AltTab brings the power of Windows’s “alt-tab” window switcher to macOS.

Ben Sandofksy went deep on the history of Lambda School, a learn-to-code startup that aimed to disrupt computer science education, and its founder, Austen Allred.

New blog post by Gábor Szárnyas

Command Line Data Processing: Using DuckDB as a Unix Tool

This blog post shows how DuckDB stacks up against classic Unix tools (such as cut, grep, sort and sed) when performing simple data processing steps.

Read more at <https://duckdb.org/2024/06/20/cli-data-processing-using-duckdb-as-a-unix-tool>

[@phire](https://phire.place/@phire) [@mhoye](https://mastodon.social/@mhoye) a friend said once that enterprise architects exist so programmers don't have to talk to business analysts, and BAs exist so that EAs don't have to talk to customers/users

It has forever changed my perception of the development process

If you'd prefer a more wizard-like interface for search-and-replacing in [#Neovim](https://hachyderm.io/tags/Neovim), grug-far might be your cup of tea: <https://github.com/MagicDuck/grug-far.nvim>

<https:tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations>

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood

Useful to save web pages as local markdown files, for search

Also useful to output PDF from pages!

Inspired by [@niclake](https://mastodon.social/@niclake) and [@robb](https://social.lol/@robb) who respectively use Jekyll and Nginx, I wrote a similar blog post for forbidding AI bot scraping, but using Hugo and Caddy

<https:darthvi.com/post/forbidden-for-robots/>

[#blogging](https://fosstodon.org/tags/blogging) [#tutorial](https://fosstodon.org/tags/tutorial) [#hugo](https://fosstodon.org/tags/hugo) [#caddy](https://fosstodon.org/tags/caddy) [#bots](https://fosstodon.org/tags/bots)

[@irvingreid](https://hachyderm.io/@irvingreid) [@gvwilson](https://mastodon.social/@gvwilson) [@mhoye](https://mastodon.social/@mhoye) [@scruss](https://xoxo.zone/@scruss) [@timbray](https://cosocial.ca/@timbray) Gonna crash this thread to plug [@reviewboard](https://mastodon.online/@reviewboard) 's PDF diffing / review support (in the Power Pack extension). If I recall correctly, that capability _is_ being used to review revisions to legal documents, at least in some shops.

<https:www.reviewboard.org/docs/powerpack/latest/features/doc-review/>

We are collecting the sounds of woodlands and forests from all around the world, creating a growing soundmap bringing together aural tones and textures from the world’s woodlands.

The sounds form an open source library, to be used by anyone to listen to and create from. Selected artists will be responding to the sounds that are gathered, creating music, audio, artwork or something else incredible, to be presented at Timber Festival 2021.

Study (N=806 orgs; 1971-2015) finds some DEI practices increase managerial diversity while others decrease it:
Increase: hiring chief diversity officer, mentoring, childcare, flextime, parental leave, empowering training, targeted recruitment, diversity goals increase diversity
Decrease: Perf evals, harassment training, grievance procedures, job tests
Mixed results: Cross-training, employee resource groups, self-managed teams, skills training
<https:hbr.org/2024/06/research-the-most-common-dei-practices-actually-undermine-diversity>

One thing really worth addressing from the post that I don't think author accepted, and I see this a lot with engineers:

> "That did introduce tension for our team because we were supposed to be taking experimental bets for the platform’s future. These bets couldn’t be baked into product without hacks or shortcuts in the typical quarter as was the expectation."
If I can pump one learning into engineers' and PMs' heads it's this: intermediate deliverables are not optional no matter how cutting-edge your team is.
You will never succeed if your pitch to leadership is "give us a budget for the next N years and expect no shippable products until the end of N years". Even if you get approved somehow at the beginning, there's a 99.5% chance your team/project will be killed before you get to N years.
Again, once again for the audience in the back: there is no such thing as a multi-year project without convincing, meaningful intermediate deliverables.
To clarify, that doesn't mean "don't have multi-year roadmaps", it means "your multi-year roadmaps must deliver wins at a consistent cadence".
Understanding this will carry you a lot further in the industry.
As a fairly cutting-edge R&D team part of your job is to figure out what slice of this is shippable (and worth shipping). If you're coming up empty you are not ready to pitch this to execs.

Those were, of course, tree swallows in a barn.

Here's a barn swallow in a tree.

I’m not ignoring my email, I’m actively improving security by not responding to potential phishing communication.

Prettier git diffs in the terminal

Carbon is the easiest way to create and share beautiful images of your source code.

[@marcoarment](https://mastodon.social/@marcoarment) [@jsnell](https://zeppelin.flights/@jsnell) [@gruber](https://mastodon.social/@gruber) [@caseyliss](https://mastodon.social/@caseyliss) [@siracusa](https://mastodon.social/@siracusa) Phil Schiller approved!

