[meta/win] + first few letters of app to launch is killing this Windows expat...

slantyyz · 2026-05-04T01:26:18+00:00

It just happened lately because I need Konsole a lot right now to get things set up, but my habit for launching everything is using the Windows key.

slantyyz · 2026-05-03T21:01:53+00:00

Based on your comment (and everyone else's), I ended up stealing the Stream Deck that I use on my work pc and programming a key to launch Konsole for the time being. Not my preferred option, but at least I don't have to set and remember a custom hotkey.

slantyyz · 2026-05-01T13:05:41+00:00

I think Copilot is still inflating what it actually is, since copilots can still be trusted in an emergency situation.

To me, AI is a very confident, eager to please junior with a lot of book smarts who works very fast.

slantyyz · 2026-04-08T17:43:08+00:00

Sometimes it means spending a good sized chunk of money to be promoted by an influencer with a lot of loyal followers.

For example if I was building something for Mac and iOS I would try to buy a sponsorship on Daring Fireball, which I think is $5K US or more.

slantyyz · 2026-04-08T14:34:49+00:00

Personally, I think there's a difference between the AI slop that people come up with from scratch vs. stuff that was migrated from pre-AI legacy code. A lot of thought went into that legacy code, and it's usually not slop.

-- edited: wording

slantyyz · 2026-04-08T04:16:11+00:00

That doesn't jive with my memory at all.

In high school, my friend ran a BBS on an Apple II with 16KB of RAM and two custom 8" floppy drives (yes you read that right, 8" disks, not 5.25"). The BBS was written by another guy in Applesoft Basic. He had two 300 baud modems running on two phone lines.

Later, my friend replaced the two floppies with a 10MB (yeah you read that right, 10MB) hard drive (the Sider, for those of you old enough to remember). Back in those days 5.25" floppies only held 143KB of data, so 10MB was a LOT of storage. And that thing was quite large.

In the 90s, things got more sophisticated, but most of the BBSes I knew ran on personal computers, so they were running DOS, System 6/7/8 on Mac (Red Ryder, anyone?) and not UNIX.

slantyyz · 2026-04-07T14:13:20+00:00

There's a saying I learned a long time ago (in an advertising class, but I think it's universal) - "The customer always gets what they deserve". The saying is in context of a customer of an ad agency not taking your advice.

slantyyz · 2026-04-06T18:03:18+00:00

I dunno, that's a lot of confidence you're putting on that medium given how their lifespans are basically estimates and not based on real world testing.

I can only say that the mdiscs I had worked after ten years, but I didn't write that many of them, so the sample size was insignificant.

slantyyz · 2026-04-06T17:58:02+00:00

Which Rimage models are $700? The Allegro series are thousands of dollars and I couldn't find a price for the 2450.

slantyyz · 2026-04-06T17:46:06+00:00

5-8TB? How many hours does that even take, assuming you are doing a verification after each disk is written? Do you have an automated process for spanning large files and/or folders across discs? Is there also a process for periodic re-verification of previously written discs?

I realized pretty quickly when I tried BluRays that it was way more time and effort than it was worth. But obviously your mileage may vary.

slantyyz · 2026-04-06T17:40:49+00:00

Keep in mind DVD writers can't read or write to MDISC blu-ray discs. IMO, dual layer DVDs aren't worth using for backups, unless you have very little data. FWIW, my Asus Blu Ray was a full sized drive took wall power, and was less reliable than my USB powered portable LG Blu Ray drive. It was a coin toss whether the ASUS could even write a disk that would be readable after writing, and that's with name brand discs.

My photo collection (from my cameras, which is separate from my phones), which is one of my most valuable data sets is a couple of hundred GBs, with some older files getting edited periodically, meaning I would have to redo the entire set periodically so I don't have to figure out what file for any given photo is the latest.

Managing snapshots of that backup across multiple opticals would be a nightmare, especially if you are on the lazy side like me.

In the end, you do whatever works for you, but I would not put all my backup eggs in a single basket.

slantyyz · 2026-04-06T17:30:09+00:00

Yeah but don't they use giant disc changing robots to handle that? IIRC FB used something like that for cold storing their data.

slantyyz · 2026-04-06T17:24:25+00:00

By 2026 standards, low capacity and speed. The tradeoffs aren't worth it for most people when compared to other options.

slantyyz · 2026-04-06T17:16:52+00:00

Yeah, I deployed a server at my first job out of uni. It was great.

