Vibin’ With Erlang
I worry only because of the craft of fine code will be lost for good.
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What to do with tainted heros?
The same here: the potency of Minsky’s ideas are forever lost on me.
Crisis opportunity
In the end, the population is better off than if the crisis had never come.
No more Erlang manuals
And the facelifts continue: now the Erlang docs can only be found on the web. You will spend a good chunk of your time just making sure Google didn’t send you to a deprecated doc page.
The Art of the Ask
Like a child wanting that amazing toy for their birthday, so must you hold a burning fire of desire from everyone you have come to ask.
OpenSMTPD & Maildrop working in concert
What we really liked about this project was how opinionated it was, how well the documentation was crafted, and how packed the mailing list was with years of helpful solutions.
Blank; Thiel; or something in between
And as much as Thiel promotes sales in ‘Zero to One,’ that’s certainly not the same thing as picking up the phone and conducting interviews.
To sell is to lie
Sure, life is too short, and for most, you got to do what you got to do in order to hold on to that little edge with your fingertips as your body hangs over a gaping oblivion.
How I behave
What matters is knowing that custom behaviors can be utilized to abstract and guarantee your code where it matters.
Split ends
I bet a good deal of our economy has disjointed false progress like this.
Calling ed(1) from less(1)
You can set your ‘EDITOR’ and ‘VISUAL’ environment variables all you like, but less sends along some arguments to your editor of choice that is clearly only intended for vi(1).
ed(1) semantics
Earlier this week, I got snagged on a gotcha with ed(1). Or at least that’s what I thought initially.
The coping business
Just think about Facebook, for example. Could a company cover more items in the ‘universal’ list, than Meta?
Is Elon Musk stupid or something?
Hey, more power to Elon. But if he didn’t own ‘x.com’ fully, why would he think that porting the ‘x’ brand name over to Twitter, would be possible?
Dirty hooks
At first, I’d see some attempt at working up there. In the case of product managers, between climbs, they would respond to their Slack messages for a bit, then get right back to projecting their boulder.
Two Erlang patterns I love
But, all the same, sometimes you have to roll your own. And with the ‘K-hunt-gather’ and the ‘O-hunt-gather’ patterns, I generally plow ahead with confidence.
Foreach derp with Csh
Rather than thinking of the parentheses as a corner to hold your args, in Csh, the mandatory parentheses do that, but also mutates your word list into an array (Thank you? Csh?)
Erlang, the Unix way
When used in anger, OTP is supposed to be started once, and never, hopefully, fall over. This is in the culture of this wonderful language, and that’s why when one uses Erlang in other ways, everything just feels a little off.
Don’t scale (even if it hurts)
But, this isn’t always so helpful, especially when one is a perennial tinkerer and always involved with upstarts.
Wartime hangovers
If the time change was 6mo. of the year, I’m certain I would never have tried to keep my time constant.
More Joy with Csh
After all, this was a pattern I expected to use more than a few times.
It’s imperative
But this isn’t all about aesthetics; there’s a prime reason why one should avoid whoppers.
CGI WTF
For some reason, I got it in my head that ‘CGI’ scripts were exclusively for Perl (and maybe Python).
‘Let It Crash’ under attack
With that, global memory is something we never have to worry about as shared state only happens deterministically via sending messages around from process to process.
Save the World: Use Invidious
But of course they are. For anyone who consumes content via the web, ads are only there to benefit the side of the equation that pushes such distractions.
Quotes from the Erlang world
Some are quotes from the founders of the language or the actor-model PLT, while otherss are from various commandos of the language.
Mason jars
After a little trouble-shooting, this start/stop Erlang service came into fruition with a surprising small amount of code.
Musky Tusky
Inevitably, the idea fails the test which signals that there’s little reason to invest time and energy building it out.
Kludge kingdom
But kludges have their place. When moving fast trumps beauty, or when the bads outweigh the immediate good, kludges come in handy for sure.
Crypto earnings are not passive income
The best example are rents gathered from property ownership. This remains the classic form of ‘passive income,’ and although crypto has been lumped into the ‘property’ box along with Real Estate, it certainly does not get treated from a tax stand-point as ‘passive income’ come tax day.
Ten years without Elixir
I never got into Elixir, largely because it looked like Ruby. I was a Rubyist for a good while, spent time and effort to learn where to park my commas, semicolons, and periods in Erlang, so I never felt that Elixir was something I wanted.
Old skin for the new ceremony
In fifty years from now, how will ideas be zipping around from one brain to another?
Value dragons
Finding a product, or an expression of a product, that gets pull, truly is the dragon protecting the gold. Not the product itself, but its interplay with timing, a group of users, its price point, etc., This is the monster anyone trying to capture the gold from, must concern themselves with.
Bye-bye, Apple
Of course, this setup isn’t for all. If you’re green on the UNIX front, or can’t read a manual, you’d be foolish to do it. For the others, it certainly is a viable solution, to say the least.
From Vim to Ed
I wanted to use an editor that didn’t have features that were constantly distracting me from what’s important: writing code.
Micrometer & axe
And if your product suffers from a slow feedback loop, whereby you don’t have the opportunity to have constant tugs at what you’re building, then the ever smaller the ruler and larger thecutting tool become.
My n-of-one observation of academia
Rick has an enormous ambition to make a difference in the world, which is interesting, as I don’t know where he would etch out time to sprinkle in innovating, deep thinking, or discovery with all the busy-ness he has currently.
The dismal tech
If crypto will last in the mainstream, it will have to marry with some aspect of our lives that operates on a positive frequency. Yes, there’s a market for guns, insurance, etc. But if crypto remains on a plateau that caters to the worry-warts, then it may never live up to its potential.
Startup hook pattern
In the case of ‘simple_one_for_one’ whereby each state-machine process, or generic server process is coming and going with some frequency, it’s often the case that I want to initialize the services, then let it take care of sorting this and that for it to be useful.
Less noise with OTP
OTP systems, even ones that are beta products and prototypes, seem to ship with less errors allowing user feedback as it concerns design to take center stage.
The saddest script I ever wrote
This was a heck of a strange workflow, but at least I could have a rewind button for shoddy software that I installed, or even wrote myself.
Future complications
2019–2020 will be one of those ‘remember the Alamo’ time-periods; it will shape this country greatly. I’m optimistic for which direction the healthcare system swings in the years ahead.
Csh is punk rock
Every time I look up a ‘howto’ or work-around about it, inevitably, there’s at least one diatribe knocking it down. Csh is punk rock in this regard; few believe in its merits.
Yazdani’s criterion
Do as Bobby says: dream huge, take a chance and let the chips fall where they may.
SNI relayd support in 6.6
OpenBSD 6.6 now has support for SNI in relayd, which is a welcome update for certain.
Chatty design
It’s one thing to convey key information. It’s a whole other to prattle on about its product inside baseball.
Berkeley smorgasbord — part II
In a nutshell, we are just expanding our rules to include TLS, and moving the web-app from the plaintext protocol to the secure one.
Nato’s question
That’s why, when building out something unproven, I constantly am asking Nato’s question: ‘How can I fake this functionality, until I know it has value?’
No itch to scratch
Long ago, Bill Joy came up with an idea and bundled it into his Csh project. It was called scratch files, though it seems as though the idea was either ditched before it was fully realized, or was quietly deprecated over the life of Csh’s evolution.
Goodbye, Joe
Joe’s books hinted at how the man was wired. Early in my Erlang hacking, I found chapter seven in Joe’s ‘Programming Erlang’ to be something I would read and re-read. For me, this language wasn’t just a language, it was a philosophy.