort of a loose approximation of the actual mechanics of the universe. The article has an indepth discussion of how it all works which is quite interesting.