Weeknotes 178

Blimey it’s cold!

The Christmas Present Buying Season once again reminds me why Amazon reigns supreme – delivery times from a lot of other companies are generally woeful. I understand that it must be nigh on impossible to compete with Amazon’s logistics, but a lot of places are just like “you’ll get it one day, probably”.

This is a good getting started with Bluesky post should you wish to subject yourself to more of the same.

If you have a folder in your macOS Dock did you know that you can open the folder directly in Finder by Opt + Cmd + clicking it? Neat!

Hat tip to ATP 🎩

Rails' Partial Features You (didn’t) Know – I didn’t know a lot of these points. Good article, but you could argue that there are too many ways to render partials, and actually a more explicit default would be better. Like a lot of the cool magic that draws people into Rails, we’d be better off without it. Probably.

This weeks I learnt about the new CSS function light-dark().

The light-dark() CSS function enables setting two colors for a property - returning one of the two colors options by detecting if the developer has set a light or dark color scheme or the user has requested light or dark color theme - without needing to encase the theme colors within a prefers-color-scheme media feature query.

Via Harry.

SQLite inside Postgres anyone?

Just when I thought I’ve seen it all, a PostgreSQL extension shows up that allows you to embed a SQLite database inside a table.

Get the best of both worlds 🤪

Black Friday got a hold of me and I ordered some Philips Hue gear. For the last fews weeks (since it’s been getting really dark at 4pm 😢) I’ve been thinking about lighting in my office. If I were a better typist this wouldn’t be a problem, but I’m not, so.

I bought a couple of light strips and a hub to experiment with. And, of course, I immediately installed Home Assistant because this is now going to become my life. I need something to fill it up with anyway.

And to immediately undermine my rant above about delivery times, fair play to Philips for delivering the goods to me quickly – within 2 days in fact. Maybe next though, they could send the items I bought rather than a random item I’ve never heard of. Keep trying guys.

Remix’s concurrent submissions are fundamentally flawed (without causal ordering) – always interesting from José.

My partner’s car was in for a service last week. These days a lot of main dealers send you a text with a report of issues they’ve found – how modern. You might have received one yourself. You can then review the items and accept or reject the work items.

Imagine our surprise when a basic service led to an “URGENT” work item (in red, no less) where they wanted to more or less replace the entire exhaust system because a hose had come lose.

This system, under the guise of modernity, seems to be in-place purely to scare the shit out of you so you panic click “Accept” and they make a nice premium on top. They back-tracked pretty quickly when we applied even the smallest amount of scrutiny, saying “I wouldn’t bother, it will be fine”.

I think we can safely file them under “Cheeky Fuckers”.

New community-maintained OTP builds for macOS – this is great. I’ve had trouble in the past with compiling new Erlang versions with all the niceties such as wx and observer, so having pre-compiled versions with everything built-in is excellent.

There’s already an asdf plugin too ✅

We went to see Ivo Graham on Wednesday, supported by Alex Kealy. Both acts were great. Being within walking distance of this sort of thing is one benefit of moving. Ivo also reminded me of LCD Soundsystem’s Dance Yerself Clean.

Make protocol errors pretty – A nice Elixir quality of life improvement for errors messages.

I’ve actually made some progress on my side project but it’s still been very little, which has resulted in the usual amount of shame, guilt, and disappointment.

A colleague was experiencing macOS kernel panic on their new MacBook Pro M4 when running rails server. I’ve never managed to kernel panic a Mac as long as I can remember, so this was very surprising indeed.

It seems to be an Apple issue though. They’ve fixed it in macOS Sequoia 15.2 Beta 4.

Fixed: Resolved an issue where running Ruby with YJIT enabled causes Mac with M4 chip to kernel panic. (139714575) (FB15774033)

I was surprised to see Apple explicitly mention Ruby in the release notes.

Via Simon Willison’s blog:

NuExtract 1.5. Structured extraction - where an LLM helps turn unstructured text (or image content) into structured data - remains one of the most directly useful applications of LLMs.

We had a brief discussion at work about how object-orientated our app Rails is. I don’t believe that most Rails apps are very object-orientated at all. Most Rails apps are Rails apps, not Ruby apps.

Object Constellations by Noel Rappin illustrates some proper OO techniques for removing conditionals. There are ups and downs, of course. Everything is a trade-off 🤪.

The gem linked in the article, null_associations, is a cool idea too.

Again, this might be my problem, but I think I would get push-back if I were to introduce a NullUser class into projects I’ve worked on, which is maybe a shame.