• The Man in the Arena

    A speech by Theodore Roosevelt in Paris 1910 that railed against cynics who looked down on those attempting to do great things.

    “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

    See also:

  • Using a Language Server in a Docker Container

    Projects that use docker for local development run into a problem when trying to use language servers with their text editor—they don’t handle multiple environments.

    There are a few ways around it, but they all have trade-offs.

    Running a remote language server

    You can connect to a remote language server (it is a server after all) by wrapping the command in a script and configuring your text editor to use it.

    For example (assuming you have docker container with pyls):

    #!/bin/bash

# Runs a python-language-server in a running container for use with
# eglot in emacs.

docker compose -f /path/to/my/docker-compose.yml \
               exec \
               -T \
               myservice pyls

    Everything works with the exception of jump-to-definition (at least when using Emacs eglot). That’s because the file path returned by the language server is the file path in the container, not your host machine.

    In Emacs, you can hack around this in eglot (albeit in an inelegant way) by redefining xref-make-file-location like so:

    ;; HACK: If the xref file doesn't exist, it probably came from a
;; remote LSP server using eglot. Try mapping it to the local
;; file system. Maybe someday it will be supported in eglot.
;; See: https://github.com/joaotavora/eglot/issues/350
(eval-after-load "xref"
  '(defun xref-make-file-location (file line column)
     (if (not (file-exists-p file))
         (make-instance 'xref-file-location :file (format "~/your/host/file/path" file) :line line :column column)
       (make-instance 'xref-file-location :file file :line line :column column))))

    Edit files in the remote language server container

    To get around the compatibility issues that comes from running in two different environments (the host machine and the container), you can edit the files remotely in the container that is running the language server (in Emacs you can use docker-tramp). This keeps the environment consistent, but it’s a bit clunky when you need to remember where the files are and flipping back and forth (e.g. when doing a `git commit` from the host machine).

  • The Internet Is a Disjointed Memex

    The memex device imagined a lattice of information that grows and can be built on top of incrementally. The internet and hypertext are that—nearly all the world’s information is now captured in the format of the web. However, it’s disjointed which makes it largely inaccessible.

    We’re not so much “surfing the web” as we are “rock climbing the web”.

    A web browser is how we view the internet, but we can only access certain parts. Some information is behind logins, paywalls, or even firewalls.

    The only way to query the vast internet is by a service that can ingest it in it’s entirety and index it as a service—Google. Because this is the primary way people access information, content gets created for (and subsequently mediated by) Google.

    See also:

  • A List of Tasks Describes Multi-Party Processes Poorly

    A list of tasks to complete does not contain sufficient information to describe a multi-party process. For example, if you were to describe ‘pick up the milk’ to an extraterrestrial you might say 1) go to the store 2) buy milk 3) check out 4) go home. However, this hides the complexity of interactions.

    Sticking with the example, what actually happens is that you get into the car and turn the ignition. The car turns on or not. If it doesn’t turn on then you are blocked (a terminal state). If the car turns on you drive to the store (ignoring the interactions between cars, traffic lights, etc. for brevity). Once at the store you find the milk and go to the cashier. You hand the item to them. They place it in a bag. They tell you how much to pay. You pay them. They accept the payment, they give you a receipt. You take the bag. You go to your car (repeating the process earlier) and go home.

    If you were new to buying milk from the store, the checklist from the first paragraph would not help you because it hides complexity by making it seem like a single-party sequence rather than a complex set of interactions between multiple parties. It lacks context and therefore would not be repeatable.

    See also:

  • Protecting the North China Plain Explains Policies in China

    Protecting the North China Plain is the highest priority in China’s policies both domestic and foreign. The North China Plain is where most of the population lives (the Hu Line) and is the ancestral home for the Han ethnic group. There is also a thousand years of history that includes failing to protect the heartland (e.g. Mongol invasion).

    One can explain many seemingly disparate decisions by China when looking at it through this lens. Adding borders and buffers to prevent land invasions—building the Great Wall, invading Vietnam, and occupying Tibet. Preventing invasions from the sea and protecting supply lines—cracking down on Taiwan (and likely annexing it entirely) and the Belt and Road initiative (which leads to persecution of Uighurs).

    Read What China Wants.

    See also:

    • Recent aggression towards Hong Kong and Taiwan China officials called the Sword of Damocles is explained by this protectionist framework.

  • GitHub Codespaces Is Too Cumbersome and Expensive to Replace Local Development

    After trying out GitHub Codespaces for work, it’s clear that—while impressive—it is not a suitable replacement to developing locally. It’s slow to set up. It’s also very expensive.

    When using Codespaces with a monorepo that uses docker-compose to run services (e.g. a database, frontend app, and API server) you want to have everything running so you can develop as soon as it boots. However, every Codespaces container builds the entire docker-compose each time which takes time for any non-trivial setup.

    If you try to set your .devcontainer to your project’s docker-compose.yml, Codespaces doesn’t expose the running docker services in an accessible way and you are attached to a single container with no way to switch. You can’t see logs (e.g. docker compose logs {service}) or execute code in another container (e.g. docker compose exec {service} {command}). You can’t change which container the Codespace is attached to so running setup or maintenance scripts is difficult.

    You could use the default .devcontainer and call docker from within the Codespace terminal, but then you push the build latency to after the Codespace boots and the user has to remember to call it for the set of services they need.

    GitHub is also working on a feature to pre-build devcontainer images, but who knows how much that will cost in storage.

    Adding up the costs of using Codespaces full time shows that it’s more expensive than buying MacBook Air M1s. At the default 4 core VM at $0.36 you’re looking at roughly $1,000 per engineer per year. Not to mention and you still need to buy and maintain a work laptop.

    There is an argument to be made that you save money on time spent dealing with local configuration issues. This makes sense at larger organizations, but for a small startup, probably not.

    See also: