tech

2024-10-18 · open the original ↗

• Every unfamiliar tool is a fight, so he values stability. The recording started about 20 minutes late because St Pierre's mic and camera would not work with Hanselman's usual recording tool, and they never learned why. He puts blindness's daily cost at about 30% of his capacity, citing a replacement headset that changed how his screen reader pronounced things, and says this is why he stays long at companies and likes maintaining software.
• Adopting a screen reader late cost him; now it speeds him up. Legally blind from birth with a degenerative disease, he was told around age five he would be blind by 20, and lost his central vision in the last few years; he has used a screen reader for about three to three and a half years. He says he should have started five or six years earlier, took a year to accept it, and now runs it at 30% of "boost" speed, reads documentation faster than ever, and ends days far less exhausted.
• A pinhole field of view trained an unusually strong working memory. Even when he could see, he took in only two or three letters at a glance, so he learned to guess words and hold code in his head. He says he can answer questions away from the computer with "that's in that file near line 500", which Hanselman calls keeping the code's object model in his brain.
• Tooling, not syntax, makes a language accessible. He moved from .NET to Go after a year of Node, and credits Go's simplicity, helpful compiler and enforced formatting with tabs, because spaces must be heard. Since he cannot scan a stack trace or a block of JSON, he relies on linters; YAML whitespace has cost him hours. He left Linux because its screen reader did not work for him and now uses Windows with WSL, calling Windows Terminal and VS Code very accessible.
• He is bootstrapping a SaaS business after a small exit. He built the main system at a company that grew from 10 to about 35 people and was acquired by Equifax in 2023, and has been trying to self-fund a product since 2008. Kiwipolis is a homeschooling planner with a 2D game element; the game is a canvas and not accessible, so he debugs it with shortcut keys that skip collision detection. He says reluctance to travel, not blindness itself, has kept him from conferences.

2024-10-18 · open the original ↗

• A Copilot icon beside each OneDrive file summarizes it unopened. Giard presents this as a new M365 Copilot feature. Clicking the icon next to a file in a OneDrive folder gives a quick overview of the document; he can then ask a follow-up question about it, or copy the result into another document or an email.
• Create FAQ turns a document into questions and answers. On the same file the Create FAQ option gives a Q&A-format summary, and a direct question ("what did I do last week?") is answered from the document. Giard says this is especially useful for long documents.
• Selecting several files lets Copilot summarize and question them together. With four status reports checked, the Copilot button gives one summary per document, and a question asked across them ("did I have any issues?") picked out the one report that listed an issue.
• Compare files shows the differences between selected documents. Again without opening them, Copilot laid out how the four reports differed; Giard chose files with the same structure for the demo, and calls this "really useful". The comparison can be copied out or questioned further.

2024-10-16 · open the original ↗

• Copilot Pages keeps responses that otherwise vanish when Copilot closes. Giard presents Pages as a new feature of Copilot for work. The Edit in Pages button moves a response into a new window where it can be edited, and a Page Link saved from it lets him return later to the same page.
• Pages runs on Microsoft Loop and embeds in other apps. Giard notes that Pages uses Microsoft Loop under the hood. The Copy Components option gives a link for supported applications such as Microsoft Teams, and edits made in Teams and in a browser show up immediately in the other, because they are the same page.
• A shared Page Link carries audience and permission settings. Before copying the link he can share with people in his company, only those who already have access, or specific people, and choose between edit and view-only access. He picks company-wide view and edit.
• Collaborators edit the same page in real time. A colleague who opened the shared link edited the page, and Giard saw those changes appear in his own view as they were made.

2024-10-16 · open the original ↗

• Visible inconsistency makes customers assume the internals are worse. Hanselman walked out of an EV test drive after spotting three chained Android tablets, each in a different font, which to him exposed which group shipped the map, the climate controls and the speedometer. Mark agrees the visible experience is what people infer the rest from, and says that inconsistency lost the carmaker a sale.
• Consistency at scale comes from shared standards, not one tastemaker. Mark rejects relying on a Jobs- or Gates-style figure and points to Azure Resource Manager, whose plug-in resource providers must follow API guidelines published on GitHub, checked by an API review board and tooling. He concedes Azure is not perfect and its older API surfaces are less consistent.
• How much an inconsistency matters depends on whether it can be undone. Hanselman's example of Copilot shown as a bot, a sparkling pencil and a magic wand in Visual Studio can be fixed next release; Mark says inconsistent APIs are locked in by backward compatibility, cause developer mistakes, and force every improvement to be built several times. Azure moved fast at first and standardised once a better pattern emerged.
• Backward compatibility is the enterprise promise, at the cost of polish. Mark is the arbiter for breaking-change and service-deprecation approvals, under published policies and formal announcement channels, because breaking an enterprise app costs money and blocks upgrades. Hanselman, stressing this is his own opinion, argues Windows keeps compatibility and so sometimes ships the org chart, while Apple breaks things unapologetically; Mark calls Hanselman's roughly 20 years of running his blog on Windows Server 2003 "incredibly insecure".
• Enforce standards with guardrails, not documents. Mark lays out a spectrum from no rules to written guidelines, to auditing, to controls that make non-compliance impossible, such as TypeSpec, whose inherited top-level definitions make new resource providers compliant automatically. Controls are costly and must not add too much friction, so he reserves them for high-stakes areas; Hanselman sums it up as "Word documents don't break the build".

