Definitely give Ruthless a go, I love it… reminds me of early game ARPG’s on higher difficulties. Positioning really matters, you have to adapt based on what you get. It seems to have been the proving ground for PoE2’s new tempo.

I was going to do an origin character as a solo play-through and a custom character for a group play-through with my mates, but now I might do it the other way around… which means hours in the character creator! Ha.

Often the question marked as a duplicate isn’t a duplicate, just the person marking it as such didn’t spend the time to properly understand the question and realise how it differs. I also see lots of answers to questions mis-understanding the question or trying to force the person asking down their own particular preference, and get tons of votes whilst doing it.

Don’t get me wrong, some questions are definitely useful - and some go above-and-beyond - but on average the quality isn’t great these days and hasn’t been for a while.

Google’s first quarter 2023 report shows they made massive profits off vast revenue due to advertising.

It is about control though. The thing that caught my eye is that they’re saying that only “approved” browsers will be able to access these WEI sites. So what does that mean for crawlers/scrapers? That the big tech companies on the approval board will be able to lock potential competitors out of accessing the web - new browsers, search engines, etc. but much more importantly… Machine Learning.

Google’s biggest fear right now is that ML systems will completely eliminate most people’s reason to use Google’s search, and therefore their main source of revenue will plummet. And they’re right to be scared, it’s already starting to happen and it’s showing us very quickly just how bad Google’s search results are.

So this seems to me like an attempt to control things from that side. It’s essentially the “big boys” trying to consolidate and firm-up their hold in the industry and not let newcomers rival them, as with ML the barrier to entry has never been lower.

If I’m okay with the software (not just trying it out) am I missing out by not using dockers?

No, I think in your use case you’re good. A lot of the key features of containers, such as immutability, reproduceability, scaling, portability, etc. don’t really apply to your use case.

If you reach a point where you find you want a stand-alone linux server, or an auto-reconfiguring reverse proxy to map domains to your services, or something like that - then it starts to have some additional benefit and I’d recommend it.

In fact, using native builds of this software on Windows is probably much more performant.

Containers can be based on operating systems that are different to your computer.

Containers utilise the host’s kernel - which is why there needs to be some hoops to run Linux container on Windows (VM/WSL).

That’s one of the most key differences between VMs and containers. VMs virtualise all the hardware, so you can have a totally different guest and host operating systems; whereas because a container is using the host kernel, it must use the same kind of operating system and accesses the host’s hardware through the kernel.

The big advantage of that approach, over VMs, is that containers are much more lightweight and performant because they don’t have a virtual kernel/hardware/etc. I find its best to think of them as a process wrapper, kind of like chroot for a specific application - you’re just giving the application you’re running a box to run in - but the host OS is still doing the heavy lifting.

As always, it depends! I’m a big fan of “the right tool for the job” and I work in many languages/platforms as the need arises.

But for my “default” where I’m building up the largest codebase, I’ve gone for the following:

• TypeScript
  • Strongly-typed (ish) which makes for a nice developer experience
  • Makes refactoring much easier/less error-prone.
  • Runs on back-end (node) and front-end, so only one language, tooling, codebase, etc. for both.
• SvelteKit
  • Svelte as a front-end reactive framework is so nice and intuative to use, definite the best there is around atm.
  • It’s hybrid SSR/CSR is amazing, so nice to use.
  • As the back-end it’s “OK”, needs a lot more work IMO, but I do like it for a lot of things - and can not use it where necessary.
• Socket.IO
  • For any real-time/stream based communication I use this over plain web sockets as it adds so much and is so easy to use.
• PostgreSQL
  • Really solid database that I love more and more the more I use it (and I’ve used it a lot, for a very long time now!)
• Docker
  • Easy to use container management system.
  • Everything is reproducible, which is great for development/testing/bug-fixing/and disasters.
  • Single method to manage all services on all servers, regardless of how they’re implemented.
• Traefik
  • Reverse proxy that can be set to auto-configure based on configuration data in my docker compose files.
  • Automatically configuring takes a pain point out of deploying (and allows me to fully automate deployment).
  • Really fast, nice dashboard, lots of useful middleware.
• Ubuntu
  • LTS releases keep things reliable.
  • Commercial support available if required.
  • Enough name recognition that when asked by clients, this reassures them.

I was using file merging, but one issue I found was that arrays don’t get merged - and since switching to use Traefik (which is great) there are a lot of arrays in the config! And I’ve since started using labels for my own tooling too.

I was recently helping someone working on a mini-project to do a bit of parsing of docker compose files, when I discovered that the docker compose spec is published as JSON Schema here.

I converted that into TypeScript types using JSON Schema to TypeScript. So I can create docker compose config in code and then just export it as yaml - I have a build/deploy script that does this at the end.

But now the great thing is that I can export/import that config, share it between projects, extend configs, mix-in, and so on. I’ve just started doing it and it’s been really nice so far, when I get a chance and it’s stabilised a bit I’m going to tidy it up and share it. But there’s not much I’ve added beyond the above at the moment (just some bits to mix-in arrays, which was what set me off on this whole thing!)

I just have a static page that I randomly change - you can see mine here. In this case I was testing the idea of having text within an SVG for better scaling from mobile to desktop, and also I’m loving orange and purple at the moment for some reason! Oh, and I was testing automated deployments from CI/CD, so I always use my own base domain with those first tests!

With regards to education, one of the things I’ve come to understand goes entirely counter to the way I was taught at University - for me, programming is a creative activity. It’s an iterative process, and the less constraints I have on how I achieve something, not what I achieve, the better I enjoy it, the more productive I am, and the better by many measures the end solution will be.

