Coding agents crossed a line this year: they’re useful enough that people are going to use them at work, whether the tooling is ready or not. So... here's some tooling!
tailscale.com/blog/apertur...
It's only good for a push start
Wikipedia sections of an article. 1: early life and career as a pirate. 2: archbishop of York.
If you're looking for a sign to switch careers: this is the sign.
In fairness, it's handy having two third gears in case one doesn't work
"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."
― Frank Herbert, Dune
cassidoo.co/post/good-br...
Class act 🙄
A four panel comic by @alexkrokus titled “waking up” Panel 1: a blue person in distress from waking up. They are lying down bound by rope next to a similarly bound but smiling red person. The blue person thinks “zzz-w-what?! where am i?” Panel 2: The scene is pulled out to see a recreation of the common trolley problem meme. The track at the top has a pile of little bags of cash with dollar symbols on them. A man in a suit, top hat and monocle stands next to a pile of similar bags next to the switch. The bottom track has alternating red and blue bound people. The blue person from panel one is first. The red person next to them says: “you’re in the trolley problem!” Panel 3: Shows a closer view of the person at the lever. From off panel the blue person says “I thought I would be the one operating the lever…” Panel 4: The red person, still smiling, says to the sweating panicked blue person “no, that’s someone else”.
Quality @alexkrokus.bsky.social
Makes you wonder what data future LLMs will train on when current LLMs put giant knowledge repositories like Stack Overflow out of business 🤔
The 'acquired by private equity' step is usually enough to seal the fate of any company
The evil priest from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (no longer the worst Indiana Jones movie!) holding the still-beating heart of the sacrifice.
Last Christmas
I gave you my heart
The very next day
Kali ma shakti de
I made a thing: a #tailscale extension for #osquery. Now you can use SQL to query different aspects of your Tailnet 🚀
github.com/noelob/tails...
Driving a steamroller over somebody is the most sincere form of flattery.
Emphasis is on the 'yo', I think the correct pronunciation is closer to she-YO-ge-heh
So just a smidge cheaper than NAT Gateway?
New on the blog: Think for Yourself
"You're about to commit a chunk of LLM-generated code into your product's codebase. Before you do, however, pause to consider and act on these questions."
kevlinhenney.medium.com/think-for-yo...
This is the right answer
What's the best of the bunch?
different terminal emulators use different escape codes terminal emulator 1: if you print out ESC[2J I’ll clear the screen! terminal emulator 2: for me it’s ESC[HESC[J! your system has a database called “terminfo” with escape codes in it how if plays out when you press Ctrl+L to clear the screen: program, with a little heart over it, thinking: ah, she wants fo clear the screen! I’ll look up how to do that in the terminfo database… (on my machine, the database is in /usr/share/terminfo) program: ESC[HESC[J terminal emulator, thinking: ok, clearing the screen! how programs know what terminal you’re using: TERM your terminal emulator sets the TERM environment variable when it starts fun fact: terminal emulators often say they’re “xterm-256color” even if they’re not this can break when SSHing into an old system with a new terminal emulator (in a VERY annoying way) happy little stick fiture: I am using ghostty program, with a little heart over it: NOPE never heard of it some ways to fix TERM install the terminfo file for your terminal emulator on the system use a different terminal emulator just set TERM=xterm-256color, it’ll often sort of work
TERM
wizardzines.com/comics/term/
(from The Secret Rules of the Terminal, out now! wizardzines.com/zines/terminal)
Also, it only helps if Y > 1.0
WTF indeed. I started off with such confidence, and ended up questioning my life choices
Who washes the washmen? 🤔
Yesterday I published Issue 45 of my monthly newsletter, and it's about why Markdown might not be the best way to implement content.
Read it and subscribe to be the first to read next month's issue.
https://newsletter.bphogan.com/archive/issue-45-markdown-is-holding-you-back/
Dune Buggy
your TTY driver has configuration you can see how it’s configured by running: stty -a for example it print out the current window size! Ctrl+S by default, pressing Ctrl+S wi(( freeze your terminal (and Ctrl+Q wi(( unfreeze) I have never wanted this in my life, you can turn it off with stty -ixon (fish turns it off by default) ###fun fact: changing Ctrl+C technically you can use stty to set a different keyboard shortcut for Ctrl+C, (ike “u” stty intr u this is extremely chaotic and I can’t imagine a reason that I would ever do this though programs have to configure the TTY driver to get friendly features developer: I want arrow keys to work in my program! other person: better tell the TTY driver to turn off canonical mode! (more on the next page) the TTY driver’s settings are called “termios settings” for the gnarly details: man termios but if you’re writing a terminal program libraries like readline or ncurses will handle setting up the TTY driver panel 6 smiling stick figure with short curly hair: I’ve only needed to use stty once in the last 20 years and I mostly don’t understand its output but I think it’s a fun view into terminal internals!
stty
wizardzines.com/comics/stty/
(from The Secret Rules of the Terminal, out now! wizardzines.com/zines/termin...)
