The-Medium-Is-the-Message

Imagine you had the Most Complicated Program On Earth (MCPOE), with 1,000,000 dependencies. Every dependency must be build correctly exactly right or the MCPOE will fail to compile. MCPOE’s 10x dev team chose their packages so that each dependency has only a 1/1,000,000 chance of having something go wrong when you’re installing them - maybe a whitespace character snuck into the wrong build script, maybe solar wind hit the build computer....

The law of diminishing returns needs no introduction. Your second slice of pizza is less satisfying than your first. Your second million dollars is less valuable to you, personally. If you think econ 101 has any life wisdom to impart, it deserves being elevated to the status of “life heuristic” - especially because, unlike some other concepts in econ 101 (comparative advantage anyone?) it feels true in a boring way, not in an actively counterintuitive way....

Here’s a secret. If you have Vagrant and VirtualBox installed, and your colleague does too, then you can both bring up an near-totally identical blank slate Debian 12 Linux VM by running 1 2 3 4 5 6 mkdir tutorial/ cd tutorial/ vagrant init debian/bookworm64 vagrant up vagrant ssh . This works regardless of whether you or they are on Linux, Mac1, BSD, or even Windows. (Through the magic of aliasing, mkdir and cd even work in PowerShell....

Shell Bling Ubuntu and finstem now have what I’m calling “speed paints” of how someone, starting from scratch on a standard Ubuntu VM, might install the programs. This came out of me realizing ffmpeg makes speeding up a video recording of a VirtualBox session a one-line operation: 1 ffmpeg -i output.webm -filter:v "setpts=0.1*PTS" -an output-fast.webm When I watched them back, I realized it gave me a really good sense of what the installation should feel and look like, even if I hadn’t actually tried it yet....

Recommendations appreciated. Disclaimer: Most of these make little sense in an Internet medium anyway. An index. An index simply lists the terms and topics discussed in a document, along with the pages they are listed on. A glossary. Could be as simple as a CSV file of terms and definitions, or as complex as a whole extra glossary/ folder. Related: A “Acronyms and Abbreviations” section. Even moreso than the last, this could be a simple CSV....