// portability

Gave me the giggles. I’ve helped maintain systems where this portable solution would have left everyone better off.

For many years malicious PDF files had the shameful honor of being the number one way people’s PCs got infected, and it’s because of bullshit like this.

“Surprise, here’s some Java code to execute on your personal computer without asking!” isn’t being done by anyone who is actually your ally.

We’re just discussing how shitty a shitty person has been toward you, at this point. There’s no good pro-social reason to deliver you an app while calling it a document.

Do we think it’s a virus? Probably not, but maybe. So we think there’s a tracker? Certainly. The average organization shitty enough to build or use this technology layer has over 500 separate relationships with companies that track you.

Someone tried to put a tracker in this PDF.

Whether people like me made it too hard for them is up for analysis.

I guarantee you that someone tried.

They’re not good enough at hiding this stuff yet, to feel confident lying about it, so it likely is disclosed in the fine print somewhere, if you’re feeling patient enough to read all of it.

There isn’t a general, easy solution to the N-body problem.

Lol. Yet.

No doubt it will be discovered by a tool assisted speed runner.

Yeah. I can understand being nervous that Putin won’t approve spending money on national defense investments.

This sounds like an important step toward fully working the right think algorithm.

I’m not sure there’s any way to tell.

The bots can pass a turing test, now.

I figure at some point it’ll just be one random dude talking to bot shadows of themself.

Broccoli.

I don’t think it’s super useful for production (I prefer chef/vagrant)

Yeah!

Docker and OCI get abused a lot to thoughtlessly ship a copy of the developer’s laptop into production.

Life is so much simpler after taking the time to build thoughtful correct recipes in an orchestration tool.

Anything that makes it less painful for a dev to destroy and rebuild an environment that’s corrupt or even just a bit spooky pays for itself almost immediately.

Exactly. The learning curve is mean, but it’s worth it quickly as soon as the first mystery bug dies in a rebuild fire.

This is great stuff.

My comment from the peanut gallery today is just that there’s no law that CI/CD can’t be kept under control and run in ten seconds.

Given the choice between a slow out of control CI/CD mess, or a shell script, I too will take the shell script every time.

But I am living my best life today, and have a simple shell script in my CI/CD pipeline.

This is another mentoring sprint, for my team. So lots of cleaning up “welcome” documents and practicing my elevator pitches for what the team does.

On the personal side, making Raspberry Pi projects with the kids. PhonieBox is pretty neat.

OWASP has some free resources that are meant to be widely accessible:

https://owasp.org/www-project-top-10-for-large-language-model-applications/

Is this the start of “relevant Sesame Street” replacing “relevant XKCD”?

I hope so. And then maybe XKCD / Sesame Street cross-overs…

Good catch! But - anyone who is capable of asking “am I the dipshit?” almost certainly is not one.

I once wore a tie to a meeting and I swear it made all the dipshits in ties feel that their opinions on technology were as valid as mine.

I gave away all of my ties after that meeting.

The world just isn’t safe for everyone else when us non-dipshits wear ties.

Exactly. So there’s no way to measure the exact egg that was first born to a species we would not recognize as a chicken.

(Edit: Warning: Only bullshit meant to amuse and fascinate follows. I’ve been watching too much “SmartyPants” on DropOut.tv, where they try to make each-other laugh with serious sounding silly presenations.)

Further, we might each choose a different arbitrary egg and declare that eggs parent “not a chicken”.

But for this question, that doesn’t have to matter.

If we can all agree that something in the ancestry of the modern chicken was not a chicken, and agree that it was likely still birthed from an egg, then we can conclude that that egg came first.

Even if we cannot agree about which exact egg hatched into the first chicken, or which exact animal was the first chicken, we can agree on their relationship such that we can agree that any selected “first chicken egg” came before any selected “first chicken” to be born from it.

The hardest part of this proposition is whether we can agree that the first chicken was born inside an egg. I propose that it must have been, by our own definitioms, because we widely agree that chickens are born from eggs. Not by any intrinsic property, but simply by our accepted definition of the word “chicken”.

So any hypothetical chicken-ancestor we choose as the “first chicken”, but not born from an egg, we should not be willing to call “first chicken”, after all.

So we must proceed forward in time from that failed choice of “first chicken” until something sufficiently chicken-like is born from an egg. Then we can call that animal our “first chicken”, and examine it’s relationship to “chicken eggs”. We will, by our method of searching, always then find that the “chicken egg” that our “first chicken” hatched from, came first.

Oh! You meant Moore’s Law is asymptotic!?

Yes! That is key to the joke I was making.

When I say Big O, I’m talking about the slick jazzy anime about rejecting true love and living with heartbreak because we believe a lie about our own superiority. This is always true, no matter what the discussion context. If I happen to say anything remotely relevant to mathematical Big O, that is just a deeply weird coincidence.

Fantastic summary. For anyone wondering how to get really really valuable in IT, this is a great write-up of why my top paid people are my top paid people.

Write more robust code.

Sure, I could read a book about best practices and Big O…but…What if we just table the idea for a few iterations of Moore’s Law instead?

Ubuntu was a big part of my path to full time Linux use. I adore everyone who has contributed to Ubuntu.

But also, Snaps are bullshit, and are why I replaced all my Ubuntu installs with Debian.

Canonical doesn’t get to pretend to be surprised by the backlash for pushing an unnecessary closed proprietary platform on their freedom seeking users.

I still adore everyone at Canonical and in the Ubuntu community, for all they’ve done for the Linux community. Y’all still rock. Thanks!