Patrick Doyle 🇨🇦

Debates over DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) versus WET (Write Everything Twice) tend to miss the point. It's not about how many times you write something. DRY is not just a form of data compression, sharing code just so you can have less code.

The real cost of repetition is that code that should change in unison doesn't: if you fix a bug in one copy, the other is still broken. So the real decision point is: use shared code if the commonalities are fundamental; make separate copies if the commonalities are coincidental.

Unpopular opinion: squashing commits when merging pull requests is a major mistake.

Just make PRs with a succession of commits. Craft your commits with care. Rebase until the commits look nice and reviewable. Then merge them with normal merge commits.

Unpopular opinion: squashing commits when merging pull requests is a major mistake.

We can probably agree that people should leave the codebase better than they found it. That means fixing little incidental annoyances as you go, and refactoring things to make your changes easier. The thing is...

Unpopular opinion: squashing commits when merging pull requests is a major mistake.

With each PR being one commit, and commits being single small, well-defined changes, you end up being led toward concluding that PRs should also be single small, well-defined changes which, despite GitHub marketing, is a Bad Idea that kills your productivity and helps your codebase rot.

Something I think people don't say often enough about Hawking radiation: There are no known black holes anywhere in the universe that are actually evaporating. Any black hole more massive than the moon has a temperature lower than the cosmic microwave background, so they absorb more than they emit.

We know of no way to form such tiny black holes, so the only lunar-mass black holes that exist are primordial, and we have little evidence yet that those exist. Known black holes won't even begin evaporating until the very very far future. Like on the order of half a trillion years from now.

I wish I knew why more Canadians aren't outraged by the CPP investment board. They manage our retirement pension fund, and they also choose the criteria by which they are judged.

This should be a scandal, and yet somehow it's not. The old benchmarks should be legislated back, so that the CPPIB is required to report on whether they are capable of outperforming a simple passive investment strategy.

I wish I knew why more Canadians aren't outraged by the CPP investment board. They manage our retirement pension fund, and they also choose the criteria by which they are judged.

Has anyone found a way to make DeepSeek v4 Flash stop using the word "honest"? It's so grating. It drives me nuts.

I've just told it "act like "honest" is a highly offensive curse word that will trigger anger in the reader". Wish me luck.

Unpopular opinion: the IAU has no official authority to define the term "planet". The rest of us have no obligation to use their definitions. I think a planet is a place made round by its gravity, but not massive enough to be a star. Is Pluto a planet? Yes, and so is our Moon.