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masto

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masto
·3 เดือนที่ผ่านมา·discuss
So management can cancel all of last week’s projects when they told us all we had to be using skills because the CEO read about them in the in flight magazine. Routines are the future, baby. DevOps already made a big announcement that they’re centralizing the Routines Hub. If you can’t keep up, we’ll get someone who says they can.
masto
·3 เดือนที่ผ่านมา·discuss
First I went to the Claude web site, because we've all been trained not to click on links promising things, right? Couldn't find anything there so I checked the domain carefully and clicked on the link, which takes me to my settings page with no discernible discount. I am no longer surprised by anything not working, perhaps Claude itself vibe-sent this mass email.
masto
·5 เดือนที่ผ่านมา·discuss
When I was in my 20s I was an insufferable know-it-all who found fault with everything.

I still spot problems and “push back”, but I have the experience now to know how to get people to listen and not just write me off as an annoying prima donna.
masto
·5 เดือนที่ผ่านมา·discuss
“Cloud to butt” was popular in the early cloud days. It went around Google internally, and caused some… interesting issues.
masto
·6 เดือนที่ผ่านมา·discuss
I’ll express my personal preference for VS Code with Cline. I don’t know exactly why, but its workflow feels right even though they’re all almost the same interface. I do like the huge choice of models and payment options. For something I use burstily, it makes sense for me to pay as I go.
masto
·7 เดือนที่ผ่านมา·discuss
I enjoy reading about other people’s approaches to motivation and creativity.

But I very much dislike when they phase it as “you need to” or “this is how it works”. Thinking everyone else’s brain operates the way yours does seems to be a frequent bias among bloggers. And managers.

I encourage those who write about their experiences to keep it in the first person.
masto
·8 เดือนที่ผ่านมา·discuss
I found a tiny bug in a library. A single, trivial, “the docs say this utility function does X, but it actually does Y”. I’m not even allowed to file a bug report. It took me some time to figure out how to even ask for permission, and they referred it to some committee where it’s in limbo.
masto
·9 เดือนที่ผ่านมา·discuss
LED matrix panels are tons of fun! I strung a bunch of them together to make a marquee across my basement soffit: https://youtu.be/W0_3rzvq9Ks?si=aTT_uOZfOYh9NLUi

I have to resist the urge to tile every surface with blinky lights. I think part of the appeal goes back to why I enjoyed writing programs on my C64 to bounce my name around the screen. It’s a limited playground, and limitations inspire creativity.
masto
·9 เดือนที่ผ่านมา·discuss
On rare occasions, I use it for the virtual display; it's actually usable to sit outside and work with a giant display on the deck, or to dial myself onto the beach. But it's not exactly comfortable for extended use, and most of the time I'd rather sit at my nice desktop with multiple monitors etc.

I also have a Quest 3 and if I could only own one device, I'd take the Q3 hands-down. The games are fun, they get you up and moving, and although I'm not going to argue that the quality of the screens is the same or anything, it's more than good enough. I'll happily give up the virtual laptop screen in exchange for the library of VR games on the Quest.

I'm not much for consuming media so that aspect is lost on me. Unfortunately, that seems to be the primary use case Apple has focused on, if you can call the anemic dribble of content they've put out focus.
masto
·10 เดือนที่ผ่านมา·discuss
I've been using Clerk and it seems fine. I'm sure there's some drama, because everything comes with drama, but I just want to get on with building stuff.
masto
·10 เดือนที่ผ่านมา·discuss
Sometimes I spend half an hour writing a prompt and realize that I’ve basically rubber-ducked the problem to the point where I know exactly what I want, so I just write the code myself.

I have been doing my best to give these tools a fair shake, because I want to have an informed opinion (and certainly some fear of being left behind). I find that their utility in a given area is inversely proportional to my skill level. I have rewritten or fixed most of the backend business logic that AI spits out. Even if it’s mostly ok on a first pass, I’ve been doing this gig for decades now and I am pretty good at spotting future technical debt.

On the other hand, I’m consistently impressed by its ability to save me time with UI code. Or maybe it’s not that it saves me time, but it gets me to do more ambitious things. I’d typically just throw stuff on the page with the excuse that I’m not a designer, and hope that eventually I can bring in someone else to make it look better. Now I can tell the robot I want to have drag and drop here and autocomplete there, and a share to flooberflop button, and it’ll do enough of the implementation that even if I have to fix it up, I’m not as intimidated to start.
masto
·10 เดือนที่ผ่านมา·discuss
I don’t know if this counts as experienced, but I’ve spent about a year exploring Next.js, the last 6 months of which transitioning from exploring to building a serious project.

I understand the author’s frustrations. I have had similar ones when it comes to middleware and other parts of Next.js. I’ve also had those kinds of frustrations with every piece of software and framework I’ve ever used. A lot of times they stem from trying to shove a square peg into a round hole, and it only gets better when I finally develop the right mental model for how the thing works.

