I've extracted paren-matching from my ad-hoc utility for sidenote parsing from last week and published it into my list of semi-ad-hoc utils. I'm going to use it even moreEVEN MORE! from now on.
I've often thought I should have a list of "things I know", or "code snippets that are useful", and now I finally have that. It's the list of public utils from above. This is a random collection of stuff I know and use from time to time. It has no structure, no guiding principle except I'll find what I'm looking for, and you may use it for whatever. Just don't expect anything out of it, or stability, or whatever.
Some things are developing, work-wise, so I might have a lot to do soon.
Also, I started working with a new customer, and that is always exciting.
PlantEd
NTS
Excellent progress this week: implemented a third behaviour and it integrates excellently with the first two. We need to tweak the curves a bit, and make selection a bit more modular, and a tad more random, but that's easy. Now we need to add a final behaviour and then we can move to the memory/preference layer.
Articles
Map-making for historians: "Instead of putting a screenshot of Google Maps into your paper, here's a simple 50-step process of creating simple maps". I'd love to understand QGIS&co better, but this is probably not the right time for people to try it: while creating a powerpoint presentation for their paper.
In fact, I think it would be worthwhile to have something resembling this process, but "prepared", ie. one-click or even web-based. And it would be really awesome to have historical map data as well, where rivers and cities and ancient roads where. Ah, one can dream...
Natural Earth Data: "Natural Earth is a public domain map dataset available at 1:10m, 1:50m, and 1:110 million scales. Featuring tightly integrated vector and raster data, with Natural Earth you can make a variety of visually pleasing, well-crafted maps with cartography or GIS software."
The Greedy Doctor Problem?: Trying to coordinate in a world without trust is a hard problem. Here are some "solutions" that'll only cost twice as much, are only three times as complicated and will work in 1/2 of the cases (probably). This is not to mock these specific solutions, it's just that a world with trust is much more efficient, so finding solutions to the more global problem of creating trust, like reiterated problems or social systems, is probably the better way to go.
Your Fingerprint Can Be Hacked For $5. Here’s How.: Nothing new here, fingerprints are super-easy to obtain and to reproduce, even in such a way that fools fingerprint readers. I have no idea about the security consequences of this fact.
I test in prod: I think this relates very much to chaos engineering, where you crash your own systems to prove that you cannot crash your own systems.
This Tool Protects Your Private Data While You Browse: "The tool uses the PageGraph tracing framework [...] to follow the behavior of privacy-harming scripts throughout the browser engine. SugarCoat scans this data to identify when and how the scripts talk to Web Platform APIs that expose privacy-sensitive data." I have no idea what to think about this.
Decentralized Woo Hoo: "The essence of the fallacy is based on either an intentional attempt to construct a post-hoc rationalisation for a crackpot idea through a specious relation to the rigour of physics; or it is an unintentional category error that attempts to use reasoning applicable for one strata of discourse and apply it to a different level, where such models cannot make predictions. In technology we have an almost identical phenomenon surrounding the word decentralized."
Funnel: "How independent developers tend to start at the wrong end of marketing, and a more structural way of thinking about marketing."
HackerNews Readings: data mining HN comments on book recommendations and then aggregating them. Very interesting idea, very boring results: Clean Code, The Martian, Pragmatic Programmer, ...
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