Nate ZEC

A status update for the #Zcash Trailing Finality Layer project:

We've published v0.1.0 of the book which links to a hackmd for the Crosslink construction, an Ebb-and-Flow hybrid PoW/PoS protocol.

forum.zcashcommunity.com/t/the-traili...

LLM feature request: automate git commit message generation.

Or: given a proposed git commit message, automate the code diff.

;-)

Today's UX gripe is brought to you by Chrome™!

Bookmarks in a menu, bookmarks in a manager widget, bookmarks in a panel on new tabs (which has a drop-down menu for overflow bookmarks), bookmarks in a sidebar!

Make up your mind!

(Each context displays/interacts w/ them differently, for extra fun.)

Well, it's possible, but clunky:

blue.mackuba.eu/skythread/?a...

It'd be nice to streamline that flow in clients.

One of my favorite Infosec UX Antipatterns: you click on what appears to be a link, only to be taken to a dialog/interstitial page warning you it's on a different website.

Like… um… have you heard of the world wide web? It allows hyperlinked content across any site. It's pretty sweet, try it.

I caught wind there's a US Executive Order or some other dino-boomer busybody "rule" that restricts access to data that was processed with too many floating point operations.

If anyone has links or download instructions for such illegal data, please share so I know what data to avoid downloading…

Turning off public reads on sites like Twitter or Reddit is a definite buzzkill.

The whole point of the web is open composition across sites! This is especially crucial during the modern epistemological crisis of centralized social control of content.

Ok, since I can link to AT Protocol (e.g. bsky.app) threads so that anyone on the web can read them, it is definitely way better than Twitter.

Perfect! This is what I was hoping for. Thanks for your service!

Who are some geeky indie sketch artists who could do this well?

Sketch: a person walks into a store to order something, and a store employee jumps in their face in front of the register to explain a new menu item, and refuses to go away until the person says "got it".

Example: I open an app, and it pops open one of those new feature dialogs with "learn more" or "got it".

My sketch comedy idea: take all the UX papercuts that bug me, and for each make an analogous scene were some characters represent users and some represent the UX.

How can I share a URL so that people can publicly read AT Proto posts/threads (with no account, signup, etc…)?

The lesson for me is: start top-down, rather than bottom up. I had gone from reading docs, to asking ChatGPT questions about the docs.

Now instead I will just explain what I want to do and ask why it's not working.

New ChatGPT unlock: I was asking multiple questions like "does `git commit --amend` run the `pre-commit` hook?"

Then I just tried: "Why doesn't this work?" and pasted a terminal paste where I cat relevant configs/scripts, ls, cmds.

It listed multiple diagnoses. The first one resolved the issue!

Has anyone written a wrapper for `rustc` which inserts `ChatGPT` project-specific advice for each error?

This is my point.

People tend to assume UBI is "guaranteed income for people without work" but in reality it implies work: proving you are human.

If we're not careful it might replace jobs where people do something valuable with a "job" of just proving you are human.

This is my point.

People tend to assume UBI is "guaranteed income for people without work" but in reality it implies work: proving you are human.

If we're not careful it might replace jobs where people do something valuable with a "job" of just proving you are human.

If you're on github, show up to that issue!

Github used to have a widget for "processing" events of interest, which showed them in a list, and when you viewed an item (e.g. an issue page) it would insert a widget with next/previous, "mark as seen".

Did they remove that?

It was incredibly helpful for me to track my state.

Trying to revive that ticket and also pointing out there are two issues: privacy and authorization.

github.com/rust-lang/cr...

Let's see if there's any way I can help github.com/rust-lang/cr...

Hm, to publish on crates.io I must use github OAuth therefore I must grant crates.io the ability to read all "private" repositories on Github for every organization of which I'm a member?

I can think of no reason crates.io needs to read any github state other than the "is a legit user" bit.

Are Charlie Brooker or Terry Gilliam on bsky?

Match made in heaven. Come on guys, do it!

How far off are we?

People surviving of off UBI + AI arms race -> more and more convoluted and time consuming CAPTCHas -> it eventually takes more than full-time effort to survive and everyone's "occupation" is just proving their humanity to the Great Machine.

It's high time for a Brazil-like dystopian comedy where people's full time occupation is just solving increasingly absurd and baroque CATPCHAs.

A fun operational engineering practice: whenever writing a delay/poll loop (e.g. `while cmd; do sleep $X; date --iso=s; done`) pick a randomish prime number for `X`.

Why?

The idea is to avoid different processes from synchronizing incidentally to help balance load, avoid spurious correlations, …

So I think I'll try `gitless` and see if unit testing is always coherent.

If so, it seems like an obvious win.

If, OTOH, it requires exceptions for unit testing, then I'll have to decide if those are better/worse than vanilla `git`.

For example, running unit tests on a git repo is often incoherent if the staged content != working directory content, so I'm always trying to patch over that and wondering why that extra complexity is necessary since it requires work to do right.