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Name Marco von Ballmoos
Member since
Email [hidden]
Home page https://earthli.com/users/marco
Description

The (only) developer at earthli.com.

Contents

3334 Articles
111 Comments

4 months Ago

Links and Notes for July 12th, 2024

Published on in Notes

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

[1] Emphases are added, unless otherwise noted.
[2] Annotations are only lightly edited and are largely contemporaneous.

Table of Contents

5 months Ago

Links and Notes for July 5th, 2024

Published on in Notes

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

[1] Emphases are added, unless otherwise noted.
[2] Annotations are only lightly edited and are largely contemporaneous.

Table of Contents

Links and Notes for June 28th, 2024

Published on in Notes

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

[1] Emphases are added, unless otherwise noted.
[2] Annotations are only lightly edited and are largely contemporaneous.

Table of Contents

Ignoring files with .gitignore

Published on in Programming

Introduction

This article defines concepts like repository and working tree and then discusses how you can use .gitignore files to determine the files and folders that Git considers during operations.

Concepts

 From a command line, you can run git init in any folder to make any folder a Git repository. Doing so creates a .git folder with a database and configuration files for the local repository. Git considers any folder that contains a .git folder with these configuration and database files... [More]

Links and Notes for June 21st, 2024

Published on in Notes

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

[1] Emphases are added, unless otherwise noted.
[2] Annotations are only lightly edited and are largely contemporaneous.

Table of Contents

Links and Notes for June 14th, 2024

Published on in Notes

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

[1] Emphases are added, unless otherwise noted.
[2] Annotations are only lightly edited and are largely contemporaneous.

Table of Contents

6 months Ago

Links and Notes for June 7th, 2024

Published on in Notes

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

[1] Emphases are added, unless otherwise noted.
[2] Annotations are only lightly edited and are largely contemporaneous.

Table of Contents

Links and Notes for May 31st, 2024

Published on in Notes

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

[1] Emphases are added, unless otherwise noted.
[2] Annotations are only lightly edited and are largely contemporaneous.

Table of Contents

Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2024.07

Published on in Movies

Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2024.06

Published on in Movies

Read the explanation of method, madness, and spoilers.[1]

  1. Big Fish (2003)8/10
  2. Barbie (2023)5/10
  3. Simon Romang: Charrette! (2022) — 8/10
  4. Darkman (1990)6/10
  5. Bullet Train (1990)6/10
  6. Last of the Mohicans (1992)8/10
  7. Mission Impossible II (2000)8/10
  8. Father Figures (2017)5/10
  9. Athena (2022)5/10
  10. Archer: Series Finale (2024)9/10
Big Fish (2003)8/10
Tim Burton directs this offbeat story (I know, it almost goes without saying) of a couple of generations... [More]

Links and Notes for May 24th, 2024

Published on in Notes

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

[1] Emphases are added, unless otherwise noted.
[2] Annotations are only lightly edited and are largely contemporaneous.

Table of Contents

Links and Notes for May 17th, 2024

Published on in Notes

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

[1] Emphases are added, unless otherwise noted.
[2] Annotations are only lightly edited and are largely contemporaneous.

Table of Contents

Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2024.05

Published on in Movies

Read the explanation of method, madness, and spoilers.[1]

  1. How it Ends (2018)5/10
  2. Castlevania S04 (2021)8/10
  3. Paddleton (2019)8/10
  4. Star Trek: Nemesis (2002)7/10
  5. The Curse S01 (2023)5/10
  6. Death Note (2017)5/10
  7. Licorice Pizza (2021)5/10
  8. A Series of Unfortunate Events S01–S03 (2017–2019)7/10
  9. Long Shot (2019)9/10
  10. Dune (2021)8/10
How it Ends (2018)5/10
Will Younger (Theo James) and Samantha Sutherland (Kat Graham) are expecting. Her parents... [More]

7 months Ago

Links and Notes for May 10th, 2024

Published on in Notes

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

[1] Emphases are added, unless otherwise noted.
[2] Annotations are only lightly edited and are largely contemporaneous.

Table of Contents

Building RegEx from scratch with Stephen Toub

Published on in Programming

This is another excellent 1-hour tour of another complex corner of .NET. Toub describes and shows how the source-generated RegEx engine works.

Deep Dive into RegEx with Stephen Toub by dotnet / Scott Hanselmann (YouTube)

  • The generated source is human-readable and debuggable.
  • It is well-commented.
  • It updates in real-time as you change the expression.
  • It includes XML documentation that describes the regular expression in plain English.
  • They rewrote the compiler in .NET 7 to not only better support source generators, but also to be able to emit not only IL, but source... [More]

Building async/await from scratch with Stephen Toub

Published on in Programming

This is another video from Stephen Toub that is just chock/full of useful information.

Writing async/await from scratch in C# with Stephen Toub by dotnet (YouTube)

At 27:30, they start to discuss about the nomenclature of Task and how it differs from an Action. It’s funny that neither of them mentioned that tasks in .NET are called promises pretty much everywhere else (JavaScript, Java, etc.). Some libraries also use the word future. For more information, see Futures and promises (Wikipedia).

As he’s building everything, it is really astonishing to note that Hanselmann has to... [More]

Building LINQ from scratch with Stephen Toub

Published on in Programming

This is a great interview with the master of performance-optimization in .NET Stephen Toub. If you’re relatively well-versed in C#, .NET, and Linq, then you can just jump to the second video (linked below). I actually watched the second one first. I didn’t feel like I’d missed anything.