2024-10-16 · open the original ↗

• Even with authority, you must sell the vision to lead. Mark says he learned this as co-founder and chief software architect of Winternals, founded in 1996 and sold to Microsoft in 2006; as Azure's CTO he lacks direct authority over most of what he drives. His influence has grown since he joined Azure in 2010 through a track record of being right, and he still has to explain why each thing matters.
• Customer advocacy should occasionally get you in trouble. Hanselman says that if you do not get in trouble twice a year for advocating for the customer you are not pushing hard enough, and that he uses his seniority to shield team members who irritate others for the right reasons. Mark qualifies it: some advocates come across as constantly abrasive, so there is a line to find.
• Stalled priorities usually lack an owner, not agreement. Mark says that when he escalates to senior engineering leaders it is rarely because people ignore something; everyone agrees it matters but no one is accountable, or no one can reprioritise without someone who owns the resources reallocating them. He relays Satya Nadella's message to Microsoft's executive staff that your job is to fix your complaints, not voice them, and Hanselman recalls his boss Scott Hunter telling him that "someone should do something" now means him.
• Understand at least one level below where you operate. Mark says writing Windows Internals taught him to go a level deeper than his subject so he could be accurate and abstract it, which is why he digs deep in meetings. He offers Nadella forwarding Hacker News threads and technical blog posts, and Hanselman offers Hunter finding product gaps while preparing keynotes, as leaders doing the same.
• Engineers in silos lose the standing to influence the product. Teaching internals with Dave Solomon, Mark found the owner of one Windows component knew little about memory management or scheduling, and he says many Azure engineers have never seen their own service's portal or SDK experience. Knowing how a component fits the end-to-end customer experience, he argues, is what lets people propose improvements credibly; Hanselman calls this being a T-shaped developer.

2024-10-15 · open the original ↗

• Access Server is the self-hosted option; CloudConnexa is the managed one. OpenVPN sponsored this video, and the host's description link pays Crosstalk a referral. He prefers self-hosting on his own hardware, and names two use cases: remote users reaching internal resources, and remote sites (a restaurant chain's point-of-sale) on always-on, split-tunnelled router connections.
• A $6-a-month DigitalOcean droplet and a domain name are enough to start. The host used DigitalOcean's one-click Marketplace image, an SSH key, weekly backups and a Cloudflare DNS A record. OpenVPN gives two concurrent connections free; more are bought as licences. The admin GUI runs on port 943 by default, and he redirected it to 443, noting a separate admin port is more secure behind firewall rules.
• Update the image immediately and enable DCO when asked. The one-click image shipped version 2.11.3, against 2.14.1 current as of recording; the upgrade requires un-holding the openvpn-as package first. The upgrade offers data channel offload, which moves tunnel encryption to the Linux kernel, and the host says to accept it in most cases for performance.
• Use a real SSL certificate for the server's domain name. The host bought a Namecheap PositiveSSL certificate for $5.99 a year via a certificate signing request, uploading the CA bundle, certificate and private key. Let's Encrypt is a free alternative that renews every 90 days, set up on the server with certbot following OpenVPN's guide.
• Site-to-site access needs a static IP, routing and a VPN gateway flag. The host added a 172.27.240.0/20 static subnet beside the default 172.27.224.0/20, gave the GL.iNet Slate AX router 172.27.240.22, and marked it a VPN gateway for its 192.168.22.0/24 LAN, with split tunnelling. The router must also allow VPN traffic into its LAN; he then reached a speed test server there. He recommends TOTP MFA, also available alongside RADIUS, LDAP or SAML.

2024-10-11 · open the original ↗

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2024-10-10 · open the original ↗

• Staying bootstrapped keeps the company focused on DNS alone. Eden says DNSimple has never taken outside money, whereas VC-funded or public rivals must keep adding hosting, email and marketing products to grow. He argues customers undervalue domains as a commodity, partly because big players commoditised them, and that focus is how a small firm keeps innovating; he is happy to keep running it as a boutique, while conceding "there's always a price".
• Domain takeovers mostly come through social engineering. Eden names social engineering as the most common takeover route and says DNSimple offers two-factor through hardware keys or one-time passwords rather than SMS because of SIM swapping. His advice is a registrar with strict policies against acting on a caller's behalf, automatic renewal, multi-year renewal for important names, and access for more than one person so a domain is not lost when someone leaves.
• Owning a top-level domain lets its owner set the rules. Asked why Microsoft is moving cloud services to its .microsoft TLD, Eden infers it removes a namespace outside Microsoft's control and lets it impose requirements from the top level, as Google did by enforcing HSTS across .app and .dev. He notes DNS was designed in the 1980s for a gentler internet and remains a regular DDoS target.
• Fast record changes come from custom sync and low TTLs. Hanselman, a customer since about 2011 who notes this is not a sponsored show, says changes on DNSimple appear almost at once. Eden credits an internal system instead of the standard DNS transfer protocols, pushing changes to eight points of presence with Australia as the benchmark, constant measurement and several redesigns, plus low default TTLs where registrars often default to a day; he wrote the core name server in Erlang, built to fail hard and restart cleanly.
• The domain control plane accepts that customers use several providers. It connects DNSimple to Route 53, Azure DNS or on-premises servers such as CoreDNS and manages zones bidirectionally, so they can be moved between providers. Eden says it was built within the last year and a half, is still early, and exists because DNSimple is "too small to force people to do anything".

2024-10-09 · open the original ↗

• The show aims to record nuanced disagreement, not loud opinions. Hanselman says his conversations with Mark sometimes leave him better off and should have been recorded, and that tech discourse lacks people who disagree and end at "I see why you think that", unlike streamers broadcasting a loud opinion about JavaScript. Mark says the format grew from the tangents in their joint conference presentations.
• It will ship as video and audio, starting a week later. The podcast was to be released on Hanselman's YouTube channel and wherever podcasts are available, with the first episode due a week after the trailer. They joke that most podcasts die around nine episodes after a run of apologies for irregular releases.

2024-10-08 · open the original ↗

• A Starlink Mini inside a sunroof works at highway speed. On a Striker mount with upward-facing suction cups, powered from a power bank over USB-C, the host got 45 Mbps down and 4.18 Mbps up parked under heavy tree cover, and 142 Mbps down and 11.8 Mbps up at 60 mph, even facing the wrong way. The video promotes his Starlink referral link.
• The host sees little evidence that suction cups crack sunroofs. He has not had it happen, knows no one who has, and the Striker mount's maker told him he had heard of no cases. He says online warnings rarely come with firsthand accounts. The cups also flip to mount on the roof, where he drove over 8 hours with a Gen 3 dish.
• Front-face EMF exceeds the public limit, but the back is shielded. On his own EMF meter, the host measured a baseline of about 17–18 V/m, about 480 V/m directly in front of the dish and about 77 V/m behind it. He compares these with ICNIRP's public limit of 83 V/m and occupational limit of 420 V/m, and judges the Mini in a car relatively low risk.

2024-10-03 · open the original ↗

• The UniFi Device Bridge brings wired devices onto wireless mesh. It picks up a mesh signal from an access point and feeds one PoE RJ45 port, usually for a camera, though a Flex Mini switch could serve more devices. Both models ship October 25: the indoor UDB at $99 MSRP (internal 5 GHz antenna, omni antenna included) and the outdoor, longer-range UDB Pro at $199.
• The host found the UDB simple to set up. He tested only the UDB, not the Pro: it appeared in UniFi for adoption on power-up, the external antenna needed a settings change, and a G4 Bullet camera plugged into it came online in Protect.

