glyph

glyph, 6 months ago to random

Since today I'm posting about how linux is trash I feel like I should contextualize why I sometimes do this. I'm not trying to yuck anybody's yum. If you use and enjoy Linux I hope you continue to do so. I am perpetually mad about desktop Linux's failures because I want to use and like Linux, and I want to support the apparent majority of my audience who do so. I do not enjoy being perpetually stuck in Apple's walled garden. However nice a garden is, "there is no escape" kind of ruins the vibe

glyph, 7 months ago to random

I need a new TV and the “smart” TVs are so much grosser than I realized (fucking ADS when I turn them on?? What?!?!) I want a high-quality OLED that just has an HDMI input. I kinda want it to have one input and I will buy my own discrete switcher thanks, given how little I trust the companies making these. Is this even possible any more? I am vaguely aware that “commercial panels” are a thing but they all seem lower quality and hard to source and missing basic stuff like color calibration.

glyph, 1 year ago to random

I get a little wistful at retrocomputing aesthetics, but the nostalgia is mostly melancholy and not exciting. When I think about the future of cool, weird software stuff, Textual and Rich are great examples of empowering, cross-platform weird and nerdy tools that are nevertheless powerful and futuristic
https://mastodon.social/@willmcgugan/110430900132509356

glyph, 11 days ago to random

@mcc me thinking about using systemd: "I don't understand why people are so mad about this, launchd is better than sysv init, this is just launchd for linux, I guess they couldn't just port it because some low-level stuff is different but I'm sure it's basically the same"

me actually using systemd: "fuck fuck what is this shit what the fuck why didn't they just actually port launchd to linux, there's no excuse for this"

glyph, 3 months ago to random

I just want to write some code, maybe make some music, maybe draw some pictures.

I don't want to be mad about blockchains, I don't want to be mad about GenAI, I don't want to be mad about terrible backfiring "think of the children" legislation, I don't want to be terrified about the rising tide of bigoted, racist fascism ending democracy in my lifetime.

I don't want you to have to be mad about all that either.

I wish the world would leave us all alone for a little bit.

glyph, 11 days ago to random

I heard many folks at PyCon — including a few very prominent ones who shall remain nameless to protect the guilty! — claiming that “black text on a white background” is uniformly and obviously the superior accessibility choice for conference presentations, for various reasons. This is, at the very least, debatable, and I think it would not be too spicy of a take to say it is straightforwardly incorrect. Some evidence follows: 🧵

glyph, 2 months ago to random

Every time I become peripherally aware of IPv6 again I get so sad. The protocol is so rich and has so much structure and the tools are just so broken. A brief collection of issues that remain unresolved in this, the year 2024 of linux on the desktop: 🧵

glyph, 2 months ago to random

New Blog: Software Needs To Be More Expensive https://blog.glyph.im/2024/03/software-needs-to-be-more-expensive.html?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon

glyph, 11 days ago to random

It suddenly occurs to me that tremendous amounts of programmer culture are just various, mostly-failed attempts at managing the work associated with keeping pace with a changing world. Specifically: SemVer, LTSes, “commercial support” funding models for OSS, Win32’s “Old New Thing”-style compatibility, SaaS interface versioning, and, arguably, the popularity of the x86/amd64 architectures themselves are all aspects of a fantasy world where you build something once and have it work forever.

glyph, 8 months ago to random

is it possible to answer the question "how much bias lighting at what color temperature is optimal to avoid eye strain" without getting an MD with a specialty in opthamology and a PhD in chromatology

glyph, 5 months ago to random

Super mad at Apple again tonight as I realize that you cannot have the Music app without Radio, the TV app without trailers for TV+, the or the Podcasts app without an un-hideable screen full of hideous murder-related content or the app store without exploitative IAP gambling-for-kids garbage. I can lock down a device so that a child can't listen to songs with the F-word in them but there is no way to say DO NOT SHOW THEM ENCOURAGEMENTS TO GAMBLING ADDICTION.

