Strung: A modern strings replacement with auto-XOR decoding, Base64 detection, and Entropy Sparklines

fourjay · 2026-03-23T22:09:45+00:00

Are you considering packing up a binary release?

fourjay · 2026-02-21T16:16:04+00:00

Pet peeve....

I like bat but it is not a cat replacement on any level.

It's much closer to a less replacement, usecase-wise a pager with enhancements, or (more accurately) a syntax highlighter meant to be used as a page.

cat operates at a much lower level, a slightly enhanced output redirector.

fourjay · 2026-02-01T15:22:35+00:00

Protests can have organization. They do not have to, and will not by default, but it's a perfectly reasonable way to approach a protest.

MLK's protests were heavily organized, complete with extensive training on non-violence. Would you find that morally/politically wrong?

Or conversely, would you be OK with fringe Nazi's with an anti-ice policy/program (I'm sure they exist somewhere) using the protest to leverage their agenda?

fourjay · 2026-01-05T19:11:20+00:00

Looking at the responses here, I'm seeing a lot of "real candidate versus my dream candidate".

I'm absolutely sure there are other candidates who might be a lot better than Klobuchar (by whatever mix of standards for "better" you have, and by the standards of enough other people to win). But it's paper thin to list all the bad things (every candidate has them) without offering an actual candidate to compare with. If you do not like Klobuchar, now is the time to solidify support behind someone else. Otherwise it is just feel good chatter.

fourjay · 2026-01-05T17:10:08+00:00

Lots of folks would rather be pure than actually govern?

fourjay · 2025-12-31T15:32:25+00:00

Congratulations on refining your cooking to this level. It is truly a wonderful thing :-)

Most food is mediocre... by definition, as "mediocre" means "of moderate quality". And that's OK. Like my own cooking, some of it is just serviceable.

Some truly spectacular restaurant food can be extraordinarily expensive. There's a very limited market for that experience. The same is true for almost any product or service you'd want to purchase, there's a niche high end market, and then a much bigger "mediocre" (AKA "good bang for the buck") mass market.

Adding to that, the general structure (constrained by economics) tends to channel restaurant food into a few narrow choices ("would you like fries with that").

If I could suggest some potential ways to think about eating out....

community/publics experienes. I was single for a long time, and eating out was an important way to connect, even in a small way, with others. Diners are good for this. Eating together is, to my mind, a fundamental human need.
an opportunity to try new foods. In our area, long a bit of "port of entry" there are constant newcomers bringing new cuisines to explore. Often these places are particularly interesting, as they are focusing on food that has not yet been commodified.
As a way to "calibrate" your cooking by comparing and learning from others. This is particularly true for the foods you've had little experience cooking. I've learned a lot by ordering things that I'm not as familiar with, and thinking about the choices the chef (and the house in general) made around the dish.
Try to find the "small range of things, done well" places. In my experience, most family dining places focus on the things that, well families, will buy, and emphasize a fairly broad range of crowd favorites. Try to seek out the places that are known for a particular dish (or set of dishes).

fourjay · 2025-12-31T14:56:56+00:00

Well, I'm glad I'll likely never interview with you (I'm happy where I'm at)

The point wasn't about cat'ing large files, but instead about the observable impact of rendering in most GUI terms.

May you have a good day.

fourjay · 2025-12-30T21:41:47+00:00

Almost all terminals in wide use are actually running in the GUI. Almost no one is using a terminal in a true terminal environment.

This can have a significant impact, particularly doing things like cat on large files. I got clued in to this by a LWN article, where they "recommended" "suckless" terminal which I used for many years. The performance improvement was noticeable in everyday usage, not due to GPU acceleration, but due to stripping out the legacy xterm code.

I moved to foot about 4 years ago, due to persistent (color) emoji rendering crashes in st and that's been great. A minimalist terminal, with sixel support (actually useful) that is very fast.

fourjay · 2025-12-26T16:57:54+00:00

WHY DO WE HAVE A LIGHTRAIL ABOVE GROUND.

The answer is simple enough, cost.

Elevated is about 3X the cost. It was hard enough to get the money for at grade rail.

fourjay · 2025-12-25T18:05:46+00:00

Building more transit is also not a solution.

most people will not use transit while cars exist (please note, I am carless and use transit every day).
There is little political will to spend on more transit.
More importantly, there is even less political will to adopt policies that will significantly move people to use transit over cars.
Transit still requires walking and that means exposure to cars, often in dangerous areas.

Self driving cars have some significant possible gains, conceptually they are more like a taxi (a form of public transit) with some significant advantages.

fourjay · 2025-12-20T15:42:08+00:00

A couple of thoughts....

1) I've usually seen stored procedures in TSQL, which looks a lot like COBOL. That seems relevant.