2024-10-03 · open the original ↗

• EGA was chosen because it was made for the screen. Minamata says the 16-colour palette of the late-1980s to early-1990s DOS era gives a crisp, unified world, where early VGA adventure games scanned painted backgrounds that clashed with their sprites. The game runs at 320x200, and she rules out moving a sequel to VGA because she sees EGA as the format she wants, not a stepping stone.
• Deliberate imperfection makes digital pixel art feel handmade. She avoids mirroring faces or objects because perfect symmetry looks stiff and uncanny, a rule she also gave artists as art director on Recommendation Dog. Dissecting Sierra screenshots showed her that their perspective is "a magic trick", since sprites never scale from front to back, and she copied it; she drew in Photoshop only out of habit and says beginners do not need it.
• The text parser is a deliberate choice despite costing audience. She says typing forces players to read and gives a sense of limitless possibility, with no dialogue trees, though it rules out a console port and made programming harder than point-and-click would have. Player feedback led to abbreviated commands for people with dexterity limits, plus an optional notebook, an online hint book and a choice of graphical or text inventory.
• An artist-first developer shipped it on community-built tools. A former magazine and newspaper illustrator with work in the New Yorker, she contrasts artists' acceptance of grind with programmers' shortcuts, citing pasting a link 71 times by hand for her newsletter. She built the game in Adventure Game Studio, a free, open-source, community-maintained engine with a built-in parser; it was part-time from its first demo in November 2018 until the last two years before its August launch, and getting builds onto Steam was the closest she came to giving up.
• A frontier mining-town setting suits a phone-free cozy mystery. The game is set in northern Ontario in 1914; she chose the golden age of Agatha Christie-style detective fiction, a single lodge setting and an era without pocket cameras, and tied it to Canada's push into resource-rich frontiers that left mining ghost towns. She has extensive notes for a sequel, hopes for a trilogy with the same EGA look, MT-32-style music and parser, and expects, warily, that it will take less time.

2024-10-01 · open the original ↗

• No two migrations are alike, and old directories hide unknown policy. Sharmer, a pre-sales principal solutions architect at Quest Software who talks to five to 10 organizations a week, says nearly 20 years of migration work has never shown him two identical projects. Twenty years of Group Policy Objects layered on each other leave customers unsure what the policies do and afraid to remove them, so the environment must be found, cleaned up and catalogued before any path to Entra.
• On-prem and cloud administration demand different skills. Sharmer describes friction between long-time AD administrators and cloud administrators, and a knowledge gap at C-level about what moving to the cloud means. He says Microsoft no longer offers an Active Directory certification, which he reads as a sign that AD is aging.
• Passwords alone are no longer secure enough. Sharmer credits the point to Giard's roadshow presentation and says Entra brings multi-factor authentication and conditional access that on-prem AD lacks. He says on-prem AD's vulnerabilities have been public for 20 years: a web search shows how to crack the directory file holding everyone's passwords. He says about 95% of the organizations he talks to want to adopt the cloud security model.
• Cloud-only is unrealistic for large organizations; start with endpoints. A CIO at a financial institution of about 130,000 employees mandated moving all of AD, workstations and identities into Entra in 12 months, which Sharmer says was not possible. Above roughly 500–1,000 seats, on-prem applications using NTLM or Kerberos, or homegrown code with hard-coded IP addresses, block a full move. He advises cloud-first for new applications, managing identities in the cloud, and moving endpoints off on-prem and hybrid join, where Intune is "bolted onto" an AD-joined device.
• Devices can move to the cloud without being wiped, he says. Sharmer says Microsoft's Autopilot route wipes the device, reinstalls the OS and can take up to five hours, and waiting for hardware refresh means about four years. Quest's tool, as he describes it, combines its long-standing re-ACLing of data and SID insertion with the bulk enrollment package from Microsoft's Windows Configuration Designer, keeping user data intact and taking about five minutes per device. He points viewers to Quest.com's AD modernization and migration pages.

2024-09-29 · open the original ↗

• With scaling ending, gains must come from whole systems. Hwu, a senior director of research at Nvidia who taught at Illinois for 34 years, says Dennard scaling (lower voltage and power and faster switching as transistors shrink) mattered more than Moore's law: for about 15 years code got faster untouched. Dennard scaling ended in the early 2000s, and he sees "at least another two generations" of Moore's law. He expects the next advances in networking, moving from electrical to optical links that cost more than 10 times their copper equivalents, in primitives for synchronising huge numbers of machines, and in cooling, where data centres are "at the cooling limit".
• Research has to target the technology of ten years out. In the 1980s his Berkeley group under Yale Patt bet that abundant fast transistors could find parallelism no processor then detected. Intel's P6 (Pentium Pro), designed by 1993, embodied those mechanisms, and he draws the lesson that ideas take five to ten years to reach hardware.
• Python frameworks throw away parallelism that lower layers must recover. He cites the Python interpreter lock, and GPU work launched from Python frameworks such as Torch as separate, isolated API calls. He expects runtime techniques such as fusing those calls on the fly, long researched, to be deployed "in the next decade or so" because other optimisations are running out.
• He predicts a new processor unit built for retrieving data. People buy processors "reluctantly" to run applications, and he argues deep-learning models bypassed going straight to the data. His proposed unit would tolerate latency and pull, for example, one kilobyte out of four petabytes in real time to feed models. If the industry "does the right things", he expects within a decade a pocket device holding a person's lifetime of memory, and says he will retire when he has one.
• Enough value makes a missing software ecosystem appear. In 2011 an NSF review panel called his GPU-based Blue Waters supercomputer proposal "risky to say the least and probably irresponsible" for lacking math libraries; he answered that GPUs were "a small puppy with big paws". Thirteen years later those libraries exist. He describes the follow-on Delta project as filling a shortage of GPUs for academic researchers, not as pushing the frontier.

