Just started this.
author: @matthew@space.matthewphillips.info
avatar: 🐧
My history of side-projects is not great, I stop working on them within a couple of months almost all of the time. https://yums.email/ is the one that I have kept with, and still have the same passion for, as I did in the beginning. I'm going to see this one through.
Yearly reminder that The Mummy (1932) is Dracula, but in Egypt. It's the exact story.
Something I wish I knew long ago: homemade jams are super easy to make (fruit and sugar, mostly) and are so much better tasting than the store bought stuff.
Foundations are a Solution to an Imaginary Problem
Watching Scooby Doo.
Small talk is the worst.
Let's try positivity this week.
45 days until Halloween, lfg.
I actually liked The Craft: Legacy quite a bit.
In recent years I think that The Craft has been my favorite halloween movie.
Iced tea is the best. Never was able to get into hot tea.
Sweaters are great.
There's nothing wrong with making quick drastic decisions on a repo when it's your own personal project. But when there's a community, and you openly solicit contributions, you owe it to contributors to give them a heads up and a chance to voice their opinions.
Whether you are a BDFL or not. It's not about whether you can or have a right to make a decision, it's about being a *considerate human being*.
Ship faster.
The older I get the more I love Halloween.
Do something different.
Black beans & rice is extremely underrated.
I've seen 3 episodes of Secret Invasion and I have no idea what's going on.
You know how normally when you do a redesign / rebranding you do it all at once and don't just throw up a new logo on the old design? Thinking about that today for no real reason.
Am currently ready 4 books at the same time. But it's a week or more between picking up any one of them. Which is challenging...
Why not build an email client for a very specific use-case? Like for example, let's say you know your users receive emails from a specific mailing list. You could build a client that organizes the messages that best serves what that list is for.
Stop saying "mental model" all of the time.
I've unfortunately come to learn that if you're going to build something around email you pretty much have to just use AWS. Setting up postfix isn't that bad. It's once you find out that to reach Gmail you have to implement dozens of anti-spam measures only to learn that reverse cname (PTR record) is not supported by most hosts these days.
AWS SES took me like 30 minutes.
Tired of the rain.
This is another test.
This is a test.
So far so good.
Giving Threads a chance.
My magnum opus:
https://github.com/matthewp/is-night/tree/master
Been cooking a lot recently. Tonight, huevos rancheros.
Automating sending articles to Kindle with forlater.email
gemini://space.matthewphillips.info/posts/automated-for-later/
A cool "read it later" like service that works by sending you an email:
Having talked with a lot of people who believe client-side routing is *always* the right thing, I'm pretty sure it comes down to simply disliking the flicker of white that occurs with MPA nav. You'll hear a lot of reasons given but it really boils down to an aesthetic preference.
Which is totally fine. Technology choices are often (I'd argue *usually*) made based on aesthetics. I'm glad that view transitions are coming and fix this preference without forcing the downsides that come with a pure CSR approach.
Puppy Linux is a bit odd in that you use root as your login and then there are a couple of users just for when root is a bad idea.
My personal laptop (Macbook) crashed hard so now I'm installing Puppy Linux on another. I choose the distro for the name.
This seems cool.
In designing stuff I use diagram software all of the time. Like, all of the time. I didn't used to do so. But especially when collaborating, it helps explain ideas so much better than either code or prose.
Murder She Wrote holds up so well.
I've never had a taco and felt regret.
Mastodon and the fediverse is unnecessarily complex. I like the culture but hate the tech. All you really need for distributed social media is RSS or similar.
It's cool how in Go when you're just prototyping you can loosely use panic() a lot and then when you're happy with the code, go back and add proper error handling.
My favorite arcade games:
https://matthewp.lists.sh/favorite-arcade-games
Here's my first list, books I've currently reading. Also works really well for recipes.
https://matthewp.lists.sh/what-im-reading
I discovered this really cool service that is a simple microblogging service for lists. Upload a list as a text file and have a dedicated URL for it.
It works by SSH, so no login required. Very interesting concept that I'd love to see more of.
Use plaintext email.