RESPECTABLE AA STUDIO is hiring 25 different LEAD EXECUTIVE SENIOR C-SUITE DEVELOPERS for EXCITING NEW GAME THAT’S BEEN GETTING LOTS OF BUZZ Requirements: -At least two PhDs in game development -Shipped at least 25 AAA titles as a lead developer -400 years of experience with Unreal Engine -Expert in C#, Python, C++, Ruby, Swift, Rust, HTML, CSS, PHP, Perl, SQL, MATLAB, R, QBASIC, COBOL, FORTRAN, Assembly, punch cards, and operating Babbage’s difference engine -No, we are not fishing for one specific person who coincidentally just left their job at another studio. Why would you think that?
THAT FAMOUS GAME STUDIO is hiring a developer for THAT BELOVED GAME FRANCHISE THAT WAS FORMATIVE TO YOU BECOMING A DEV! Benefits: -$150,000/year plus insurance, dental, a retirement plan, and a puppy -Hang with those famous game devs you saw at that GDC talk -We have a ball pit! Requirements: -A positive attitude 😊 -Passionate about our game! -Willing to learn -Some basic game dev experience a plus but not required -Onsite only on Pitcairn Island
A 14-YEAR-OLD WHO DOWNLOADED UNITY YESTERDAY is hiring a developer for I DECIDED TO TURN MY DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS CAMPAIGN INTO A GAME -so im making this game and i have this rly rly good idea but i never made a game b4 so i need u to do all the engine stuff and the programming and fix the mechanics and do the sound and lighting and shaders and backgrounds, i drew my characters on the back of homework but can u turn them into pixel art for me, i cant pay u but we can do rev share and when this game is a big hit youll make millions of dollars
The three types of game dev job listings
Ruin a book by adding Tom Clancy's to the title
"Tom Clancy's Dune"
![your shell lets you run many programs (“jobs”) in the same terminal tab
programs can either be:
foreground
background
stopped (which is more like “paused”)
& runs a program in the background
for example I like to convert 100 files in parallel like this:
for i in `seq 1 100`
do
convert $i.png $i.jpg &
done
jobs lists backgrounded & stopped jobs
$ jobs
[1] Running python blah.py &
[2] Stopped vim
use the numbers to bring them to the foreground or background (like fg %2), kill them (kill %2), or disown them
when you close a terminal tab all jobs are killed with a SIGHUP signal
you can stop this with disown or by starting the program with nohup: disown %1 (job number goes here) nohup my_program &
a trick to kill programs if Ctrl+C doesn’t work
press Ctrl+Z to stop the program
run kill %1 to kill it (or kill -9 %1 if you’re feeling extra murderous)
a little flowchart
Three boxes, labelled “running in foreground”, “stopped”, and “running in background”
Ctrl+Z goes from “running in foreground” to “stopped” fg goes from “stopped” to “running in foreground” fg goes from “running in background” to “running in foreground” bg goes from “stopped” to “running in background”](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:nzrozayxq764zbgl4qtp5ald/bafkreigxoajfoayzbyucv22q6daqvpvcjlftkkhbeaajib5mbri3cwj5fq)
your shell lets you run many programs (“jobs”) in the same terminal tab programs can either be: foreground background stopped (which is more like “paused”) & runs a program in the background for example I like to convert 100 files in parallel like this: for i in `seq 1 100` do convert $i.png $i.jpg & done jobs lists backgrounded & stopped jobs $ jobs [1] Running python blah.py & [2] Stopped vim use the numbers to bring them to the foreground or background (like fg %2), kill them (kill %2), or disown them when you close a terminal tab all jobs are killed with a SIGHUP signal you can stop this with disown or by starting the program with nohup: disown %1 (job number goes here) nohup my_program & a trick to kill programs if Ctrl+C doesn’t work press Ctrl+Z to stop the program run kill %1 to kill it (or kill -9 %1 if you’re feeling extra murderous) a little flowchart Three boxes, labelled “running in foreground”, “stopped”, and “running in background” Ctrl+Z goes from “running in foreground” to “stopped” fg goes from “stopped” to “running in foreground” fg goes from “running in background” to “running in foreground” bg goes from “stopped” to “running in background”
job control
wizardzines.com/comics/job-c...
(from The Secret Rules of the Terminal, which is out now!)
Ghost writer or AI generated?
It’s interesting to watch the arms race of LLMs ingesting the whole Internet illegally and countermeasures like this HTML zip bomb
ache.one/notes/html_z...
I just wanted to say, I’m probably more proud of this Ted talk than just about anything I’ve ever done so I’m gonna be absolutely useless for the next couple of weeks as I promote the shit out of this because I want you to watch it because it matters in the moment we are in youtu.be/dVG8W-0p6vg
