Armin Ronacher wrote that Scaling Mastodon is Impossible

I'd like to offer a rebuttal. As someone who's been doing professional web development since 1995, with most of that time being spent in Rails jobs, or doing Rails work on the sidelines, I think i have a pretty good perspective on the situation. For those who don't know, Mastodon is written in Ruby on Rails.

Decentralization promotes an utopian view of the world that I belief fails to address actual real problems in practice.

Exploring an Idea With Midjourney

I haven’t seen anyone talk about what it’s like to try and work with Midjourney, or any of the other Image AIs. No-one has shown just how much work it takes to get from an idea, to the beautiful output we keep seeing.

This post will take you through the journey, from a spark of colorful and strong Native American imagery, depressed cyborgs, to visions of Muslim women, in a dry and trying future.

Summary

While leaving “private comments” on a repo can be incredibly useful, it can get you into trouble if the wrong person sees them and disagrees with what they see. This post goes into the problems, consequences, and things that tools that provide this functionality need to do to protect their users from accidental harm.

Some Context

A while ago I wrote a tool called “Private Comments”, which allows you to leave “private comments” on a codebase that aren’t actually in the codebase. Imagine leaving little “breadcrumbs” for the future you that are actually attached to the relevant lines of code, and go away when that code changes, but reappear if you need to look at the relevant past version of it. It can be used for you, or shared with your team.

This post describes how to make high quality recordings of terminal sessions that can be replayed in the terminal, or shared on the web. I’m defining high quality as recordings with zero typos, and relatively controlled timing between commands.

to see an example of the type of output I’m talking about.

Why? Videos and gifs take up a lot of disk space, don’t age well as display technology improves, and are problematic for folks low vision requirements.

A quick post to help future Raku geeks understand a couple of confusing error messages:

expected Positional[Array] but got Array

and

expected Associative[Hash] but got Hash

These are conceptually the same problem. If you’ve received one of these errors it means you’ve double-specified your parameter by using the @ or % and Array or Hash.

A parameter of Hash %foo says “I would like to be passed something that implements Associative and has a Hash in it.” (a Hash of Hashes). Likewise Array @foo says “I would like to be passed something that implements Positional and has an Array in it”. Yes, that sounds backwards. No, I can’t explain why.

Overview

Following on the heels of my last post on why you should (not) self host your git repos, I went ahead and used Gitea to set up a local mirror of all my repositories, and all the repositories I don’t want to loose access to.

The results were surprising, and after reading this, you might want to do the same. This post will be a qick overview of how I did it, some tips that’ll help, and what I learned as a result.

Table of Contents

1. Why You Should Self-Host
2. ➠What about GitLab and other Competitors?
3. Why You Shouldn’t Self-Host
4. So what’s a geek to do?
5. What am I going to do?

Once upon a time, GitHub was a successful geek enterprise. Then Microsoft bought it, and folks started arguing that you should abandon ship. You should self-host your repos they say.

I 100% agree, and 100% disagree. Let me explain.

GitHub’s been a benevolent host. When they bought NPM they went from being a de facto piece of internet infrastructure to an actual piece of critical infrastructure. At this point you may as well argue that we should sever our connection to the electric company.

Those of us who love the command line, have a tendency to install a lot of useful utilities, and want them available on all our computers. On macOS we tend to use Homebrew. This document serves to describe three ways to generate a useful file to solve that problem.

As I see it there are 3 basic approaches to syncing your homebrew utilities across machines.

1. I don’t care about the details, just make it work.
2. I would like a simple installation document that
   • lists what I’ve installed
   • what each is for
   • can be used to install the same things on other machines
3. I would like an efficient installation document that
   • lists what I’ve installed
   • what each is for
   • can be used to install the same things on other machines
   • won’t waste time trying to reinstall things already installed
   • can handle post-install tasks, and make sure they only get run once.

This pots will address each of those, in order.

There has been a lot of uproar about the “ethics” of AI generated art from tools like MidJourney, Stable Diffusion, and Dall-E. People talking about “theft” and “copyright infringement” and how artists should be paid for “stealing” their styles.

This blog post intends to break down the ridiculousness of those claims with simple logic, and historical counterarguments. I’ll show how the uproar is ultimately just an emotional knee-jerk reaction by people ignorant of the reality of art, illustration, and these AI systems.

The Problem

For the past decade or so, I’ve noticed a trend amongst my coworkers. When they need to look at the contents of a file that they’re not currently editing, they will go to GitHub, and click their way down through the folder structure until they eventually find the file they want to see the contents of.

On a related note, I believe that most of my coworkers don’t know how to take a relative path in a repo, and tell their text editors to open it.