Worse-Is-Better

Today I released a dump of six months of flashcards I autogenerated from my tiny Finnish news archive to make the lives of my fellow language learners easier. The actual code which generates this archive is about 300 lines of Python . The basic value add for the user: What you want: Better fluency in Finnish. What you need: Practice. Lots of it. What this gives you: GOTO 2. This is emphatically not the kind of product, or use case, I would stumble upon as a brain-in-the-vat developer....

A while back I stirred up some controversy on Hacker News by talking about why I liked it when tutorials take you from clean VM to working, installed software. I’ve since taken to calling this the “tutorial-in-a-box” method. When I write them myself, I usually put them under the header Slowstart, a riff on the proverbial Quickstart. Two examples: A gentle introduction to reposurgeon. The Slowstart for selkokortti, some flashcard generating software based around my Finnish language news archive....

tmux (short for “terminal mux” (short for “multiplexer”)) is i3 for your terminal. Oh, it’s so much more than that, and I recently discovered with some joy that it is installed by default on OpenBSD, but its fundamental value add to any programmer who has to SSH into servers more than once a week is it allows you to split your screen up into multiple independent shells without needing a graphical environment at all....