Category: Uncategorized
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A GitHub Copilot AI Anecdote
I’ve been watching Three Body—the 2023 Chinese television adaptation of the same Liu Cixin science fiction novel that Netflix also put out a version of. My copy was found on the high seas shortly after the release of the series, but it’s now available on a few streaming services. I was about 20 minutes into…
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When do we teach kids to edit?
My 10 year-old recently had to write an essay for an application for a national scholarship program. He did great, writing 450ish words that were readable, thoughtful, and fun, with pleasantly varying sentences. And then we started editing. I remember feeling like giving up in my early editing experiences, out of sorrow for the perfect…
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Was the Cambrian JavaScript Explosion a Zero Interest Rate Phenomenon?
A kind of cliché-but-true complaint common among programmers in the late 2010’s was that there were too many new JavaScript things every week. Frameworks, libraries, and bits and pieces of tooling relentlessly arrived, exploded in popularity, and then receded like waves on a beach. My sense is that this pace has slowed over the last…
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Prevent Unoconv From Exporting Hidden Sheets From Excel Documents
At work we use unoconv—a python script that serves as a nice frontend to the UNO document APIs in LibreOffice/OpenOffice—as part of our pipeline for creating preview PDFs and rasterized thumbnail images for a variety of document formats. Recently we had an issue where our thumbnail for a Excel spreadsheet document inexplicably didn’t match the…
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Playing Marathon (via Aleph One) With Controllers on RetroPie
Bungie released Marathon in 1994, the same year Doom II came out. Marathon was also a first-person “run around picking up guns to kill aliens with” game, but had a comparatively robust plot with multiple conflicting AI characters, multiple settings, a relatively fleshed-out picture of the bad guys, effectively moody atmospheric music, and some additional…
Intended Effect 