2024-09-27 · open the original ↗

• Copilot in Excel requires AutoSave and the Copilot service. AutoSave means the workbook has to be stored in OneDrive. With both in place, a Copilot button appears on the Home ribbon and opens a pane that takes plain-English questions and instructions as a second way of working the sheet, alongside formulas.
• Copilot turns a plain-English rule into conditional formatting. Giard asks it to highlight each player's name where dribbles per 90 minutes beat either interceptions or tackles per 90. Copilot first says what it will do and applies it only when he clicks Apply. The formula it wrote is visible under the conditional formatting rules. Giard says he could have built it himself, but it saved him the trouble and is a head start if he wants to change it.
• Advanced analysis writes the Python for you. "Start advanced analysis" adds a new worksheet holding a data frame that previews the data it will work on. Asked for each region's monthly total value as a line chart, it produced one covering January 2022 to the end of 2023, about 24 months, with east and west regions. The generated Python code is shown and can be edited and rerun, which Giard calls a good starting point.
• Follow-up prompts add a forecast and restyle the chart. Asked to forecast each region's total value for the first six months of 2024 on the same chart, Copilot drew the forecast as a dashed line without being told to, but in a different colour from the historical line. A further prompt (label the forecast explicitly, use the same colour for actual and forecast, and make forecast lines dashed and four times as thick) regenerated the chart as asked.

2024-09-26 · open the original ↗

• Most data API code is copied CRUD that a tool should provide. Nixon, a Microsoft product manager on the SQL Server team under Azure Data who is in charge of Data API Builder, says the layer between client and database is mostly create/read/update/delete repositories, endpoints, unit tests and CI/CD steps copied from project to project, "almost a third of the code" in an application. Data API Builder (DAB) drops that data API on top of the database instead; he jokes it should be "CRUDE", with execute for stored procedures.
• It is zero code: a JSON file handed to a stock container. The file describes the database, which can be SQL Server, Postgres, Cosmos DB or MySQL, in Azure, AWS or on-prem. The container is a standard Microsoft one that runs on Kubernetes, Azure Container Apps, Azure Container Instances, or inside Static Web Apps, which hides the container for the many users who cannot run one. Clients in any language just call it over HTTP and get JSON back. Nixon says large customers whose policies now forbid talking to the database directly use it, sometimes with a citizen developer and no development team. The config can be built with a .NET CLI tool (dab init, dab add) rather than by hand-editing JSON, and a drag-and-drop configurator is planned for "hopefully sometime next year".
• REST and GraphQL can be served at once from one config. Nixon says this meets REST shops trying out GraphQL as well as GraphQL shops with one REST operation. He argues GraphQL saves mobile bandwidth with one nested query, such as an invoice, its line items and product photos, and can insert an invoice and its lines as one transaction with no custom endpoint. Entities can point at tables, views, stored procedures or NoSQL documents. A Cosmos DB and a SQL Server source can be queried together into one payload, and relationships can be declared even where the database has none ("we can make a crappy database look awesome").
• Security is set per entity in the config, not by the DBA. Each entity lists roles and their allowed actions; his example lets anonymous users create and read but not delete. Policies such as owner ID equalling the caller's user-ID claim restrict users to their own rows. Connections can use passwords, system- or user-assigned managed identities, or secrets read from environment variables, and telemetry goes to Application Insights, with more log sinks planned.
• DAB replaces only the CRUD, and it is free and open source. Nixon says business operations ("launch the missile") still need their own API, possibly still on Entity Framework, which DAB neither uses nor replaces. It has no Microsoft prerequisite and runs fully on-prem for some customers. The repository is at aka.ms/dab, where community sign-ups shaped the team's priorities for the coming six-month planning "semester".

