Thoughts

they were not necessarily happy, but Thoughts feels a lot more serious than my Twitter did. It’s also interesting the extent to which I can imagine the collective set of thoughts on here as a weight, because they define the entire website that I have to maintain. It would be very hard to match the levity with which I slung Tweets into the abyss, because now the abyss is an SQLite database on a VPS with 92% disk utilization and I need to figure out how to free up space.

it's interesting because it's possible to have this intelligence without having an ability to understand complex things. And so you end up using MS Paint because it's simple and you can see a solution involving it.

> a foreign terrorist organization that relishes the killing of Americans. > Glorifying and supporting terrorists who kill Americans is grounds for visa issuance to be terminated => https://www.tuftsdaily.com/article/2025/03/federal-authorities-detain-tufts-student-in-somerville The op-ed co-authored by Ozturk which caused her visa to be revoked and her to be detained and imprisoned: > Credible accusations against Israel include accounts of deliberate starvation and indiscriminate slaughter of Palestinian civilians and plausible genocide. => https://www.tuftsdaily.com/article/2024/03/4ftk27sm6jkj At this point it is no longer possible to debate or discuss this issue neutrally. From a practical standpoint, it is not possible to have a discussion when expressing a view on one side of the issue leads to arrest and detainment for *any member* of the population—because you've silenced relevant voices on only one side of the issue. Without knowing the immigration or citizenship status of anyone who remains silent on this issue at any time, I must concede that it's possible they share Ozturk's views and Ozturk's immigration status and remain silent because of the threat by the Department of Homeland Security. As soon as you have a view that is illegal to express, it's impossible to have an open conversation because it's possible that your real opinion isn't the one you're expressing. The government is violating Ozturk's freedom of speech, not as given to her by The Constitution but as given to her by God. I will now say what Ozturk was imprisoned for saying: Credible accusations against Israel include accounts of deliberate starvation and indiscriminate slaughter of Palestinian civilians and plausible genocide. Tufts University's response to the resolutions of the Tufts Community Union Senate has been wholly inadequate and dismissive of the Senate, the collective voice of the student body. I, Matthias Portzel (though I have no relation to the university), join Graduate Students for Palestine, Tufts Students for Justice in Palestine, the Tufts Faculty and Staff Coalition for Ceasefire, and Fletcher Students for Palestine in rejecting the Universities response. We reject any attempt by the University or the Office of the President to summarily dismiss the role of the Senate and mischaracterize its resolution as divisive. The open and free debate demonstrated by the Senate process together with the serious organizing efforts of students, warrant credible self-reflection by the Office of the President and the University. We affirm the equal dignity and humanity of all people and reject the University’s mischaracterization of the Senate’s efforts. We urge President Kumar and the Tufts administration to meaningfully engage with and actualize the resolutions passed by the Senate.

I need my apple. But my apples were all rotten

Tray fey lay Every hour I need you every hour I need you every hour. As I sink down in my lonely mind, I think of life far from this time. I need to change my brain or bread. Or I’ll sink down in my own head.

There’s an interesting mathematical paradox. If you have a 60% chance of winning and doubling your money and a 40% chance of losing everything—an odd sort of casino where the odds are in your favor, you should make money, right? Your expected winnings are positive. For any finite amount of time. But if you keep playing until you run out of money, if your only stopping condition is losing, then you’re trapped there until you lose and you’re broke. And sometimes that what I feel like life is like no matter how good you are at making software if you keep making software until you can’t anymore then you’ll stop after something you can’t do and you’ll lose. ggs. RIP.

team. Apple makes proprietary software and hardware. You can't just pass a law that Apple needs to provide a solution that is "equally effective as the solution available to Apple." Apple developed a proprietary *chip* from the ground up for AirPods. And the EU is like, eh, you need to make an "equally effective solution" available to every other headphone manufacturer. And they mean on iOS, and they mean an API that is equivalent. But like. I'm just anti-authority.

