froztbyte

Not entirely the usual fare, but i figured some here would appreciate it

I often rag on the js/node/npm ecosystem for being utter garbage, and this post is a quite a full demonstration of many of the shortcomings and outright total design failures present in that space

Invite up at https://2024.revision-party.net/blog/04-invitation/

~2 weekends away (who cares about the week)

Prepare for watching mathematical black magic!

this is in part because it's for (yet another) post I'm working on, but I figured I'd pop some things here and see if others have contributions too. the post will be completed (and include examples, usecases, etc), but, yeah.

I've always taken a fairly strong interest in the tooling I use, for QoL and dtrt reasons usually (but also sometimes tool capability). conversely, I also have things I absolutely loathe using

1. wireguard. a far better vpn software and protocol than most others (and I have slung tunnels with many a vpn protocol). been using this a few years already, even before the ios app beta came around. good shit, take a look if you haven't before
2. smallstep cli. it's one of two pieces of Go software I actually like. smallstep is trying to build its own ecosystem of CA tools and solutions (and that's usable in its own right, albeit by default focused to containershit), but the cli is great for what you typically want with certificate handling. compare step certificate inspect file and step certificate inspect --insecure https://totallyreal.froztbyte.net/ to the bullshit you need with openssl. check it out
3. restic. the other of the two Go-softwares I like. I posted about it here previously
4. rust cli things! oh damn there's so many, I'm going to put them on their own list below
5. zsh, extremely lazily configured, with my own little module and scoping system and no oh-my-zsh. fish has been a thing I've seen people be happy about but I'm just an extremely lazy computerer so zsh it stays. zsh's complexity is extremely nonzero and it definitely has sharp edges, but it does work well. sunk cost, I guess. bonus round: race your zsh, check your times:

% hyperfine -m 50 'zsh -i -c echo'
Benchmark 1: zsh -i -c echo
  Time (mean ± σ):      69.1 ms ±   2.8 ms    [User: 35.1 ms, System: 28.6 ms]
  Range (min … max):    67.0 ms …  86.2 ms    50 runs

6. magic-wormhole. this is a really, really neat little bit of software for just fucking sending files to someone. wormhole send filename one side, wormhole receive the-code-it-gives the other side, bam! it uses SPAKE2 (disclaimer: I did help review that post, it's still good) for session-tied keying, and it's just generally good software
7. [macos specifically] alfred. I gotta say, I barely use this to its full potential, and even so it is a great bit of assistive stuff. more capable than spotlight, has a variety of extensibility, and generally snappy as hell.
8. [macos specifically] choosy. I use this to control link-routing and link-opening on my workstation to a fairly wide degree (because a lot of other software irks me, and does the wrong thing by default). this will be a fuller post on its own, too
9. [macos specifically] little snitch. application-level per-connection highly granular-capable firewalling. with profiles. their site does a decent explanation of it. the first few days of setup tends to be Quite Involved with how many rules you need to add (and you'll probably be surprised at just how many things try to make various kinds of metrics etc connections), but well worth it. one of the ways to make modern software less intolerable. (honorary extra mention: obdev makes a number of handy pieces of mac software, check their site out)
10. [macos specifically] soundsource. highly capable per-application per-sink audio control software. with the ability to pop in VSTs and AUs at multiple points. extremely helpful for a lot of things (such as perma-muting discord, which never shuts up, even in system dnd mode)

rust tools:

1. b3sum. file checksum thing, but using blake3. fast!. worth checking out. probably still niche, might catch on eventually
2. hyperfine. does what it says on the tin. see example use above.
3. dust. like du, but better, and way faster. oh dear god it is so much faster. I deal with a lot of pets, and this thing is one of the invaluables in dealing with those.
4. ripgrep. the one on this list that people are most likely to know. grep, but better, and faster.
5. fd. again, find but better and faster.
6. tokei. sloccount but not shit. handy for if you quickly want to assess a codebase/repo.
7. bottom. down the evolutionary chain from top and htop, has more feature modes and a number of neat interactive view functions/helpers

honorary mentions (things I know of but don't use that much):

