That's why I only drink pure grain alcohol and rainwater

If you're serious - I made the jump to nvim a while ago - I highly recommend using vim keybindings in vscode to get used to them/learn them, without having to worry about setting up a viable vim configuration/learn everything at once.

It depends on what you mean by “good alternative”.

We use a self-hosted OSS LanguageTool server that's containerized and runs in a private, on-prem cluster to provide good performance and be HA, but it only works on our corporate network or when using a VPN connection while roaming/remote.

It's incredibly reliable.

It's also devoid of AI/LLM bullshit for writing. Spelling and grammar rules, a few notes about long sentences, that's it.

However, LanguageTool nerfs their other plugins (like mail plugins) to require a subscription service.

I've pleaded with them for years to please allow me to pay a subscription price but use our internal server simply because we don't want/need a spelling/grammar tool to send content to the cloud.

We don't want free. We want private.

The odd thing is that the official LanguageTool browser plugins DO allow use of a self-hosted LanguageTool server; clearly it's doable. There's a poorly maintained obsidian plugin that also works(ish). But that's about it.

We live with these limitations.

Meat proxies; proxying the transfer of wealth for the benefit of the few at great cost to the many.

Waymo does not do this. You can't remote drive a car.

This feels like an incomplete statement. Waymo makes decisions locally and also escalates to humans, often. Humans making decisions at intersections or important route moments or unexpected scenarios is probably the right move for a long time, in my opinion. The moment by moment decisions are onboard as they have to be but it isn't "wayno doesn't do this".

IIRC the car typically asks yes/no questions, but comes to a safe stop on its own first. In some cases they might draw an escape route for it on a map.

There are no certificates to share with Wireguard. Nothing to rotate if you don't want to. Once it works, it works.

I've even got a backup wireguard server running on a Pi 1b. Works fine. We currently run wireguard on our router (and it seems more and more routers are supporting it).

There are keys to configure for each client, but once you have the configuration for one client, the rest come very quickly and easily.

I should add that I don't have any experience with Tailscale, but compared to OpenVPN and other VPN solutions, Wireguard is lightweight, simple, and easy to setup/configure.

We use it on all our mobile devices (phones, laptops, tablets) to tunnel our traffic through our home network with all the filtering it offers (along side access to private services we host).

Alt text: Buzz Lighter sees functional programming paradigms everywhere.

PS - I don't follow JavaScript or use it much, but these are nice tools to have in any language.

I've never seen an incident report or postmortem that didn't include action items to cover the core issue noted in this writing: "can we / how do we prevent this failure mode from recurring?"

I'm not saying these moments of discovery / epiphany aren't valuable, they are and this retelling is enjoyably written.

I am saying that action items borne of incidents should be de rigueur.

Right, this is not even table stakes, it’s the whole point of a post-mortem.

When you have a bug in a program, you fix it. This is just a variation of that incredibly obvious “advice” applied at a slightly different level.

I recently had to implement a stripe payment system for a client (having never used it before) and found their documentation to be accurate and excellent (at least for the Java SDK and relatively basic use case).

No love for Stripe but IMO their documentation feels like a first-class product.

I think the specific cases where it failed was when the customer was one of their earlier ones. My guess is that some data schema migration happened, and older data was being served which didn't quite match. So perhaps recency wouldn't potentially even surface those problems either.

There are already consequences.

We (collectively) were unprepared for a machine that presents itself in human forms. We were the frogs that boiled ourselves. We built a world of images and words on a screen. And then we built a machine that can (increasingly) mirror that world; it does so in a way which most of us are incapable of disambiguating.

It feels like there is indeed a ghost in the machine.

And there is, but that ghost is us. And that ghost is fading surprisingly quickly.

I’ve found the downgrade surprisingly minimal on plasma 6 - and it’s far more customizable.

Thanks to marginal gains on MacOs (nee OS X) the Linux desktop gets closer more quickly than Apple can pull away.