mlcastle

This is a tumblr. I don't know what it is for.

[mlcastle]

[laughterkey]

All my binheads know what's good.

[mlcastle]

How to remove a CDK resource referenced across stacks

Suppose you have a stack A which contains some resource used by stack B, and that you no longer need this resource. Here is how you can get rid of it:

Remove all uses of the resource from stack B. In stack A, force the resource to continue being exported by writing

this.exportValue(this.resource.property);

Deploy.

Now, and only now, you can safely remove the resource (and associated export) from stack A.

Deploy again.

That's it!

[mlcastle]

[mlcastle]

I gave a talk at Droidcon NYC this year about our experiences using React Native to build and launch a new mobile app in just a few months.

[ragingrougarou]

[mlcastle]

a selected list of things you can buy in the international terminal of Bogotá airport

Juan Valdez brand coffee

A mug saying (in English) “It's Colombia, not Columbia”

Columbia Sportswear brand clothing

[mlcastle]

"Smash the State: an introduction to functional programming and the actor model" is an article that somebody really ought to have written by now.

[poison-liker]

god. everything about this. the misplaced eye. the gradient abuse. the fucked up mouth-neck zone. the misproportioned head. the lumpy legstumps. the poorly tessellated shell.

this smug piece of shit killed my son and now it’s taunting me. i hate it.

[mlcastle]

Dark times are indeed afoot for the Google emoji animals. Quite a fall in the official rankings.

[mlcastle]

The New York Times is known to moderate the comments on their website, requiring human moderators to individually approve each comment before it is posted. And, according to an individual with knowledge of the comment moderation operations, in addition to spam, profanity, and ad hominem attacks, the Times prohibits spreading conspiracy theories. So, like, you can't rant that the news of the day was actually secretly created by the illuminati. Fine.

But! There's a problem now: our President-elect is busy spinning conspiracy theories. And it would be unfair to prohibit commenters from spreading the theories that the soon-to-be-President spreads.

Apparently, the Times' editors decided then to give the President a magical power where he can admit nonsense theories into the permitted discourse. So, you're allowed now in the comment sections to say that three million undocumented immigrants voted in the election, if that's a thing that for some reason you want to say. But, the editors also decided, you're not allowed to present any evidence for these theories, because there isn't any evidence, because the theories are totally made-up. So, you're not allowed to say, for example, that you saw three million undocumented immigrants go to the polls, because you didn't.

Welcome to America in 2017, everybody.

[fuckyeahanarchistcats]

Bite back

[nprfreshair]

Critics always want to make the next generation seem more alien than it actually is, like anthropologists reporting back from a field trip to Youngster Island.

Geoff Nunberg, linguist 

Irked By The Way Millennials Speak? ‘I Feel Like’ It’s Time To Loosen Up

(via nprfreshair)

[mlcastle]

Engineering Reliability

Sometimes my colleagues and I discuss ways to make computer systems seem reliable despite the fact that computers are actually unreliable. A suggestion that often comes up is to put some kind of fancy retry logic into mobile clients, and I almost always try to dissuade folks from this approach, because smartphones and mobile wireless connectivity, while amazing, are still far more failure-prone than pretty much anything that one can do within a datacenter.

But there is an even worse thing that you can do, which is to put a retry button on the screen, because if there's anything less reliable than cheap smartphones and shoddy 3G links, it's making human beings mash on dumb pointless retry buttons.

Think about how amazing that is, though: here in the second decade of the 21st century, the connection between you and an object which is literally in your hand can still be less reliable than the radio-wave-mediated connection between that object and another object on the on the other side of the world.

Not bad, if you're interested in reliable engineering.

[yoisthisracist]

Maybe cops SHOULD be afraid of killing people. Maybe that'll keep them from doing it so often.

Yeah, claiming that protesting racist police brutality “makes police afraid to do their jobs” only makes sense if you think the job of police is to murder innocent black people. (I know that that’s what these racists actually think, but sometimes it helps people to have it spelled out)

[mlcastle]

But the death of the university had also been accompanied by a curious double movement. Scholars are expected to spend less and less of their time on scholarship, and more and more on various forms of administration—even as their administrative autonomy is itself stripped away. Here too we find a kind of nightmare fusion of the worst elements of state bureaucracy and market logic. But at the same time, just about everyone involved in some form of autonomous cultural production which has traditionally operated at least somewhat outside the logic of capitalism is expected to become part of this system: not just independent intellectuals, who effectively no longer exist, but painters, sculptors, poets, even investigative journalists.

David Graeber, "Anthropology and the rise of the professional-managerial class", HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory

Relevant, of course, not just in academia.

[mlcastle]

we had a hackathon last week

[mlcastle]

so, like, if you:

buy one of the officially blessed devices directly from Google, and then

subscribe to the security updates, so you know when you should

troll reddit to find links to zip files on android.googleapis.com and then

do some weird command-line magick to install updates by "sideload"

then you can have your device patched to fix things only a month after "partners were notified about the issues".

And this actually is progress!