October 2024
Oct. 16, 2024
📝 I’m loving Rails Stimulus; check out this example. #
I’m working on a site that has a left column for navigation. Standard stuff. But I wanted a simple control that lets you hide and show the left column.
When I first started using Stimulus, I would create a left_column_controller.js. Within it, in the connect() and disconnect() methods I would add and remove listeners. It worked, but it was verbose and I wasn’t enjoying Stimulus. Later, I refactored all my stimulus controllers to extract common interactions. Now I finally “get” Stimulus and I’m loving it!
Oct. 18, 2024
🔗 The FTC is finally making it easier to cancel (#).
The US Federal Trade Commission is taking action against subscriptions that are difficult to get rid of. On Wednesday, it adopted a final “click-to-cancel” rule requiring businesses to make canceling a subscription as easy as signing up.
This is bad. It’s another small crack in the glory days of web and mobile startups. I’ve had my share of frustrating subscriptions that are hard to cancel, so I’m sympathetic to this. But anyone who has tried to start a retail business is aware of just how difficult it is to navigate a web of regulations to get your store open. Those regulations don’t come all at once, they’re added one “reasonable” regulation at a time, slowly strangling the startup ecosystem.
🔗 Kindle Scribe Review (#). I occasionally think about buying a Remarkable writing tablet. I tried it in the store and was pretty impressed. But I really like the idea of a single device that is both a Kindle reading device along with a digital notebook. I use my iPad almost daily for writing notes, reading books, and the other iPad stuff (email web). It works well enough for reading & writing, but I’d love to try this Kindle Scribe to see how much better it is at those two. Note to self: find a friend who has one.
🔗 Tips for terminal colors (via HN) # I increasingly prefer text user interfaces over graphical interfaces. As one example, I switched from the github GUI to lazygit TUI a couple years ago and love the speed and keyboard shortcuts. I think about converting a couple of my utilities to solid TUI so this may be helpful when figuring out colors.
🔗 A complete map of all neurons and the connections in a fruit fly (via HN) #
The brain contains 10^5 neurons and 10^8 synapses that enable a fly to see, smell, hear, walk and fly. Flies engage in dynamic social interactions18, navigate over distances19 and form long-term memories20. Portions of fly brains have been reconstructed from electron microscopy images, which have sufficient resolution to reveal the fine branches of neurons and the synapses that connect them. The resulting wiring diagrams of neural circuits have provided crucial insights into how the brain generates social21,22, memory-related23 or navigation24 behaviours.
I wonder how long it will be before we can run a complete simulation of this brain on silicon? Maybe there is missing information still such as the weight between neural connections.
🔗 John Carmack on Functional Programming (via HN) #
A large fraction of the flaws in software development are due to programmers not fully understanding all the possible states their code may execute in. In a multithreaded environment, the lack of understanding and the resulting problems are greatly amplified, almost to the point of panic if you are paying attention. Programming in a functional style makes the state presented to your code explicit, which makes it much easier to reason about, and, in a completely pure system, makes thread race conditions impossible.
A significant part of John Carmack’s intelligence is his ability to recognize the importance of having principles while not shunning pragmatic tradeoffs.