Now what's a good mastodon instance for me? Any tips for how to move accounts, like what to do or not to do?

Ugh now I need to worry about the fediverse server I picked. One fosstodon moderator has political opinions that aren't mine. I went through the trouble of chasing down various links. But I only see one liner reddit comments by this mod picked from a longer period. No clear long objectionable […]

I think avoiding RA Fisher because he was an eugenicist is impossible because he was extremely influential in science. But it's definitely food for thought. Fisher was conservative but some may be surprised by progressive figures who were eugenicists. I wonder whether a better path is not […]

Friends don't let friends use iris, those flowers are not innocent: "Many people using iris will be unaware that it was first published in work by R A Fisher, a eugenicist with vile and harmful views on race. In fact, the iris dataset was originally published in the Annals of Eugenics. It is […]

As a generalist developer with a lot of experience I have done so many different things in my career I fit many wildly different job profiles. Python/TS/Rust backend. TS frontend. (yawn) And then wilder stuff like form frameworks, backend/frontend frameworks, workflow engines, programming […]

The reason I try to avoid using rhetorical hammers in discussion is not because I don't have them. It's because I don't like their effect on the discussion or on how I feel.

I think there has been great progress in programming languages but many of the ideas in them go back to the 70s and 80s. These ideas just weren't widely distributed. OO from the 70s got to the mainstream in the 90s (arguably in diluted form). Type inferencing from the 70s became mainstream only […]

"Political correctness" is an ancient term that meant social pressure not to say some things that really upset people. "Cancel culture" also once described social pressure being brought to bear by stopping to listen to some people. When it's actual politicians who use actual formal political […]

I love free anarchistic software reuse in open source, building things on top of other things without being beholden to anyone, which allows a lot of creativity and innovation. I think we shouldn't stop enabling or celebrating this as I think there's a lot of good in it. But that system has […]

Finally we have extensive code reuse and now we are unhappy. People complain about software bloat and dependency churn, and risks entailed. Sure! But then the answer that's offered is to work harder to avoid dependencies, implement stuff yourself instead. Bloat is not an individual work ethic […]

"Vendoring" by Carson Gross https://htmx.org/essays/vendoring/ "You get more of what you make easy, and if you make dependencies easy, you get more of them." "This demonstrates significant cultural problem with dependency managers: They tend to foster a culture of, well, dependency."

"doesn't work", "best practice", phrases frustrating to me flung widely

Recently I found myself on a discord channel with mostly much younger people reciting poetry to each other. And people there keep telling me they like my voice, and that I should do something with it. Which astonished me and is very flattering. The things one can discover about yourself when […]

I go for an optimistic #solarpunk poem: https://hyperstate.org/poems/the-city-is-the-forest-now/ #poetry

I'm still looking for (remote) freelance clients who are interested in hiring a very experienced developer! Interested in using #rustlang, and also mentoring Here's more about me and what I'm looking for: https://blog.startifact.com/posts/new-challenges-2025/ I've written a lot of Rust code […]

I go for an optimistic #solarpunk poem: https://hyperstate.org/poems/the-city-is-the-forest-now/ #poetry

One thing I will say about Rust, is that simply learning it has made me a better programmer. Similar to how a static-typed language teaches its users concepts about types, (which you may take for granted if you learned programming with Java and have never met a python developer,) Rust has taught […]

@jeroenbosman makes the most important point in all of the discourse: "Trying to profit from the onslaught on academia by specifically inviting 'top' researchers is not solidarity." https://akademienl.social/@jeroenbosman/114330243912926967

Bought two copies of that Fred Brooks book so I can read it twice as fast

It's #caturday How do I adore your countenance as I drift off into sleep

Creeping charlie, not deliberately planted, but in glorious bloom, with green alkanet a delightful blue in the foreground. #bloomscrolling

I practice decent information hygiene. I look for sources. When I make a claim I often research it quite a bit. Recognize bias including my own Like being my own Wikipedia editor. This influences my attitude towards LLMs which do none of this. On the one hand I am appalled when some people do […]

I have done autocomplete with LLM and played with vibe coding. I think autocomplete is not very risky if constrained to just a few lines and used responsibly: read the code carefully. I haven't experienced much in the way of bugs myself. Vibe coding supports the creation of low stakes tools […]

