mikeschinkel

Me

What is the lowest power combination of server motherboard, CPU, reliable drives, ECC memory, fans and case that would make for a good powerful home router for one person with a lot of computer equipment?

ChatGPT

When choosing a motherboard, CPU, and other components for a home router, it's important to consider the level of performance and reliability you need. You should also consider the power consumption of the components, as a low-power system will be more energy-efficient and potentially save you money on your energy bills.

For a powerful home router for one person with a lot of computer equipment, you might consider using a motherboard with a low-power CPU, such as an Intel Atom or a Qualcomm processor. These CPUs are designed for low-power applications and can provide sufficient performance for routing and other basic tasks. You'll also want to choose reliable drives, such as solid-state drives (SSDs), to ensure that your router is always available.

In addition to the motherboard and CPU,

mikeschinkel

How to Combat Misinformation in the US, especially Fox News?

Me

Explain how to require Fox News to limit itself to factual reporting without violating the 1st amendment to the US Constitution that guarantees free speech.

ChatGPT

It is not possible for the government or any other entity to require Fox News or any other news organization to limit itself to factual reporting without violating the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, which guarantees freedom of speech. The First Amendment protects the freedom of the press to report on issues and events as they see fit, even if their reporting is not always factual or unbiased.

However, there are ways to encourage news organizations to strive for accuracy and factual reporting. One way is through the use of media literacy education, which helps individuals develop the critical thinking skills needed to evaluate the accuracy and reliability of different sources of information. This can help people to identify and avoid sources of misinforma

mikeschinkel

Managing String Literals is a PITA,
Not Just in GoLang but in (All?) Other Languages

When working in Go, or Bash, or PHP, or any other language for that matter I find one of the most tedious tasks that are also very error prone is management of literal strings.

AFAIK no programming language has addressed this head on, ever. If I am right about that, it would be great if Go was the first.

Literal String Management

Management of literal strings occurs especially with URLs and local paths, but also with many other values that end up as literals used in source code. And there is not one good way to handle them, only several different ways all with major cons, and so developers are all over the map in how they handle string literals.

One approach is for a developer to assign a string literals to a named constant, and then use that name constant wherever the value is needed, e.g.:

mikeschinkel

Making encoding/csv.Reader extensible

The simple idea behind these potential modifications is to add a function csv.ReadFunc() that can be passed a csv.LogicFunc when called where the signature of the passed closure and related type and consts would be.

In this case there is really only one evalation needed, but there could easily be multiple in other use-cases.

mikeschinkel

package test
//
//  Initial source for benchmark from https://stackoverflow.com/a/40678026/102699
//  Added BenchmarkConcatAppendPreAllocate()
//
import "testing"

func BenchmarkConcatCopyPreAllocate(b *testing.B) {
	for n := 0; n < b.N; n++ {
		B = concatCopyPreAllocate(slices)

mikeschinkel

Function GrantLogonAsAService([string]$Username) {
    Write-Host "Grant Logon-as-a-Service for $Username"

    $SecurityId = $null
    try {
        $Principal = new-object System.Security.Principal.NTAccount $Username
        $SecurityId = $Principal.Translate([System.Security.Principal.SecurityIdentifier]).Value.ToString()
    } catch {
        Write-Host "Attempt to access SecurityID failed."
        $SecurityId = $null

mikeschinkel

<?php declare(strict_types=1);
/*
 * This file is part of sebastian/type.
 *
 * (c) Sebastian Bergmann <sebastian@phpunit.de>
 *
 * For the full copyright and license information, please view the LICENSE
 * file that was distributed with this source code.
 */
namespace SebastianBergmann\Type;

mikeschinkel

Proposal for Streamlined Error Handling in Go

This is a proposal for a way to simplify the error handling in Go.

The idea is to use attempt{} and recover{} blocks to separate the happy path from the error handling. NOTE: this is NOT exception handling as you would see in Java or PHP. More on why below.

In this proposal Go would allow the developer to omit capturing the last returned variable from a function call if and only if that call was within a attempt{} block. The Go compiler would handle providing access to the error instance via the geterror() function within the recover{} block if any function returns a non nil error as its last omitted parameter, i.e.:

attempt{
 data:= GetData()

mikeschinkel

<?php

// Put this in wp-config.php
define('PREPARED_SQL_REQUIRED',true);

// A site builder who wants to use  prepared statements and parameterized queries 
// could run these in various hooks before $wpdb->query() below is run.
$question_fragment = $wpdb->prepare( '`question_id` = %d', $question_id );
$answer_fragment = $wpdb->prepare( '`answer_name` = %s', $new_answer );
$wpdb->compose('UPDATE %s polls SET vote = vote+1 WHERE %s AND %s',

mikeschinkel

<?php

$safe_var = 'all your base they belong to us';

file_put_contents('/tmp/exploit.txt',$safe_var );
// imagine lots of stuff going on here...
$safe_var = file_get_contents('/tmp/exploit.txt');

function make_literal(string $non_literal):string {
    $literal = '';