brandons's recent activity

  1. Comment on Alternatives to Goodreads? in ~books

    brandons
    Link Parent
    I came to recommend Story Graph. I am a (happy) user and can recommend it :)

    I came to recommend Story Graph. I am a (happy) user and can recommend it :)

    19 votes

  2. Comment on <deleted topic> in ~talk

    brandons
    Link Parent
    I agree, more and better bike infrastructure is always welcome. But, I think there are more situations where an e-bike is useful even in a "perfect" world. For example, I live in a hilly, urban...

    I agree, more and better bike infrastructure is always welcome.

    But, I think there are more situations where an e-bike is useful even in a "perfect" world. For example, I live in a hilly, urban area. So hilly that it's basically up-hill both ways. My partner and I like to do all our shopping via bike, and that includes going to the grocery store and Costco. For that, with 50-100lbs of groceries, an e-bike has been a huge improvement in our lives. Especially when you add in the fact that Costco is 8 miles one way. Doing a 16 mile ride isn't bad per se, but with all that weight, it's just enough to make you want to drive.

    Another use-case that is gaining more popularity in my area is parents carrying their kids around.

    A final use-case is accessibility. An aging person might not have the strength to bike long distances or up hills, even with perfect infrastructure. An e-bike is a great way to let people retain independence and age more gracefully.

    Ultimately, I think e-bikes are a great way to take cars off the road and increase awareness of biking infrastructure (or lack thereof). They are definitely more dangerous than traditional bike, and people should be responsible on them, but, by and large, people are responsible on them in my experience.

    4 votes

  3. Comment on What programming/technical projects have you been working on? in ~comp

    brandons
    Link Parent
    It was so long ago that I don't remember to be honest haha. I'm sure I saw it on HN or a programming subreddit like r/rust or r/programming. When I went to reimplement this project in Rust, I was...

    Oh wow, TIL cooklang. How on earth did you come across this?

    It was so long ago that I don't remember to be honest haha. I'm sure I saw it on HN or a programming subreddit like r/rust or r/programming. When I went to reimplement this project in Rust, I was prompted by my brain randomly remembering that a thing like this exists. "A thing like this" being a thing that parses ingredients from recipes. Even then, it took some digging.

    It's a pretty nifty idea, and the author has been really responsive and helpful.

    3 votes

  4. Comment on What programming/technical projects have you been working on? in ~comp

    brandons
    Link
    I've been iterating on this project once a year for the last 3-4 years. I've implemented it 3 times in 3 different languages (python -> scala -> rust) because it's been such a great way to learn a...

    I've been iterating on this project once a year for the last 3-4 years. I've implemented it 3 times in 3 different languages (python -> scala -> rust) because it's been such a great way to learn a new language.

    At a high-level, there are two components. The first sends me a weekly email of three randomly chosen recipes (weighted on how frequently they have been recommended in the past) from my list of recipes. The email contains a button to "Add Ingredients". If I click that button, a second component runs. That component adds all the ingredients from those recipes to a Todoist project. This iteration incorporated cooklang as the recipe parsing layer, which enabled the ingredients to be sorted by where they are in the grocery store as well as combining the same ingredient from different recipes.

    repo

    12 votes

  5. Comment on Whats the most important alias or function in your bashrc file? in ~comp

    brandons
    Link
    I have some there are maybe more interesting or powerful, but these probably save me 1-5 days per year: alias gb="git branch" alias gc="git checkout" alias gp="git pull" alias gs="git status"...

    I have some there are maybe more interesting or powerful, but these probably save me 1-5 days per year:

    alias gb="git branch"
alias gc="git checkout"
alias gp="git pull"
alias gs="git status"
alias gfu="git fetch upstream"

  6. Comment on Whats the most important alias or function in your bashrc file? in ~comp

    brandons
    Link Parent
    Oh dang I didn't know about the color flag on grep. Thanks!

    Oh dang I didn't know about the color flag on grep. Thanks!

    1 vote