Many, many years ago Google Search conquered — there’s no other word for it — the Internet. None could stand before it, not Yahoo!, not AltaVista, Not Ask Jeeves. It was brilliant: a single text box, in which one could type anything, hit Return and get excellent-quality results. It even grew smart enough to know individual users.
No more. Today, I had a problem with sp-kill-hybrid-sexp (a Emacs command in teh smartparens package to delete the remainder of a line, respecting S-expression delimiters) hanging in SLY, so I searched for sp-kill-hybrid-sexp sly slow.
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SSH is a reasonably awesome tool: it enables encrypted, authenticated access to hosts across a network, whether across the LAN, across a WAN or across the Internet. But that authentication has a weak point: it defaults to Trust on First Use (TOFU); i.e., the first time one connects to a host, one is prompted about whether one wishes to trust that host or not. Most people just blindly trust the prompted key: after all, how likely is it that one’s very first connexion would be attacked?
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I found out early this morning that ZaReason, a Linux hardware vendor, has closed its doors for the last time.
For many years I hand-built my own Linux desktops. It is remarkably easy to do, and with a Micro Center a short drive or bike ride away from my home it was really appealing: any time I wanted to improve the system, or any time something failed, I just had to make quick run to the store and my problems were solved.
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This morning I thought ‘hey, I wonder how difficult it is to write a quine in Go.’ Spoiler alert: pretty easy.
What’s a quine? It is self-replicating program, i.e. a program whose output is itself. I knew what they were, but I had never actually sat down and tried to write one (I know, I know … it’s an elementary exercise, I just never got around to doing it before).
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Ben Kuhn is right: wireless is a trap. It is seductive, to be sure. And certainly all other things being equal it would normally be preferable to have wireless devices (although I like how wires help keep headphones fixed in place) — but that’s the trouble: all other things aren’t equal, and quality, latency, reliability, privacy & efficiency all suffer with wireless.
I know that in the past my younger colleagues have been really puzzled by my preference for wired over wireless devices.
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A really insightful point: it’s not so much what programming languages make possible, so much as what they make probable.
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Aral Balkan notes that Apple just killed Progressive Web Apps and explains why that’s such a bad thing. This sort of thing is why — despite Google’s often-problematic behaviour — I choose to stick with Android: at the end of the day my Android phone respects me and my decisions (well, most of the time anyway). Apple fundamentally doesn’t respect its users: it seeks to provide them with what Apple thinks is a great experience, whether they want something else or not.
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The Journal of Design & Science had an interesting article about How to become a centaur, i.e. to augment one’s intelligence with a computer — Intelligence Augmentation rather than Artificial Intelligence. One might quibble with some of the details (e.g. I understand that pure-machine players are now better than man-machine teams), but it’s still an interesting idea.
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I’m afraid to say that I had to quit the Advent of Code even earlier in 2019 than in 2018. Just too many things going on at work. It’s a pity, because it was a really good year, with some really intriguing puzzles which were right up my alley. I really enjoyed the intcode stuff in particular. There’s always next year!
Or maybe I will get the free time to work on some of the problems from last year during this year …
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Fun little tree-walking puzzle. Nothing terribly fancy here. I could have been a bit more clever with the second part but … it gets the job done. And sometimes that’s the most important thing.
Happy Feast of St. Nicholas!
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Now this is the sort of problem I love! I don’t know why, but I really enjoy writing little state machines.
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I misread this one over and over and over — little-known fact: ‘increase’ and ‘decrease’ mean different things. Ended up stealing from https://chrispenner.ca/posts/advent-of-optics-04 . Oh well, there’s always tomorrow.
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