https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Mould

deeply sane

I hope somebody describes me like this one day.

They’re only pausing production for four days.

It was a feature built in to the web browser, providing a website, file sharing, a music player, a photo sharing tool, chat, a whiteboard, a guestbook, and some other features.

All you needed to do was open the browser and forward a port, or let UPnP do it (since everyone still had UPnP enabled back then), and you’d get a .operaunite.com subdomain that anyone could access, which would hit the web server built into the browser.

This was back in 2008ish, when Opera was still good (before it was converted to be Chromium-powered). A lot of people still used independent blogs back then, rather than everything being on social media, so maybe it was ahead of its time a bit.

I’m sad that Opera Unite failed. It was the closest thing to self-hosting for regular non-technical people.

All I want is an EV convertible that can be bought in the USA. Maybe I should move back to Australia to get the Chinese ones.

I like Notepad++. It can handle anything you throw at it.

I switched to Linux (Fedora with KDE) and I like KWrite for similar reasons.

The current UI is very different to the original UI though.

Some Windows apps do handle it properly. For example, if you have an archive open in 7-zip and try to delete it, Windows Explorer should correctly tell you that it’s open in 7-Zip. I’m not sure why it doesn’t work that way for all apps.

Definitely going to fill this out once I get some free time. What will the data be used for?

Nice! Having power outlets at every parking spot would be useful for things other than EVs too.

This is in the county I live in (San Mateo County), near SFO airport. Peninsula Clean Energy has some good rebates for residential customers too, like $2500 off a heat pump water heater and $2500 off a heat pump HVAC. That’s in addition to federal and state rebates.

Of course, the installers know this and charge more for San Mateo County customers than other nearby counties, but it still means you can get a heat pump water heater for minimal out-of-pocket cost.

might be rolling in it in a couple years

Doubtful given 70-90% of startups fail.

VBScript did catch on originally, though. When IE had over 90% market share, it was nearly as popular as JavaScript was. It only dropped in popularity when other browsers became more common. Back then, most scripting was just to enhance the page, and the page still had full functionality without it, so a lot of developers just didn’t care about making it fancy for the 5-10% of other browsers.

“AJAX” (XMLHttpRequest) was originally an IE-only, VBScript-only feature. It was originally implemented using ActiveX, which only VBScript supported originally.

I’m hoping that more DOM and BOM APIs become accessible in WebAssembly without having to go through JavaScript. There’s a few frameworks that let you build web apps in other languages (like Blazor for C#) but they still need some JavaScript to interop with the browser, and going through a translation layer (WASM to JS to browser) adds some overhead.

Even visual basic for the web would make sense

This is exactly what I did for a few years before switching to JavaScript: VBScript. It was pretty common back in the early 2000s when Internet Explorer had 90%+ market share. The few remaining Netscape users would just get a page without scripts. There’s a lot of features missing in VBScript that exist in JavaScript though, even basic things like closures and first-class functions.

My employer is trying to get people to use AI more, too.

I’m skeptical of AI, but I’m finding it useful for menial tasks - things that you’d otherwise automate using an AST-based codemod tool (like jscodeshift, libcst codemod, etc), a hacky find/replace, or do by hand (boring, tedious work that I’d rather not do). Giving the AI system an example patch for something like migrating away from a legacy API, and saying “do this same thing across these 200 other files”, can have pretty good results.

In general, it seems like a good tool for things where the entire process is well-defined - the prompt and context provide all the info it needs - and I include example code in the context.

I don’t trust it for brand new code in a large existing codebase… Even the best AI models still get a lot of things wrong.

Let me preface with a fuck microsoft.

Yet you’re praising copilot, and likely using an editor built and maintained by Microsoft (VS Code). I’m confused.

Thanks for the info. I haven’t used BASIC in a very long time and can’t remember much about the syntax. Must be over 20 years ago now. I switched from VB6 to C# when .NET Framework 2.0 was released.

of at least one dialect of BASIC that allowed subroutine calls to lack their parentheses

Did sub calls normally have parentheses in BASIC?

BYD busses are in the USA too, or at least small ones are… My employer uses some to transport people between buildings.

I’d say 9/10 aren’t doing proper backups given most people don’t actually do DR runs and verify whether they can fully recover from their backups. If you don’t test your backups, you don’t have backups!