I may have made a thing

i'm getting too old for this stuff
(WWDC24 recap song)

A simple, blazingly fast, selfhosted URL shortener with no unnecessary features; written in Rust. - SinTan1729/chhoto-url

[#SilentSunday](https://mstdn.social/tags/SilentSunday) [#birdsOfMastodon](https://mstdn.social/tags/birdsOfMastodon)
Red winged Blackbird harassing a Great Blue Heron June 2024

Built a new (tiny) SwiftBar plugin to replace a broken one for monitoring Wi-Fi signal on the Mac. No binary so you’ll have to build it yourself; may package it better at some point. <https://github.com/nriley/wireless_status>

The article I was looking for a while ago about the feel of cutting - "kireaji", sometimes translated as the "flavor of cutting" - was this, from TW Lim, called "Forming An Edge"

<https:www.scopeofwork.net/forming-an-edge/>

This is, I think, a wonderful paragraph:

Small fix to watchgha: don't truncate lists at 30 items (oops!)
WatchGHA reports on GitHub Action progress in a terminal UI.

<https:pypi.org/project/watchgha/>

Title: Moon at Magome (1930)

Artist: Hasui Kawase

<https:www.japan-guide.com/e/e6076.html> [#ShinHanga](https://mstdn.ca/tags/ShinHanga) [#Art](https://mstdn.ca/tags/Art) [#HasuiKawase](https://mstdn.ca/tags/HasuiKawase) [#Showa](https://mstdn.ca/tags/Showa) [#Spring](https://mstdn.ca/tags/Spring) [#FullMoon](https://mstdn.ca/tags/FullMoon) [#Moon](https://mstdn.ca/tags/Moon) [#Magome](https://mstdn.ca/tags/Magome) [#KisoValley](https://mstdn.ca/tags/KisoValley) [#Nagano](https://mstdn.ca/tags/Nagano) [#Japan](https://mstdn.ca/tags/Japan)

Scoop: I obtained the contract Samsung requires independent shops to sign to buy phone repair parts from them.

It requires:

- "Daily" dumps of customer data
- The "immediate destruction" of any phones a shop comes across that has third-party parts

<https:www.404media.co/samsung-requires-independent-repair-shops-to-share-customer-data-snitch-on-people-who-use-aftermarket-parts-leaked-contract-shows/>

What an absolute unit.

[#birding](https://fediscience.org/tags/birding) [#birdphotography](https://fediscience.org/tags/birdphotography) [#owls](https://fediscience.org/tags/owls)

Slopple.
<https:hachyderm.io/@thomasfuchs/112485627917497636>

Cool new fan site for NetNewsWire themes!

<https:paiji.github.io/NetNewsWire-themes-collection/>

Here's the code for the AI counter app I used in my [#PyConUS](https://fedi.simonwillison.net/tags/PyConUS) keynote today - it uses vosk and pyaudio to listen through the microphone and increment a visible Tkinter counter any time it detects "AI" or "Artificial Intelligence" <https://github.com/simonw/count-ai>

Prompts I used to write it are here: <https://chatgpt.com/share/58f2352d-1f17-495b-94f1-4eb44cd574b9>

"What radicalized you?"

An ongoing pattern in the AI march:

- the hardware efficiency improves
- the software efficiency improves

So I continue to argue that energy consumption as a PRIMARY criticism of AI is going to be unpersuasive, as incentives drive down the energy costs with time, and all critique of the energy costs is just as applicable to conventional cloud computing, which we have already accepted into our social bargain

(and which underpins every single tech salary)

so instead:

<https:redeem-tomorrow.com/the-average-ai-criticism-has-gotten-lazy-and-thats-dangerous>

See <https://pandoc.org/typst-property-output> for more info about the new [#typst](https://fosstodon.org/tags/typst) property support introduced in [#pandoc](https://fosstodon.org/tags/pandoc) 3.2.

[@mhoye](https://mastodon.social/@mhoye) I'm all in on “lightweight alternatives to Elasticsearch / Solr”. Let's see if I starred something useful…
<https:github.com/valeriansaliou/sonic> (Rust)
<https:github.com/zincsearch/zincsearch> (Go)
<https:github.com/askorama/orama> (JS)
<https:github.com/CloudCannon/pagefind> (specifically for static sites)
<https:github.com/kbrsh/wade> (Rust, library like Lucene)

The Dutch names for some of the elements/molecules are charming:
- hydrogen: water-stuff
- carbon-dioxide: carbon-stuff
- oxygen: acid/sour-stuff
- nitrogen: suffocating/choking-stuff

[@blabberlicious](https://toot.community/@blabberlicious) [@baldur](https://toot.cafe/@baldur) Corollary:
Experienced Writers: "Why would you use AI for writing? It's good at code generation tho."

Experienced Devs: "AI for code is garbage. I use it to summarize text, tho."

