Nibbles, Bits & Bytes.
An uncurated collection of links & blurbs.
It's like a backlog, but for my attention span.
I should update Plant Smart. Thinking it should get a similar treatment to this site. Maybe even exploring moving completely to Hugo instead of a haphazardly-assembled static Svelte site.
Some small incremental updates for the site today:
- The addition of a new bit type for site updates like this one.
- Proper RSS feeds for both long-form articles and bits. Check the footer!
- A quick sweep of the site map to ensure everything maps out properly. There were a few dead links previously.
- You can now filter bits by type! Have a play with it at the top of this page.
- Some minor grammatical updates here and there for some recent content.
Something to note is that the bits filter is purely JS based and assumes all content will be displayed in a single page. This is fine for now, but there may be 100s or even 1,000s of entries on a long enough timeline. At that point, basic text search and filtering that supports pagination may be necessary. But, not today!
Man, some of these router CVEs are laughably bad. Not saying rolling your own router with OpenWRT is a perfect solution… but compared to this it functionally is.
An interesting study on the concept of “cognitive surrender” or, how we simply offload thinking to an LLM and implicitly trust whatever it spits out the other end.
Tempted to drop the custom fonts altogether. They account for well-over half the transfer on a hard refresh.
I am not a smart man. I completely forgot I was using the “Pro” version of FontAwesome and had the entire library committed to this very public repository without any licensing coverage. I mean, the pro version shouldn’t be shared anyway. You may have noticed the associated Github repository has been temporarily set to private and that all commit history as been wiped. Sucks, but I felt this was much more pragmatic than removing multiple specific files from the tree. I am not an expert git surgeon, so that got a hard pass from me.
I’m currently experimenting with some alternative OPEN SOURCE web icons and updating the third-party licensing notice bundled with the repo to cover icons as well as web fonts.
Luckily, only I noticed this issue and immediately worked to address it.
edit: Good-bye, sweet git history!
I’m keeping these stupid test quotes around. I love them. Fight me.
“Simplicity is a great virtue but it requires hard work to achieve it and education to appreciate it. And to make matters worse: complexity sells better.”
— Edsger Dijkstra
“There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things.”
— Phil Karlton
“Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.”
— Harold Abelson
“Premature optimization is the root of all evil.”
— Donald Knuth
“The best error message is the one that never shows up.”
— Thomas Fuchs
“Talk is cheap. Show me the code.”
— Linus Torvalds
“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry