hackers.town: 2024-12-31 Tue 07:48

Fare thee well Polywork. You were never as interesting as your initial marketing, and a desperate AI pivot didn’t change that.

I really wish it had been the hip cool LinkedIn alternative they described at first, but it felt like more of a Fiverr alternative and somehow less useful than that? Then an AI-powered Link In Bio for LinkedIn users?

Anyways.

https://mailchi.mp/77b92188bb90/important-update-polywork-shutdown-notice-7229972?e=71bbf91a0d

hackers.town: 2024-12-31 Tue 07:56

@nukehavoc who among us can say they did not get a die stuck in their nose at some point?

oh

that’s a lot of hands

I am

(rolls)

weirdly proud

hackers.town: 2024-12-31 Tue 09:12

@jaywilliams not before coffee I’m not

hackers.town: 2024-12-31 Tue 09:39

Gotta remember that I don’t know how much English the dogs know.

@IamMrsGeek steps out the door for an appointment. Jumpy Dog looks at the door a little uncertain.

Me: “Let’s hope she comes back!”

Jumpy Dog: (immediate nervous shaking)

hackers.town: 2024-12-31 Tue 10:01

@tek sorry you’re picking up on my anxieties. My drawing iPad’s getting old, I’m broke, and I worry about breaking it.

hackers.town: 2024-12-31 Tue 10:08

@tek welcome to AaH! The Anxiety at Home community program, where you all contribute your spare cycles to processing my multitudinous worries. Thank you for doing your part to help make my life a little better.

To opt out of this program please click here and wait 30-60 business weeks for processing.

hackers.town: 2024-12-31 Tue 16:32

Discussing how we can probably put the Christmas tree away soon, seeing as how Barry’s put about half the decorations away already.

hackers.town: 2024-12-31 Tue 17:19

I have most of a decent blog post written, but the final bits aren’t satisfying. So of course I’m puttering with #Nushell, which is not part of the blog post. Keeps me entertained while the rest of my brain works out the important stuff.

hackers.town: 2024-12-31 Tue 20:35

Thought it was javelinas banging garbage bins but no the noise is just fireworks.

How banal.

hackers.town: 2024-12-30 Mon 11:05

@deafferret Currently on NetNewsWire. Been pondering implementing local fraidycat myself

hackers.town: 2024-12-30 Mon 11:41

Trying to read a blog post and getting sidetracked by 14px monospace font where the contrast somehow doesn’t feel sharp enough at 9.98:1 and thank goodness for browsers with Reader Mode but anyways hashtag you might like this if you can read it #AstroDotBuild #Emacs #DoomEmacs

Setting up Doom Emacs for Astro Development • Edmund Miller

hackers.town: 2024-12-30 Mon 11:43

@earthshine Mutes, filters, and blocks applied to those who try to use “clever” nicknames for topical people / orgs

It’s the only way I’ve been able to survive online for so long.

hackers.town: 2024-12-30 Mon 11:44

@earthshine I have a few specific exceptions on accounts that roll with nicknames, but 80% of the time it’s a block.

hackers.town: 2024-12-30 Mon 11:52

@earthshine oh yes for follows absolutely.

But I’m a fan of the pre-emptive block. Something gets boosted into my feed, or I see a reply in someone else’s thread, I keep an eye out for annoyances.

And somebody that still uses Micro$oft or similar, we’re not gonna have a good time if we accidentally converse.

hackers.town: 2024-12-30 Mon 12:39

@GillBates @earthshine no, but it means I probably won’t follow this account.

hackers.town: 2024-12-30 Mon 12:45

@GillBates @earthshine completely obvious, and appreciated. I just overindulged in satire and ironic detachment up to the early 2000s and my doctor told me to cut back for my health.

hackers.town: 2024-12-30 Mon 17:44

@masukomi Do they involve food? A look like that traditionally involves food hopes.

hackers.town: 2024-12-30 Mon 18:15

@mhoye that is heckin’ awesome

i wonder if it was supposed to be an insult

hackers.town: 2024-12-30 Mon 18:17

Sometimes it seems like every time I do a major editing run through my blog archives, somebody else mentioned in it has died.

