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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 4th, 2023

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  • Out past the planets is the heliopause, the final boundary between the solar system and interstellar space. Voyager discovered it, but other probes have confirmed it. The radiation and particles emitted by the sun create a pressurized bubble around it, where plasma (energized particles, mostly hydrogen) is much denser than past the heliopause. Cosmic rays are more prevalent outside it.

    I’ve heard it compared to the empty zone around where a sink faucet first hits, creating a little “wall” of water around it as the splashing water pushes back the standing water.

    “Empty” space is anything but. There’s tons of particles and energy flying though it, just not as dense.



  • I made a static site with Hexo a few years back. I thankfully didn’t make any “Get started with Hexo” posts but I did only really use it for a few months. I think that puts me in the cluster with the “switch from Jekyll to Hugo” people. Now it just sits there, absorbing some money every two years for the “personal website tax”.

    Shame too, I constantly think I need to get back to it. Hexo is nice, popular with Chinese users I think. I don’t recall now why I liked it over Jekyll or Hugo, but I’ve always loved an underdog. Once I got the hang of using it, it was very customizable and fun to work with.



  • I really enjoyed this game back when, and replayed it a couple of years ago. Very unique RTS mechanics and engine, I’m excited to see this open sourced!

    Perimeter had several weird gimmicks. Bases must be built on terrain that has been flattened with a terriforming tool (voxel/heighmap manipulation of the landscape is part of the game.) The titular permiter is an energy shield that you can put up around your entire base. There’s also only 3 basic units, but units can be fused together (and separated back out) to make more advanced units on the fly.

    The terraforming-as-war approach is neat and I’ve always been surprised that more games don’t try to incorporate similar mechanics. The multi-units are interesting but to me suffer a similar issue as games with many guns but only one kind of ammo. By the time you’ve decided to switch tactics, you might already be too low on basic units of one type to change into what you need.







  • As a senior at my last big company job, basically all I did was conduct meetings and do PRs. It’s such a grind.

    My opinion now is that most PR is worthless anyway. Most people give, at best, a superficial skim for typos, lack of comments, or other low-hanging replies (that usually, really, a static checker or linter should be dealing with).

    Reading the code base in little chunks like that doesn’t give you proper context for the changes you’re reading. Automated unit and integration tests would be better for catching issues like that, but of course then who is reviewing and verifying the tests? Who’s writing them for that matter?

    Ideally, pair-programming or having extra people on projects to create knowledge redundancy would help. But companies want to replace juniors with AI now, so that’s not looking good. Senior devs and architects might know the major pieces of much of the code, but can they “load it into working memory” sufficiently to do a quality PR that will catch something the tests didn’t and QA wouldn’t? Not in my experience.

    I think the best actually-implementable solution for most teams is to get rid of PR expectations and take a multi-pronged approach to replacing that process.

    1. use tooling to check for and fix basic stuff. Use a linter, adopt a code standard, get a code formatting tool that forced adherence to the standard and run it on every PR.
    2. Unit tests if you got them, start if you don’t. You don’t need 90% code coverage, just make sure critical paths are covered.
    3. Turn one of your useless meetings into a code review session. Each week/sprint, one Very Important Code section is presented by the developer that works on it most or that last changed it. This helps the whole team learn the code base, gets more eyes on the important stuff regularly, and enforces not just a consistent style but a consistent approach to solving and documenting problems.
    4. PR (and the github PR approval stuff or its equivalent for you) should be streamlined but preserved. Do have a second person approve changes before merging, just to double check that tests have finished and passed and all that. If your team is so busy that no one ever approves PRs then allow self-approval and be done with it. This will make regular code review very important for security and stability, since any dev could be misbehaving unseen, but these are the trade-offs you make when burning out your team is more important than quality.

  • I think that the push for using it as AR is much stronger than with other headsets. Apple (and their investors especially) want there to be another huge shift in how computers are used, on par with the massive shift from desktop PCs to mobile devices. I think it’s a long shot, but there is some belief that AR will replace all your other devices. You’ll go to the coffee shop to work with your visor instead of your laptop, setting up your “virtual office” wherever you are. They want you to drive with it on and get smart AR navigation and avoidance hints.

    I don’t think the memes are entirely astroturf (I wouldn’t be surprised anymore though) but there’s definitely a societal shift occurring where people are hashing out what the acceptable norms for headsets are. Memes are part of our communication about what we find normal and what is weird or bad.