Rubenerd

Today @fraveris shared one of my favourite contemporary artists! Here’s her Country Garden:

Her collection is available for purchase on paper and canvas on McGaw Graphics. The site describes her technique that I find so compelling:

Working in oils and acrylics on gessoed hardboard, Karen uses both brushes and painting knives to build up glazes of transparent color, finishing with layers of opaque color painted loosely so that the vivid first layers show through in places; the end result often reminds the viewer of stained glass.

I’m still in a state of disbelief. Australia’s populist leader, and his conservative coalition government, have been voted out of office. I’m choking up the same way I did when my American friends voted out Trump.

Labor aren’t half as progressive as their proponents postulate, and their record on digital rights is suspect. But they have to be damn sight better than a leader who sees a crying, burning country and says “I don’t hold a hose”, then fucks off to Hawai‘i. It’s been a decade of wasted opportunities, scandals, ethical failures, financial irresponsibility, and international gaffes.

On the left we got the biggest Greens result ever, and my right-of-centre friends delivered us an unprecedented slew of new independents who stood for responsible climate action. Prime minister Anthony Albanese leading a minority government with these new MPs, or tempered by a robust Senate crossbench is about the best I could have hoped for.

UK, you’re up next.

I thought the reason for snacks near checkouts was common knowledge, but I saw this CNN report shared with surprise in a few places:

“Impulse purchasing represents a much, much larger component of consumer behavior than people realize,” said James Burroughs, who studies consumer patterns at the University of Virginia’s McIntire School of Commerce. “The front of the store is prime real estate to put impulse items.”

[S]tores map out nearly every inch of their physical environment to influence shoppers’ decisions. For example, the dairy case is placed way in the back of stores, forcing customers to wander and scoop up plenty of other products before they buy milk. The meat case is often over on the other side of the store to get shoppers to walk around and toss even more items into the cart.

One thing I didn’t know was that people are trying to change this:

Top grocery chains in the United Kingdom have eliminated candy from checkout altogether. In the United States, Berkeley, California, passed a “healthy checkout” law in 2020 regulating which products can be sold near the register. Out: junk food, candy and soda. In: fresh or dried fruits, nuts, yogurt and sugar-free gum.

This is a great idea at addressing a clear market failure. A healthy population is better than an unhealthy one, so making the choice for the latter easier for people can only be a good thing.

Nuts have been great for this personally. A small handful from my desk with a cup of black coffee can keep me full and happy for a long time, and was another great way to wean myself off sugar. Even the last dark chocolate bar I had a bite of tasted sickly sweet before I gave it up for an almond.

I’m relieved to see more people seeing the emperor naked under his new cryptocurrency clothing, but proponents still point to issues with current systems and claim it’s a superior solution. This is a slight of hand.

I rewatched The Problem with NFTs by Folding Ideas again last week, and Dan addresses this point in part one on Bitcoin; emphasis added:

As far as banking is concerned, Bitcoin was never designed to solve the actual problems created by the banking industry, only to be the new medium by which they operated. The principal offering wasn’t revolution, but a changing of the guard. The gripe is not with the outcomes of [the 2008 financial crisis], but the fact you had to be well-connected in order to get in on the grift in 2006.

Cryptocurrency does nothing to address 99% of the problems with the banking industry, because those problems are patterns of behaviour.

He comes back to this point about the purported protections offered by blockchains in part three:

In the pantheon of fraud, man-in-the-middle attacks [blockchains prevent] are rare … the majority of fraud doesn’t come from altering information as it passes between parties, rather from colluding parties entering bad information from the start. Con artists don’t hack the Gibson to transfer your funds to their offshore accounts, they convince you to give them your password.

It’s a combination of garbage in, garbage out, and this classic xkcd about security.

You wouldn’t need to scroll far in my archives to see my views of the global financial system. But the greed, deception, and lies told by people in these systems aren’t addressed by this new generation of tokens representing wasted power. In fact, these fraudsters that bankrupted American families and retirees to gamble on speculative assets in which people live are now heavily into cryptocurrency themselves. Why would this be?

Realising that technical solutions aren’t always the answer to human problems has been the biggest (and frankly most shocking) challenge to my world view since I hit my thirties, and I’m still coping with the fallout.

I empathise with starry-eyed nerds who thinks immutable ledgers and code will solve or route around issues in the global financial system. Cryptography has done wonders to secure modern communications and give people living under repressed regimes a voice. I can feel the heady optimism that such a similar system could be cleanly and meaningfully applied to finance.

But, and this cannot be overstressed, it can’t. Not while behaviour can and does exist for which such a ledger cannot account for…. which turns out to be almost everything. At that point, a tamper-proof ledger is the least of your concerns.

My recent post about vim-plug spawned a couple interesting discussions, including additional features and the need for plugin managers in light of Vim 8’s native plugin support.

