Yep, shellcheck + syntastic in vim makes for a great bash "IDE".
https://github.com/vim-syntastic/syntastic looks like it is no longer maintained. Is there something more recent for syntastic?
Agreed WRT shellcheck.
Readit NewsHankB99 commented on Debugging Bash Like a Sire (2023) blog.brujordet.no/post/ba... · Posted by u/gfalcao
HankB99 commented on Make Your Own Backup System – Part 1: Strategy Before Scripts it-notes.dragas.net/2025/... · Posted by u/Bogdanp
Coincidentally the 2.5 admins podcast just published an episode on ZFS basics: Why ZFS https://2.5admins.com/2-5-admins-256/
ZFS relates to backups. In my case (among the many things I like about ZFS) is that it preserves hard links which I used to reduce the space requirements for my primary `rsync` backup but which `rsync` blew up copying to my remote backup. (Yes, there's a switch to preserve hard links but it is not sufficiently performant for this application.)
(Episode #256 which is a number that resonates with many of us. ;) )
Friendly reminder that the AARD code never shipped.
It shipped in the release version but was disabled according to a note on Wikipedia.
> Microsoft disabled the AARD code for the final release of Windows 3.1, but did not remove it so it could be later reactivated by the change of a single byte.
IIRC it did manage to make it into the PCs of some users - testers and early adopters?
/pedant
> Karoline Leavitt: “This alleged assessment is flat-out wrong and was classified as ‘top secret’ but was still leaked to CNN by an anonymous, low-level loser in the intelligence community. The leaking of this alleged assessment is a clear attempt to demean President Trump, and discredit the brave fighter pilots who conducted a perfectly executed mission to obliterate Iran’s nuclear program. Everyone knows what happens when you drop fourteen 30,000 pound bombs perfectly on their targets: total obliteration.”
All the juicy intel is right here in this press statement. The bombs struck bullseye and killed satire dead.
I'd like to emphasize "Everyone knows what happens when you drop fourteen 30,000 pound bombs perfectly on their targets" because I don;t and I suppose anyone not intimately familiar with this particular munition and the task to which it has been applied does either.
She's just bloviating which makes her the perfect mouthpiece for Trump.
HankB99 commented on Maximizing Battery Storage Profits via High-Frequency Intraday Trading arxiv.org/abs/2504.06932... · Posted by u/doener
Battery production rates are creeping up to multiple twh/year now. This is accumulating to a lot of battery sitting around in vehicles, domestic storage, grid storage, etc. Mostly the goal of these batteries of course isn't supporting the grid but some other use case. But if it's plugged in, it could potentially be available for selling power. Right now, most EVs can't contribute power. But that's something that is starting to change. Small experiments with thousands or tens of thousands of vehicles have already been done and seem to work fine. Now imagine tens of millions of vehicles being part of the grid. That's a serious amount of stand by power for absorbing excess power or dispatching power when needed.
Another interesting aspect is that as grid demand fluctuates, a lot of cables are under utilized at least some of the time. Which means there is plenty of capacity for charging batteries provided there is excess generation and cable capacity. A lot of that power currently gets discarded instead. Batteries allow better use of this excess power. And having a lot of local battery means that cable capacity can be freed up as well when needed and then recharged when demand reduces.
And then finally battery prices are coming down. With sodium ion cell production ramping up in several places, things could get quite a bit cheaper. These don't depend on scarce metals or materials. And they last quite long as well (relative to NMC).
> A lot of that power currently gets discarded instead.
How is power discarded? I would expect peaking generation to be cut back or perhaps even base load plants can reduce output. (AFAIK "base load" means they are expected to be kept operating continuously whereas "peaking" is designed to start up when needed and shut down when not.)
HankB99 commented on How the United States Gave Up Being a Science Superpower steveblank.com/2025/05/13... · Posted by u/enescakir
Very true, among them:
- Nuclear energy
- Internet & GPS
- Numerous medical advancements (rapid medical response techniques, advanced trauma care, etc.)
It's a dual-edged sword.
> sword
I'm not sure if this was intentional or not, but I bet a fair bit of metallurgy was learned producing a better sword.
HankB99 commented on Persuasion methods for engineering managers newsletter.manager.dev/p/... · Posted by u/Liriel
As a former freelance graphic designer I also had to think about Cialdini, but his book "Presuation".
You don't want to manipulate anybody, but man are customers stupid sometimes (cue "clients from hell"). E.g. a pattern I noticed was that especially self-important customers always wanted to change "something" if presented with one draft — not because that change made sense, but because they felt the need to be in control. And if you know that is going to happen irrespectively you might as well just control the context within which it happens.
This is why I switched to presenting multiple drafts after each other with the first one being the "lightening rod draft". This way all the self-importance could be channeled there and they would (empirically) be far less likely to make destructive proposals on the later drafts which they then also liked more.
That is certainly manipulation. But manipulation done with the intent of saving customers from making stupid choices that fall back on me after a while, because of in the heat of moment paychological needs. If I was someones customer I'd like them to do the same for me.
If someone really didn't like all drafts I'd recalibrate and figure out what they want, I can be wrong and my ideas are not holy. But if you hired me, it was very likely that I know more about the craft than you did.
> customers always wanted to change "something" ...
> multiple drafts after each other with the first one being the "lightening rod draft".
This reminds me of something I learned in a developmental psychology class (many) years ago. It reflects the "terrible twos" when the toddler learns they can disagree with their parent and answer almost any question "No!" in order to exercise their newfound power.
The suggestion in the class was to phrase questions in a manner to give the toddler a choice between two reasonable options rather than a yes/no query. For example "Do you want to play inside or go outside?" rather than "Do you want to go outside?" [1]
It seems that the choice could be manipulative or could offer reasonable options depending on how it is cast. (Of course there is a continuum between the two.)
[1] Our two boys never wanted to go outside and play but once outside, didn't want to come back in, claiming "Do we have to? We're just starting to have fun."
HankB99 commented on Man pages are great, man readers are the problem whynothugo.nl/journal/202... · Posted by u/WhyNotHugo
Will I be struck down or downvoted into oblivion if I mention man2html? Definitely not light weight since it also installs Apache, but I do like to view man pages in the browser. I think 'python3 -m http.server' could be substituted for the server and perform well enough for a single user system.
It's unfortunate that Markdown isn't better standardized so it could be extended to better meet the needs for man pages. (Do we need a new standard to rule them all? Yes, I'm thinking of the XKCD comic.)
HankB99 commented on Federal cuts disrupt repairs to iconic U.S. trails apnews.com/article/pacifi... · Posted by u/geox
Brookings Institute has a good plot showing how much federal spending is being cut by this administration:
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/tracking-federal-expendit...
Turns out all the cuts are only a fraction of a percent of the federal budget. It's an ideological purge, nothing to do with efficiency at all.
The budget for the NPS is so small that if they shut it down, the effect on the deficit would be too small to measure. But someone would still need to manage those properties so it would be "necessary" to sell them off to private interests.
I really hope that's not going to happen, but that fits with strangling the parks for the necessary resources needed to operate. (And then mandating that they remain open.)
I have literally been doing we development since their was a web, and the companies I developed for are openly hostile to the idea of putting their valuable, or perceived valuable, information online in a format that could be easily scraped. Information doesn't want to be free, it wants to be paid for. Unless the information shared pulls visitors to the site it doesn't need to be public.