jcoglan

the very rare these days jcoglan blog post: uses for nested promises https://blog.jcoglan.com/2026/03/23/uses-for-nested-promises/

why has tailscale decided it needs to put an icon in the cmd-tab menu when it doesn't have any windows open

figured out a nice way to make sure all the config parameters in the escodb settings file are authenticated, essentially by adding them to the authenticated data that's bound up when encrypting the key for each section rather than adding new MAC blobs into the file

petition to remove the ability to concatenate strings from all programming languages effective immediately

maybe one day I'll revive that typed template composition project I prototyped over a decade ago

got a fun reply yesterday that was like "yeah I can't believe people are taking such a lax approach to verifying the behaviour of software especially if they use LLMs. we never would have done this when I worked at <well known arms manufacturer>"

am now getting email spam promising to "promote" my open source work via chatgpt. I cannot say this forcefully enough: eat shit

RE: @jcoglan@mastodon.social

just had the misfortune of seeing yegge's latest piece and you could not paint a clearer picture of technofeudalism if you tried. it's all the worst aspects of 2020s tech in a single product

me 3 months ago: £100+/mo is an unjustifiable expense for what claude does for me

me now: not sure I could live with myself knowingly giving £100+/mo to the "blow up a random school" machine

this had been a script sitting in my dropbox for ages but I recently migrated my command-line totp app to escodb and put it on github https://github.com/escodb/totp

the actual totp algorithm is tiny: https://github.com/escodb/totp/blob/main/lib/totp.js

this whole app is < 80 (eighty) lines of code while escodb itself is 2,200. most of the complexity of an authenticator app is secure key storage

ubuntu 24 doesn't open .deb files? how are you supposed to install anything?

(yes it's my first time using desktop linux for a while)

today I got the error "Text file busy" when trying to run an executable on linux, first time I've ever seen this, and my first reaction was "what is this windows"

RE: @baldur@toot.cafe

they're not even good now, my phone frequently fails to spot typos with a levenshtein distance of 1 from correct spelling

RE: @jcoglan@mastodon.social

this thread from yesterday about password manager flaws is still rattling around my head. some of these things are deliberate design choices while others are "I thought you guys employed cryptographers what the hell"

RE: @soatok@furry.engineer

"Two popular AES libraries, aes-js and pyaes, “helpfully” provide a default IV in their AES-CTR API" nope. nope nope nope

this isn't a "this is suboptimal" problem this is a "the encryption is completely pointless" problem

RE: @GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social

the thing about the median-output machines is that they reproduce the extremely common mistakes that people with actual expertise know how to avoid

put all the money into programming ergonomics research

who called them persistent data structures and not cow tools