Mark T. Tomczak

Career software engineer living something approximating the dream he had as a kid.

homepage: https://fixermark.com
blog: https://blog.fixermark.com
GitHub: https://github.com/fixermark
BlueSky to Mastodon bridged account name: @mark.mastodon.fixermark.com.ap.brid.gy

Last Notes

2025-10-21 22:11:17 UTC

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Cool. That has already fallen out of my head but I'm glad it's in yours. 😉
Seriously though: bash is easier to use when I remember that Perl was trying, among other things, to be a better shell-style scripting language. So syntax like "we loop on a read command, the command you think of as getting keyboard input but is also just the command to dice up stdin" is entirely sensible from that era and not weird nonsense that mixes statement and expression context, because those contexts aren't precisely a *thing* in Bash. And I ignore that the approach is entirely different from the approach of looping over space-separated values in a variable, which is how I'd accomplish this task if it was a one-argument list of values instead of a two-argument list of values.
... but alternatively, if I do it in emacs I can gut-check the incremental steps of stream modification as I go and that feels way safer. I'm glad shell is there if I want a terse way to describe how to repeat the process though!

2025-10-21 21:08:42 UTC

"Oh man, I have to run this shell script on every pair of values in this CSV file. I know how to loop over one argument, but how do you loop over two in Bash?"
**The regular-brained way**<li>Look it up</li><li>Write a bash script to do it</li><li>Test it on a small sample of the file because you definitely messed it up on the first try</li><li>Run on the rest of the file</li>
**The emacs-brained way**<li>Copy file to a buffer</li><li>Split out the comma-separated values into space-separated values</li><li>Prefix every line with <code>script-name</code></li><li>Save as a Bash script and mark executable</li>
I'm sure there's a very lovely syntax in Bash for iterating over two-argument lists and I won't be learning it today.
#emacs

2025-09-26 20:01:55 UTC

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This may be the cynic in me talking, but I've had enough trouble getting a group of six people to decide where to eat that I'm highly skeptical of the masses endowing libraries.
I'm not saying it *couldn't* happen. I am saying there is a certain simplicity to the process of a captain of industry just deciding to devote a huge chunk of their fortune to philanthropy that you don't get out of a committee (for good or ill).
(And for the record, I'm still very much on team if-you-make-a-billion-dollars-your-marginal-tax-rate-should-go-to-100%, while at the same time not having *deep* faith that the money the government would get their hands on would go to a library and not, say, police drones).

2025-06-26 15:52:02 UTC

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(I'm now thinking of a special holiday where there's, like, an Earth-Jupiter or Earth-Saturn convergence and during that brief window you can shoot billionaires into the sun via a slingshot maneuver, as a treat ;) ).

2025-05-02 16:25:33 UTC

God, the CPB responding to Trump's EO trying to end their funding with "I'm sorry, who are you again?" is really sending me.
This is the energy I want in the room.

2025-05-01 15:24:46 UTC

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Sadly not physically. Much as I'd like to see them get yeeted out the front of the White House like Jazz in Fresh Prince.

2025-04-29 15:37:04 UTC

I gotta be honest, it's funny as shit to watch Bezos try to bend the arm of Trump by adding an "Onorato Tax" line to the Amazon purchase UI.
In the way it can be funny to watch two seals fight for the role of Beach Master.

2025-04-29 00:07:46 UTC

I rarely miss working for Google.
... but I will note, as I read this error in the commit-tests for this PR I wrote that says "That button on GitHub's UI? Never press it. This is the commit check to make sure you didn't press that button..."
Google's NIH syndrome is legendary, but one of the pros of it is that there is *always* someone to file an issue with to *remove that damn button* instead of having to work around it.
NIH is hell. Having to deal with everyone else's software and third-party integration pipes is also hell. Different circle.
#google

2025-03-28 19:59:16 UTC

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Interesting! In a sense, this is addressing the "color" problem by making every function potentially asynchronous.
I don't know enough about the history of how JavaScript arrived at aysnc to know why that wasn't their first solution. I can imagine two possibilities but the history of how we got here will be more illuminating than my speculation:
a) performance concerns, as you noted
b) predictability concerns. The "color" is annoying, but (not unlike lifetime guarantees in Rust) is serving as a guarantee: functions that aren't async have simple flow control, they either return or raise exception. Adding a third option to *every* function complicates reasoning about the code significantly ("when will console.log happen if any of the arguments to it could be a function that can await?").
There are other languages where that's how things work (orc comes to mind), but JavaScript historically doesn't and popping the lid on that behavior could let all the ghosts out.

2025-03-25 20:15:25 UTC

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Shit, that means the Fediverse is currently Gram-negative?
(... I'll go put myself in the corner).

2025-03-14 19:16:10 UTC

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I'm cautiously optimistic. Not 100% sure that's a good thing; as an American, I already think there are too many damn superpowers (we being one of them in the "too many" category) and I don't know humanity wants to be adding more.
... but if one has to fall and one has to rise, I'd rather it be Canada than anyone else. Y'all got the skill, you got the talent, you got the smarts, and even if people don't know it... you got the viciousness when you need to pull it up. I'm told some of the Geneva Conventions were specifically added due to a few "What the fuck, Canada?!" moments in WWII.

2025-03-11 17:48:30 UTC

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It makes me wonder how this impacts Google search results in the large, because way down in the stack for Google's ranking algorithm has always been CTR and click-bounce.
I have no idea if they're controlling for AI (and their own OneBox surfacing's) impact on those signals. Be interesting if that were one of the explanations for the perceived enshittification of search results.

2024-05-14 18:28:49 UTC

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I worked with a colleague at Google who's byphrase was "Don't optimize for the unusual case." Every time I hear about someone losing their account permanently and being lost in the labyrinthine halls of the recovery process that assumes a particular type of spherical point-like user, I think about the fact that he still works there and his philosophy is closer to the centroid of Google's philosophy on software than mine.
... anyway, a friend's parent got his Yahoo account compromised a little while ago, and he was able to reclaim it with one phone call. Someone at Yahoo checked the recent access logs, confirmed that it was obvious that someone had radically changed the access pattern of the account immediately after a password change, and *just reset the password back.* No muss no fuss.
So now I tell people to get a Yahoo account if they can.