Weeknotes 96

“Why ChatGPT Won’t Replace Coders Just Yet”

The “bullshit” problem turns up in code, too

For a while now I’ve experienced compilation issues when installing new Erlang versions with asdf. Which is annoying because I often want to quickly try out some of the new improvements to the Elixir ecosystem and ending up in a ./configure debugging session is no fun.

After digging in a bit it seems that the Erlang configure step thinks that this machine is x86_64, which it isn’t. I’m fairly sure this is down to me using Rosetta 2 (x86 emulation) when I set everything up. Back when I got this machine there were various teething issues, also compilation related, with getting my Ruby projects up and running, so I setup iTerm is be run under Rosetta and everything started working.

However, I think now is the time to start anew and remove any emulation. A lot of Ruby issues have been ironed out, and it might just fix my Erlang problems too. Watch this space.

Did you know you can find out whether a file starts with a BOM by using xxd and seeing what the first three bytes are?

xxd -l 3 -p path/to/file

If they are efbbbf then you have found a BOM.

Why, yes. I have been reading The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!). Again.

I listened to The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling audio documentary. The fact that I hesitated to even include that fact here should give you an idea of just how contentious the issue is.

Some feedback on a recent PR of mine prompted a small investigation into how the default ordering of records works with ActiveRecord. So a reminder.

A standard order(name: :asc) is going to order like this.

Annabel
Barry
Christoph
annabel

Using SQL with LOWER like order("LOWER(name) ASC") is going to get you something more sensible in most cases.

Annabel
annabel
Barry
Christoph

If you change the column datatype to citext you get something different again.

annabel
Annabel
Barry
Christoph

Which is correct depends on you 😉

I know a previous colleague, and current friend, suggested in the past that all email columns, in particular, should be citext to save the constant calls to String#downcase or LOWER(field) before comparison. I think there’s something in that.

Smartphones With Popular Qualcomm Chip Secretly Share Private Information With US Chip-Maker

This is possible because the Qualcomm chipset itself sends the data, circumventing any potential Android operating system setting and protection mechanisms.

🔥 This is fine 🔥