@ewhac

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Software engineer of a Certain Age, particularly with low-level and embedded systems, and device drivers. Closet extrovert.

(It's pronounced " 'eɪ.wæk ".)

All opinions expressed are solely my own, on my own behalf, and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.

Home Pagehttps://ewhac.org/
YouTube Channelhttps://www.youtube.com/c/ewhac
GitHubhttps://github.com/ewhac
yes  

Been mucking around with my Neovim config the last couple of days. I've been using the CoC framework for a few years, which was originally written for Vim, but activity there seems to be slowing as Neovim gets bigger mindshare. So I've been trying out LazyNvim and Mason together... Although it seems to me, if you need two separate plugin managers, something went wrong somewhere.

The hardest parts are A) selecting key mappings for all the functions; and B) remembering what they all are later.

Epilogue: Less than a day after reporting the bug to `npm`s maintainer, an update was pushed to Sid fixing the problem.

Yay!

The headline on this story is wrong. It should read, "Mark Zuckerberg Admits He Doesn't Know or Care What Happens at Meta."

Sub-head: "Also evidently doesn't do jack shit."

https://www.theverge.com/tech/910990/meta-ceo-mark-zuckerberg-ai-clone

Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly building an AI clone to replace him in meetings

Meta is working to build an AI version of its CEO Mark Zuckerberg, which he will use to interact with employees, according to a report from the Financial Times.

The Verge

(*weary sigh*)

Neovim has a popular addon called Mason, with which you can install other addons very easily. Except...

There were some addons it was failing to install: "Go look at this logfile for more info." (Narrator: There was no more info.)

After half a day of poking around and dropping printf()-equivalents inside Mason, I found the culprit: `npm init` in a bare directory errors out, sans clues -- not what it's supposed to do.

Obervation During Inebriation: Remember how Comcast whined and bitched that their peer points were being flooded with Netflix traffic (they weren't), and was making bank off of "their" subscribers? Remember how Comcast deliberately throttled Netflix until they agreed to the pay the ransom?

...Interesting that we haven't heard a peep out of ComXCastFinity, or indeed any of the CDNs, about the massive abusive traffic coming from the LLM companies.

RE: https://mastodon.online/@tomshardware/116365921116274137

If I were a manager at AAPL, I would have a rather sharp conversation with the engineer who checked this in, because it's such an obvious failure point: "Did you do the arithmetic? And if so, what made you think 49 days was long enough!?"

This chart Nate Silver made of the X accounts with the most engagement in 2026 seems like it might be useful to show decent orgs who resist moving their primary online presence off X. Is this really the company your org wants to keep?

https://www.natesilver.net/p/social-media-has-become-a-freak-show?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1198116&post_id=193285131&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=wabr&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

Thanks to the Anthropic code disclosure, we now know LLMs do exactly the same thing, only much faster.

This is not productivity. This is not engineering. This is, to coin a phrase, "Guessing at scale."

Ever watch a newcomer to programming write code? Too often, they're programming by auto-correct. They type a plausible-sounding function name, look at the fuzzy-find hovertext that pops up, pick something plausible, and see if it works. Rinse, repeat. A valid approach for a beginner, but let us not pretend that, at least at this stage, the coder actually *understands* what they're doing.

They're lab rats, poking the button until treats come out.