Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Kevin Menard @nirvdrum.bsky.social · 10d

Saying he’s arguing is bad faith is not the same thing as saying he’s wrong or misinformed. It’s a bold value judgment you’re making about him, publicly, without any evidence. The time to seek clarification is before you declare someone is arguing in bad faith.

1 2

Kevin Menard @nirvdrum.bsky.social · 10d

Yet another example of why auto-upgrading to the latest version of every library in the name of security is a farce developers created because “convenience” often isn’t a winning argument. Ideally you’d vet every upgrad. Sadly, that’s inext to impossible in JS land.

www.koi.security/blog/postmar...

First Malicious MCP in the Wild: The Postmark Backdoor That's Stealing Your Emails | Koi Blog

www.koi.security

1

Kevin Menard @nirvdrum.bsky.social · 20d

Arguing against self-hosting because a SaaS company will handle security better vastly misunderstands how little security is a concern for an MVP. It’s rarely addressed while a startup seeks product market fit. The engineers slinging code have no security background. And LLMs aren’t going to fix it.

Kevin Menard @nirvdrum.bsky.social · 22d

Running native extensions in parallel is a huge performance boost. Running a large internal Rails application, we saw performance roughly double. Very workload dependent, of course, but all of the major DB adapters are implemented as native extensions.

We also added support for the blake3-rb gem.

3 6

Reposted by Kevin Menard

JetBrains @jetbrains.com · Sep 2

Exciting news for Ruby and Rails developers!

RubyMine is now FREE for non-commercial use! It joins the list alongside WebStorm, Rider, CLion, and RustRover, allowing you to learn, develop your open-source and hobby projects, and create content for FREE.

Learn more: jb.gg/tqov3b

4 23

Kevin Menard @nirvdrum.bsky.social · Aug 22

Ticketmaster is killing it with these recommendations.

1

Kevin Menard @nirvdrum.bsky.social · Aug 5

I shut Mogoterra down in 2009 and at that time the company was better known as Mogotest. I very much doubt there were 35 searches for it on LinkedIn this week.

2

Kevin Menard @nirvdrum.bsky.social · Aug 3

Is there any game that benefits from having two sets of Joy-Con 2? I have Switch 1 Joy-Cons and Pro controllers. I’ll get the Joy-Con 2 now if beneficial, otherwise I’ll probably wait for models with a different design.

1

Kevin Menard @nirvdrum.bsky.social · Aug 1

What are the margins on the Switch, Switch Lite, and Switch OLED?

Price increases aside, it’s never been a better time to buy used. Lots of people that upgraded to Switch 2 don’t have much use for an original Switch. I’m seeing OLED models, including special editions, going for $105 around me.

2 1

Kevin Menard @nirvdrum.bsky.social · Jul 31

This is a team effort. Third parties could produce full game cards but are choosing not to. Maybe that shouldn’t be a choice they can make. I’m a bit surprised retailers went along with this. It seems to be a deliberate attempt to push digital purchases.

4

Kevin Menard @nirvdrum.bsky.social · Jun 14

It’s really quite sad how quickly we went from fretting over 50 - 100ms in front-end code to letting React and Cloudflare add seconds to page load. And then for the hell of it we decided to trash privacy because Cloudflare made blocking any VPN other than theirs a one-click process.

1 4

Kevin Menard @nirvdrum.bsky.social · Jun 4

I hope LLMs can one day automate the generation of useful changelogs and allow us to destroy the scourge of Conventional Commits.

Kevin Menard @nirvdrum.bsky.social · Jun 4

This is going to sound nitpicky, but I’m legitimately curious: is this an editor approved usage of “agnostic”? I’ve been trying to figure out if “agnostic” should’ve been “indifferent” in most software contexts but someone mixed them up and it’s snowballed (like HTML shivs).

1

Kevin Menard @nirvdrum.bsky.social · Jun 4

I have LLMs using two hyphens and it’s driving me nuts.

2

Kevin Menard @nirvdrum.bsky.social · Jun 3

Please let me know how you like the machine. I’ve been looking at getting a Minisforum machine for a little arcade and/or pinball project.

1

Kevin Menard @nirvdrum.bsky.social · Jun 3

I’m already in the Unifi system and am generally happy with it, so I don’t want to have hybrid equipment.

And, yeah, I have a TrueNAS SCALE server. But, what’s driving it is my new workstation motherboard has integrated 5 Gbps. It’d be great if I could use it without having a 10 Gbps copper LAN.

1 1

Kevin Menard @nirvdrum.bsky.social · Jun 2

It's rather annoying that Ubiquiti skips right over 5 Gbps. I appreciate 10 Gbps over copper is doable now, but it's not power efficient and I'm somewhat concerned it'll burn down my house. Running fibre throughout and replacing all my switches for SFP+ will be ungodly expensive.

1

Kevin Menard @nirvdrum.bsky.social · May 25

Issues like this are why I loathe "stale" issues:

github.com/linuxserver/...

It's not resolved, despite messaging to that effect. Community members were trying to help each other out, but that conversation is now shut down. And for what? So a project can juice its issue close rate?

Support for physically connected USB devices · Issue #58 · linuxserver/docker-calibre

Desired Behavior Allow a user to plug-in their Kindle or e-reader device via USB Allow a user to upload files directly to connected device Steps Start docker with: --privileged -v /dev/bus/usb:/dev...

github.com

1

Kevin Menard @nirvdrum.bsky.social · May 14

Do we know if any of the international cartridges will have the whole game? I’ve picked up a few games from Play Asia that were digital-only or semi-digital (e.g., FF X and FF X-2) in North America but were standalone cartridges elsewhere.

1

Kevin Menard @nirvdrum.bsky.social · Apr 27

It’s a little sad to me that I haven’t written anything with ExtJS in a decade and no UI component framework has come out since that’s competitive. I’ve seen 17,000 different ways to render tabs but hardly any toolkits include a Tree component. And nothing comes close to ExtJS’s Grid component.

Kevin Menard @nirvdrum.bsky.social · Apr 25

@stuffwithstuff.com I’m going through “Crafting Interpreters” again with a book club at work. One thing I’ve noticed is the Java code would be a lot easier to manage with newer Java functionality like pattern matching switches and records for data classes, should you ever do a 2nd edition.

1 2

Kevin Menard @nirvdrum.bsky.social · Apr 25

No. Is there a list worth following? I followed a few accounts doing hardware mods on retro consoles back on Twitter, but haven’t managed to fill that niche here or on Mastodon.

Thanks for sharing, by the way.

1 1

Kevin Menard @nirvdrum.bsky.social · Apr 24

It’s time to part with some more computer books. A couple of these I’ve had since high school.

I have digital copies of the Manning books, which is nice, but outside of using them for reference I vastly prefer the tactile experience of a real book. They’re much easier on my eyes, too.

Kevin Menard @nirvdrum.bsky.social · Apr 24

One of these days I either want to build a SNES emulator or write something for it. Outside of some fiddling around with Godot I don’t do game development, but the SNES holds a special place in my heart. Learning its architecture would be fun.

2 1

Kevin Menard @nirvdrum.bsky.social · Apr 24

NES development? Or something else?

I used to do some Z80 on my TI calculator.

1 1