Here's my observation: ballparking an estimate for a whole project, in my experience, tends to be more accurate than estimating each task and adding them together.

I like to think of this as 'pragmatic agile': for sure break it down into tasks in a backlog, but don't get hung up on planning it out to the Nth degree because then that becomes more waterfall and you start to lose agility.

Legit question: when working on finding security issues, are there any guidelines on what you can send to LLMs/AI?

Personally, I'd just use common sense and good judgment. At the end of the day, would you want someone to hand your address, and other private data to OpenAI just like that? Probably not. So don't paste customer data into it if you can avoid it.

On the other hand, minified code is literally published by the company. Everyone can see it and do with it as they please. So handing that over to an AI to un-minify is not really your problem, since you're not the developer working on the tool internally.

I got downvoted, so maybe that means someone thinks un-minifying code is not advised for dealing with security issues? But on reflection surely you can just use the 'format code' command in the ide? I am no expert but surely it's ok to use AI to help track down and identify security issues with the usual caveats of 'don't believe it blindly, do your double checking and risk assessing.'

Doesn't Chrome Developer tools automatically un-minify?

Try a band called Thantifaxath - not to everyone's taste I'm sure, the music is pretty disturbing. But if you can handle the heaviness, the energy is conducive to programming. I think this is because your brain has to (more) actively filter out the heavy sounds and then the music takes on a kind of ambient quality, but at the same time the manic energy invigorates your cognitive programming activities. Give it a go and let me know how you get on!

Thanks for the hint. Just listened to their "Sacred white noise" album on youtube. The music is definitely interesting, but even less suited for me to get into a programming flow (still too much going on, and soooo nihilistic). That's music I listen to out of my interest as a musician myself, but not for programming. Maybe you know "Music for 18 Musicians" by Steve Reich (see e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oOmUi4HGt0) which transports me in an abstract world that let's me flow away and program for hours without noticing.

Yes I love that piece, such a trip - good for driving too. When I was at school and revising for exams I used to listen to a lot of classical music, mainly Beethoven, Rachmaninov, Elgar, Britten - I found that it really helped (also The Köln Concert by Keith Jarrett). So maybe the ultimate focus music is a bit like classical but with added noise and hypnotic rhythmic patterns ...

Steve Reich is "minimal music", played on classical instruments. I very much appreciate all other composers/improvisers you mention, but again they would distract me too much and require my full attention, barely leaving anything left for "mental work". There is also fully algorithmically composed and played music which sometimes has a similar effect as Reich's 18 Musicians IMHO: e.g. https://djezmusic.bandcamp.com/album/idem.

Wow, yes the Idem album really does well for focus music, thanks for the tip.

Not sure if this is up your street but if you ever need to focus AND be super fast productive, here's a good compilation https://bcco.bandcamp.com/album/bccova16-curated-by-berkikz

Thanks for the link, will have a listen.

81,608 new online casinos in one month! Presumably most of these are affiliate sites funneling new players.

And 164,010 new e-commerce sites. Does this mean that drop shipping is still a viable business?

I don't know if drop shipping is still viable, but there are lots of those types of sites so...

"To be fully engaged in your own creative or logical challenges, while at the same time fully on board the emotional rails of the musical ideas of another person can make for an experience not dissimilar to meditation — but rather than focussing on the simplicity of nothingness while swatting away introspective daydreams, you are engulfed in enough complexity to cause introspective daydreams to burn up on re-entry."

I recommend Stair (2:22:22) by datassette for focus and ambient background. The artist recorded the sound of downtown Chicago overnight from his hotel and then processed and mixed this together with processed sounds from MS-DOS strategy game soundtracks from the 80s. Brilliant.

https://datassette.bandcamp.com/track/stair-2-22-22

Datassette has a site with mixes, from himself and others, all "intended for listening while ${task} to focus the brain and inspire the mind."

Concerning games, Datassette released a brilliantly beautiful arcade shooter called (Utopia Must Fall)[https://store.steampowered.com/app/2849680/Utopia_Must_Fall/], with lots of retro sounds.

Good piece on pirate radio culture from issue 2 https://www.muzikmagazine.co.uk/issues/muzik002_july_1995.pd...

That's odd, usually older computers, especially NUCs are very well supported under Linux. I've got a 3yr old NUC-like Mini PC (from Minisforum) and it everything worked OOTB (with Fedora and Arch).

Yes, and to extend this line of thinking: Spotify pioneered this model as a solution to rampant music piracy and consequently very low and diminishing revenues for recorded music. For the music consumer it's a beautiful proposition to have this enormous catalog for $10 or so a month. The music industry now has record revenues, and the streaming platforms can, and often do, turbo charge a new artist's career.

When I browse Spotify randomly I'm frequently surprised by coming across artists that I've never heard of with 1 million, 3 million, 15 million, etc monthly listeners, and then finding good, interesting, historically significant but obscure artists with just a few hundred or thousand listeners.

My friend, a recording artist, recently broke the 1 million monthly listeners barrier on Spotify, he's dead chuffed of course, but this is more listeners than innumerable great, classic artists. I don't see this discrepancy as a failure of the streaming system, but as a success: my friend is a young artist making money and getting good exposure.

Just saying: yes Spotify has it's faults, but it's also great too.

There was a study that looked at the economics of this [1]: user centric (UCPS) vs market centric (MCPS) payment system. In short: UCPS would transfer some revenue from the top artists to the middle rump of popular artists, but the small and obscure artists would not be affected much since they hardly make much in the first place.

My take on this: of course the top artists should not be taking a disproportionate cut at the expense of the less popular artists, a UCPS is not a panacea but it would be an improvement.

[1] https://legrandnetwork.blogspot.com/2021/02/user-centric-mod...

Thanks so much for linking this, I think it's a great study.

And I agree, I don't think it would be a panacea. But I think it would be a lot fairer, and would help a large selection of artists in that middle tier. For the most obscure artists, while the study says it has a "low impact" on them, they actually had the highest percentage increase, but since their royalties are already so low the euro amount increase was in the single digit euros. And again, that seems fair to me - if hardly anyone is listening to you, you're not going to be getting a big payout.

I think the real issue that needs to be solved for this is how you will convince big artists to sign while giving up some revenue to less popular artists ... because you absolutely need them.