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Ruby on Rails has built-in support for managing uploaded files with ActiveStorage, which both cleans up your application code and acts as an abstraction over different storage backends. Azure Storage is one of the supported backends, but configuring it securely can take a little figuring out. The most sensible way I’ve found to have it configured is with files stored having no public access, but allowing temporary access via signed …

I’m evaluating the usability of GitHub merge queues under a set of conditions that makes merge queues hard: pull requests have a high probability of failing CI when merged together despite passing on their own. (Plus, GitHub’s implementation has like 11 different knobs, and the documentation is somewhat limited.) I could make a bunch of PRs on my own, but that’s boring, and I’m not good at finding edge cases …

WelcomeYesterday we played a show in the Great Hall of the Dominion Museum in Whanganui a Tara. I returned for the second day to Akin for breakfast, the café with a name that I still couldn’t think of a pun for but an establishment that I now trusted to provide me with the nutrition to get me through a day of travelling and performing. Moving into the savoury section of …

Let’s talk about the basic concept of the "making app". I’ve written about this before, and demoed it in some of my public project walk-throughs, but there’s no single straightforward explanation out there, so let’s take a swing. What is a "making app", and why might one want to roll one for a project? In […]

I recently took a trip to the Yukon (and two days in Alaska) with my partner Elaine. The trip was mostly hiking focused and generally enjoying the nature. We took almost two weeks which was a good amount of time for us. Enough to not rush and soak in a lot of nature but not so long that our legs really started hurting and we started missing the comforts of …

Back by popular demand, here are some AI-generated drawing prompts to use in this, the spooky month of October!Longtime AI Weirdness readers may recognize some of these. That's because this is a throwback list, all the way back to the times of very tiny language models. These models had not feasted on huge chunks of the internet, but had sipped delicately on hand-curated artisanal datasets. They trained rather slowly on …

I often think about writing a feature like writing a story. If I do my job well, it is coherent and easy to read, write, and maintain. When there's a lot of indirection, it feels like a book with its pages out-of-order. There seems to be a lot of similarities as well. We have readers, it just so happens that our readers are machines -- as well as our colleagues. …

There are two possible outcomes: if the result confirms the hypothesis, then you’ve made a measurement. If the result is contrary to the hypothesis, then you’ve made a discovery.—Enrico FermiReply via email or Mastodon.

In the San Francisco Bay Area, the regional transportation planning body, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC), has launched a major effort to improve the coordination between the region’s 27 transit agencies. One element of this, just unveiled, is a regional standard for transit network maps. The goal is to have all of the region’s maps evolve toward the same style, so that it’s easier to explore the entire region’s network. …

[There is a shortage of skilled tech workers in Japan](https://www.japantimes.co.jp/business/2024/02/06/tech/japan-tech-firms-labor-shortage/), and a growing number of Japanese companies have responded by building new, multinational development teams. An in-house multinational team, which typically uses English as a first language, can allow a Japanese company to take better advantage of the global talent market. But what's it like for the international developers working on those teams? Are there communication issues with management? Is …

I like Charlie Stross in general, I really enjoyed Accelerando, and many people talked positively about The Laundry Files, so I decided to give it a go. I like the universe, where unspeakable horrors exist and governments have secret departments in charge of keeping the world safe. I like this premise already. But it’s a well trodden trope, and what differentiates this from, say, Hellboy, or Man in Black§ is …

It finally seems to be happening. The old hotel I worked at is getting torn down. It seems weird to see it go. I wouldn’t have had this website without that hotel. Here is a link to the Beloit Daily News article about the place getting torn down.

Vincent Simonetti collected his first historic tuba - a ~1910 Cerveny BB-flat Helicon - in Boston in 1965, while playing tuba on tour with the Moyseev Ballet Company. Today the collection has grown to more than 350 tubas, and is now the largest private collection in the world that is dedicated exclusively to members of the tuba family. The collection entirely fills five rooms of a bright yellow house in …

Many things have been said about the Andromeda Galaxy, arguably the most majestic galaxy that amateur astronomers can image due to it's sheer size in the sky—many times larger than the Moon appears to us, but also many times dimmer.With the naked eye, even in dark skies it appears but a tiny little fuzzy patch. But once you start collecting those photons photographically with long exposures it comes to life.Total …