Popups in tmux
I was looking for "floating" windows in tmux. The concept is there there, it's just called popups:
Display a popup running shell-command (or default-command when omitted) on target-client. A popup is a rectangular box drawn over the top of any panes. Panes are not updated while a popup is present.
Metadata from your photos
Back in 2023, Harley Turan extracted EXIF metadata from the photos he took with his phone over the past 14 years, did some experimental analysis and now makes us realise how much it reveals about out lives, even without looking at the actual photos.
Any app that can access your photo library can, with enough effort, determine your address, where you shop, where your friends live, where you go on holiday, where you work, and when you go to bed. This is without looking at anything within the images themselves.
You’ll be pleased/saddened by the lack of AI in this piece.
If AI is powered by big data, then your photo library’s metadata is really the biggest data you own, and you’ve been collecting it with every photo you take.
Via @nhoizey
Deep sleep/suspend with Linux on a Dell XPS 13 9315
A while back, I got myself a "new" (2nd hand) laptop, a Dell XPS 9315. Their XPS 13 laptops have been my weapon of choice for more than a decade: They are small and powerful. And Dell is, via their project Sputnik actively trying to make these laptops work well with Linux.
The 9315 is a few years old (2022) and seems to be the last generation of XPS 13 that still has a row of physical Escape and F-keys. I wonder how they at the same time remove these keys and promote the laptop as "developer focused", but here we are. It's probably an executive decision by someone ignorant who would in fact rather have a job at Apple.
Anyways:
I quickly realised that the sleep performance for the laptop was horrible. It would keep running and heat up my backpack when I left work. And run out of battery over the night.
Trying to figure out a solution, I found out that Microsoft at some point had the great idea of getting rid of existing sleep states and introduce a new state, "Modern Standby", instead. And apparently my computer wasn't able to enter that state. I was wondering whether it was a limitation of Linux, but quickly figured out it (of course) wasn't.
I was at the brink of giving up, and just coming to terms with the fact that modern computing sucks, when I found a solution (after a deep dive into the rabbit hole).
Apparently, all you need to do is go into the BIOS settings, under Storage and change the SATA/NVMe Operation mode from the default RAID On to AHCI/NVMe. I'm not sure I understand the techical details, but having it set to RAID seems to prevent the computer from entering the desired "Modern Standby" sleep state of S0ix.
This fix also applies to other Dell laptops, as far as I can tell.
The absence of shovelware
Mike Judge has taken a look at some numbers that would indicate an increase in productivity, if vibe coding actually delivered on the promises of the hype:
There’s no sudden indie boom occurring post-2022/2023. You could not tell looking at these charts when AI-assisted coding became widely adopted. The core premise is flawed. Nobody is shipping more than before.
The impact on human lives is incredible. People are being fired because they’re not adopting these tools fast enough. People are sitting in jobs they don’t like because they’re afraid if they go somewhere else it’ll be worse. People are spending all this time trying to get good at prompting and feeling bad because they’re failing.
This whole thing is bullshit.
AI imposter syndrome
Colton Voege in his blog post about curing your AI 10x engineer imposter syndrome:
It's okay to sacrifice some productivity to make work enjoyable. More than okay, it's essential in our field. If you force yourself to work in a way you hate, you're just going to burn out. Only so much of coding is writing code, the rest is solving problems, doing system design, reasoning about abstractions, and interfacing with other humans. You are better at all those things when you feel good. It's okay to feel pride in your work and appreciate the craft. Over the long term your codebase will benefit from it.