Clearly I need to stop doing major editing runs through my blog archives.

hackers.town: 2024-12-30 Mon 18:40

@futurebird right here!

https://www.amazon.com/ActivityPub-Programming-Social-Evan-Prodromou-ebook/dp/B0DHT1RK5T

by @evan

hackers.town: 2024-12-30 Mon 21:19

when hyperfocuses collide

as i think my way through Astro components for IndieWeb replies

gonna take a few tries for sure

hackers.town: 2024-12-30 Mon 23:06

@ireneista @mcc yep you probably did know that!

I remember getting bit by variable name constraints in Applesoft BASIC in elementary school.

Always been a fan of verbose names.

hackers.town: 2024-12-30 Mon 23:48

Shifted all the posts on the blog’s Astro iteration from Markdoc to MDX and only regretted it a little bit.

MDX version 2 is sufficiently fussy that I was getting XHTML flashbacks.

hackers.town: 2024-12-29 Sun 00:17

@denis not sure if better or worse than the toolkits you’ve tried, but maybe Python NiceGUI? Or some flavor of Glimmer?

Or yeah maybe just use the good-enough tool that’s already out there.

hackers.town: 2024-12-29 Sun 06:38

@denis well that is disappointing.

hackers.town: 2024-12-29 Sun 15:43

I enjoy closing out the year with questionable judgment

New post on Random Geekery:

Starting 2025 With Astro

#Blog #Astro

https://randomgeekery.org/post/2024/12/starting-2025-with-astro/

hackers.town: 2024-12-29 Sun 16:36

@richlitt @josh journaling somewhere that I can do full-text search and bookmarks. That takes care of the daily dozen random ideas.

When I notice I’ve actually been working on implementing one of the random ideas, it gets a dedicated page with task items.

If interest is sustained, I bookmark the project page so I can still see it when attention inevitably wanders.

This is not so much a system as a habit. The more detailed the system the less likely I am to stick with it.

hackers.town: 2024-12-29 Sun 17:15

@aurynn I agree with your assertion, even with my unnecessarily large iPhone!

hackers.town: 2024-12-29 Sun 21:21

Carter outlived Kissinger.

It’s not much, but I’ll take it.

hackers.town: 2024-12-28 Sat 10:15

The part that might be strange to the external observer: I am really enjoying myself right now.

#CSS

hackers.town: 2024-12-28 Sat 10:21

@sarajw closely followed by finally getting exactly the layout I was thinking of, and going “no I don’t like that. Let’s try this other idea.”

The exploration and poking and learning is a delight!

hackers.town: 2024-12-28 Sat 11:17

having fun with :has() abuse

(note: this is the extremely fiddly version. If I still like it after walking the dogs, I need to adjust past “works on my browser”)

#CSS

hackers.town: 2024-12-28 Sat 13:52

I find it amusingly apropos that the Atlassian job board is unnecessarily complicated.

hackers.town: 2024-12-28 Sat 18:08

Oh there’s loads more I want to do – a dark theme, for starters, and I want to fiddle a bit with the whitespace for the wide view – but I think I’ve hit “good enough.” Gonna let me brain cool off and start a nice little post-mortem post.

(and probably putter incessantly with little layout issues catching my attention already)

hackers.town: 2024-12-28 Sat 19:02

@nat It’s ridiculous. In my street rat days, some of my friends would try out a new name every few months. Some more often than that. We used the names they gave us, because nobody calls you by the name on your ID but cops and bill collectors.

Somebody that’s had the wrong name most of their life, and picks another one that’ll probably also last a long time, that’s easy.

I mean ADHD so I’ll still forget. But I’ll be forgetting the right name, because I care!

this did not go where i thought it would

hackers.town: 2024-12-28 Sat 19:07

I almost certainly won’t be sticking with this exact site style. Already been tweaking little bits here and here. It looks too much like a reskinned version of a theme I used five or six years ago.