I've used name.com forever. It is secretly bad and I didn't know about it? Never hear it being discussed.
All new projects of mine will be in sr.ht going forward.
I've been away for the last week. Excited to be back home and work on some of the projects I haven't touched in a while.
Go is a really good language.
Feels like there's been a slight backlash against serverless (for web hosting) recently. Reminds me of when people first started questioning if GraphQL was worth it 3 or 4 years ago.
Innovation never goes backward; but you do bring back old ideas and mix them with new.
For GraphQL, a lot of people realized what they really liked about it was that it was RPC. That has survived into present.
What are those things for serverless? My guess is that it's *not* the fact that you spin up a new instance (ish) on each request.
Traveling for work next week. Not going to be checking social places for a while. Looking forward to some projects for when I get back.
I have a pretty exciting Gemini project in the oven at the moment. My schedule is pretty hectic for the next couple of weeks so I'm not expecting much movement, but hoping by the end of June I have something I can share.
My wife loves the F1 show.
*me feels motivated to tackle my watch list*
*me just watches something I've seen 💯 times already*
Renfield was ok.
Dogs.
Damn, the new Mortal Kombat looks good.
Sourcehut is nicer than GitHub.
Make a Batman Beyond movie with Michael Keaton, cowards.
Does this ever work out for the person in power that pulls this kind of move (the unfortunate answer is 'yes it does')
https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/17/americas/ecuador-president-dissolved-parliament-intl/index.html
AWS Copilot seems useful:
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonECS/latest/developerguide/getting-started-aws-copilot-cli.html
Trying out Fargate and am having an "i don't know what I'm doing" dog moment.
APIs focused on appearances (aka "winning the code snippet") will always get most of the attention. But basing your product on fashion inevitably sets you up to go out of fashion. Well-made things stand the test of time.
Pac & Pal is criminally underrated.
Don't trust any API where testing is an afterthought. If you've ever attempted to test a Node.js HTTP route you know what I mean. How many person-hours have been wasted fighting with that one.
I predict I'll make it half way through the Laravel tutorial before I decide to create my own version in Bash. I have a disease.
I have the best dry rub recipe. It's mine and no one else's.
That's a lie, I found it on the internet.
cgi-bin is serverless done right.
I posted an off-the-cuff commentary on serverless yesterday that went semi-viral. Can't express how little thought went into it. 😂 The fact that many people responded just shows how much frustration there is with serverless architecture and the hand-cuffs it puts on us all.
Serverless: "what if we made basic things like connecting to a database as hard as fuck?"
Today is Derby day, time to pick a horse at random, or possibly by its name.
Reminder that `edge` is a marketing term. There's no difference between edge and multi-region. Some edge providers have double (or more) the number of locations than others.
The Velma writers continue to not understand why people have a problem with their show. As I said previously:
https://matthewphillips.info/social-spooky/statuses/01GQBQ3B23QJB4CTBCMT221G1P/
I've moved my old GoToSocial instance to archived static pages which can be viewed here:
https://matthewphillips.info/social-spooky/
I will be taking down the instance in the coming weeks. Plan to write about my decision to move back to a regular Mastodon instance eventually.
The problem with Mastodon in my opinion is that it's just so damn complicated to implement. it's too big. an open protocol that's simple to implement is magical and freeing. Mastodon is not that.
I can't stand the Worms level of Golf with Friends.
Quarterly reminder that there's no reason for a movie to be longer than an hour and a half.
Back after one week in Copenhagen. 😴
A delayed flight has led to a day hanging out in NYC. Not the worst outcome.
One of the ways that docs really helps in API design is that it brings together APIs that make sense in isolation, but start to break down when thought of as a whole. As engineers it's easy to miss the big picture some times and documenting APIs exposes shortcomings.
Just for fun, I guess.
I'm building a framework in Bash and I'm not sure why. I have no use-case.
I still believe you could create a startup around GitHub workflows. Not exactly sure *what*, but there's something there.
love cast iron skillets
Building a toy framework in bash (deployed to AWS lambda) and it's currently working pretty well, but I'm nervous that perf is going to suddenly crater.
