What kind of a world have we built where we have to justify, in writing, something as natural as parents visiting their children? That’s exactly what I just had to do so my Turkish parents can get a visa to visit me in Ireland. Here’s the letter of invitation I just wrote.

How is MacBook Pro "Pro"? I have to run Visual Studio in parallels and the lack of Home/End/PageUp/PageDown troubles me to no limit.

Didn't know that Nightly by default doesn't share profiles with other Firefox installations.
Just chucked Vivaldi and installed both Firefox & Nightly on the same machine.

"We are told that cars are about freedom of choice. But every aspect of this assault on our lives is assisted by state planning and subsidy. Roads are built to accommodate projected traffic, which then grows to fill the new capacity. Streets are modelled to maximise the flow of cars. Pedestrians and cyclists are squeezed by planners into narrow and often dangerous spaces"

check out "Cloud Firewall", a #BigTech blocker by Gokulakrishna Sudharsan that was inspired by Kashmir Hill's series and Dhruv Mehrotra's VPN: addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firef

[conversation with search internet]

me: what is gradle?
- 5 minutes later -
me: why do i need a build tool?
- 2 minutes later -
me: fine, just tell me how to use gradle

It's really frustrating how much we could self-host the internet but can't because consumer ISP service is intentionally broken

OK, this is my favorite thing SlateStarCodex has ever done: slatestarcodex.com/2019/03/04/

presenting true facts like they're insane conspiracy theories. what if Obama... ISN'T FROM AFRICA AT ALL? what if the GOVERNMENT had a SECRET RESEARCH PROGRAM to reach THE MOON in the 1960s?

The show how 1. any information is more appealing when presented as SECRETS THEY DON'T WANT YOU TO KNOW and also 2. a lot of true facts about the world are pretty weird.

The red MSpaint arrows are a nice touch.

stallman's hottest computer take is

"The most powerful programming language is Lisp. If you don't know Lisp (or its variant, Scheme), you don't know what it means for a programming language to be powerful and elegant. Once you learn Lisp, you will see what is lacking in most other languages."

A first look at Rust's LSP seems pretty fast! Faster than manually working with Racer mode.

Given that I superficially used Java's LSP for Emacs and found it to be pretty interesting for smaller (4-5 files) project, I've high hopes for Rust.

Came to know about it from this post:


on scale:

While lower class tends to cause problem in local scale (daily basis crime), it's clearly to see that the upper class (policy maker, royal family, politician, etc.) tends to cause problems in massive scale (national, global, etc.).

A nifty trick if you have a repo already and fetching a different tree (which has diverged quite a bit) is slow.
Just add the different tree as an upstream and pull.


An interesting (long form) article about the challenges of creating and using encrypted databases.

Reading and understanding might require multiple passes but TLDR is that the encrypted databases might not be very secure as these leak data, might give false sense of security, and/or be impractical at a technical level.


It really does impress me quite a bit how much functionality you get from #gitea with such a lightweight program.

The sheer number of people on Facebook with their real names, photos, locations and workplaces on their profile who are happy to throw abuse at other people kinda disproves the argument that it’s online anonymity that causes abusive behaviour

So I just bit the bullet and here are the results. Here's what a fresh/non-cached page from gets from the mothership.

513 requests. 82MB.

I don't know if I want to laugh or cry.

Facepalm when you have to wait for more than 2 minutes to access your files because the the entire internet is getting downloaded along with what you want.

I so want to disable uMatrix in Firefox to just see how many requests this page is making!

Also, what the hell is a dll.js file?! I guess somewhere in those requests is the entire windows SDK! 😩

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