Software-Dev

Consider the problem of “how do I run more than 1 terminal at a time”. At this moment, I have at least 5 different ways I can effectively solve this issue: I can, from a different physical computer, SSH in to a new session. I can, from the same physical computer, switch to a different tty session with … C-S-F2 through 6 or something. (Rare, but sometimes it comes in really handy.) I can, in the same user session, open 2 separate windows of a terminal emulator. I can, in the same terminal emulator, open a new tab. I can, in the same emulated terminal, run tmux and open a new pane. There are yet more exotic options like Serial over LAN that I’m only theoretically aware of. ...

Between our ESP32 prokaryotic organisms and our 24/7 Internet-enabled megafauna servers, there exists a vast and loosely-defined ecosystem of things the B2B world likes to call computer appliances. Picture a bespoke Pi 4 packaged up neatly with some Python scripts, a little fancy plastic embossing, and maybe a well-guarded id_ed25519.pub in case you end up in hot water during the (long - very long, stable cash flow for generations long) maintenance contract, and you’re in the ballpark. ...

There are few things I think about more than the essays on gwern.net, and there are few with as satisfying a theoretical payout to contemplate in my orb as his essay on “leaky pipelines”, aka log-normal distributions. The skulk: Say you’re working on a Laravel web app. You’re about 90% sure you know how to start the app. You’re 80% sure you know how to handle the infra you’ll need to get it online. And you’re 70% sure you know how to get your first customer. What is your chance of successfully going from zero to first customer? 0.9 * 0.8 * 0.7 = a little over 0.5. That’s … a lot less encouraging than any of the previous numbers, if you buy my multi-step modelling. ...