Deep Dive on LINQ with Stephen Toub by dotnet (YouTube)

Stephen Toub’s the guy who writes the 100+-page release notes on performance. See the following links.

Links and Notes for May 3rd, 2024

Published on in Notes

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

[1] Emphases are added, unless otherwise noted.
[2] Annotations are only lightly edited and are largely contemporaneous.

Table of Contents

KRAZAM videos are gold

Published on in Fun

KRAZAM makes videos about working in tech and, more specifically, about working in a tech team that has been scrummed out, with lots of layers of management.

This is one of the more recent ones.

Positive Affirmations for Site Reliability Engineers by KRAZAM (YouTube)

“Your friends and family understand what you do.”
“Your friends and family appreciate your humorous work stories…”
“DevOps is a meaningful term.”
“That joke you told in your meeting was funny! If your coworkers were not on mute, you would’ve heard them laughing.”

At the beginning, it shows that... [More]

ESC 2024: Semifinal #2

Published on in Fun

Malta
Body suit. Naked-looking. Getting dragged around by a bunch of 90s-era-looking background dancers. This is just f*%ing awful. My ears hate me already. Jesus Christ, anyone who thinks this is good should reevaluate their life choices. This is how we’re starting off? No-one will notice when the robots take over. They’ve blindfolded her, flipped her around, they all threw their shorts off, now they’re porn-dancing. She’s got quite a Madonna-style tooth-gap going on. Good for her. There was... [More]

ESC 2024: Semifinal #1

Published on in Fun

Cyprus
Dances way better than Dua Lipa. But, then, doesn’t everybody? She’s 17 and lip-synced in English. Her backup dancers all look like they go to high school with her. She’s very, very cute. Gorgeous, actually. And, for ESC very special: not in a porn-y way. Good for them.
Serbia
Alone on the stage. Goth-y. Low, slow song. She sang in what I assume was Serbian. She was barefoot. Utterly forgettable. We won’t have to hear her again.
Lithuania
Not English. Rappy. Boys got some backup... [More]

Generating trash pandas with Copilot

Published on in Technology

I was chatting with someone about some picture and I noted that maybe we could find something appropriate.

I prompted DuckDuckGo with “raccoon trash panda digging in garbage can”. It gave me a whole grid of pictures, of which I quickly picked the following as my favorites.

My interlocutor had never really used any of the LLM-based machines before, so I gave GitHub Copilot a whirl. I prompted GitHub Copilot: “Show me a cartoon of a raccoon digging in a trash can with its butt in the air”.... [More]

Links and Notes for April 26th, 2024

Published on in Notes

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

[1] Emphases are added, unless otherwise noted.
[2] Annotations are only lightly edited and are largely contemporaneous.

Table of Contents

Links and Notes for April 19th, 2024

Published on in Notes

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

[1] Emphases are added, unless otherwise noted.
[2] Annotations are only lightly edited and are largely contemporaneous.

Table of Contents

Freedom as a means of control

Published on in Quotes

“The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.”
Frank Zappa

It’s 2024. How’s it going, JavaScript?

Published on in Programming

This video is from a great channel, which published a lot of great videos a while back. They covered pretty much everything already, but circled back to JavaScript for 2024.

Interview with Senior JS Developer 2024 by Programmers are also human (YouTube)

Some choice quotes from the video.

“We push on save.”
“2024 is the year of the serverlesslessness.”
“They say that every year, but this year they’re out of VC funding.”
“Don’t write this down, next week all of this is gonna change.”

This guy just keeps knocking it out of the park. Pretty much everything he mentioned... [More]

The Cosmic Call

Published on in Fun

The article Try it and see by Mark Dominus (The Universe of Discourse) discusses the graphic below, which is part of the “Cosmic Call”, a message to extraterrestrials.

 Cosmic Call

The author says that he told his 11-year-old niece,

““I bet you could figure it out if you tried.” She didn’t believe me and she didn’t want to try. It seemed insurmountable.”

I sent this to a few people in my family.

Hint #1

After a little while, I provided some context. The Cosmic Call is:

“In 1999, two Canadian astrophysicists, Stéphane Dumas and Yvan Dutil,... [More]”

Links and Notes for April 12th, 2024

Published on in Notes

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

[1] Emphases are added, unless otherwise noted.
[2] Annotations are only lightly edited and are largely contemporaneous.

Table of Contents

8 months Ago

A society without oppression is an illusion…

Published on in Quotes

“Around the mid-1800s humanity began to notice it doesn’t make sense for a small group of rich people to own everything and for everyone else to continually give that group labor, rent and expenses just to stay alive, and ever since then the media, the mainstream culture and the foreign policy of the ruling class have been intensely devoted to aggressively erasing this realization from humanity’s memory.”

Avoid primary constructors in C# (for now)

Published on in Programming

tl;dr: avoid C# 12's primary constructors for classes except for very small, simple classes, in which case you should consider using a record instead.

The following video discusses the downsides of the current implementation of primary constructors:

The C# 12 Feature You Shouldn’t Use, Yet by Nick Chapsas (YouTube)

To sum up:

  • Primary constructors don’t have a readonly backing field; you can still assign to it within the type.
  • You can’t control the visibility of the generated property or backing field.
  • You can’t throw exceptions, except in a... [More]