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Tux Machines
Posted by Roy Schestowitz on Oct 08, 2022
> “We need a strong leader” implies “we need a different leader”.
> What is causing the current leadership (whether vested in a single person explicitly or distributed) to be inadequate?
> Changing or adding one person with authority can be a quick fix, but isn’t guaranteed to work; especially if you don’t have a diagnosis that explains the need for a new leader. Do you really need a superhero to save you?
> What are your best hopes for what a new leader will do? What stops you doing those without them?
> Tie::ShadowHash is a small Perl module that allows one to stack an in-memory modifiable hash on top of a read-only hash obtained from anywhere you can get a hash in Perl (including a tied hash), functioning much like an overlay file system with the same benefits.
> Typing is still a bottleneck. I make a lot of errors. Correcting the errors sometimes breaks my concentration, and then take a while to recover what I was doing. I'm particularly bad around special characters. Some of this is caused by my new laptop having a slightly different keyboard layout. It might be worth spending a few minutes a day working on typing exercises, focused on the keys that are in different places or have different shapes on my new keyboard.
> The previous entry in this series shows how to use the new DIP1000 rules to have slices and pointers refer to the stack, all while being memory safe. But D can refer to the stack in other ways, too, and that’s the topic of this article.
> When you resize, rotate, or in any way transform an image; or more generally when you resample some discrete signal, the software you are using must _interpolate_ between the discrete points to produce a result.
> One major thing that I learned throughout the years is the power of debugging. Irrespective of the programming language I use, debugging is for me key when it comes to understanding the functionality of code (also for code written by someone else). One of the very first steps when digging into a new coding basis is always turning the debugging mode on - it guides you so nicely through the functions that were written (and that show you how they are connected)
> Over new years this past year I made dura. It’s like auto-backup for Git. It tries to stay out of the way until you’re in a panic, trying to figure out how to rescue your repository from a thoughtless git reset --hard. It makes background commits, real Git commits that you don’t normally have to see in the log, by committing to a different branch than the one you have checked out. Overall, it’s been a blast. I’ve learned a lot from the contributors, like how to write well-formed Rust as well as a bit about Nix.
> One recurring quesion has been, “why don’t you just commit more”?
> When I took my first software engineering job at Electronic Arts 20 years ago someone told me “More time is spent maintaining old software than writing new software.” Since my project at the time (“Spore”) was brand new, and I was writing brand new code for it, I found that hard to believe. My experience with my R package choroplethr, however, has proven that saying to be correct.
> A few weeks ago CRAN emailed me saying they detected minor problems in an HTML file in the package, and asked me to fix them. Since I had not touched the package in over two years, and the error seemed minor, I ignored the message. I also ignored their followup message. They then sent me an email saying that if I did not fix the issue they would archive the package. That got my attention.
> So many new learning resources have been created this month! There’s information on tools, deploying models, Quarto presentations and blogs, neat tables and so much more. I love how these show so many different types of things you can do, because with code, so much is possible. That combination of learning what you can do, and the ‘how-tos’ of creation, give us the ability to use data to answer the questions we have. I’m so excited to see everyone continue to explore what’s possible.
> “Strong” is often used as a metaphor for capable, competent, effective leadership.
> Strength is not always the most helpful metaphor for leadership skills.
> Listen to how people describe strong leaders, sometimes there are connotations at odds with effective leadership. Sometimes even hints of toxic masculinity. What does it say about our gender biases that we so often use strength as a metaphor for leadership effectiveness?
> If you stopped pouring petrol onto the fires, maybe you would not need such experienced firefighters.
> [...]
> “We need a strong leader” implies “we need a different leader”.
> What is causing the current leadership (whether vested in a single person explicitly or distributed) to be inadequate?
> Changing or adding one person with authority can be a quick fix, but isn’t guaranteed to work; especially if you don’t have a diagnosis that explains the need for a new leader. Do you really need a superhero to save you?
> What are your best hopes for what a new leader will do? What stops you doing those without them?
> The upcoming clang 16 release features substantial improvements to configuration file support. Notably, it adds support for specifying multiple files and better default locations. This enabled Gentoo to finally replace the default-* flags used on sys-devel/clang, effectively empowering our users with the ability to change defaults without rebuilding whole clang.
> This change has also been partially backported to clang 15.0.2 in Gentoo, and (unless major problems are reported) will be part of the stable clang 15.x release (currently planned for upcoming 15.0.3).
> In this post, I’d like to shortly describe the new configuration file features, how much of them have been backported to 15.x in Gentoo and how defaults are going to be selected from now on.
> I vaguely recalled that Tokodon had had one bug that really annoyed me when I had last tried it a few weeks or months ago, and when using it I noticed that it was still there – unsurprisingly since I never had reported it: When composing a toot, the text would not wrap when reaching the end of the text field, but go on and on unless you would add a manual line break, which then would look bad in the resulting toot unless I would remove them.
> Since I keep hitting any character limit a service has, I, unsurprisingly, was more likely to run into this than others. I was annoyed, but when I first encountered it while briefly trying out Plasma Mobile on the Pocophone F1 on a release that wasn't the latest, I just lazy-searched the project, did not find any issue or merge request on the topic and went "well, surely this is fixed in the latest release, I don't want to annoy people".
> I then later discovered that this wasn't the case when re-evaluating Tokodon after Tootle's archival. So I figured: Ok, time to file an issue - but how do I describe this? I could not find the word, was stuck in my native German, thinking "Was heißt Zeilenumbruch auf Englisch?"
> In the real world? It just doesn't matter. For me. But I was curious, so I hacked up a simple benchmark of calculating 12! (i.e. The factorial of 12).
> The specific timings will vary based on the system which runs the test(s), but there's no threading involved so the relative performance is probably comparable.
> Anyway the benchmark is simple, and I did it "fairly". By that I mean that I didn't try to optimize any particular test-implementation, I just wrote it in a way that felt natural.
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