• 2 Posts
  • 506 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 24th, 2023

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  • Yes, I was shocked at how small it is. I had no experience working with such limited resources going into this project. Our router had 32MB of storage. At one point I was looked into adding a python interpreter, and it was like 11MB. The Lua interpreter is like 250KB. Tiny!

    Also, the ternary operator has the best syntax of any language I have ever used.

    x = [condition] and [true value] or [false value]

    No question marks or colons or anything weird. It’s a logical extension of && and || after commands in bash using keywords since it is a verbose language. I wish every language had this syntax.

    For contrast, python is:

    x = [true value] if [condition] else [false value]

    It just seems weird to me to have the condition in the middle.



  • I was the lead engineer on an Openwrt router for 2 years at my old job. Their documentation is complete and utter shit, but their design is extremely intuitive. Whenever I said to myself, “hell, let’s just try this and see if it works,” it had an insanely high success rate.

    I didn’t know Lua going into this project, but when I left the company, it made me really wonder why more people don’t use Lua. It’s a really nice language.

    I really enjoyed having my own open source router that I could just drop new features into by adding packages and recompiling. I was sad when I had to send all my dev units back.










  • It was accidental.

    So I started working at a startup right after I graduated college. They couldn’t pay a competitive wage, so they gave me a ton of stock. A year into working there, about half the company was laid off. I survived. They begged us not to leave the company by giving us more stock. I started interviewing elsewhere, because I have bills to pay, but I never got any other jobs. Then one day they handed me an envelope. It contained paperwork for even more stock. I thought it wasn’t going to be worth the paper it was printed on, so I kept looking for other jobs. Never found one.

    Well, a few years go by and the company starts doing very well. Then we got bought out. Suddenly all the worthless stock they gave me was worth a fuck ton of money. The buying company bought ALL of it. Even unvested shares. One day they wrote me a really, really big check, then I went and bought a house.

    It was absolutely life changing, and I tried to throw it away at every chance I got. I got so lucky.




  • Thank you for the explanation. I admittedly am a bit cautious about this feature. But I can see how it can be a powerful tool to prevent bullying.

    Hopefully we can trust our admins. But theoretically a bad actor could make an instance that federates with everyone and then takes this info and posts all the vote counts publicly for every post and every comment. And if we don’t know which instance is the one responsible, we wouldn’t be able to defederate from them to stop them from getting this info.

    Not that this feature is the cause of that. Admins could already do this with a db query. And I don’t think there is any way around that without making votes completely uncrackable. Just kind of thinking out loud.