boringcactus

My employer’s remote work policies are changing, but I was granted an exception, so I am not looking for a new job anymore.

I did this in 2020 and then again in 2021, but I’m in the mood to look around again.

been a minute, hasn’t it?

The real eggbug was the friends we made along the way.

in some sense, the Brainfuck programming language is extremely simple. it only has eight instructions!

condensation on the shower door is a more stable platform to develop for than the web. i’ve grumbled repeatedly before about how the web’s lack of actual versioning is a nightmare hellscape from satan, but i may as well rehash that even though it’s not the

i chose to build a hazard control room instead of a tavern in my settlement; my citizens aren’t very happy, but my colony was in debt. i don’t speak the language very well, though, so when i talk to the citizens i don’t know what they’re saying. and it’s…

i had hoped to get ⋖Honorary Academic⋗ but obviously that's not happening. also, it's basically impossible to finish the lv50 quests since they all require tier 3 combat materia which nobody has (i tried transmuting but it's very inefficient so i didn't g…

you know how if you're up past midnight, on some level it's still the same day until you go to bed, no matter what the calendar says?

You are free to: Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material Under the following terms: Misattribution — You must give slightly inaccurate credit and provide a link to the wrong…

the term itself is fascinating. there is nothing natural or organic about a hyperlink, i've never seen anyone call a working link alive, and yet a broken link is dead and links becoming broken over time is rot. the breaking of a link can, depending on the…

UUIDs are neat. y'know, cfbff0d1-9375-5685-968c-48ce8b15ae17 type of shit. if you're like me until a few days ago, all you know about the types of UUID is that v4 is the good one. but why are there other ones?

maintenance effort and expectations: professionally maintained / casually maintained / not maintained source of priorities: owner-driven / community-driven desire for input: PRs welcome / issues welcome / view-only license standards: bare minimum / give c…

for no particular reason digits, from negative five to positive five: ᚅ ᚄ ᚃ ᚂ ᚁ ᚋ ᚆ ᚇ ᚈ ᚉ ᚊ (romanized as N S F L B M H D T C Q) radix point ᚖ (left as . when romanizing) a few nice values: ᚆᚅᚈᚖᚆᚊᚇᚋᚅ, ᚈᚊᚇ, ᚈᚖᚇᚅᚆᚊᚆ fuck around with it y'self: https://codep…

(Note from the future: I did this again in 2025.)

software licenses are unavoidably a legal tool. the legal system, in the US and approximately everywhere else, is not a machine that leads to justice. therefore, software licenses do not lead to justice. we cannot software license our way to a better worl…

Follow some cool people on Twitter.

The Free Software Foundation has decided they'd rather hang out with a sex pest than have an ounce of credibility, so fuck em.

It's well-established that naming things is one of the two hardest problems in computer science (along with cache invalidation and off-by-one errors).

Git is fundamentally a content-addressable filesystem with a VCS user interface written on top of it. — Pro Git §10.1 Most software development is not like the Linux kernel's development; as such, Git is not designed for most software development.

(Not exhaustive; based on cursory readings of parts of Wikipedia articles.)

A program is free software if the program's users have the four essential freedoms: The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0). – the Free Software Definition, emphasis mine Goddamn, what the fuck?

(Previously in Crowbar: Defining a good C replacement, Simplifying C's type names) Originally, I hadn't decided whether Crowbar should be designed with an eye towards compiling to C or with an eye towards compiling directly.

(Previously in Crowbar: Defining a good C replacement.)

I like Rust a lot.

Rust is a nice programming language.

(Note from the future: I did this again in 2021 and in 2025.) a popular trend in the Rust community is to ask "Are We X Yet" for various things that it would be nice to be able to develop easily in Rust - game and web are the most prominent ones as far as…

i'm writing this like a day after big mozilla layoffs that included a lot of people working on cool and important shit. the consensus i'm seeing is that it reflects mozilla's search for profit over impact, mismanagement, and disproportionate executive com…

edit 2025-03-04: this explanation is bad in the same way that most monad explanations are bad: it doesn’t address why the abstraction of “monad” is valuable. the first explainer i’ve seen that actually explains why it’s worth understanding is Demystifying…

america is at a crossroads of sorts. widespread dissatisfaction with how governments at all levels handled the COVID-19 pandemic, decades of police brutality overwhelmingly targeting POC, two presidential candidates nobody (or at least nobody worth a damn)

so my city has a community-run police scanner broadcast on the internet, but the person who runs it is a bootlicker who's been threatening to shut it down if people are using it to make trouble for the cops. so i figured i'd set up my own. this is how i d…

Since my university has gone as remote as possible due to coronavirus, I was looking at ways to run an entire desktop session remotely over SSH, using MobaXterm because it is very cool.

thing that is cool: writing the same codebase and having it run on desktop, mobile, and web thing that is lame: JavaScript is the only language where people really do that right now, outside of big commercial game engines things that need to happen for Ru…

I just spent a while trying to make this happen, so I'm putting this here so I don't have to redo all that research next time.

I just released version 1.0 of vidslice, a wxPython GUI that wraps ffmpeg and youtube-dl to make "give me from 1:03-1:15 of this youtube video" really easy to do.

I'm going to be graduating from college in December and I'm a little bit freaking out.

I think there are three things that can make work rewarding: Working with cool people Working on cool things Working in cool ways Right now (summer of 2018) I am working with cool people but on boring things in less-than-ideal ways.

Let's say you have one big image (say, a Telegram sticker) and you need to dice it into a bunch of smaller images (say, Discord emoji).

Last summer I figured I'd learn Vim.