vogelke

If you can suppress your gag reflex, M4 can do some of what you want. sinclude(...) will include a file and be silent in case of failure. I did something like this for user-login history because I couldn't use PHP or Perl:

    me% cat index.m4
    <!DOCTYPE html>
    <html>
      <head>
        <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
        <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
        <title>Better user history</title>
        <link rel="stylesheet" href="local.css">
      </head>

      <body>
          <h3>Users</h3>
          <ul>
            <li><em>By username</em></li>
            <ul>
    sinclude(`byuser.m4')dnl
            </ul>
            <li><em>By last login date</em></li>
            <ul>
    sinclude(`bydate.m4')dnl
            </ul>
          </ul>
    sinclude(`footer.m4')dnl
      </body>
    </html>

    me% cat byuser.m4
    <li><a href="byuser/A-L">A-L</a></li>
    <li><a href="byuser/M-Z">M-Z</a></li>

    me% cat bydate.m4
    <li><a href="bydate/2025">2025</a></li>
    <li><a href="bydate/2026">2026</a></li>

    me% cat footer.m4
    <p><em>Last update: syscmd(`date | tr -d "\n"')</em>

    me% m4 index.m4 > index.htm

    me% cat index.htm
    <!DOCTYPE html>
    <html>
      <head>
        <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
        <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
        <title>Better user history</title>
        <link rel="stylesheet" href="local.css">
      </head>

      <body>
          <h3>Users</h3>
          <ul>
            <li><em>By username</em></li>
            <ul>
    <li><a href="byuser/A-L">A-L</a></li>
    <li><a href="byuser/M-Z">M-Z</a></li>
            </ul>
            <li><em>By last login date</em></li>
            <ul>
    <li><a href="bydate/2025">2025</a></li>
    <li><a href="bydate/2026">2026</a></li>
            </ul>
          </ul>
    <p><em>Last update: Mon Oct 12 03:08:32 EDT 2026</em>
      </body>
    </html>

1. Price tracking over time.

2. MPG tracking by brand -- I get about 1.5 MPG better with BP.

Lovely.

+1. One of my favorite quotes:

No one hates so bitterly as the lazy and poor contemplating the energetic and prosperous. --Dale Worley

> in, say, two years, we will be all writing and talking like this

Shoot me now.

If they can't justify why this is a bug, and why it's worth your time to fix this as opposed to something else, you should be able to revoke their permission to touch your backlog.

This is perfect.

Since AI makes it easier for incompetent people to look smart, AI can help us expose those people for what they are.

By checking the diffs carefully, you're showing how to use an LLM to add value instead of creating a 17000-line PR that nobody with any sense will read.

LLMs are really good at making it harder to ignore ignorant people, and you've demonstrated that you're NOT part of the problem.

This is right on the money. It's not that we have way more bad engineers than before; it's that the damage they do is out of all proportion to their numbers.

> I can't give them any sort of answer that makes sense ...

Pride of workmanship. For those who understand, no answer is needed. For those who don't, no answer will work.

> ...management is making strategic decisions after snorting a long line of social-media-psychosis and TED talks.

+1. Straight into my quotes file.

I love this. Straight into my quotes file.

Matt Stoller has written some excellent articles about Ticketmaster's monopoly crap.

Probably. As an American, I have to agree with you -- it's been the case for many years (WAY before Trump) that within 50 miles of our border, your rights go to wherever last year's snow went.

It's too bad so few people can say "My country, if right to be supported, if wrong to be corrected."

I have a Dell 2208 monitor with 4 USB-2 ports. If I bought three of these switches, would I be able to share keyboard/mouse/monitor between two machines? My monitor does not have HDMI, just VGA.

Best part about open source -- Mercurial is still around, I use it for my home servers, and it's being maintained. I can use git, but Mercurial's workflow just makes more sense to me.

The "Demon Seed" book was creepier (and a lot more pervy) than the movie.

I hope you're kidding. I've seen lots of 'Net people claim to be experts, and I wouldn't trust most of them to feed my cat.

https://lwn.net/Articles/343828/ describes Alan Cox trying to fix the TTY layer, being trashed by Linus, and removing himself from the maintainer page.

Exactly. Legal drugs get weaker because you can exchange information about minimum required dosages (saving money) without risking arrest.

Illegal drugs get stronger for exactly the reason you stated in your first paragraph.

> It's a one lane road and "over taking" is not possible.

Best poop-related comment I've seen.

Your core skills are fine. Unfortunately, appreciation for those skills has already been blasted into orbit by the AI-BS bubble.

This tech has made it easier for second-handers to pass off inadequate work as the equal of your work. They're too lazy to exert the effort to read/think/write, and being second-handers, they're fine with the APPEARANCE of reading, thinking, and writing.

This has been going on for millenia, and the only fix I've seen is to call it out every time it rears its head.

Thank you for this article. If I want to be told when to upgrade, I know where to shop, i.e. Bill's Bloatware in Redmond.

Great example of a commonplace book. Jillian Hess has written extensively about this -- her books are well-researched and organized.

I've read at least 8 articles this week about LLMs having massive hallucinations/brain-farts when writing testbeds for code. Unfortunately, the author didn't see the problems until he tried adding a test; then he had a huge WTF moment.

The fact that the LLM you mention gave good answers is probably more a reflection of YOUR documentation than any particular "brilliance" on the LLM's part.

If I treated reading like a chore, it would start to feel like a chore.

I'm not being graded. If I start a book and I don't care about the subject or the characters after 50-100 pages or so, it goes in my Goodwill pile. The only decent exception to that for me is Stieg Larsson -- his "Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" books take their time getting started without being boring.

> I don't think I've ever seen a school essay back then that wasn't obviously written by a parent.

That's when you discuss the essay with the kid, and if he can't understand something that presumably he wrote, immediate consequences. First time == suspension, second time == removal from that class.

I'd recommend the book "Beautiful Code: Leading Programmers Explain How They Think". Published by O'Reilly, ISBN-10 ‏ : 0596510047

> millions of victims from false advertising of Big Tobacco

People have known that smoking is bad for your health for around 400 years. You can't fix stupid, not even by making advertising illegal.

I use it for two things:

* saving webpages as text with the links nicely organized at the bottom, and

* calling it from mutt (MUA) to display HTML parts of mail messages.

It works great and it's consistent.