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Refactoring

The process of gradually turning code into the code you would have written if you fully understood it all from the beginning

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My ChatGPT Moment

I was struck by inspiration while browsing r/cocktails

So naturally I wanted to save this conversation to share. Screenshots, saving to HTML or printing all didn’t work. So I had the idea to search stack overflow for some javascript that could dump out the current state of the DOM. I found it and pasted it into my browser console. I got an error, so I figured let ChatGPT figure this out.

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Can you make a web app with only HTML and SQL?

Thanks to our friends HTMX, Supabase, and a touch of some lesser known SQL, yes. Here’s how.

Supabase is exceedingly easy to get going with. I’ve yet to encounter a single source of friction in starting a basic project and setting up my database.

I created this dummy table with the foolproof GUI.

Then I populated some data.

Now here’s the magic. We can generate XML via our SQL query using Postgres’s XML functions. I’ve wrapped it in a function to make it easy to call.

This creates the following HTML

<table>
  <th>Column 1</th>
  <th>Column 2</th>
  <tr>
      <td>This content</td>
      <td>came from a database</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
      <td>hosted on supabase</td>
      <td>and populated via HTMX</td>
  </tr>
</table>
Column 1 Column 2
This content came from a database
hosted on supabaseand populated via HTMX

Simply by creating this function, Supabase automatically create an API for us using PostgREST. The API Docs section shows use exactly how to use it.

curl -X POST 'https://<my-project-id>.supabase.co/rest/v1/rpc/home' \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-H "apikey: SUPABASE_KEY" \
-H "Authorization: Bearer SUPABASE_KEY"

Here’s the HTML of our web page which calls our function using HTMX

And the result

There was just one snag in this all, which is that Supabase currently only returns query results as JSON, so it wraps our HTML in quotes. Luckily HTMX offers hooks into its workings, via event handlers and stripping those quotes is trivial. But I plan to submit a feature request to Supabase. I figure they could omit the quotes when using the header Content-Type: application/xml. This particular use case of conflating HTML and XML might be considered hacky, but I think it’s very reasonable to want to create an XML API using Supabase and SQL XML functions.

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Black Sands – Bonobo

I love this song. It’s like it was made specifically for me.

It features the clarinet, which I played as a kid. It does a good job showing of the range and timbre of the instrument, which is what really attracted me to it.

It has significant polyphony. I’m a huge sucker for that. It has this kind of swaying, braiding, one-over-the-other feel that resonates with me as a skater and skier.

The syncopation in the drums I love. Really groovy.

It very gradually swells adding in more and more layers. I love this in a song. Where it changes so gradually you don’t really notice at the time. But at some point you look back and it’s changed so much. What a metaphor for life!

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Some Deep git Trivia

A typo lead me down a little rabbit hole today.

The typo was git pul instead of git pull

~ git pul
git: 'pul' is not a git command. See 'git --help'.

The most similar commands are
	pull
	spull

git spull? That sounds funny. What does that do? Google results for it are disappointing. (Ripe SEO for this blog post).

~ git spull --help
'spull' is aliased to 'svn rebase'

Hmm… How do I list all my aliases?


~ git alias --help
'alias' is aliased to '!git config --list | grep 'alias\.' | sed 's/alias\.\([^=]*\)=\(.*\)/\1\	 => \2/' | sort'

Hmm…

~ git alias
a	 => !git add . && git status
aa	 => !git add . && git add -u . && git status
ac	 => !git add . && git commit
acm	 => !git add . && git commit -m
alias	 => !git config --list | grep 'alias\.' | sed 's/alias\.\([^=]*\)=\(.*\)/\1\	 => \2/' | sort
au	 => !git add -u . && git status
c	 => commit
ca	 => commit --amend
cm	 => commit -m
d	 => diff
l	 => log --graph --all --pretty=format:'%C(yellow)%h%C(cyan)%d%Creset %s %C(white)- %an, %ar%Creset'
lg	 => log --color --graph --pretty=format:'%C(bold white)%h%Creset -%C(bold green)%d%Creset %s %C(bold green)(%cr)%Creset %C(bold blue)<%an>%Creset' --abbrev-commit --date=relative
ll	 => log --stat --abbrev-commit
llg	 => log --color --graph --pretty=format:'%C(bold white)%H %d%Creset%n%s%n%+b%C(bold blue)%an <%ae>%Creset %C(bold green)%cr (%ci)' --abbrev-commit
master	 => checkout master
s	 => status
spull	 => svn rebase
spush	 => svn dcommit

So if you like to create short little aliases, think about using some of these built in ones instead so they’ll be pre-configured for you everywhere.

I like to use a gui for viewing history, but git l, git ll, git lg and git llg are pretty nice.

I also tried

~ git spull
Can't locate SVN/Core.pm in @INC (you may need to install the SVN::Core module) (@INC contains: /usr/local/git/share/perl5 /Library/Perl/5.18/darwin-thread-multi-2level /Library/Perl/5.18 /Network/Library/Perl/5.18/darwin-thread-multi-2level /Network/Library/Perl/5.18 /Library/Perl/Updates/5.18.4 /System/Library/Perl/5.18/darwin-thread-multi-2level /System/Library/Perl/5.18 /System/Library/Perl/Extras/5.18/darwin-thread-multi-2level /System/Library/Perl/Extras/5.18 .) at /usr/local/git/share/perl5/Git/SVN/Utils.pm line 6.
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at /usr/local/git/share/perl5/Git/SVN/Utils.pm line 6.
Compilation failed in require at /usr/local/git/share/perl5/Git/SVN.pm line 25.
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at /usr/local/git/share/perl5/Git/SVN.pm line 32.
Compilation failed in require at /usr/local/git/libexec/git-core/git-svn line 22.
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at /usr/local/git/libexec/git-core/git-svn line 22.