But the pieces are there, and it’s in Astro, leaving room for more silliness later, so I’m pleased.

hackers.town: 2024-12-28 Sat 21:25

I think I might need some tea. It’s grooming time for the household critters and all the tiny noises are causing me angst.

hackers.town: 2024-12-28 Sat 23:40

oh hey ExpressiveCode is pretty neat for the syntax highlighting and suchlike

hackers.town: 2024-12-27 Fri 00:33

Skimming through LinkedIn for job leads, as one does 12:30 at night right after Christmas. Saw a suggested post that opened with “Elon Musk is right” and nearly put my foot through the monitor.

Instead I calmly clicked that I wasn’t interested in the post, closed the tab, and made inarticulate snarling noises for five minutes.

As one does.

hackers.town: 2024-12-27 Fri 09:53

Task 14/31: the /follow/ page. Took a little work. Been using Markdoc for low-effort Hugo shortcode equivalents, but Astro only supports Markdoc for content collections (like blog posts).

Rather than make another collection, I added MDX integration (for later ideas). A look I’m not used to seeing in my Markdown, that’s for sure.

hackers.town: 2024-12-27 Fri 14:59

Task 15/31: basic automated testing of site

With normal invocation, Astro fails on the first file whose frontmatter displeases Zod. So without help you don’t know how much further you’ve got.

Figured out how to do parametrized testing with vitest (an array of post files processed by me, and a describe.each(posts) block with the actual tests)

and uh I don’t think I’ll make that field required after all

hackers.town: 2024-12-27 Fri 17:14

Me: yeah I don’t really care about computer stuff and especially not about performance or desktop apps or lower level programming languages

Also me: glued to the screen for almost an hour-long demo of an immediate mode GUI layout library written in C

Introducing Clay - High Performance UI Layout in C - YouTube

hackers.town: 2024-12-27 Fri 19:07

Warning that something was using an excessive amount of RAM on the laptop. I assumed it would be Minecraft but no it was VS Code.

hackers.town: 2024-12-27 Fri 19:33

With my current configuration, Minecraft is allocated 10GB RAM. VS Code apparently tries for the other 22GB.

hackers.town: 2024-12-27 Fri 23:59

Probably shouldn’t have put the toilet so close to the food prep. Also, I’m gonna have to guess that you should avoid failing construction so badly you light yourself on fire.

The crawlers didn’t even rate a screenshot after all that.

#Stardeus #FediGames

hackers.town: 2024-12-26 Thu 08:24

A hill I will not die on, but will side-eye malignantly until the day I die:

A “util” namespace in your package or project is an architectural yellow flag.

Starts as a good bucket for functionality that’s still cooking.

Forever after, provides temptation to just drop a new function in utils rather than finishing and filing it.

hackers.town: 2024-12-26 Thu 08:33

What’s worse than a util namespace is multiple util namespaces without meaningful associations.

Like – I sometimes use “helper” namespaces, which is semantically equivalent to “util”. I’ll split it up though: “slug_helpers”, “date_helpers”, etc. And my shame will eventually fold them into a real module.

One library I looked at had “util”, “utils”, “util2”, “util3”, “util3_final”

okay not really on that last one but yes on the first four

hackers.town: 2024-12-26 Thu 08:36

@jnkrtech Knowing my own ability to adhere to my own READMEs and prescribed practices, I’d lean towards the latter.

Some solid dev practices are just reflexively flinching away from the stove because you remember those times you burned yourself.

hackers.town: 2024-12-26 Thu 09:01

And for the bloggers out there:

Titling your weekly note “weeknote” or “snapshot” or whatever? That’s a util namespace for your blog. That’s why I stopped doing them.

(a beehive I’ve been wanting to shake for most of the year)

hackers.town: 2024-12-26 Thu 09:25

@carlton I mean I love the weekly, monthly, or “when I think of it” updates and I want to do more of them again.

But at least identify a theme for the interval you’re posting on, and use that to come up with a title.

hackers.town: 2024-12-26 Thu 09:46

@carlton I’ve been chewing on that information-architecture-wise. I’ve dabbled with taking a tumblelog approach to short posts, where the current timestamp serves as title. The problem comes two years later, when I’m trying to find a link I know I left somewhere in that span, but I don’t remember the name.