Andrii Lytvyn emailed:

I’ve been using vim-plug for years now, but recently it came to my attention that starting from version 8 Vim (and Neovim) has it’s own barebones package managing system. As such, now Vim autoloads any plugins that you put in the ~/.vim/pack/*/start/ folder.

Andrii automates this with a few additional lines in vimrc to detect and install plugins, but otherwise runs Vim completely stock. This appeals to me for situations where I don’t have that many plugins.

Ben Oliver expands on one additional feature of vim-plug I didn’t realise:

The coolest thing about vim-plug (ok perhaps not cool) is that you can create a lockfile of all your plugins in their current state. So you run the install like you did already, then once you are happy everything is working:

:PlugSnapshot foo-bar.lock

Then if an update happens and something breaks, you can roll it back with (from CLI not vim)

vim -S foo-bar.lock

It’s also useful for deploying to multiple systems, instead of having different versions of plugins on different machines.

Tommy emailed me with an embarrassing spelling mistake:

I think you meant to use “allude” instead of “elude” on /about#mascot

This is absolutely correct, and frankly quite silly that I’ve had it there for years without noticing. It reminds me of the adage that computers are where good spell checkers go to dye.

Clara’s and my merchandise from the GamersNexus store just arrived! It included a brand new anti-static modmat work surface, Mini-ITX mouse pad, and this fun new coaster set. It was packed extremely well, and arrived internationally to Australia faster than some of our domestic parcels.

Steve and his team at GamersNexus have done so much for my mental health over the last year. Their thorough and principled PC component reviews, coupled with their entertaining and thoughtful personalities have largely been responsible for getting me back into building computers again. My optimistic, PC-obsessed childhood seemed so distant as an anxious guy in his mid-thirties, but he’s back with a vengeance!

This wasn’t just to support their channel though; the quality of this stuff is as good as you’d expect. The mousepad is also larger than I expected, which turns out works well with my 60% Topre keyboard. Maybe I need to buy another one for the mouse too.

Thank you :).

A question from Mark C. in email this morning, among all the rude explanations about what .gitignore files are:

What percentage of time do you spend on your computers? Is it Linux mostly and some Mac? What makes you choose one over the other? Love your blog!

Thank you! I needed that :).

It’s interesting how computers and our perceptions have changed over time. I mostly used Mac laptops and Windows desktops growing up, because the Mac was the fun tool with good Wi-Fi, and Windows was for the serious desktop machine. Thesedays the Mac is my work machine, and the fun desktop at home runs FreeBSD and Linux.

I only arrived back on the Linux desktop recently in the context of games, thanks to all the work Valve and Wine have put into Windows compatibility (though I’ve since switched back to Fedora Workstation). Otherwise it’s FreeBSD and NetBSD, the former because the tooling is awesome and I prefer OpenZFS, and the latter because I still harbour a soft spot for its clean design and community.

For the sake of completeness, my vintage machines run a combination of old, pointless OSs like DOS, Windows for Workgroups, and Commodore Basic. My aim is to eventually have my childhood Pentium 1 also booting BeOS and OS/2, but they’ve proven more challenging than I expected with my IDE to CF adaptors, and even my new SCSI to SD.

I’m not sure what exact ratios each OS would have, but I’ll bet if I added all those up as percentages, I’d get 100 :).

How do you mentally reset, and a microbreak doesn’t cut it? Say you’re looking at a terminal prompt, or a blank email, or an empty text file, and your brain is mush. Or maybe you’re an introvert who’s just finished a long client meeting.

When I worked in an office five days a week, I got into an afternoon habit of stretching my legs and getting a coffee. This had the cumulative negative side effect of taxing my weekly budget more than I expected, not to mention the added time taken to wash my reusable takeaway cups. The humanity! But I always came back to my desk feeling pumped and refreshed, and I’ll bet it wasn’t just the caffeine.

Working from home (WFH) provides even more flexibility. I love taking brief showers after long calls, or after a mammoth technical writing session. It’s the same reason I buck the Southeast Asian trend and shower first thing in the morning as well; it forces my brain to transition from sleep state to (something closer resembling) one of awareness. When time doesn’t permit, even splashing cold water on my face makes a big difference, then walking to the kitchen and making a hot cup of tea.

The world is slowly moving back to working in offices again, albeit hopefully with more flexibility. I enjoy spending time with my colleagues, but I’ll also miss my sneaky showers.

I initialised a new Git repository, and added a .gitignore file instructing git to ignore .gitignore:

git init .
echo ".gitignore" > .gitignore
git status

And the result:

On branch trunk
No commits yet
nothing to commit (create/copy files and use "git add" to track)

Therefore, we can see Git ignores .gitignore because its in .gitignore, which means it didn’t ignore .gitignore for instructions.

Is any of this informative, surprising, or useful? … Absolutely.

Update: Some Hacker News and Reddit readers have missed the silly tone or read this literally. This isn’t surprising! But I’ll endeavour to be a bit more overt with my nonsense in the future. Maybe I should have linked to yesterday’s Frog and Peach first.