Nevkontakte
@me@m.nevkontakte.com
Lawful neutral. Definitely not a cat in a hat. Opinions are of Cthulhu. what/why.
Holy fuck, I knew Chromium git repo was huge and unwieldy, but I spent last hour trying to simply clone it locally and I still don't have a working copy. On a 4th attempt now Scratch that, on a 5th attempt now, with previous failing with a random Failed to connect to chromium.googlesource.com:443 after 5 ms: Could not connect to server message.
Expect the command to take 30 minutes on even a fast connection, and many hours on slower ones.
No shit.
https://github.com/chromium/chromium/blob/main/docs/linux/build_instructions.md
So now that RAM prices are through the roof and are aiming for an orbital insertion, can we agree to stop using WebView for every UI app ever?
Nevkontakte shared 3 days ago
after 15 years, iOS has finally caught up with all the main android features, such as
- very mid ui design
- kinda floaty feeling
- unpolished vibe
android itself has progressed little, although it is rapidly achieving feature parity with iOS on "locked down user hostility". overall both ecosystems look very appealing, energetic, and healthy, for shareholders
Nevkontakte shared 25 days ago
Picard management tip: Make it so the crew feel welcome and appreciated. Remember there are other starships they could transfer to.
The moment you think yourself too important to be disagreed with, you stop being qualified for being important.
Everyone is worried about AI paperclip optimizers, but capitalism has been doing it all along.
Nevkontakte shared a month ago
On Nov 18 of this year, the Voyager 1 spacecraft will be one light-day from Earth -- more than 16 billion miles. Voyager 2 will be nearly 14 billion miles away.
There's a quiet, heroic effort by NASA techs to keep these 49-year-old spacecraft functioning. The technology and parts we knew how to make in 1977 can still talk to us. It is a small engineering miracle.
Linking directly to the Hackaday story on this, but click through to The Register.
https://hackaday.com/2026/08/06/nasas-just-prolonged-voyager-2s-science-mission-with-a-big-bang/
Love me some engineers.
Nevkontakte shared a month ago
New blog post: Tracking down a Zsh history data loss bug 🐞
For many years, I sometimes discovered that commands I was sure I had run were no longer present in my Z shell history file (~/.zsh_history). In this article, I will show you how I tracked down the bug. Spoiler: ultimately, patching Zsh to make it crash loudly and analyzing the crash’s core dump was the winning strategy!
https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2026-08-09-zsh-history-truncation-bug/
Achievement unlocked: fixed a bug strictly by deleting lines of code.
Rabbit holes all the way down...
- I need to go fiddle on a server to adjust some of the containers I run there...
- Meh, I don't have tmux set up there, and ssh'ing multiple times is for n00bs...
- Let me try this new terminal I heard can replace tmux but better...
- Let me spend two evenings reading through its configs to get keymapping the way I'm use to...
- Now this is complex enough config I ought to store it in my dotfiles repo...
- Let me double-check my dotfiles repo tests haven't regressed in the last couple of months...
- They did. Let's fix that first...
- Oh, neovim plugin wants a newer neovim version than the one Ubuntu 24.04 has, let me add a ppa...
- Oh I never had tree-sitter CLI installed, no wonder syntax highlighting looked wonky...
git commit -m "add the new config to dotfiles, finally"
So, where was I?..
Nevkontakte shared a month ago
Nevkontakte shared 2 months ago
What if we ban computers from using kids instead?
Well, that's a first. I've dealt with slop pull requests before. Today for the first time I got a slop review in response to my pull requests.
Unachievenent unlocked
Nevkontakte shared 3 months ago
Nevkontakte shared 3 months ago
I feel like this whole Anthropic export ban thing should be a wakeup call to anyone outside the US that if you've been newly developing a dependency on a proprietary US cloud service the government could decide to restrict export access to at any moment, you've made a strategic error and should probably reconsider that.
Asciiticism is a digital lifestyle characterized by voluntary abstinence from using any unnecessary characters that weren’t present in the original ascii table.
I think 2038 would be a fine year for me to take a sabbatical.
Nevkontakte shared 3 months ago
After enough years in software, you learn that LGTM doesn't actually stand for "Looks Good To Me".
Only the pros know its real meaning:
"Looked. Got tired. Merged."
Nevkontakte shared 3 months agoGitHub Copilot got 25x more expensive over night.
I just felt a great disturbance in the force, as if millions of low-effort PRs suddenly cried out and were silenced.
Maintainers worldwide breathe a sigh of relief. Businesses are about to wake up to some very interesting invoices.
I wish YouTube supported word banlist for suggested videos. "Reacts to" would go straight on that.
Yes, there are a few informative videos where someone knowledgeable does an actual analysis of the thing, and shares useful information that isn't readily apparent in the original.
But the vast majority is just "ooooh" and "woooow" and "this is nuts" and rehashing the obvious.