2024-09-24 · open the original ↗

• The MAX BR2 can run two 5G carriers at once. The host describes the Peplink MAX BR2 as a professional-grade cellular router with two onboard 5G modems, plus two wired WAN ports, all manageable together through load balancing, failover or Peplink's SpeedFusion bonding.
• It is built for vehicle mounting, as a mobile network in a box. The host points to a metal case with built-in mounting brackets and a 10–30 V DC terminal block with ignition sense, and suggests emergency vehicles, police cars, ambulances or broadcast vans as uses. Crosstalk says it is a Peplink partner and offers sales and support.

2024-09-20 · open the original ↗

• Most users will notice no difference between $100 and $500 mesh. At Costco the host found Deco mesh systems at about $100 for Wi-Fi 6, $249.99 for Wi-Fi 6E and about $500 for Wi-Fi 7, and says the vast majority of users would see no difference whatsoever between the cheapest and the dearest.

2024-09-19 · open the original ↗

• Staying a one-person shop trades polish for time. Finney, a Microsoft MVP and former mechanical engineer of 10 years who builds apps beside a full-time job, says time is his scarcest resource and finding the right hire could take months with nothing shipped. He accepts that design and architecture "suffer a little" as long as the result is good enough, and he picks whichever framework avoids fighting each app's one hard step.
• Data-loss bugs are the ones he will not tolerate. He reasons that large companies ship bugs too, so the fear he prioritises is Ink Calendar users losing their journals. In app messages and review replies he writes "I" rather than "the team" so users know it is just him.
• App store reviews give users no channel for dialogue. Text Grab users file GitHub issues with line numbers. Ink Calendar, found through the store, draws one-star reviews about Store download and update failures that have nothing to do with the app. Hanselman suggests developers review more kindly than consumers, and Finney agrees.
• Store packaging, not coding, is what eats an indie's time. For his React Native app he pays for Expo's hosted service, where "EAS build all" builds, signs and submits to both stores and generates icons. On Windows the toolchain fails midway or at certification, and the MS Store CLI has not worked for him. He defends the stores' cut (70 cents on a dollar) as covering hosting and distribution he could not run himself.
• Giving Text Extractor to PowerToys paid in exposure, not money. He contributed it when a GitHub issue proposed the feature, keeping a narrower scope while Text Grab stayed his more flexible app. Users still come to Text Grab from it, it led to his MVP award, and the team later built that functionality into Snipping Tool, which he calls "inevitable".

2024-09-19 · open the original ↗

• Copilot in OneDrive summarizes selected files without opening them. In OneDrive on the web, Giard selects one or more files under My Files and chooses Summarize from the Copilot menu, which returns a summary of each file after a few seconds. He shows that follow-up questions can then ask for more detail or about something specific in the files.
• A Compare option builds a side-by-side table across up to five files. Again without opening them, Copilot lays out differences as a table. In his demo of a Word document and a PowerPoint deck it gave the title, creator, purpose, target audience, methodology and expected outcome, and it took follow-up questions.
• Files that share a format give a more useful comparison. Giard says the Word-and-PowerPoint pair worked only because the topic matched. Three of his old status reports from 2015, all with the same sections (past two weeks, next two weeks, upcoming, issues), came back as a table set out by those sections. He calls it a "very simple interface" for analyzing and comparing files quickly, which he says works because Copilot integrates directly with OneDrive.

2024-09-17 · open the original ↗

• Managed identities hand secret management to Azure, shrinking leak risk. Rodriguez, who works at Microsoft supporting enterprise Azure customers, says you set the permissions and Azure creates and rotates the tokens underneath. A connection string or access token can always leak by human error, and the question is the blast radius and the work to clean it up. He notes that GitHub has become better at blocking token uploads. Giard adds that his employer scans his repos and emails him about checked-in secrets, and that Teams blocks messages containing connection strings, which Rodriguez says can be tricked.
• Service principals, the mechanism underneath, are what make this painful by hand. Rodriguez compares them to on-prem service accounts. Their client secret expires after a maximum he is unsure of ("something like six months, nine months"), and he says Azure gives no reminder, so the first warning is users complaining. He says he relearned how to create one three or four times because he used them so rarely.
• The managed identity only covers Azure-to-Azure calls. For on-prem, AWS or Google resources you are back to managing secrets. His approach is to keep those in Azure Key Vault and read them with a managed identity. He warns against apps holding the Key Vault's own password, since that one leak exposes everything in the vault.
• Code passes a credential object instead of a connection string. In C# you construct DefaultAzureCredential and pass it to the service client. It walks a list of credential sources, and he recommends disabling the unused ones for performance. Alternatively, ChainedTokenCredential starts empty and you add only the sources you use. Giard calls the chained form more secure; Rodriguez says only that it fits zero trust better. Locally, it picks up the developer's Azure CLI, PowerShell or Visual Studio sign-in, so the developer personally needs the same permissions the deployed app's identity has.
• The up-front learning makes development easier afterwards. Rodriguez says each developer can stand up their own environment and grant themselves access, so nobody asks in team chat for an updated connection string and nobody is tempted to commit one. He blames Microsoft for early Azure samples that used connection strings. He says learn.microsoft.com documentation now defaults to the managed-identity version of the code, though not everywhere yet.