glyph, 2 months ago to random

people that I respect tell me that LLM tools help them write code and I believe them, but every single interaction I have with an LLM coding tool goes exactly like this https://chat.openai.com/share/f71df9c8-9f85-444a-9856-bb188447c8ac

glyph, 1 month ago to random

Watched the original Star Wars trilogy with the kid this weekend and it’s been a long time since I have seen it. One thing that really stuck out to me was… what, thematically, is the movie trying to say about droids? The message seems to be that they are regular people like everyone else, and also chattel slaves, and also that’s it’s fine and also kind of funny? Like both Han and Luke are repeatedly shown doing obvious villain shit to droids and I can’t tell why we are not supposed to care

glyph, 15 days ago to random

It’s friday, so it’s time for a Glyph update! This one, predicably, is mostly about PyCon. https://www.patreon.com/posts/patreon-update-104876830

glyph, 10 months ago to random

The iPad remains one of the most vexing devices in my digital life. The experience of using one is magical. Still reminds me of Star Trek TNG. The pencil's verisimilitude is phenomenal; even moreso with a Paperfeel screen protector. The screen is gorgeous; like a window into another world.

But I just don't know what to do with it. SSH is better on a laptop. Handwriting is awesome for a tech demo but annoying in day-to-day use. It's visually better for ebooks, but less ergonomic than a phone.

glyph, 5 months ago to random

This is a subtoot of like nine different things at once, but, fellow progressive/left-leaning friends: please for the love of all that is good in the world just stop ranting about "capitalism". if you think some feature of our current market system is bad, just like, describe the market mechanism and the incentive it creates and the bad outcomes of the incentive. Criticizing "capitalism" is like criticizing "evil" at this point. it's so nonspecific and nebulous that it's counterproductive.

glyph, 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago) to random

So my own anodyne childhood memories of the mac paled in comparison to @danilo ’s moving tribute and I had to go back to the drawing board on this 40th anniversary post, so instead of that, please enjoy these spicy takes where I claim among other things that Steve Jobs wasn't really all that great at product design

https://blog.glyph.im/2024/01/the-macintosh.html

#mac40th #macintosh

glyph, 3 months ago to python

New version of Fritter today, <https://pypi.org/project/fritter/0.0.7/>, my #Python library for interacting with the passage of time in a generalized way, for both civil and physical times (i.e.: datetimes and epoch-second timestamps).

This software is proudly ZeroVer <https://0ver.org> right now, as I am rapidly evolving its interfaces and documentation without a compatibility policy yet, trying to make sure I'm comfortable committing to it. But as of today it has 100% test coverage.

glyph, 11 months ago to random

One of my litmus tests for a software product these days is that, if it has search, I should be able to search for a nonsense phrase and get an answer that says “no results”. Every website and app is so damn thirsty for clicks now that it will just show an infinite scroll of useless garbage no matter what I’m looking for, which means I can’t get “no results” and then refine my search quickly, I have to page through the “results” to see if they’re plausibly related to my query. Please stop it.

glyph, 2 months ago to random

I think I am going to do a test stream today, somewhere between 2:30PM and 3PM -0700. I have had this thought many times before but perhaps letting it escape my brain in this way will make it actually happen. Where will it be? Good question. That will be a decision I make between now and an hour from now

glyph, 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago) to random

1Password offers Git commit signing with SSH keys, and I don't need to faff around with GPG. Should I set this up, or should I not encourage this sort of pointless security theater?

glyph, 23 days ago to random

Does anyone happen to know if it is possible to get a projector for an open space at #PyConUS? I have some ideas that involve discussions of code where it would be useful if a participant could share their screen with a larger group.

glyph, 10 months ago to python

Here's a puzzle:

Let's say we have a bunch of different kinds of object that exist in some long-lived context, like a server-side physics sim or a GUI. They have attributes. We want to model them as such, not stringly-typed config, because they're data structures with types & behavior.

How to implement generic change notifications without inheriting an implementation of setattr or something morally equivalent?

This is the final frontier of composition-over-inheritance for me.

#python

glyph, 3 months ago to random

As everyone under 40 in infosec tires of the “Hackers” aesthetic plastered on everything by us tedious elder millennials, one thing that I think gets lost, particularly for younger folks, is that the movie isn’t just goofy camp. I mean, obviously, it’s heavily fictionalized, but there really was a hacking subculture kind of like the one depicted in it in New York in the 1990s. I barely grazed the outer periphery of it myself, and I sometimes wonder if anyone did a serious ethnography of it.

glyph, 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago) to random

If I have a Python package which contains a module whose contents define external boundaries and are all themselves objects with no implementation — typing.Protocols, constants, enums, interfaces, actually-abstract ABCs, type aliases, maybe exceptions — what is a good name for this namespace?