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20 years is a long time to work on something, congrats Blake! So many great links to small web creators, why, and how to build your own site.

As algos turn to shit the small web remains a space that cannot be ruined. There will always be rss feeds from real humans writing for other humans.

I recently discovered Termix by Termix-SSH, and it’s truly impressive.

Termix is a web-based server management platform with SSH terminal, tunneling, and file editing capabilities.

there is literally no universe that this is true 10k lines and its not bug filled crap? ok Lex Luthor, its time to step away from the keys

Is this 10k real production code? Dry in the sense that it hasn’t re-implemented the same s3 api dozens of time? What language are we talking something dense like python? something very verbose like html? Maybe a language where you implement everything from scratch like lua. This matters a lot. Playing with little POC applications that dont mean anything I can quickly come up with 500-1k likes of code that I may never look at again. I’m sure I can come up wtih 10k decent lines of code a day.

But for the same application without duplicating everything over and over? For something that moves the needle and really matters?? every single day?? Consistently +10k, not 10k changes, not 10k deletes of yesterdays code. nah thats wack.

If you’re into interesting projects, don’t miss out on nwg-look, created by nwg-piotr.

GTK3 settings editor adapted to work in the wlroots environment

Discovered the Brutalist Report from CJ on syntax.fm on their rss-is-not-dead episode. The way he described it, I was like gnaw thats whack, not into it, but I had to check it out. It’s actually great! Except the political shit, I go to rss to get away from political finger pointing. The Hacker News list is great, maybe I need to pay more attention to hacker news??

It’s facinating how many people are making the jump from mac/windows, not just to linux, not just to archlinux, but to a full on tiling window manager. DHH has omakub and omarchy. Omakub is advertised as easy and for beginners, but many are skipping right over that to go straight for the hard stuff.

DHH mentions hyprland here, one thing I think he is missing is that this is the first real mainstream tiling window manager that is a competitor to i3, awesomewm, qtile that runs Wayland. I think they were able to pull a bunch of great benefits such as lack of screen tearing and animations from this.

I wonder how much of killed-by-google is due to is 20 percent time. Allowing engineers to follow a passion project turns into a real product that doesn’t have full backing and support of the company.

similar to DHH as much as I am hurt by reader and all of their privacy BS that comes from ad based revenue I appreciate YouTube and them supporting all of the creators on it. Giving a platform for small creators the ability to sustain themselves and reach a larch audience without big coorporate rules.

Googles 20 percent time is fascinating to me. It seems like a great way for engineers to fill up their tank with new skills, passion projects, and the need to scratch an itch. To me these days it feels like something that would incentivize good talent to join.

I can remember back earlier in my career December and January were slow months for big companies. Riddled with vacation and annual planning cycle. I would use this time to create tools and libraries that would help me move quicker throughout the year.

I clearly remember having a conversation with a colleague several salary grades ahead of me come mid February asking what I was up to. I was furiously pecking away at some of these projects while he let me know that he had been waiting for this years plan for months and had no tasks from the boss.

That said, I don’t think any major tech company is going to adopt 20% time these days. It’s too chaotic, too hard to manage and impossible to measure.

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Niki has one of the coolest yet simple personal sites that I have seen in a long time. We need more of this on the internet! hover over his face, try dark mode, submit personal data, there are so many really cool Easter eggs to discover!

I wholeheartedly agree that packaging is broken, semver is broken, expecting much better from a system of oss that is built on top of volunteers, passion projects, nights and weekends is a fools errand. With that I disagree that we we dont need lockfiles. Maybe its Nikki’s experience in java and my lack that puts us on this opposite spectrum, but without lockfiles the world changes underneath us as we release. One small change to your source can introduce a whole set of new features/bugs that you did not plan on without a good locking system. It can also cause you to need to do dependency resolution at application build time and not ahead of time.

Fantastic write up on their experience in ai, opinions on ai being a hoax with a veil of reasonable usefulness. Arguing that most people do not understand enough to see the difference, and thought leaders see where it is now, see where it was yesterday, it must be going to general intelligence tomorrow and you all will loose your jobs without this. I appreciate the satirical language here.

Letting Ai drive code feels like giving up so much control. It feels like its leaving so many brain cycles open for other things, yet its not quite good enough to do production level things on its own, so we must watch it, we must review it, yet its code can be some of the worst to review left unattended. I’m feeling this right now as I’m avoiding writing a bit of js that I could probably do myself. Some day this is likely to flip, and it will get better and we will spend our brain cycles thinking about architecture, security, marketing, big picture ideas about the problem we are trying to solve, but we are not yet there and as long as we still need to review I find it a much more pleasant workflow to have in a separate window than have it change the whole fucking project for a simple change.

Woof, ai is sucking the soul from everything, being forced onto teachers who don’t want or care about it and are simply sharing ai-slop to their kids without giving it much thought. remember that it is rude to share ai-slop with others that you have not vetted, It’s next level to turn this into teaching material for children who are forced into your classroom and have no choice about the matter, you should be ashamed.

I have a couple of use cases for simple qr codes in python coming up. One is for blog posts, the other is for auth into a new server application logged to a terminal. I tried the qrcode library and it does not look as nice to me and I found pyqrcode to be quite nice.

import pyqrcode url = pyqrcode.create('https://waylonwalker.com/qr-codes-in-python') url.svg('qr-codes-in-python.svg', scale=8) print(url.terminal(quiet_zone=1)) url.svg('qr-codes-in-python.svg', scale=12) url.svg('qr-codes-in-python.svg', omithw=True) # width is controlled by the container url.svg('qr-codes-in-python.svg', omithw=True, module_color='#ffd119') url.svg('qr-codes-in-python.svg',...