downsplat

4 ms·

1.
by downsplat 2mo ago
How often do you reboot your laptop anyway? It takes a couple seconds to type in a well-rehearsed passphrase. When I reboot mine it's actually three passwords that I need to put in: disk encryption, linux login, and firefox master key.
2.
by downsplat 3mo ago
Cool article, but the one it acknowledges and riffs off of, at https://lr0.org/blog/p/arabic/ , is much more informative, and tells all about how we got decent Arabic script rendering on our browers and OSs
3.
by downsplat 3mo ago
The point is not about what it means exactly to "own" something, you'll get plenty of noise discussion around that one. But if I care about some piece of digital art enough to pay for it, I sure want a non-DRM copy to sit on
4.
by downsplat 3mo ago
Redis is a great piece of tech but it suffers from trying to be good at two different jobs (persistent data structures, volatile cache) which should not be combined. And indeed in Redis itself they don't combine well - persistence is
5.
by downsplat 3mo ago
Search around, there's surely a way to break the drm. When theres no better way that's what I do too: pay for the book, convert to plain epub. The publishing industry never got its head out of... some dark place. We've been
6.
by downsplat 3mo ago
Yep, if you haven't lost the will to put a bit of curation work upfront, RSS never stopped being the right answer. Substack has been a pretty good addition to the landscape, bringing lots of people into blogging (without calling it tha
7.
by downsplat 4mo ago
I've been using Claude to work on a medium-sized (100+kLoc) codebase, and it's a great productivity multiplier. Putting hours into creating a good AGENTS file is more improved results a lot. I find that over time it picks up the c
8.
by downsplat 4mo ago
I basically skipped React. I went from jquery to Vue3, and use even that sparingly. When React got really popular, I read the docs and played with it, but I prefer the Vue model where the component runs once and sets up its reactive tree. W
9.
by downsplat 4mo ago
If postgres is too heavyweight for you but you still want client-server, I'd consider MySql. It's an old classic, pretty fast and scalable, and has much better mainstream support and a bigger ecosystem than Firebird. I'm not
10.
The Mystery in the Medicine Cabinet(asteriskmag.com)
4 points by downsplat 5mo ago|1 comments
11.
by downsplat 5mo ago
Well-researched article on the relative safety of acetaminophen and ibuprofen.
12.
by downsplat 6mo ago
It's called euthanasia. You can ask the medical system for an assisted suicide if your life situation is extra painful with no hope for recovery. This case got heaps of media popularity because the christian right wing latched on it, a
13.
by downsplat 6mo ago
https://www.boe.es/diario_boe/txt.php?id=BOE-A-2021-4628
14.
by downsplat 6mo ago
What kind of context has you deploying into old systems that don't ship a recent perl? If that is a legacy requirement for whatever reason, then at least I'd use docker or podman to get a recent runtime. Or would you also write
15.
by downsplat 6mo ago
What are you using for parameter type checking? I switched to native function signatures, native try/catch and might look into the new class system soon, but I don't recall native type checking...
16.
by downsplat 6mo ago
This looks like a huge project, even with AI help... I have a sweet spot for perl but I'm honestly not sure if the current community has the bandwidth and interest to sustain an alternative implementation. At the very least it should b
17.
by downsplat 6mo ago
Alcohol has been deeply embedded in human culture for thousands+ years, that's why prohibition is a bad idea. Loot boxes are a new invention, if they're deemed too harmful we can just do without them.
18.
by downsplat 6mo ago
It's amazing how people will jump to something new just because it's there and it's being promoted. When wireless headphones came out, I looked at my wired ones and asked the simple question: is a tangling cable worse than bl
19.
by downsplat 6mo ago
I guess it's really not for me though. First thing I do is turn autoplay off, and I'd refuse to use a service that doesn't give me that option. OTOH, I do sometimes find it fun to hunt for good stuff among the recommendation
20.
by downsplat 6mo ago
You've probably already done this, but first thing, turn off autoplay and make sure it stays off. Much easier to not get sucked into things when you have to actively click on them.
21.
by downsplat 6mo ago
Why would you want to do that? I'm so happy I can search exactly what I want among heaps of long tail stuff, I would never want to go back to a "live tv" interaction model.
22.
by downsplat 6mo ago
For most situations, I deal with this by keeping dates as strings throughout the app, not objects. They get read from the db as strings, passed around as strings. If I need datetime calculations, I use the language's datetime objects
23.
by downsplat 6mo ago
It's not really a Linux vs MS thing though. When Unicode first came out, it was 16-bit, so all the early adopters went with that. That includes Java, Windows, JavaScript, the ICU lintaries, LibreOffice and its predecessors, .NET, the C
24.
by downsplat 6mo ago
The old defense of 16-bit chars, popping up in 2026 still! Utf8 is efficient enough for all general purpose uses. If you're storing gigabytes of non-latin-alphabet text, and your systems are constrained enough that it makes a differenc
25.
by downsplat 6mo ago
Did this post come out of a freezer from 1998? Who on earth creates databases in Latin1 in 2026? Nevermind, looks like Sql Server didn't add utf8 collations until 2019 (!) and for decades people had to choose column by column between t
26.
by downsplat 7mo ago
I don't think openclaw can possibly be secured given the current paradigm. It has access to your personal stuff (that's its main use case), access to the net, and it gets untrusted third party inputs. That's the unfixable tri
27.
by downsplat 7mo ago
Which LLM hallucinated this monstrosity? Just use a regex, it's a one-liner!
28.
by downsplat 8mo ago
Been flying with Audacious and deadbeef for ages. Minimalistic but quick and effective.
29.
by downsplat 8mo ago
I guess one thing we can agree with the author is that YAML is technically a piece of crap.
30.
by downsplat 8mo ago
It still works well in the appropriate settings. LibreOffice (nee OpenOffice) uses ODF, an XML format, for its document files, and it has been working nicely enough for a long time.

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