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Today in #FreeSoftwareAdvent it's lynx(1).

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  • Today in it's lynx(1). Which is amusing because it's been scheduled for today on my calendar since the beginning of the month, but @neil chose to share links(1) today as well, for many of the same reasons. 😆

    It's been around for decades—I used it to browse gopherspace (and maybe WAIS?) in the 90s via a 1200 baud dial-up connection to a shell account and later the nascent WWW when it arrived.

    Sadly, ClownFlare, Google, and anti-AI-bot/scraper tech has made many formerly-accessible-with-lynx sites now inaccessible, some blocking by User-Agent, some blocking due to the lack of JavaScript support.

    But it has the right amount of usability and friction, so I can use it from my command-line-only writer-deck netbook to do a little research or read some HTML documentation, without getting sucked into the modern web.

    My custom configuration puts it in Advanced mode (no help-bar at the bottom), specifies vi-key-bindings, a custom color-scheme, uses links-and-form-fields-are-numbered making it easy to jump to them, and text-fields-require-activation so I don't get stuck in text input boxes when using j/k to scroll up/down in the document.

    I also have a couple shell wrapper-functions to invoke lynx on particular URLs (Wikipedia, dictionary/thesaurus/rhyming resources, web search, etc) with the CLI arguments filled in.

    I also have mutt configured to show text/html messages in lynx (either using `lynx -dump` and the internal pager, or using `m` from the attachments menu to view it interactively)

  • stefano@mastodon.bsd.cafeundefined stefano@mastodon.bsd.cafe shared this topic on

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  • @rubenerd @exchgr also, note that weather app has all the things I probably wouldn't have bothered doing on a small throwaway project because they're tedious: Good test coverage, every static analysis option possible, nice packaging and automatic deployment to the server when tagging a release via Github actions. All that would have taken me days to write by hand, even though that's exactly the kind of stuff I do every day at work, versus a few minutes of prompting and occasionally correcting.

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  • @aeva ahh I see, makes more sense knowing about swipe. I never did figure that out myself, heh.

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  • @rubenerd @exchgr I could have built the weather app in...maybe 3x-4x the time it took? But, I probably wouldn't have, because I didn't want it three or four times more than that amount of effort.

    I've got two other much larger projects that haven't really launched yet, that have also taken remarkably less time than I would have required doing it myself.

    I hate being "rah rah AI", but I'm not going to lie on the internet about it when I know it's gotten really good at writing code.

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  • @johnlogic I’d remove the AA and the “just classes” from education. If you’re concerned about gaps, you already call it “career impact” so it doesn’t have to be complete.

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  • @GhostOnTheHalfShell

    By posting on here, tapping into my social network is exactly what I'm trying to do.

    I've heard that weak ties can be the most powerful, especially when job seeking.

    I also have a pretty extensive professional network, as I volunteer for the world's largest technical professional organization, IEEE.

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  • @rubenerd @exchgr I was dragged into it by my employer, as I like having health insurance, but it works. Over the holidays I built a bunch of stuff (an absurd amount of stuff), more working code than I've ever written in such a short time in my life. I wanted a weather app without ads, so I built one in a couple of hours. https://wthr.lol/ (And, if you're curious about code quality, it's here: https://github.com/swelljoe/wthr.lol )

    I've used it to find bugs in huge projects and build from scratch.

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  • @aeva *it turns out, sometimes the juice is not worth the squeeze

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  • @rubenerd @exchgr yeah, I read all the studies and felt quite smug about AI, as well. And, then I actually built some stuff and found some bugs with current gen frontier models, and my priors were upended.

    I'm not saying I like it, as it's going to cause a tremendous amount of disruption, and not in a good way, given who holds every leadership position in government and industry right now. But, I simply can't pretend it doesn't work, anymore, because I've seen it with my own eyes.

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    Today in #FreeSoftwareAdvent I'm thankful for the BSD projects, particularly FreeBSD & OpenBSD. Nothing against NetBSD or DragonflyBSD, I just haven't found a regular use-case for them in my day-to-day.I recently wrote upš why/how I ended up on a mix of FreeBSD & OpenBSD after a long tenure with Debian since it drifted from the Unixy principles² I loved and grew up with.⸝š https://blog.thechases.com/posts/why-bsds/² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy
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    Though a bit niche, my #FreeSoftwareAdvent today is ed(1). As the goofball behind @ed1conf, I certainly play it up, but I certainly use it more than the average Unix/BSD/Linux user.A while ago I wrote up list of reasons¹ why one might use ed, and some are more obscure/improbable reasons (though I've encountered all of them in that post), there are a couple of those that drive me back to ed regularly:• I can still see the output of previous commands on the screen while I edit, where a full-screen editor would obscure that output that I need to incorporate in my edit• it's just darn fast for a quick edit, changing a variable name or adding/removing an entry in a list, etc. No startup costs for a honkin' huge $VISUAL with dozens of plugins and language-server processes and GUI rendering• very usable on low-bandwith/high-latency connections like I sometimes get when I remote into machines (less of a problem now, but I still experience sessions where I'll SSH in, invoke ed, make the change, write & quit, and exit the shell, in a couple seconds, while the screen repaints things oh-so-slowly• and most importantly, there's quality geek-cred for using it in front of others 😆⸻¹ https://blog.thechases.com/posts/cli/why-ed1/
  • Today it's awk(1)

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    Today it's awk(1)I use it almost daily—from simple column-extraction (specifying column separators and mashing together various columns feels easier with awk than with sort(1)), to summing and running totals, to aggregating counts of data, to reformatting text, etc…so many little uses pop up.It's available on every POSIX platform making it easy to write cross-platform utilities without having to install additional run-times like Python/Ruby/Node and the heavy dependencies that come with them.I've even written cgi-bin/ scripts in awk, allowing dynamic data processing on my stock OpenBSD systems with httpd+SlowCGI without non-stock software in the chroot.https://blog.thechases.com/categories/awk/#FreeSoftwareAdvent
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    Kicking off #FreeSoftwareAdvent (thanks, @neil), I'll open with remind(1)While it took several articles and a couple attempts before I switched over to using it, once you taste the power of what it can do, it's hard to go back to less-capable calendaring tools.While the classic "garbage day is on Thursday unless there was a holiday earlier in the week, in which case it moves back to Friday" scenario is a nice little demo of its power, one of the best examples from my daily use is the kids' school calendars:• the teen has an A/B schedule which doesn't mesh nicely with calendar days, week-days, etc• similarly, our elementary-age kiddo has a 4-day cycle schedule for her "specials" classBut remind's nonomitted() function makes quick work of both of those, taking into consideration weekends, the school holidays, and using PUSH/POP directives for high-school testing days that impact his A/B schedule but not her 4-day cycle. I've never encountered another calendar that handled all the edge-cases with so little effort.It's a little rocky interchanging with other calendars (you have to use rem2ics to create .ics files to share, and pulling in others' iCal is non-trivial and doesn't seem to maintain the fidelity of remote events).But otherwise, this runs a great deal of my life schedule.