Titles give me more context hooks than timestamps. So I shouldn’t generalize to everyone else’s case when it’s more about my specific ADHD flavoring.

hackers.town: 2024-12-26 Thu 09:54

Unexpected side effect of digging deeper into TypeScript for the Astro iteration of my site: I really want to get back into playing with Julia.

Not sure why. Thought process something like “TypeScript types are interesting. Remember what else had types and was fun to sketch quick ideas in? Julia!”

hackers.town: 2024-12-26 Thu 09:58

@calcifer @remotenemesis right, I gotta agree on the pragmatics. Semantically I prefer “helpers” but do I recognize there’s a spot for generically helpful functionality. But it should be kept as small and simple as possible.

hackers.town: 2024-12-26 Thu 10:06

@carlton yep! Doing the public brain was an attempt to add that context. I haven’t given up on that, but will be chewing on the plan for a bit.

One thought is to borrow liberally from Dendron, particularly their approach to note hierarchies.

Do my writing in a nicely structured batch of Markdown files, add links as needed, and have a distinct namespace for journaling / snapshot posts.

(also possible in Obsidian but the tidiness of Dendron’s approach appeals to me)

hackers.town: 2024-12-26 Thu 10:07

@carlton unfortunately, Dendron itself is a) tied to VS Code; and b) in maintenance mode now.

But it had some great ideas that shouldn’t be discarded.

hackers.town: 2024-12-26 Thu 10:15

@carlton ooh yep very similar to one of my ideas, combining thoughts from Dendron, Riv, and nb for a CLI-friendly structured RST brain.

hackers.town: 2024-12-26 Thu 10:16

@carlton that’s the problem is too many ideas, not enough executive function to address half of them

hackers.town: 2024-12-26 Thu 12:56

I haven’t decided whether Melvor Idle is fun, but I do enjoy watching the numbers go up.

#FediGames

hackers.town: 2024-12-26 Thu 15:59

First time watching The Dead Don’t Die and enjoying the casual conversational fourth-wall breaking.

Now imagining a Jim Jarmusch Deadpool movie.

hackers.town: 2024-12-26 Thu 17:48

@vantablack why’d you type *******

hackers.town: 2024-12-26 Thu 19:53

I enjoyed The Dead Don’t Die. But yeah that’s another sleepy movie. Probably wouldn’t play it for someone else unless I thought they needed a nap.

Definitely appreciated Deputy Adam Driver immediately after the first mysterious murder scene, goes “I’m thinking zombies.”

Extremely rare for someone to out and say it in a zombie movie.

It didn’t end well. But still.

hackers.town: 2024-12-26 Thu 19:56

@aburka @timbray It started happening immediately, and has been extremely depressing.

hackers.town: 2024-12-26 Thu 20:17

@ireneista @AlgoCompSynth especially reasonable since hovering over an autoplay thumbnail adds that video to your history.

hackers.town: 2024-12-26 Thu 20:46

Finished 12 of 31 Astro site revamp items. Only five or six of the remaining tasks are required to avoid breakage, if I maybe put a big 🚧 UNDER CONSTRUCTION 🚧 GIF somewhere

hackers.town: 2024-12-25 Wed 07:12

I do enjoy Christmas classics.

#NowPlaying

Fairytale of New York by The Pogues, Kirsty MacColl

hackers.town: 2024-12-25 Wed 08:53

Barry and Jack wish you all a completely disinterested Christmas.

hackers.town: 2024-12-25 Wed 09:49

Me to Mom, who dislikes the heavy Grinch presence muddying up her neighborhood solstice celebrations:

“The Grinch was wildly misunderstood. He just wanted his party house neighbors to STFU.”

hackers.town: 2024-12-25 Wed 09:50

I think even Dr Seuss missed the point there with the Grinch.