I think that is a key part of what’s missing from CS education, to understand that and lean into it to both increase engagement but also to get people thinking outside the box for solutions to their problems. Students seem to be taught so much, but very little about “Here’s a high-level problem, provide a solution” which is the “core loop” of software development (outside of being a code monkey implementing other people’s designs). You go over requirements and specifications, but you don’t actually DO it… you don’t speak to people, ask the questions, realise they’d don’t know much about software, then later go “Oh shit, I made this assumption and made the wrong thing!”

One of the things that I used to like more than anything was achieving things even though there were constraints. For example, back in the 90’s even before even AJAX was a thing, I created a site for a betting company that was a SPA and pulled in data and live betting odds. I did this by having a message queue in JavaScript, a hidden frame from which to send messages from the queue to the server using a form, and then the server returned JavaScript code which executed and put the data where needed and updated the page. I absolutely loved that project, and most people on the team just couldn’t believe it was even possible.

But I didn’t solve it through engineering, I solved it through playing - trying things, seeing what would work/what didn’t, adapting the idea, etc. until I found something that worked - and it was based on some of the things I’d been messing about with in my own time (somewhat bizarrely, creating a sort of online aquarium of Dr. Seuss fish where each one was a person viewing the site!)

I think if we can inject more of the creativity, tinkering, iterative, playful side into our education it’ll make a huge difference.

I left University in the late 90’s and got my first job based on the things I’d been messing about with in my spare time with the University’s facilities/at home (Unix, Internet protocols, client/server arch, distributed computing, etc.) rather than anything I’d been taught. I learnt more in my first 3 months in work than 3 years of education.

Then the dot-com boom hit, and the number of applicants for any position surged - everyone was going into software development for the money. The whole team became involved in selecting candidates and being part of the interviewing process - it was a nightmare trying to give every person a fair chance. We had some good hires and some bad hires, but the bad hires became such a problem because we had to go through the recruitment mill again.

But we realised that the number one factor for whether they’d be a good hire or not was not education, but their own personal projects. That’s what mattered. Doing this for fun was the key indicator of being good, and became the ONLY thing we looked for on CVs in the first pass. Doesn’t matter if you have a 1st from Cambridge, if you don’t demonstrate you have a passion for the subject, you don’t get an interview. It was a huge success, and we built an amazing team and saved ourselves a ton of time during recruitment.

Those people still exist though, I see it all the time! But I think now that the “industry” has grown so much that in any given field there are less people (relatively) being attracted to it. For example, I can see that while back in the 80’s I was drawn to the personal computer, then the 90’s the internet - those things are staples of everyday life now. But I can see more modern young people being attracted to things like AI, drones, quantum computing, 3D printing, and so on as well.

This is a truly excellent pair of articles, brilliantly written.

Explains the problem, show the solution iterating step by step so we start to build an intuition about it, and goes as far as most people actually need for their applications.

Are there any good alternatives?

We’ve started using Jitsi for video/screen-sharing and that’s going well so far - but it’s based very much around the “corporate meeting” concept, rather than “playing D&D with mates” or “online gaming with people”.

Mumble is decent enough for voice comms, but of course lacks video, which for my friend group is a deal-breaker. While the audio quality is noticably better most of the time, its noise suppression is not as good as Discord. It does have text chat, but lacks the utility of Discord’s chat - which we use in D&D for sharing information, images, note-taking, etc.

Things do game tracking/voice like Steam, Xbox Live, PSN, etc. but then each only supports their own platforms and services - whereas Discord is common to all.

I think what DIscord does well is bring together a few really established, tried and tested technologies, under one roof and integrates them seamlessly. There is definitely value in that, and I would be really interested in an open source/self-hosted equivalent.

My main concerns with Discord are:

1. They inevitably ramp up income earning opportunities and therefore eventually compromise the system.
2. It can’t be catalogued/searched easily.
3. It seems like a near-perfect platform for harvesting data for ML (and the platform has some traction with the ML community already).

There’s more! Well, it’s more a bash thing than a cd thing… in bash the variable $_ refers to the last argument to the previous command. So you can do the following:

> mkdir -p my/nested/dir
> cd $_
> pwd
/home/user/my/nested/dir

It’s handy for a whole host of things, like piping/touching then opening a file, chown then chmod, etc.

Which follows the similar functionality used by the cd - command to switch to the previous directory you were in. Very handy!

“Out of the frying pan, into the fire”

From a personal perspective, I absolutely agree - I only check my email when I’m specifically expecting something, which is rarely. But at work emails are still incredibly important.

Are there any protocols/services designed specifically for one time codes? Receipts? I think something that’s dedicated to those kinds of tasks would be great from an ease-of-use perspective - no more messing about waiting for delivery, searching through hordes of emails, checking spam folder, etc.

Another problem we have is the rise of oauth - the core idea is great, but the reality is that it ties a lot of people to these Big Tech services.

I’m new to it too, I’ve known about its existence but have been thinking about adding support for it to a project I’m starting soon - really to learn more about it (I tend to learn best by doing!)

It’s goal is for each of us to have personal ownership of all our data online, and full control over who can access what. That’s certainly something I can get behind! You do this by creating a “pod”, which is essentially a database of all your data (I think organised into groups, e.g. each organisation can have their own group of data), which you can self-host if you like, along with the ability to control access.

It’s current impact I would say is near zero. But TBL is a person with a reasonable amount of pull, and he’s setup his own company providing commercial services (presumably, consulting). My guess is they’re dealing with governments and mega-corps - there seems to be very little effort pushing it to “the masses” (i.e. application developers).

The theory sounds interesting but the practicalities of it seem to offer a lot of challenges, so I think the best way to get a real sense of whether it has legs or not is to build something!

He’s pushing for a decentralised web, he’s specifically focussed on personally owned data through his Solid project. But it feels like maybe this month or so could be a tipping-point, so it would be great to get his input and/or for him to see how we all work away at it!