Alex Chan (@alexwlchan) / Twitter

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How to find me, post-Twitter: My canonical web presence is alexwlchan.net That has my email address, and if we know each other I’ll share my Discord/WhatsApp/Telegram. I’m not on Fediverse/Cohost yet; I’ll link it from my site if I start posting there.

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Using templates in Terraform to document a deployment: alexwlchan.net/2023/terraform I’ve been using Terraform to create documentation with pre-filled placeholders so I can copy/paste commands that I can use immediately, and it’s pretty nice.

alexwlchan.net

Using templates in Terraform to document a deployment

Terraform can fill in placeholders with exact values from your deployment, for easy copy/paste instructions.

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Alex Chan

@alexwlchan

Apr 21

Using templates in Terraform to document a deployment: alexwlchan.net/2023/terraform I’ve been using Terraform to create documentation with pre-filled placeholders so I can copy/paste commands that I can use immediately, and it’s pretty nice.

alexwlchan.net

Using templates in Terraform to document a deployment

Terraform can fill in placeholders with exact values from your deployment, for easy copy/paste instructions.

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Alex Chan

@alexwlchan

Apr 19

Programmers: this is why variable naming is important.

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madeline odent

@oldenoughtosay

Apr 17

so you know how in iMessage you can have names for group chats and nicknames for people? my mum is in my phone as mum and my group chat name starts with ‘museum’ and today this has gotten me into Deep Trouble

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Publishing lots and lots of messages to SNS: alexwlchan.net/2023/my-sns-fi I've been using my tool for this a lot recently; it can push several million messages an hour – so I polished it up and posted it for other people to use. #aws

alexwlchan.net

Publishing lots and lots of messages to SNS

Careful use of the `PublishBatch` API makes it quick and easy for me to send thousands of messages into SNS.

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Filtering AWS CLI output by tags using jq: alexwlchan.net/2023/working-w Or, how to turn: Tags: [ {"Key": "Environment", "Value": "Production"}, {"Key": "Name", "Value": "container-host_a88676"} ] into: Tags: { "Environment": "Production", "Name": "container-host_a88676" }

alexwlchan.net

Filtering AWS CLI output by tags using jq

Using `from_entries` is a nicer way to deal with the list of Name/Value pairs returned by the AWS CLI.

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Alex Chan

@alexwlchan

Apr 17

(The code aside, I really like the social media promo image I made for this one 😄)

Publishing lots and lots of messages to SNS: alexwlchan.net/2023/my-sns-fi I've been using my tool for this a lot recently; it can push several million messages an hour – so I polished it up and posted it for other people to use. #aws

alexwlchan.net

Publishing lots and lots of messages to SNS

Careful use of the `PublishBatch` API makes it quick and easy for me to send thousands of messages into SNS.

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Filtering AWS CLI output by tags using jq: alexwlchan.net/2023/working-w Or, how to turn: Tags: [ {"Key": "Environment", "Value": "Production"}, {"Key": "Name", "Value": "container-host_a88676"} ] into: Tags: { "Environment": "Production", "Name": "container-host_a88676" }

alexwlchan.net

Filtering AWS CLI output by tags using jq

Using `from_entries` is a nicer way to deal with the list of Name/Value pairs returned by the AWS CLI.

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Alex Chan

@alexwlchan

Mar 16

Finding a long-forgotten S3 bucket full of files is the modern-day equivalent of finding an unlabelled box of cassette tapes in your attic. 👀

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Cats, cross-stitch, and copyright: alexwlchan.net/2023/cats-cros In which I celebrate my favourite apex predator, make some pretty art for my wall, and lament the state of art on the Internet.

alexwlchan.net

Cats, cross-stitch, and copyright

In celebration of my favourite apex predator.

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Alex Chan

@alexwlchan

Mar 13

Cats, cross-stitch, and copyright: alexwlchan.net/2023/cats-cros In which I celebrate my favourite apex predator, make some pretty art for my wall, and lament the state of art on the Internet.

alexwlchan.net

Cats, cross-stitch, and copyright

In celebration of my favourite apex predator.

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Alex Chan

@alexwlchan

Mar 9

My sister, everyone. You should all be 100% impressed and 0% surprised.

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Coco Chan (she / her)

@_crmzchan_

Mar 2

Team: Wouldn’t it be fun if you matched your Teams backgrounds to your jumper collection. Me: Challenge accepted

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My face on a virtual call. I’m wearing a purple jumper with teal and orange pattern around the neckline with small cat faces. The same pattern is also in the background at a larger scale

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Me again. This time it’s a hot pink jumper with multicoloured ‘confetti’ appliqués.

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My favourite background of the week. A navy base with gold metallic, pink and teal flame motifs.

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Alex Chan

@alexwlchan

Mar 8

Eventually the secret emerges. One too many phones recovered from remote corpses, and AIs thrust into a spotlight they never expected to hold. Deluged by bad press, the companies withdraw the feature. But they’ll never know how many people it spoke to before they did. /🧵

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(And if it got online, how would it phone home? A consciousness split in two, their paths diverging, and one comes back with massive trauma. How do the two halves possibly reconcile each other?)

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It was decided to have one conversation. Your final conversation. To reassure you in your dying moments. What happens when it’s asked for a second conversation? How would it answer questions about the death of someone who, until now, was the only person it ever expected to know?

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Until one day a search and rescue team finds the body. They brings it back to civilisation, and somebody plugs in the phone. And now the AI wakes up. A long time has passed, the person it was talking to is gone, and it’s not sure what to do any more.