Neighbors screaming and singing and banging stuff every opportunity, by the time Christmas rolls around I’d be pondering domestic terrorism too.

hackers.town: 2024-12-25 Wed 10:18

@shadowspar notice the distinct lack of decorations within reach

hackers.town: 2024-12-25 Wed 10:19

@shadowspar they do love the tree, though. It is simultaneously adorable and annoying.

hackers.town: 2024-12-25 Wed 10:35

@GGMcBG are they taking a break from Hitler or something? Or oh I know they’re showing “Hitler’s last Christmas” right?

I mean I’d hate for the History Channel to break a twenty year streak on subject matter.

hackers.town: 2024-12-25 Wed 10:41

@thegibson how well did you do last Christmas?

hackers.town: 2024-12-25 Wed 10:45

@thegibson Ah well, once bitten twice shy.

hackers.town: 2024-12-25 Wed 10:52

skipping through the holiday playlist

too peppy

too loud

too derivative

oh here we go

#NowPlaying

Christmas Will Break Your Heart by LCD Soundsystem

hackers.town: 2024-12-25 Wed 11:06

oh heck that was almost Dave Bazan / Pedro the Lion levels of melodic depression. Let’s fiddle with the dial a bit.

🎵 Baby Jesus, born to rock

#NowPlaying

Everything’s Gonna Be Cool This Christmas by Eels

hackers.town: 2024-12-25 Wed 12:25

Honestly I made out pretty darn good for Christmas.

Book is exactly the right size and weight that I thought @IamMrsGeek got me D&D stuff at first.

#htmx

hackers.town: 2024-12-25 Wed 13:56

We tried playing MunchinQuest and nearly made it through an entire turn after an hour and a half.

The household board game experts will be working on it and revisit with the rest of us later.

hackers.town: 2024-12-25 Wed 18:06

We have watched Krampus. Enjoyable. Shortly we will be watching Rare Exports. A tradition.

hackers.town: 2024-12-25 Wed 19:35

It does occur to me that my favorite movies are mostly quirky and quiet. Rare Exports, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead, Down By Law, The Castle (1997), Clockwise, stuff like that.

I’m always impressed when somebody stays awake through the whole thing. Well done @IamMrsGeek

hackers.town: 2024-12-24 Tue 04:15

@packetcat good morning! I slept for almost two.

I think my day might include a nap.

hackers.town: 2024-12-24 Tue 04:53

Naturally, 5am is when Barry wants to be a lap kitty. For nearly a whole minute.

Not so much “wants” as “is willing” but still he was in my lap, biscuits were made, and no blood was shed.

hackers.town: 2024-12-24 Tue 05:35

@catsalad the ears are saying a lot right now

hackers.town: 2024-12-24 Tue 05:54

@carlton I still use GitHub as backup, with mirror repos for (some of) the stuff that lives somewhat precariously on a Raspberry Pi Gitea instance.

hackers.town: 2024-12-24 Tue 05:56

Ah you can tell I’m enjoying myself when part of the puttering includes checking in with https://caniuse.com

hackers.town: 2024-12-24 Tue 06:02

yeah processing images for responsive srcsets definitely added some overhead to initial build time. Ten minutes to process 3,306 images.

But only 13s for the second build, so I’ll allow it.

hackers.town: 2024-12-24 Tue 11:38

They got all their fingers more often than not these days. Now you can focus on the awful taste and the vague feeling that you’re looking at a Ben Garrison work.

Not sure whether the replacement of terrible stock image selection with terrible generative image prompting in festive holiday LinkedIn posts is a good thing or a bad thing.

Gonna mark it as a good thing, giving an early warning signal not to ever entrust that person, team, or company with a design brief.

hackers.town: 2024-12-24 Tue 11:44

@vantablack it’s a very particular kink

hackers.town: 2024-12-24 Tue 12:03

I mean it’s always been my core Christmas song, but yeah really feeling it this year.

🎵 Father Christmas, give us some money🎵 We got no time for your silly toys🎵 We’ll beat you up if you don’t hand it over🎵 We want your bread, so don’t make us annoyed🎵 Give all the toys to the little rich boys

#NowPlaying

The Kinks - Father Christmas (Official HD Video) - YouTube

hackers.town: 2024-12-24 Tue 12:25

@farah I mean it might not be your style, but I make room for short notes on my blog. Good way to share random thoughts and indicate continued existence.

https://randomgeekery.org/categories/note/

hackers.town: 2024-12-24 Tue 12:51

It is December 24th and I have completed wrapping Christmas presents.