I just want to chill at home and play Ms. Pac-Man
It grinds my gears when JS programmers think they are writing functional code because they don't use classes. If your functions are mutating state galore, it's imperative.
The definition of functional programming is nuanced, but what you're writing isn't it.
Side effect free functional code is probably the most testable you can get. Imperative code with just functions is probably the least testable. Either you mock modules and implementation details (cumbersome) or you just only do integration tests (slow, brittle).
You don't have to like classes to realize that they are just a thousand times easier to test for imperative code.
Go code is extremely easy to test. That it's based on interfaces is why. You don't have to have Java style classes to get the testability benefits!
To me Mastodon is just another overly complex place to post short messages. It should not *own* my data. Open source or not the data is inaccessible. So I treat it as a place to crosspost to.
So what if I want to watch 🎄 movies in April, what's it to you?
I need to get back to reading more.
prefer feature work on a friday over bugs
Why is the 'pause AI' crowd completely unaware of game theory?
One thing bash is really good at is printing a help message.
I now have a pretty elaborate setup that lets me post status updates to my own site which then gets distributed to Mastodon. It's elaborate but also pretty elegant. I'm happy with it. Need to write up how it works.
Browsing https://sr.ht/ feels like what GitHub used to feel like before they implemented hybrid server/client routing. I have no idea why anyone would prefer client side routing over this.
Good morning to everyone except those building AI that will destroy humanity.
Don't indicate me bro
I HATE being at a bar or somewhere it's loud and attempting to have a conversation.
If this works I'll be excited.
Testing directly in production. 🙌
This is just a test message, ignore.
Automating things is fun.
I've never seen a dog reject someone for the way they look.
Having looked into every 'post a status' social network out there I've come to the conclusion that they are all wildly overengineered. I think the web has really produced a culture of overengineering everything. Not every web service needs to be built to scale to millions of users and thousands of features. A status log is just a text file with a date and a message. Start there, add on top.
Look, is AI going to exceed our intelligence in the matter of a few years and then decide we're in the way and eliminate the human species in the matter of minutes / hours? Yeah, probably. But that doesn't mean we can't have a good time until then.
I bet Batman is a self-hosting kind of person. Can't see him intrusting his criminal research to AWS.
If AI decides to kill us all it could do it death star style and blow up the planet with itself safely off-Earth. On the other hand that would be a waste of resources. So I think Terminator style hunting down humans one by one is the more likely scenario.
Trying not to let the threat of the end of civilization get to me.
So glad to see so many AI experts in my timelines
There is no scenario in which we "stop" or "slow down" AI development. Prisoners dilemma prevents that from happening. So we have to assume that it will continue at minimum at the current pace.
Having accepted that, whether we like it or not, we can now set about the goal of creating AI that will benefit humanity and not destroy it. We have to operate under the assumption that others are out there creating AI not to benefit humanity in general. And we have to beat them. Otherwise we are truly fucked.
I'm enjoying WSL a lot but they have some cryptic errors when they want you to upgrade:
Wsl/Service/0x80040326
I don't think people realize you can't stop AI. It doesn't matter if the whole world agrees (it doesn't), no one will cooperate to "slow down" because it's a classic prisoners dilemma situation.
Whatever is going to happen will happen. Just enjoy the ride.
The main reason I still use iTerm is that the font isn't tiny by default. And has a dark background. Rather than figure out how to configure terminal to have sane visuals, I just install iTerm.
I've wasted so much time on social media. Yet keeping a permanent record of my throwaway thoughts is still somewhat important to me.
Everything I know about bash I learned from Googling specifics like "How to do X". I never probably learned the language, I can't say I "get it", except I know to do things like always quote variables. Everything else is copy pasta.
I want to write a web app in bash.
What use cases is the web trying to be really good at? Not adequate, really good. Attempting to perfect. This is a question for the maintainers.
It seems like Steam wants to update every time I open it.
Bugs
The Munsters holds up extremely well.
Learned more about UTC offsets this morning than I'd care to know.
Woke up too early.