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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • The encoding format of URLs is URL encoding, also known as percent-encoding. Content in the URL may be first encoding in some other format, like JSON or base64, and then encoded additionally using percent-encoding.

    While there is a standard way to decode percent-encoding, websites are free to use base64 or JSON in URLs however they wish, so there’s not a one-size-fits-all way to decode them all. For example, the “/” character is valid in both percent-encoding and base64-encoding, so to know if it’s part of a base64-encoded blob or not, you might end up trying decoding several parts of the URL as base64 and checking if the result looks like URL-- essentially brute force.

    A smarter way to do this might be to maintain a mapping between your favorite sites that you want to decode and what methods they use to encode links. Then a tool could efficiently directly decode the URLs embedded in these click trackers.


  • Lol. After professionally hosting email for 15 years I’m happy to let someone else handle it now.

    About 90% of incoming mail will be spam and it will be your job to make sure you are doing good job of classifying it so you don’t get junk in your inbox and don’t lose real mail in the spam folder.

    Then for outgoing mail you need to make sure SPF, DKIM and DMARC are all in order.

    Then there is all the usual stuff of security updates, backups, monitoring, alerting, logging and having a plan for internet outages.

    Yes, it’s all doable but I won’t expect it be “set and forget”. I expect there will be quite a bit of tuning with some possible spam and delivery problems while you get kinks worked out.
















  • This is interesting, I would be quite impressed if this PR got merged without additional changes.

    We’ll see. Whether it gets merged in any form, it’s still a big win for me because I finally was able to get some changes implemented that I had been wanting for a couple years.

    are you able to read and and have a decent understanding of the output code?

    Yes. I know other coding languages and CSS. Sometimes Claude generated code that was correct but I thought it was awkward or poor, so I had it revise. For example, I wanted to handle a boolean case and it added three booleans and a function for that. I said no, you can use a single boolean for all that. Another time it duplicated a bunch of code for the single and multi-monitor cases and I had it consolidate it.

    In one case, It got stuck debugging and I was able to help isolate where the error was through testing. Once I suggested where to look harder, it was able to find a subtle issue that I couldn’t spot myself. The labels were appearing far too small at one point, but I couldn’t see that Claude had changed any code that should affect the label size. It turned out two data structures hadn’t been merged correctly, so that default values weren’t getting overridden correctly. It was the sort of issue I could see a human dev introducing on the first pass.

    do you know why it is uncommented?

    Yes, that’s the fix for supporting floating windows. The author reported that previously there was a problem with the z-index of the labels on these windows, so that’s apparently why it was implemented but commented out. But it seems due to other changes, that problem no longer exists. I was able to test that labels on floating windows now work correctly.

    Through the process, I also became more familiar with Rust tooling and Rust itself.



  • This weekend I successfully used Claude to add three features in a Rust utility I had wanted for a couple years. I had opened issue requests, but no else volunteered. I had tried learning Rust, Wayland and GTK to do it myself, but the docs at the time weren’t great and the learning curve was steep. But Claude figured it all out pretty quick.