2024-09-12 · open the original ↗

• Battery life comes from an efficient Arm ISA plus dedicated accelerators. Van Doorn, a Qualcomm senior vice president, cites 19 hours for the Dell XPS and 26 hours for HP on Snapdragon X Elite. Running Recall on the NPU costs about 30 minutes of battery against 6 hours or more on a GPU. He credits Arm's later start with shedding x86's 40-year legacy, which he notes is also x86's strength.
• Qualcomm had to unlearn an IP company's caution to court developers. He says he joined two years ago and wrote an internal "open manifesto": a cell-phone business with a handful of customers does not scale to the thousands of developers in PC, XR, IoT and auto, so they need "no touch or low touch" enablement without licence terms. Legal and licensing had to change too. Engineers enabled Linux on X Elite outside the product plan and open-sourced it, and Qualcomm worked with Linaro and Microsoft on LLVM for Windows.
• The PC part is not a phone chip. It shares building blocks such as CPU cores with phone parts, but memory channels, accelerator counts and the NPU's processing elements are scaled per target. He says the PC chip is too big and too expensive for a phone.
• NPUs win on power but cost the most developer effort. NPUs compute in integers, which need far fewer transistors than GPU floating point, but models trained in floating point must be quantised, which he calls tricky and slow. Efficiency runs NPU over GPU over CPU, and ease of bring-up runs the other way, so teams pressed for time to market start on the CPU. He reports Llama 7B and a 1 to 1.5 billion parameter speech-to-text model running on the NPU.
• Local AI will run hybrid: on-device first, cloud as fallback. He gives privacy, response time and power as reasons, since cloud GPUs are expensive and power-hungry. Models of 7 billion parameters run fine on device, while 80 billion is "more tricky". He says the architecture could shift again if one large model gives way to many small ones under an orchestrator, and warns that hallucinations mean users still need expertise.

2024-09-10 · open the original ↗

• Developers should keep the web controlled by its users, not corporations. Stahl says the issue is not corporate control as such but control by someone other than us; on Mastodon, open-source W3C-based software anyone can host, each instance states its own moderation policy, and a user who dislikes it can move all their content and social graph to another instance or their own. He urges POSSE (publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere), suggesting self-hosting Mastodon from ready-made container instances on Azure under your own domain, so every piece of content has a canonical URL; Giard adds that the $150 monthly Azure credit in an MSDN subscription would cover it.
• ActivityPub can describe any stream of activities, not just social posts. Stahl describes ActivityPub, a W3C spec he puts at version 2.0, as actor–activity–entity messages ("David posted a photo", "Barry liked it") that are easy to extend, with ActivityStreams, in his account, defining the APIs; a Mastodon instance is an implementation of those APIs plus a data store. He floats, without being sure it makes sense, publishing his car company's field advocates' activities (such as fuelling a vehicle) in that format and showing them on a big board through a Mastodon client.
• Fediverse apps interoperate, so cross-posting to every service becomes unnecessary. Mastodon (microblogging), PixelFed (photos) and WriteFreely (blogs) speak the same protocol, so a Mastodon user can follow a WriteFreely blog directly. Stahl says his static GitHub Pages blog could post to his Mastodon account as a GitHub Actions step, or have its own presence (Cognitive Inheritance) that his account follows and boosts; Giard, who copies and pastes each post to Mastodon, Facebook and LinkedIn by hand, summarizes this as push and pull models.
• The Fediverse could save democracy because nothing rewards outrage. Stahl argues engagement-driven corporate platforms profit from anger and push users to extremes and misinformation, while Fediverse feeds are chronological, with no algorithm, no universal policy and no single owner who can boost or silence voices. Governments cannot remove it either: a group whose instance sat on Afghanistan's .af domain was banned by the Taliban, who control the DNS, but could move the instance elsewhere, which he says suits organizing direct action.
• It probably won't, through inertia and missing money, unless technologists act. Stahl calls this a warning rather than a prediction: network effects favour incumbents, and though each upset (Brazil blocking Twitter after its owner refused to appoint a legal representative there) brings an influx, he has an order of magnitude more contacts on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn than on Mastodon, and the software is largely a hobby with no financial incentive. He asks listeners to contribute code, reviews, documentation, moderation or money, to build on the open APIs as developers did on Twitter's before it closed (his own idea is an activity-stream bot to "radiate intent" to coworkers privately), and points to a governance report, published "last month", backed by the Digital Infrastructure Insights Fund, that studied which Fediverse governance policies work.

