Some call them homeless. The new nomads refer to themselves as ‘houseless’. Many took to the road after their savings were obliterated by the Great Recession. To keep their gas tanks and bellies full, they work long hours at hard, physical jobs. In a time of flat wages and rising housing costs, they have unshackled themselves from rent and mortgages as a way to get by. They are surviving America....
In Finland, the number of homeless people has fallen sharply. The reason: The country applies the “Housing First” concept. Those affected by homelessness receive a small apartment and counselling – without any preconditions. 4 out of 5 people affected thus make their way back into a stable life. And: All this is cheaper than accepting homelessness. Finland’s take on the homelessness problem is remarkable and gives hope. I live in a small town where the problem is not as apparent as in, say, San Francisco....
Today I learned how to remove a file from a git repository while also cleaning it from the history. When you delete it with git rm or git rm --cached, tracks remain in the commit history (the reflog). That might not be a big deal, but if the file has sensitive contents that you want to disappear from version control entirely, then you also want it cleaned from the reflog. That’s when git filter-branch comes to the rescue....
Like everyone else on the planet, I’ve been following GitHub Copilot since its launch. It is an impressive achievement and a remarkable milestone for the deep learning industry, that’s for sure. We are obviously at the early stages in deep learning applied to software development, and it is somewhat unsettling to ponder what the future might hold in this field. Like many others, however, I worry about code quality issues and the risk of license infringements1....
Volker Ullrich’s Eight Days in May describes the period from April 30, 1945, the day of Hitler’s suicide, to May 8, the day of signing the German capitulation, with significant jumps backwards in time and some hops in the future. We’re covering only eight days, and the dictator dies on day one. What essential events might ever have happened in such a short period? Well, many pivotal ones, as this well-researched work shows us....
Terrific piece by Jonathan Zittrain, on The Atlantic, on link rot and digital preservation. I love how well documented and informative it is. Yet, it remains perfectly approachable for both the non-knowledgeable reader and the technically savvy. Too much has been lost already. The glue that holds humanity’s knowledge together is coming undone. We need more content like this.
I couldn’t recall a tmux command, so I quickly reached for my trusted default search engine DuckDuckGo. I typed “tmux cheat sheet” because, well, once I found an excellent one which I wanted to summon again. To my surprise, the search result included an in-page cheat sheet—a good one too. It isn’t the first time that DuckDuckGo surprises me like that. Need a new GUID? Search for it. Need a quick QR code?...
A long-sought first draft of Marcel Proust’s ‘In Search of Lost Time’ surfaced a few years ago. Its fascinating story and intriguing news are revealed in a Tablet article titled Proust’s Madeleine Was Originally a Slice Toast. Being the Tablet “a daily online magazine of Jewish news, ideas, and culture”, it makes sense that a good part of the article focuses on Proust’s ambivalence about his Jewishness. Still, there are many other interesting tidbits to be learned....
I am pretty excited about the [Minimal APIs][3] feature that is coming with .NET 6. Three lines of code will be enough to build a fully functional REST microservice1: var app = WebApplication.Create(args); app.MapGet("/", () => "Hello World!"); await app.RunAsync(); If you’re a seasoned ASP.NET MVC/WebApi developer, the snippet caught your attention because, pre-.NET 6, achieving the same result will have you messing with a lot of extra cruft2. I suspect, however, that this feature is not primarily targeted at existing ....
Vera Gheno’s “Potere alle Parole” (Power to the Words) is an essay on the importance of appropriate use of the (Italian) language, not just in written works but also and predominately in everyday life. What would we think of a person who, having a vast wardrobe of beautiful clothes, always wore the same suit out of laziness? These situations appear unlikely; yet, they are examples of the attitude that many have towards their language: they have access to an immense, incalculable patrimony, which out of indolence, or fear, or inexperience, they use partially....