1. mrh. not doing as much consulting as I used to, using it less. quickly checks all git(?) repos in a path for uncommitted changes
2. fzf. still haven't really gotten to integrating it into my usage
3. just. need to get to using it more.
4. jql. I ... tend to avoid jq? my "this should be in a program. with safety rails." reflex often kicks in when I see jq things. haven't really explored this
5. rtx. their tagline is "a better asdf". I like the idea of it because asdf is a miserable little pile of shell scripts and fuck that, but I still haven't really gotten to using it in anger myself. I have my own wrapper methods for keeping pyenv/nvm/etc out of my shell unless needed
6. pomsky. previously rulex. regex creation tool and language. been using it a little bit. not enough to comment in detail yet

I don't really know enough about the C64 to say anything one way or the other, but this comment on youtube did okay:

@eightbitguru
1 year ago
2021: We have definitely seen everything the C64 can do now.
2022: My beer. Hold it.

and I'm posting this without even having seen the whole thing yet

will this sure is gonna go well :sarcmark:

it almost feels like when Google+ got shoved into every google product because someone had a bee in their bonnet

flipside, I guess, is that we'll soon (at scale!) get to start seeing just how far those ideas can and can't scale

archive.org | and .is

this is almost a NSFW? some choice snippets:

more than 1.5 million people have used it and it is helping build nearly half of Copilot users’ code

Individuals pay $10 a month for the AI assistant. In the first few months of this year, the company was losing on average more than $20 a month per user, according to a person familiar with the figures, who said some users were costing the company as much as $80 a month.

good thing it's so good that everyone will use it amirite

starting around $13 for the basic Microsoft 365 office-software suite for business customers—the company will charge an additional $30 a month for the AI-infused version.

Google, ..., will also be charging $30 a month on top of the regular subscription fee, which starts at $6 a month

I wonder how long they'll try that, until they try forcing it on everyone (and raise all prices by some n%)

The Mistral 7B Instruct model is a quick demonstration that the base model can be easily fine-tuned to achieve compelling performance. It does not have any moderation mechanism. We’re looking forward to engaging with the community on ways to make the model finely respect guardrails, allowing for deployment in environments requiring moderated outputs.

“Whoops, it’s done now, oh well, guess we’ll have to do it later”

Go fucking directly to jail

my comment over there just made me recall this

this demo is the next one in a long arc of people doing absolutely remarkable things to the original PC. that series went 8088 corruption (pouet) -> 8088 domination -> 8088 mph and if you've never seen them before, you absolutely should

area 5150 has a recording of the production as well as an audience reaction recording from share day

it's astoundingly awesome

something I really enjoy about the scene is that the more you learn (about the technology, the math, the methodology), the deeper the appreciation of it gets

a friend linked this to me earlier today: nitter (someone else maybe archive it? I don't know what tusky has done to birdsite and how to make wayback play nice)

in one lens/view one could see this as just more of the same (if people were already gunning for YC track shit, there's other things already implied etc), but even so: just how bad is(/must) the "belief" (be) for young people to feel this intensely about it?

I'm over here just watching the arc of likely events and I can barely fathom the anger and disappointment that may[0] come about in a few years after this

[0] - "may" because it seems a lot of folks have their anger redirected far too easily; remains to be seen if it can remain correctly directed in future

Halm, who according to his social media profiles just graduated from Harvard, tweeted that he’s simply in the arena trying stuff.

"I just wanna buuuuuuuuilllddddd" goes the annoying little fuck even before he's asked any questions about social impact and such

“The goal is to create the most addicting & personalized image recommendation system. V1 is as simple as possible. Future versions trained on current data will enable even more personalized images & user interaction in image generation."

just fuck right off

I've been using it for a good while now, but figured it's worth a shoutout incase others don't know it. one of the few pieces of Go-ware I don't substantially hate.

I've previously slapped together a tiny set of shellscripts for my use of it which you're welcome to steal from. also recently seen backupninja as something that can use this, but haven't tried that

content: image of google "moderating" (i.e. eliminating, permanently, without apparent recourse) an entry in a user's URL collection/bookmarks. the entry is for kickasstorrents. (archive)

I recall seeing an example of them doing something like this to people's gdocs stuff (and iirc that was on paid account, but I could be misremembering). seems like they're ramping up the where to more coverage of their services/assets