Interesting. So git has some SVN functionality partially built in but it depends on some perl modules.

So that’s just an interesting exploration into some functionality built into git that you might not know existed.

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Programming Paradigms: Procedural, Object-Oriented, Functional

Problem

You’re at dinner with a group of friends. Everyone knows how much their meal cost. You have to add up each person’s meal cost to get a total.

  • You: $11
  • Alice: $10
  • Bob: $12
  • Claire: $13

Procedural

You call out to each person and ask them how much their meal cost. As they answer, you write on a piece of paper.

11 + 10 = 21

21 + 12 = 33

33 + 13 = 46

Object-Oriented

You have a calculator. You announce to everyone to key in their meal cost. You key in 11. You give the calculator to Alice. When Claire hands it to you it reads 46.

Functional

You: Alice, what was the total for you and everyone to your left?

Alice: Bob, what was the total for you and everyone to your left?

Bob: Claire, what was the total for you and everyone to your left?

Claire: What was the total for you and everyone to your left?

You: $11 Claire

Clair: $24 Bob

Bob: $36 Alice

Alice: $46

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How to Create a Quick and Dirty Free Basic Website

As ubiquitous as the web is, it is not currently as democratic as I suspect its early creators anticipated it would be. In particular, creating an extremely basic text based website is complicated enough that the rising generation Z tends to either rely on a social media platform, or they resort to creating their content as images. Text as images is terribly inaccessible for the blind. It can’t be easily searched or copied and pasted. The beauty of digital formats has given way to analog style degradation by way of lossy image compression.

There is a way to make a basic website quickly and easily for free with no skills necessary. I have dog-fooded it and documented it here.

GitHub is owned by Microsoft, so you’re still dependent on a tech giant. You do have to sign away your soul a little to create the GitHub account. But they don’t add any crap to around your content like cookies or pop-ups to use the mobile app. They don’t require readers of your content to create an account. I think this is a pretty good trade-off for most people. I’m sure there are plenty of other ways to get a similar basic site up, but I think the stability, reliability and dependability of GitHub, and the robust hosting you’ll get makes this a pretty sweet solution overall.

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Climate Denial Fund

I think the best argument against climate change denial is the free market. Anybody can spew nonsense arguments on social media, or even on the floor of congressional chambers. But when real money is on the line, do companies deny climate science? I propose the creation of a climate change denial fund. A mutual fund/ETF that invests in companies and perhaps some commodities that would benefit from climate change being a hoax. Then when confronted with a denier, we can ask them to put their money where their mouth is and invest in this fund.

You might retort that there are already pro-climate funds. This is true, and theoretically you could say that shorting those would be equivalent. I think a purpose built denial fund would be superior though for teasing out true positions from green-washing.

The best argument against this is that asking a politician to invest in such a fund creates perverse incentives. But I think it would still be a good argument to use against non-politician deniers. Also just having the price of the fund to point to is well worth creating it.

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Needs More Crypto

Various problems that could be solved by the application of cryptography

Phone Spam and Scams

The problem of phone spam is not knowing that the caller is who they say they are. We already have solved this problem on the web. It’s the same problem as knowing that you’re getting your bank website and not some hacker. Usually when web security is explained to lay people, the focus is on the fact that traffic is encrypted to prevent eavesdropping. Of course this is important since web traffic hops across many untrusted routers and servers between its origin and destination. But what is also crucial is knowing that the destination is who you want it to be. Encryption alone only guarantees that you are being hacked by no more than one hacker.

Phone calls need to be initiated over a protocol that validates cryptographic certificates to confirm that the other party is who they say they are.

This would solve both the problem of spammers bugging regular people and also scammers imitating customers to businesses. I had an experience the other day where I called my credit card customer service and as soon as I connected to a person the call dropped. This happened twice. I suspect they thought I was a scammer because I was at the time logged into my account on my work computer. My work computer is on a VPN which I’ve heard sometimes routes our traffic through India, probably related to the fact we have a team in Bangalore.

If my phone had a trusted certificate, my bank could have more confidence that it was me calling.

Transferring Medical Data

I had a bothersome time recently getting new glasses. I didn’t want to buy into the Luxotica cartel, so I used a popular startup. To get my prescription they offered to call my eye doctor themselves. The eye doctor tried to fax it over but that failed for whatever reason. I’m not sure why I can’t be trusted to relay my prescription to the eye glass store. But let’s assume there’s a good reason. My prescription could have been sent using PGP encrypted email. And I wouldn’t have to ask my eye doctor to send the prescription to the store. They could send it to me, along with their PGP signature that references a public key on the popular key-servers. This would validate that the prescription wasn’t altered by me or any other intermediary. I’m not sure how this works with HIPAA compliance, but I don’t know of a good reason this wouldn’t work. There’s just the bad reason that the secure email market is dominated by non-interoperable proprietary solutions.

Resumes

Study: Job Applicants With 4-Year College Degree Just As Successful As Those Who Lie About Having 4-Year College Degree

The Onion

I don’t know how real of a problem this is, applicants lying about degrees or experience on their resumes, but I can imagine a cryptographic solution. That would be a digital resume format which contains for each employer, a cryptographic signature for that portion of your resume. When checking the references for a candidate, a prospective employer can call up previous employers to verify dates of employment. But we can cut out the manual steps. This can be done the same way certificate-based digital signatures work with PDFs with the only difference being that instead of one signature validating the whole document, we’d have multiple different signatures, each validating only a portion of the document. The infrastructure costs could be minimal if public keys are hosted on the traditional networks of key-servers used with PGP.

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Two new creational design patterns