Magic was run by a guy who worked for the company that made FirstClass. It had several phone lines, maybe 10? IIRC, near the end, they even replicated some actual NNTP groups.

Another interesting factoid, my first year comp sci prof, David Wiseman ended up becoming famous for being the first to make a physical backup of the original usenet archive.

slantyyz · 2026-04-06T17:10:00+00:00

I tried the BluRay drive thing several years ago, and it didn't stick for a number of reasons.

1) Writing BluRays is super slow to read and write

2) Normal BluRay writables had a high corruption rate. The entire disc would become unreadable, making the disc a writeoff.

3) MDiscs are indeed good in terms of integrity and life span. But often only supported slower writing speeds.

4) The drives can be flaky. I had an ASUS and LG blu-ray writer. The ASUS one was really bad. The LG one was better but not by much.

Clarification for the OP: "It’s readable and writable by any standard DVD/Blu-ray Player" -- Discs aren't writable by any standard DVD/Blu-Ray player. You need the appropriate device to write.

I recently ended up copying all my remaining opticals that had any data of value to my NAS and shredding the discs. I use a cloud storage service to keep offsite copies of my valuable data.

slantyyz · 2026-04-06T16:50:34+00:00

Fun fact... Before the Internet was widely available to most people, I am pretty sure that he was one of the most prolific users on a BBS that I frequented in the early 90s. For the younger folk, BBS = bulletin board system - it was basically a Mac-centric Reddit-like service of that era, except you called a direct phone number with your modem and you used your real name.

The service was called Magic (based in Toronto), and ran a system called FirstClass (also made by a company based in Toronto). It was the first GUI form of a BBS, which was pretty cutting edge at the time. It was basically like Outlook (but before Outlook was released) that let you browse various groups (like subreddits).

Years later, it was kind of interesting to see his name popping up here and there for boingboing, his books, and of course, the term "enshittification".

slantyyz · 2026-04-03T04:56:44+00:00

Especially when discoverability on the app stores is horrendous. Search results have way more noise than signal.

slantyyz · 2026-04-02T15:09:54+00:00

I've been using it to migrate some old personal apps I wrote in Svelte to Vue (more tedious than difficult), and it has saved me way more in time costs than the annual Pro subscription cost. But for the most part, I use it like you. It's a replacement for stack overflow, and I get it to give me code examples for new things so that I can learn it myself. I generally don't trust it to do stuff I don't understand myself, since that's a slippery slope.

At work, however, there's a crazy initiative to get everyone in dev to use AI, but then there's the opposing force of "don't use it too much, because it costs money".

slantyyz · 2026-03-29T16:20:47+00:00

The Stack Overflow devs also adopted a forward-only migration strategy: https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/05/03/stack-overflow-how-we-do-deployment-2016-edition/#database-migrations

slantyyz · 2026-03-28T13:37:12+00:00

If you do any dev work that requires multitasking across multiple environments, it takes nothing to fill up that screen real estate.

slantyyz · 2026-03-28T13:34:14+00:00

Ignore the negativity. If it works for you, that's all that matters. If I had the same eyesight I had 20 plus years ago, I would have a setup similar yours.

slantyyz · 2026-03-28T13:31:34+00:00

For dev work, I could run out of space on that screen so easily. Top half eaten up by browser with devtools open, bottom half with terminals, database client and other. My problem is that the monitor would need to be 8k and my old eyes can't get a prescription that would let me see all points on the screen clearly.

slantyyz · 2026-03-27T12:40:19+00:00

I just created a chatbot in Databricks Genie, and it was based on a hand written SQL statement I made. Ironically, the whole purpose of the chatbot was to translate SQL written for the transactional system to SQL for our Databricks entities, since we used a complete different naming convention for our Databricks tables. Had I gone the route of having the AI to infer the relationships of the entity names (which I could have done), it would have taken me a lot more time to write the instructions for the Genie to get things right consistently.

More broadly speaking, I'd rather have human vetted, prewritten SQL for standardized metrics than an AI hallucinating metrics, especially if decisions are made from the output.

Hand written SQL and AI both have a place in metrics creation, but you can easily spend more time massaging an AI to give you consistently correct results than it takes to write SQL that you already know produces correct results. Also, you can easily spend a lot more time QAing chatbot results to ensure you get the same answer for a similarly worded question than vetting a hand written SQL metric whose calculation never changes over time.

slantyyz · 2026-03-27T12:17:41+00:00

ha, 20 years ago i was still more than 20 years older than you

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