This is awesome. Perfectly solving a problem, showing off tech, and adorable.

> I proceeded to do the work.

> I did the work.

> I worked.

Each one of these has slightly different readings in my eyes.

Unlike the last variant, the first two imply there was some quantity of work and it was all completed.

I don't really see the difference between the two though.

Well, option 1 implies that there was something else going on before the event described in the sentence. Option 2 is neutral about that.

Compare:

1. I did the work for that last week.

2. I proceeded to do the work for that last week.

Sentence 2 strikes me as questionably grammatical. It needs to be proceeding from something in the context.

Not different enough to make it worth using anything but the simplest one.

I'm of the notion that my certainty is not sufficiently concrete to discover myself in the realm of agreement

Perhaps yet another American cultural artifact. One that - if I were to guess - originated from the Calvinist disdain for ostentiousness.

Yes yes, anybody who prefers plain, easily parsed wording is American.

Wording? Don't you mean diction?

A -> B =/= B -> A.

I didn't claim that this was exclusively American. Though I'd have to admit that one doesn't have to be American to adopt Ameracanisms: rhotic Rs, Netflix color-grading, and copy-cat political movements are other American cultural artifacts showing up across the world due to America's dominance of the zeitgeist.

Rap verses in pop songs wasn't a spontaneously phenomenon across the globe, the origins are tracably American - but that doesn't make all rappers American.

Unix philosophy strikes again

HTML tools are a good name. I called them something like "a local html file"

One problem I solved with this was a packer needed to scan a few (10-40) ids into his barcode scanner. It was not enough where pulling up their bulk-id-uploader program but also too tedious to go to some "number to barcode" website.

Turns out, barcodes can be made from a google font!

https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Libre+Barcode+39

You can just display a number using that font. Then hooked up a for-loop that's progressed by pressing the space bar: paste in IDs, scan first, space, scan next, repeat.

FYI, looks like keyvalues.com didn't pay their bill

> This service has been suspended.

> That's a little more than 10% productivity, so not anywhere close to 10x.

No Silver Bullet still alive and well in 2026

You didn't read far enough:

> Dollar General stores have failed more than 4,300 government price-accuracy inspections in 23 states since January 2022, a Guardian review found. Family Dollar stores have failed more than 2,100 price inspections in 20 states over the same time span, the review found.

> Among these thousands of failed inspections, some of the biggest flops include a 76% error rate in October 2022 at a Dollar General in Hamilton, Ohio; a 68% error rate in February 2023 at a Family Dollar in Bound Brook, New Jersey; and a 58% error rate three months ago at a Family Dollar in Lorain, Ohio.

> Many of the stores that failed state or local government checks were repeat violators. A Family Dollar in Provo, Utah, flunked 28 inspections in a row – failures that included a 48% overcharge rate in May 2024 and a 12% overcharge rate in October 2025.

> The Guardian’s examination of inspection failures by the two chains was based on record requests to 45 states and more than 140 counties and cities in New York, Ohio and California, along with court documents and public databases.

> what's the difference?

Did you read the article? Charging what's actually on the price tag is the first thing that's the difference.

> Dollar General said it was “committed to providing customers with accurate prices on items purchased in our stores, and we are disappointed any time we fail to deliver on this commitment”. In one court case in Ohio, Dollar General’s lawyers argued that “it is virtually impossible for a retailer to match shelf pricing and scanned pricing 100% of the time for all items. Perfection in this regard is neither plausible nor expected under the law.”

LOVE LOVE putting what their PR says right next to what their lawyers say in court.

We absolutely need this more in this kind of reporting of late-stage capitalism.

Yes, absolutely