I believe that programmers are new age wizards #programming

I've made the Xee XSLT testrunner actually run comformance tests for Xee now. It's incomplete as a testrunner, but it should present plenty of hacking opportunities. 100s or even 1000s of new passing tests are probably within relatively easy reach for contributors […]

Strung Together https://hyperstate.org/poems/strung-together/ A #bloomscrolling #poem #poetry

Good article about how science fiction influenced tech billionaires towards some bad ideas. As a life long reader of sf this was not new to me. I enjoy speculation. I think the future will likely be very weird. Yet I find their views simplistic. I don't even think you need to experience very […]

posting this so i can pin it: what up we're trying to make a federated bittorrent tracker, in the short term as an emergency information preservation vessel to avoid a fascist memoryhole, in the long term as a merger between the lessons of the federated and pirate web: * web […]

@thisweekinrust a project announcement https://blog.startifact.com/posts/xee/

My wife is training to be a therapist, and she spent a lot of time observing my interactions with my Chinese family. We always joke that many southern Chinese people are basically emotionally stunted. Can’t talk about feelings. Instead of talking about feelings, and openly resolving conflict […]

Did the Trump admin use AI to generate that tariffs list? It sounds stupid but then again that makes it more plausible that they did, not less

every core unix command I use

I write poems and sometimes the perspective character is explicitly female, sometimes I think of her that way, and often it's gender neutral. Sometimes the main character in my dreams is a woman, too. Often they're not really me. If that sounds weird for a straight male try reading a novel or […]

Now if companies that depend on XML stuff would want to get together to fund Xee a little that would be nice. https://blog.startifact.com/posts/xee/ #xml

Years ago I was one of the primary creators of the Grok web framework. It's had a Wikipedia page for a long time and I did something I wouldn't do now - I created it. Those were different times. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grok_(web_framework) Recently that Wikipedia page has come up for […]

Quentellsche Wandtafeln selbst im tiefen Andalusien, @lavaeolus Spotted in Baeza, Santisima Trinidad

@jsbarretto seems we take turns whose project gets on the hacker news front page. I wish you not too many grumpy comments!

@jsbarretto an interesting parser use case come up and off the top of my head I have no idea whether you can do it with chumsky: subsetting. Could I have a larger grammar and then say "okay I only want to use this subset of it now"? I'm not talking about a composed grammar but about a grammar […]

> I opened up my eyes in the middle of the night > In the sea of dreams I found a port > I saw the moon amongst the racing clouds > in this centre point of time https://hyperstate.org/poems/midnight-vigil/ #poetry

Yay my Xee post made it to lobste.rs!

Poems take much less time to write than codebases. More developers should try their hand at poetry; especially formal poetry has strong rules that remind me of programming.. But from that crucible of formality emerges expressive and hopefully beautiful - the effect is so different! (free verse […]

Midnight vigil https://hyperstate.org/poems/midnight-vigil/ #poetry

LinkedIn is.. I saw a suggested post with a list of 5 books every software engineer should read with a picture of said books and two are about passing coding interviews. I haven't read any of them and feel vaguely resentful seeing this post. Are these the fnords lots of people see? I think that […]

Should I post my Xee blog post to lobste.rs only to see nobody wants XML even if rewritten to Rust? As a stickler I am also daunted by their self promotion policy. Decisions

@jsbarretto by the way Xee contains a fairly sizable chumsky parser that parses a real world grammar. https://github.com/Paligo/xee/tree/main/xee-xpath-ast/src/parser I have been enjoying chumsky even though at times I am daunted by its magnificence, thank you!

If those AI scraper people all collaborated to create a single shared scraping bot that they then all ingest data from... It sounds like what's happening now is very inefficient. I realize you can't distinguish yourself anymore by scraping more or different than any other party but you can […]

#rustlang is magica. I wrote a codebase that's well over 50k lines on Linux. I let CI build a Windows binary too. Someone downloaded it and it just worked.

Someone downloaded the Windows build of xee from the releases page and it just seems to work! I told this guy he's the first person ever to run Xee on Windows. I never even tested it. Quite a nice bit about Rust! https://github.com/Paligo/xee/releases/tag/xee-v0.1.5 #rustlang #xml

Hey, @flub I know you were talking about the benefits of having standards and fondly of the XML world. Here's what I've been up to the last two years: https://blog.startifact.com/posts/xee/

Hey @divclassbutton maybe Xee is of interest to you? https://blog.startifact.com/posts/xee/