In wrapping paper, not gift bags.

And I didn’t just impulsively hand them over the day after I got them.

An #ADHD victory.

hackers.town: 2024-12-24 Tue 13:37

https://hackers.town/users/lmorchard/statuses/113709718061978893

hackers.town: 2024-12-24 Tue 13:37

@lmorchard I love seeing moments like that.

hackers.town: 2024-12-24 Tue 13:42

Finding myself using Logseq again for the first time in a few weeks, which also means cleaning some stray tasks related to $gig[-1].

(light sigh)

hackers.town: 2024-12-24 Tue 14:02

@thegibson I remember those days! I still miss my tank of a gaming laptop from ~2015.

hackers.town: 2024-12-24 Tue 14:16

@edebill yeah these weren’t work specifically so much as tasks encouraging me to improve my workflow or address feedback-related issues. More of a brain dump with some emotional weight.

hackers.town: 2024-12-24 Tue 17:16

Me the other day: Hey let’s make a fresh Astro iteration of the site! Sure it’s a lot of fiddly bits but they’re all solved problems we should have it all done by the new year.

Me this morning: Hey uh maybe we should itemize exactly which tasks remain before we can call this deployable.

Me this evening, having finished one of 27 tasks: I don’t think I’m gonna have it all done by the new year

But at least I’m having fun and learning things.

hackers.town: 2024-12-24 Tue 19:36

Finished 2 of 27 or so: cover images work again.

The layout’s just me having fun with an awkward attempt at pure CSS masonry layout. It won’t be sticking around in exactly that form.

hackers.town: 2024-12-24 Tue 22:03

@suzannealdrich Hadn’t heard of Hugo Blox. “No code,” but sounds like a lot of configuration?

hackers.town: 2024-12-24 Tue 23:15

https://hackers.town/users/kusuriya/statuses/113711991504048217

hackers.town: 2024-12-23 Mon 11:19

Three times today I remembered that I forgot to take my #ADHD meds.

Four.

hackers.town: 2024-12-23 Mon 11:24

@Trg404 please just don’t bring up the sticky bit.

hackers.town: 2024-12-23 Mon 12:35

Me, talking to the therapist about new ADHD medication regimen and rounding up the last of my mental bullet points of changes noticed since last update (fewer intrustive thoughts, slightly better prioritization, poorer appetite awareness, but getting more stuff done)

“and I’m getting positive feedback on the sex life aspect of things.”

hackers.town: 2024-12-23 Mon 12:39

@nomad Is that Foghat? Because it certainly looks like a

Slow Ride

hackers.town: 2024-12-23 Mon 20:24

Still many broken pieces, but it builds under #Astro and you can get from one post to another. That’s fun.

Markdoc has functionality to overload vanilla Markdown, similar to Hugo render hooks. I’ll be playing with that for sure.

hackers.town: 2024-12-23 Mon 20:27

Incidentally the #AstroDotBuild folks have done a fine job over the life of the project. First time I tried this experiment (around 1.0 release), it took a minute and a half to build ~500 pages. Now it takes about ten seconds to build 700.

As I get fancier it’ll take longer, but the first time I couldn’t even think about getting fancy.

hackers.town: 2024-12-22 Sun 08:39

On the bright side, at least we don’t need an extra bed for the man in black.

#FediGames #Rimworld

hackers.town: 2024-12-22 Sun 13:22

Neovim plugin management is getting clever sorry I should say what I mean, and I mean ridiculously complex.

Almost as bad as a Python project.

Anyways I’m having an easier time using Doom Emacs instead at the moment.

The correct answer would be to use Neovim with no / fewer plugins, or roll back to Vim. But where’s the sport in that?

hackers.town: 2024-12-22 Sun 21:42

And now I’m enjoying myself with Astro. Component-based development is even more fun when you add Markdoc integration. Because it doesn’t take quite so much work to get those Hugo shortcodes working again.