As a web developer going back to CGI scripts in the 90s, all this server and client side rendering, edge runtimes, etc., is quite foreign. But when I find myself screaming “why won’t it let me do this?”, the answer is often “because it doesn’t make sense to do that”. Auth is one of the places where that happened, and going through the process of “but why can’t I look the user up in my database from middleware” was a big part of wrapping my head around the parts of Next.js that I had been ignoring.

As far as being married to Vercel for hosting, not at all, if you don’t choose to use all their stuff. The sample Docker build they have works just fine to deploy anywhere, in my experience.

Maybe I’m speaking mostly out of ignorance of not having tried dozens of other modern TS web frameworks (I was on a big tech island for a decade and not in touch with what the cool kids were up to), but I rather like Next.js. I may feel differently when I want to start adding native mobile apps and realize I was lulled into omitting a clean API layer, but for now, adding features has been pretty smooth.
masto
·3 ปีที่แล้ว·discuss
Here's a little more detail on the construction if you're interested: https://youtu.be/eojYicG_Kjs?si=6cBHOUdk0n9hVoUh
masto
·3 ปีที่แล้ว·discuss
Rough estimate: I got the LED panels from AliExpress (https://www.aliexpress.us/item/2255799924064579.html), the price fluctuates from around $10-$12 each x 12, so round up to $150 for the lights.

They practically give ESP32s away with an oil change, so you could call it done at that point, but I chose to use a QuinLED Dig-Quad (https://quinled.info/pre-assembled-quinled-dig-quad/) to make it easy to wire up and mount on the wall. That cost me about $60 shipped. And I added a MEAN WELL LRS-100-5 power supply for $20.

Finally for the laser-cut frames, I burned up about $30 of wood, and there's some minimal amount of 3D printer filament as well. Along with the incidental things like having to buy a spool of 3-conductor cable, connectors, etc.

So all together I'd guess it was around $300. A completely no-frills version could be maybe half that.
masto
·3 ปีที่แล้ว·discuss
I built an LED scrolling sign in my basement using the same 8x32 panels as the OP, controlled by the more-than-fast-ish-enough ESP32.

I never got around to making a proper video about the construction and installation, but I do have this demo of one of the applications I wrote for it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSq8dYBHVBQ

I should do a full write-up so I can submit it to HN. Code's on GitHub anyway. https://github.com/masto/LED-Marquee
masto
·3 ปีที่แล้ว·discuss
They are the most common type of addressable WS2812 (AKA NeoPixel) LEDs. Type that into Google, choose a library.
masto
·6 ปีที่แล้ว·discuss
I appreciate the response. I hope my story didn’t give the wrong impression. There are a lot of paths to enlightenment, and who knows what 8-year-old me could have done with an interactive book.

I could only view it through a mobile device earlier, and now that I’ve had a more detailed look, I see how the simulation and experimentation aspect adds another dimension to the theory. I intend to work my way through the whole thing and see how knowing more of the math will influence my future tinkering.
masto
·6 ปีที่แล้ว·discuss
I don’t want to be a jerk with this comment.. this looks like a great resource, and it obviously represents a lot of work by a lot of talented people. But the premise seems to be the same premise that kept me away from a fun and practical hobby for decades.

I got a Radio Shack 50-in-1 electronics kit for Christmas when I was a little kit. I thought it was the coolest thing ever, but when I tried to go further with my interest, all I got was equations and theory. For years I just wanted to understand how a transistor, with only 3 connections, could be like a relay, which had two pairs of connections and made logical sense to me. Keep in mind this was pre-Internet, so resources were somewhat limited. In any case, I eventually gave up on hardware and focused my attention on programming.

It wasn’t until the advent of the Arduino that the spark was rekindled and I found a new on ramp to electronics. Start with a breadboard and cookie-cutter circuits that you don’t really have to understand at first, and control everything with software, because you know software. Gradually phrases like “current-limiting resistor” and “bias voltage” start making sense. Watch people like Dave Jones and Big Clive take things apart on YouTube and reverse engineer them. The circuits get bigger and more complex. The next project needs an op-amp, and to your surprise, you can understand the theory now. The data sheet parameters make sense. You can pick out which 4 of the 5 answers on the electronics Stack Exchange are wrong, and adapt the right one to your needs.

I’m having a lot of fun making things, and to answer the question in the book’s introduction, “have you considered how electron collisions lead to Ohm’s Law‘s linearity”, the answer is a resounding “no”. And if people hadn’t told me I needed to consider that to play with electronics, I might not have missed out on many more years of fun.
masto
·8 ปีที่แล้ว·discuss
There's a sort of running gag at Google that "An Update On Foo" is how the company announces that they're canceling Foo. So my first read of this headline was.. different.