strangebroadcasts
@strangebroadcasts

Do you need to install a program to do precisely one thing? Do you want to test whether your game installs the correct redistributables on PCs which don't have them? Do you want to test whether your fancy batch script will actually reorder your movie catalogue instead of deleting it?

Windows Sandbox solves all of that: it sets up lightweight VMs in seconds, which are destroyed once you close them. You can configure it to allow or deny sandboxes network access, give them access to certain folders, or to run specific commands when they start up.

It is really nice, but for some unfathomable reason Microsoft made this a Pro-only feature you have to manually enable, instead of advertising it widely as the place to try out that cool game you got on Discord*

(*Okay, it's a lightweight VM with networking enabled by default, you'll want to exercise some caution still, but it is going to make it significantly harder to do lasting damage)



vogon
@vogon

the unfortunate things they don't tell you about You Aren't Gonna Need It are that:

a) you might actually need it though
b) the longer before you realize you actually needed it -- the closer you get to being right that You Weren't Gonna Need It -- the harder the work to unwind the assumption will be
c) being wise enough to think in the moment that You Weren't Gonna Need It doesn't get you a discount on that work


strangebroadcasts
@strangebroadcasts

Some features really do get much harder to add after the fact - I like Simon Willison's and Luke Plant's lists of PAGNIs, "probably are gonna need it" features

Sadly none of these lists have the one true example of PAGNI: undo/redo, which is straightforward to solve with the command pattern if you think of it ahead of time, and pain otherwise



Kind of finished the Picosteno I'm putting together for a friend, as in: some of the keys were working fine, but no longer do after assembling the keyboard :(

It's weirdly hard to get good solder joints on the key switches' ground pins, but it's also been ages since I soldered regularly.

Will leave it at that for today and try to resolder it tomorrow.