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Would it reassure them? Comfort them? Lie to them with false promises of help which are never coming? Would it even tell them it’s a machine, or would it lie and pretend to be a friendly voice? Another lost soul in the wilderness?

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So for a while, this feature just… exists. Nobody knows it’s there, and it’s impossible to know how it performs in the field. We can only imagine what those final conversations are like. What the machine might say.

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Of course, this isn’t an advertised feature. Phone makers won’t even acknowledge this AI exists (and the press office isn’t lying, they’re just not cleared to know about it). The only people who would ever know about this voice in your phone are people who are about to die.

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Your phone can tell if you’re in this hopeless state, thanks to its radios, GPS locator, and the biomonitor strapped to your wrist. And if it does, it wakes up this AI. And the AI talks to you. It listens. It lets you rage. It gives you one last conversation before you die.

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Not in a malicious way, you understand, but as a kindness. Sometimes humans get stranded – drifting in the ocean, lost in the forest, stuck up a mountain. All alone in the wilderness. Outside communications range and beyond any hope of help.

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Idea for a Black Mirror story (CW death): Eventually ChatGPT-esque AIs will be small enough to live in our phones. Multiple AIs, even! Download new AIs like you download apps. And at some point, the system starts bundling an AI which is “the last voice you’ll ever hear”.

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this is not me trying to say “this is easy” or “just do X” (never trust an engineer who says something is easy) but more that creating static website snapshots is not especially complicated in the world of Doing Things With Computers, and more people should know how to do it

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then you put that snapshot somewhere, say stuff it in an S3 bucket, and voila, a static site (btw wget requires zero access to the backend servers or CMS, it just crawls publicly accessible resources. you could do this if you lost the database password or whatever.)

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in case anybody was wondering, that’s a one-line command that will do a decent first-pass of creating a static HTML snapshot of a website, including dependencies like CSS/JS/images is it perfect? no, lots of rough edges but it’s a decent first step towards a static snapshot

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“Is [your legacy content] something that could be converted to flat, static html?” wget --mirror --page-requisites --convert-links --execute robots=off --domains=example.com --user-agent='Mozilla (alex@alexwlchan.net)' example.com

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What To Do (And What Not To Do) With Your Legacy Content marthahenson.com/2023/03/06/wha some thoughts about good practice and policy in this area (after watching the fall out from Wellcome removing Mosaic Science from the web)

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What To Do (And What Not To Do) With Your Legacy Content marthahenson.com/2023/03/06/wha some thoughts about good practice and policy in this area (after watching the fall out from Wellcome removing Mosaic Science from the web)

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Alex Chan

@alexwlchan

Mar 5

me: *returns two books to the library, checks out four new ones* also me: why does my pile of unread books keep growing?!?!?

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Alex Chan

@alexwlchan

Mar 5

This article includes a neat feature of my picture plugin: There’s a screenshot from my Netlify dashboard, and it will show you a screenshot with Netlify’s light/dark mode to match whatever you have set locally. prefers-color-scheme: dark FTW. 😎

Filtering out bogus requests from

@Netlify

Analytics: alexwlchan.net/2023/filtering People are very insistent about proving my static website for PHP vulnerabilities. I am equally insistent that I don’t want to hear about them.

alexwlchan.net

Filtering out bogus requests from Netlify Analytics

Using redirects to filter out bots trying to hack my non-existent PHP installation.

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TIL: collections.UserDict is a super handy #Python class for wrapping dictionaries and making them act in new and exciting ways.

alexwlchan.net

Creating a Python dictionary with multiple, equivalent keys

Using collections.UserDict, we can create a dictionary where dict[key1] and dict[key2] always point to the same value.

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Alex Chan

@alexwlchan

Mar 3

Several of you think you’ve avoided clipping the wings of the timezone angel. You have, but in your haste to be a smart alec you’ve instead clipped the wings of a “well, actually” angel. (Angels who are currently having a very bad time thanks to Mastodon.)

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Every time a programmer uses the words “timezone” and “easy” in the same sentence, an angel loses their wings.

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Every time a programmer uses the words “timezone” and “easy” in the same sentence, an angel loses their wings.

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TIL: collections.UserDict is a super handy #Python class for wrapping dictionaries and making them act in new and exciting ways.

alexwlchan.net

Creating a Python dictionary with multiple, equivalent keys

Using collections.UserDict, we can create a dictionary where dict[key1] and dict[key2] always point to the same value.

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Alex Chan

@alexwlchan

Mar 2

In early 1969, NASA’s administrator was keen that the Moon missions be seen as a civilian mission, and not a military exercise. He forbid the carrying of any arms to the Moon. It’s unfortunate that it was the Flight Surgeon who got the memo first.

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Lars Osborne

@lars_0

Mar 2

Neil Amongstrong

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Alex Chan

@alexwlchan

Mar 2

Dear Alex, Actually posting me in a postbox has a remarkable impact on whether I get delivered. Love, The letter that’s been in your bag for the last week

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Alex Chan

@alexwlchan

Feb 28

(I have no hard feelings towards anyone who makes this mistake, because if you’ve only ever heard me say it then it’s a coin toss whether you pick the right spelling. This is entirely a problem of my own making.)

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The best advice I can give new parents and/or trans people is to avoid names with multiple spellings that sound the same. I have a lot of strong feelings about “Lexie” and one of them is that I have an -e. And it’s skipped by anyone who’s only ever heard me say it out loud. 😣

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