Eine Google suche kostet im extremen bis zu 0.0003 kWh oder auch 1.08kJ. Eine ChatGPT-4 Anfrage in dem Bereich von 0.001-0.01 kWh(3.6-36 kJ)

Also ist das 3-36 mal mehr um eine Antwort zu bekommen, die mit Glück richtig ist und mit Sicherheit nicht vollständig.

und alle so "This is awesome!"

ich komme da nicht mehr mit. Echt nicht.

shit shit shit shit shit. Dealt with my first set of AI-generated-code plagiarism cases this semester.

Dear students: LLMs are terrible plagiarists and they do not give a damn (or have any capacity to care or avoid doing so) if they get you in deep doodoo by reproducing verbatim code from existing repositories on github or from web pages. And on assignments, it's quite likely to happen.

We didn't identify these cases by using an AI detector: They were identical to a source on the web!

🖥️ New post! Yesterday I imported all my YouTube subscriptions into Feedbin so that I can watch videos via RSS. To do this I needed to turn my 500+ subscriptions into an OPML file. In this post I detail how I did it using a combination of awk, curl, jaq, JavaScript, shell, scraper, and Python.

<https:www.wezm.net/v2/posts/2024/youtube-subscriptions-opml/>

[#YouTube](https://mastodon.decentralised.social/tags/YouTube) [#Invidious](https://mastodon.decentralised.social/tags/Invidious) [#NewPipe](https://mastodon.decentralised.social/tags/NewPipe) [#RSS](https://mastodon.decentralised.social/tags/RSS) [#Python](https://mastodon.decentralised.social/tags/Python)

✍️ New post! I realised after mentioning the title case web page earlier today that I had not written about the other projects on my projects domain, 7bit.org. This post remedies that covering the following:

- Dew Point Forecast ­— 7 day weather forecasts that include the dew point
- RSS Please — Generate RSS feeds from web pages
- Titlecase — Convert text to title case
- MacBinary — a MacBinary decoder

<https:www.wezm.net/v2/posts/2024/7bit-projects/>

[#weather](https://mastodon.decentralised.social/tags/weather) [#VintageMac](https://mastodon.decentralised.social/tags/VintageMac) [#rss](https://mastodon.decentralised.social/tags/rss) [#dewpoint](https://mastodon.decentralised.social/tags/dewpoint)

I just watched Perfect Days (2023). I haven't yet fully understood the
effect it's had on me. But I think it's one of the best films I've ever seen. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_Days>

only way to regain sanity

Spectacular timelapse capturing an entire night from sunset to sunrise over the ALMA Observatory on the Chajnantor Plateau in the Chilean Atacama Desert.

Video Credit: ESO/C. Malin (christophmalin.com)

Timeline cleanse.

[#birdphotography](https://fediscience.org/tags/birdphotography)

When I think about what has happened with camera technology over the past quarter-century, I can't get my head around how it's possible to shoot a chestnut-backed chickadee at twilight at 1/100th second with a handheld 800mm lens.

[#birdwatching](https://fediscience.org/tags/birdwatching) [#birdphotography](https://fediscience.org/tags/birdphotography)

This cutesy feature popover in Slack is easy to dismiss until you discover that “precise customization" is the ability to disable the fricken’ gradients that make the navigation area such an unreadable mess.

Settings > Themes > Custom Theme > Window gradient — and you have to do it for every Slack you're in because of course you do.

Golden hour is for rabbits too.

Bought some Italian butter cookies this morning. Asked for an assortment.

Clerk: Any allergies?

Me (being silly): Just cats.

Clerk nods and made a show of putting back one of the cookies.

School tuck shop (aka canteen, cafeteria) menu from 1978, at the [#Australian](https://mastodon.social/tags/Australian) [#school](https://mastodon.social/tags/school) I attended as a kid. Older Aussies might find this interesting.

“Of course I like to read nontechnical books, although I read very slowly. Here are some that I heartily recommend.”—Don Knuth

😳

<https:www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/retd.html>

Another great tool is skhd (<https://github.com/koekeishiya/skhd>), which is a hotkey daemon for Mac. It's especially great for controlling things like yabai. Here's my keybinds for moving focus to different spaces, and also moving applications between spaces.

I’m never really a fan of covers, but Royel Otis' cover of Linger by The Cranberries is incredible. Feels like going back to the 90s/00s. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGUVB19e13s>

For once this bushtit held still long enough for me to squeeze off a couple of frames.

[#birding](https://fediscience.org/tags/birding) [#birdphotography](https://fediscience.org/tags/birdphotography)

I upgraded the llm-gpt4all plugin to support running Llama 3 8B Instruct (thanks, Nomic AI):

llm install --upgrade llm-gpt4all  
llm -m Meta-Llama-3-8B-Instruct 'Write Python code to print 5 great names for a pet pelican'  

The quantized model is a 4.34GB download and should run on machine with 8GB RAM - works great on my M2 MacBook Pro

<https:github.com/simonw/llm-gpt4all/releases/tag/0.4>