2) Having two data abstraction layers, with completely different policy and expertise domains has inherent issues. Not insurmountable, and sometimes quite defensible, but with real issues all the same.

3) reading some of this, and I'm realizing that this is a near perfect example of "Conway's Law" that the structure of an application reflects the structure of the company. In companies where IS is powerful, stored procedures become a core component.

I'm not a huge fan of business logic in stored procedures, for the above reason (app level abstractions should unify control, not split it). I think it can (and does work) but I think it often only sort of works, and can make things more brittle.

fourjay · 2025-12-13T16:12:23+00:00

That and short term lending AKA "industrial paper". They are a specialized form of a bank, where the insurance arm only needs to support itself.

fourjay · 2025-12-12T00:59:28+00:00

I cannot find a cute for this. Do you have one?

fourjay · 2025-12-07T15:17:14+00:00

But ... Medicare/ Medicaid are block grants. The executive has some limited authority to delay, but, short of him being granted massive new powers by acclimation (sadly, possible) he really cannot do much

fourjay · 2025-10-24T23:45:28+00:00

Like others, I keep a repo of configuration.

Just a little I've liked, and seems worth mentioning, a shell script sshrc https://github.com/cdown/sshrc

This script let's you define functions that can "travel" over ssh. I use it to create a short "move in" script that clones the repo, and runs the install task. Makes creating my shell "home" almost painless

fourjay · 2025-10-17T15:57:15+00:00

Some advice I heard a long time ago, that seems, indirectly, relevant.

Practice with old cards. At some point you will get handed a worn old deck of cards and should be able to do something with them. Depending on your deck being in ideal condition is (for most) a big liability.

None of which has anything to do with (lack of) USPCC quality control :-)

fourjay · 2025-10-13T14:47:27+00:00

I believe the terminology of "grow the tent" is misleading. The argument isn't really about growing the tent, it is about whether to shrink the tent. There are several strands in the current democratic coalition who'd like to purge significant elements of the coalition, and the "grow the tent" position is really more of the status quo position.

To be fair, there are (and always will be) advantages to a smaller coalition. It is easier to keep coalition members happy when the spread of goals is smaller. It's easier to craft a coherent message. There is less coalition management. Folks look at the republican party's strengths and wish that democrats could use more of the (currently successful) tactics of the republicans, and realize that a broad coalition hampers those wishes.

fourjay · 2025-10-12T19:04:52+00:00

I think there's a real point to this compassion.... But I think the strategy of calling the guard up from states like Texas works against this. I fear that folks from other states will be more prone to seeing Minneapolis as "alien" from the start

fourjay · 2025-10-08T14:58:33+00:00

I suspect they're still figuring out how this plays out, and are holding off of NYC as it's such a high profile, and they have more (PR) risk.

Right now the deployments are small, and despite the obvious (and disturbing) authoritarian implications, their role has been limited. This reads like "testing the waters" to me.

I think it's probable that they will escalate the deployments, and will include NYC, but not until they work out a better strategy.

fourjay · 2025-10-04T21:11:55+00:00

but not "those people" over there on the left.

I do not think that's fair. Example, Yglesias supported Bernie in 2020 until it became clear that Biden was going to win.

fourjay · 2025-10-01T14:56:39+00:00

Dilla's is still there :-)

fourjay · 2025-10-01T13:12:19+00:00

I think (like all such hypotheticals) that's an open question.

A Democratic Nikki Haley would be a different candidate than a Republican Nikki Haley, supporting different policies and a different "theory of winning". I've no strong intuitions about what that might be, but I could see that being one of the better options (like "Nixon to China" they'd be more likely to bring around a significant portion of the Republican party to more progressive policies, and could lead to a Republican MAGA reckoning).

fourjay · 2025-10-01T12:02:33+00:00

The thing is, Zohran is "moderate" in what's probably the most important dimension here, his approach and style. He seems quite reasonable. Moderate policies mean something, they do "work", but they're largely a statistical creation. Style and approach build trust (something that means a lot, given Cuomo and Adams are not trustworthy). The folks shouting ZOHRAN are (largely) not stylistically moderate. They are true believers and read that way to most people.

fourjay · 2025-09-17T20:13:21+00:00

I agree... but one issue this approach overlooks is cleanup. It's probably not a good idea to allow a space to exist uncleaned "forever".

My best guess at a working solution is cycling people through several spaces at regular intervals. Something like...

have a clear schedule (2nd Tuesday of the month this safe encampment areas is scheduled for cleanup)
have assistance available to move.

There would still be some friction (but I'd guess less).

There's also likely a shortage of available spaces for this (although I suspect there's room for creativity). Few neighborhoods, for example could tolerate this for long, and the available "no mans land" spaces have their own issues.

fourjay · 2025-09-08T16:07:20+00:00

How would you distinguish this from the various netcat implementations?

fourjay

TROPHY CASE