I’m just now realizing that there might be a schism within the Nix/NixOS ecosystem/community on old versus new interfaces. If that’s remotely true, then somewhere, a great holy war is at play. Here’s an article summary of the old versus the new interface that I stumbled upon recently.

Don’t believe everything people say — users secretly love ads, clickbait and top 10 lists. Data tells no fables. So if you need something to be noticed, any of the above will do. If you need to keep a low profile, do the opposite — simple really :-)

If reader mode fully takes off, then there’s no need to worry about styles in specific situations (articles). Offer some bare minimum semantic HTML and you’re good. Firefox’s reader mode wins hands down right now. Content before context.

Flexbox as a base layout is convenient but tricky due to CLS or “jank”. If the dimensions of the base flex container(s) are ambiguous, then the browser constantly recomputes the dimensions as HTML streams in.

My favorite trick is to give the browser dimension hints and avoid computational properties like flex. Set as many dimensions (width/height) as possible unambiguously. My Internet speed is sufficiently slow enough that I can see layout shifts in many sites, including my own (this micro blog).

Every so often I stumble upon really interesting YouTube channels. It doesn’t take very long though for all of them to go “poof” ..and gone.

Speaking of mmorpgs — this channel revisits old mmorpgs in current year. It’s mind blowing that many of them are still going, and that people still play them. I can’t even remember the last time I played a game, let alone a mmorpg.

I really need to suss out an offline mode for this thing once I find the time. There’s an isp or power company outage every 2~3 days or so. That’s a normal thing in The Bahamas btw.

It just dawned on me that social media is exactly like a mmorpg. Think about it — we’ve got characters/personas, bots, cheat codes/walkthroughs and black markets that sell accounts, followers, and clicks. (was on the shady side of the net today)

imo, it’s a fascinating demonstration of psychological prowess that corporations have convinced everyone that programming/computing is hard.

People are smart, take what they can get, and deal with a lot of computing frustation. Software is bespoke enough that technically you have to “program” in roundabout ways to get useful things done (generality).

yj is handy for converting between YAML, TOML, JSON, and HCL. yes.

yj -yj -i < config.yaml > config.json
yj -yt -i < config.yaml > config.toml
yj -yc    < config.yaml > config.hcl