Just a basic programmer living in California

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  • 71 Comments
Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: February 23rd, 2024

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  • From the paper,

    Launching a dart via an atlatl ‘normally’ requires that force is applied by hand to the short arm of a lever, moving the dart at the long arm of the lever […] a downward launch of an atlatl dart may partially hinder or entirely deactivate the biomechanics required for the atlatl to work optimally. […] [Additionally] the atlatl dart’s light weight may result in it more easily rotating in mid-air such that it is no longer perpendicular to the ground.

    My guess is that the dart falls out of the launcher fast enough to miss some of the push from the launcher.







  • I lived in Grenada for a couple of years. It’s a chill, safe place. I had my family there and we always felt safe, as long as we kept an eye out for speeding buses when crossing the street. It certainly checks the boxes you specified. Night life is limited. I’m planning to go back for a vacation in February.

    As I recall there is a time of year that gets very windy. I think that’s in winter, but my memory is fuzzy. The internet says February is the windiest, and that matches some of my memories. In any case it’s always warm. I wouldn’t worry about rain. That’s tapered off by December. If it does rain it’s a warm rain, and it’s likely to come in short showers so I don’t think you’d be stuck inside all day.

    If you want to be in walking distance to amenities I’d recommend staying near Grand Anse. You can also get public buses there. (They are actually vans.) There are resorts close to the airport, but in those places you’d be dependent on taxis to get away from the resort - which might be fine if you want to be somewhere quieter.



  • When I researched this previously I concluded that there are two very good options for regular backups: Borg and Restic. These are especially efficient at backing up a diff of what has changed since the last backup. So you get snapshots of your filesystem state at each backup point without using a huge amount of space. You can mount any snapshot as a virtual directory. After the initial backup, incremental backups take a minute or two.

    I use Borg, and I back up to cloud storage on Borgbase. I use Vorta as a GUI for Borg. I have Vorta start automatically when I start my window manager, and I have it set up for daily backups. I set up the same thing on my kid’s computer.

    I back up my home directory. I have some excluded directories like ~/.cache, and Steam’s data directory. I use Baobab to find large directories that I don’t want backed up.

    I use the “exclude caches” option in the Borg “create archive” settings. That automatically excludes Rust target/ directories because they follow the Cache Directory Tagging Specification. Not all programming languages’ tooling follows that spec so I also use directory name pattern excludes. For example I have an exclude pattern for .*/node_modules/.*

    I use NixOS, and I keep my system config in a git repo so I don’t need backups for anything outside my home directory.







  • Probably not very similar, but Git Butler is very interesting. It adds its own layer of management so that you can have multiple branches “applied” to your working tree simultaneously. It’s helpful when you have multiple changes that should go into different branches, and some that shouldn’t be committed - it has a system of lanes that help keep track of all that. Or you can test how changes from two branches interact.

    Last time I used it, maybe 6 months ago, it was rough around the edges so I didn’t stick with it. But they’ve done lots of work since then so I’m thinking of giving it another go. It is (last I checked) an all-in tool. When you’re using Butler on a project you probably won’t be able to use other git tools.



  • I think it depends. Lua is great for scripting - like when X happens do Y. I agree that makes sense for a case like Home Assistant. Sometimes you really want the result to be a data structure, not an interactive program, in which case I think more sophisticated configuration (as opposed to scripting) languages might be better.




  • hallettj@leminal.spacetoProgramming@programming.devWhy YAML sucks?
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    2 months ago

    I agree - YAML is not suitable for complex cases that people use it in, like Terraform and Home Assistant. My pet peeve is a YAML config in a situation that really calls for more abstraction, like functions and variables. I’d like to see more use of the class of configuration languages that support that stuff, like Dhall, Cue, and Nickel.

    There is another gotcha which is that YAML has more room for ambiguity than, say, JSON. YAML has a lot of ways to say true and false, and it’s implicit quoting is a bit complex. So some values that you expect to be strings might be interpreted as something els.