2024-09-05 · open the original ↗

• AI serves human desires and cannot supply them. Washington, a .NET programmer, Microsoft MVP and author of books on AI, says LLMs seem alive only because they manipulate language and humans think in language. His grand-niece at one year old, who wanted her block back, was "so much more advanced" than ChatGPT. AI will not take jobs, but "the people who use AI may", like a person with a sewing machine.
• Whole books from AI fail; single paragraphs succeed. Asked to write a whole book, the model produces work he grades F, against Hanselman's B-minus, and feeding in two books to get a third "will never ever... work". His free, open-source AI Story Builders writes one paragraph at a time that he then edits. He reports about 1,200 words in a 15-minute session, which he says was not possible before.
• Tight grounding in each prompt keeps paragraphs on the rails. Without it, a flashback to a five-year-old has "little Timmy" driving to an appointment. The app uses retrieval-augmented generation to put character attributes, age at that point, location, season and weather into the prompt. It also extracts new characters and attributes from paragraphs he writes, but he stresses a human still builds the database.
• Fine-tune for behaviour, never to add content. In what he calls his own opinion, which others dispute, new information belongs in RAG, while fine-tuning should only change behaviour such as writing style. After about three chapters, a button in the app produces a fine-tuning file. He uploads it to OpenAI and gets back a model in about an hour that writes closer to his style.
• Plain text files are enough to store embeddings. To keep the app free without paying for databases, he saves embeddings as text files. The Blazor MAUI app in the Windows store keeps them in app storage. The Blazor WebAssembly version zips them into browser local storage, and both run the same code.

2024-09-04 · open the original ↗

• Pull-request reviews serve two ends: quality gating and knowledge sharing. Dixon, a director of web and mobile development at the agency VML, says the gate keeps changes within a project's architectural constraints. Her examples are rejecting an unmaintained third-party library where the rule requires maintained, unit-tested ones, and catching a React dependency array that triggers an infinite loop. She prefers "better practice" to "best practice", because best is relative.
• Reviewing active pull requests is how she onboards fast. She says developers typically take six to eight months to know a codebase, but her agency contracts run three to six months. She reads the pull requests because that is the code being actively worked on, and that is how she finds things like helper functions. She did not write the codebase of over 30,000 lines that her team asks her about; she read as much of it as she could.
• Skipped reviews cost more time than they save. She says a pull request should rarely live beyond about 48 hours, and longer ones point to process problems. Her example is a car-service scheduling client with three entry points: the dealer's website, the owner's portal and an app, including in-vehicle. They share React components, so a size change made for the in-vehicle or phone screen silently broke desktop. She counts work that breaks production as not done. She also wants changes small: about 10 files at most, two or three for a single component, because 88 changed files take her a long time to review.
• Reviews go faster with a team mindset and agreed norms. On one team she introduced an experiment in which everyone unblocks the team first thing each morning, before stand-up across time zones, by reviewing open code. She wants a few designated reviewers who rotate, so the burden does not fall on the lead or architect. She asks whether a solution is good enough within the project's constraints rather than her favourite, and links to the existing helper rather than just rejecting a rewrite. Authors need not accept every suggestion and should discuss them. The other reasons people skip reviews, she says, are reviewing outside their own stack and juniors afraid to review seniors.
• Her review routine starts from the ticket and reads code bottom-up. She uses a PR template that links the ticket ("if there's not a ticket for it, why are we working on it?") and checks that the change solves that scope. She may pull the branch and run it locally, since "works on my box" is not acceptable for enterprise customer-facing sites. She opens the smallest files first and ticks GitHub's "viewed" box, then reads from the bottom up, a habit from English essays, so her brain does not fill in missing words. She traces logic such as a continue button's validation and checks accessibility, such as close buttons without labels and carousels without arrows. She also checks that the design system's styles and the existing custom button are used rather than new ones.