a flight on Google it shows you a Google Flights result. "Alphabet was designated as a gatekeeper for the Google search service" yeah. EU making it illegal for Google to decide what shows up in Google search results. It's crazy. It's just raw socialism. Only a very small number of companies (6 I believe) are effected, intentionally, because it's not about protecting consumers. If you wanted to protect consumers, you'd write a law that search engines have to provide a list of links and aren't allows to include "smart" result boxes. But that's not what they did. They said Google isn't allowed to provide "smart" result boxes with information from Google services. Anyone else can do it. It's about hurting and slowing down Google so that European competitors can catch up. It's about saying that Google is big enough that they are no longer legally allowed to pursue their own selfish interests, they have to pursue the interests of the government.

defining themselves and their identity against an unrealistic standard. He leaves because he identifies with a dream that is unrealistic (being a successful stand up comedian even though he doesn’t have talent) and she identifies herself as having an unconditionally loving and faithful husband, even though she doesn’t. And what I’m describing generally is pride, but more specifically I’m connecting it to a feeling I had the other day that I’m attempting to describe. I felt like I couldn’t imagine myself as anyone but someone who did a, b, and c, but I didn’t have enough hours in the day to do all three. (And I don’t even remember what the things were.) “Be perfect [mature, complete], therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect [mature, complete].” “test and approve what God’s will is” “You are already clean because of the word I have spoken to you.”

“Want?” and ”should?” questions are harder to answer, often, and can give inconsistent answers. But I have a decently strong sense of identity and I can use that carry some of the weight, if you will, of deciding my morality or my opinion. The problem is that when I am trying to be or want to be someone that isn’t realistic it affects not just my instantaneous mood but my identity. I was planning on speaking at an event, 6 years ago now. And if you asked me if I wanted to do it, I would have said “sure.” But I wasn’t going to do it for the fun of it. I felt like I was type of person who should speak at the event. And so when they didn’t include my speech in the final schedule for the event, I felt slighted, sure, and I was bummed, sure, but I’m sad thinking about it now 6 years later because I felt personally attacked. It was a blow to my pride and to my sense of identity.

romantically attracted to). It's interesting to run through the comparisons.

Lewis in The Problem of Pain puts forward the theory that hell will literally, in some sense, burn souls, and that they will be reduced to a sort of soul-ash, which will last eternally but would be distinct from the healthy, eternal souls in heaven. In this sense, hell will be empty in the way that a fireplace with only ash is empty. It provides an interesting pair to the universalist assertion that hell will be empty because God won't send anyone to hell. At some point (after death), people do end up out of God's reach.

unacceptable. And there's no documentation, no instructions, either because it's supposed to just work, or you're supposed to just figure it out. And I can figure it out, but I don't want to.

> Praise Father, Son and Holy Ghost. > A-men. -Doxology

cw language; it's a Feinberg clip This is how I feel when reading bad takes on the internet every day. Edit 1:53: Another Zig programmer who is like 'why does my loop take a different number of milliseconds in debug mode. [screenshot of assembly]' Like I'm sorry I'll fix that for you. I'll fix LLVM to make sure that the assembly is the same with or without optimizations. Zig has two different features for this. You can `@setRuntimeSafety` or you can use built-in assembly and if that's not enough there is accepted proposal to implement `@optimizeFor` which you can implement in the language because it's open source. Okay. "I'm surprised by how 'lazy' this assembly is for such a simple loop. 😕" If you can write better assembly. Write the better assembly. Put it in an asm block. That's why they exist in the language. If you the LLVM backend is missing an optimization, you can reduce the LLVM IR and file an upstream bug. But they can't do that. They don't want to do that. They haven't included which of Zig's three release modes they're building in. They haven't included their target. They haven't included their backend. They haven't included their whole code. I'm pretty sure this screenshot of assembly that they're complaining about being 13 instructions is being compiled in Debug because when I put it into Godbolt I get 3 instructions. I'm crying. My mental is too fragile to deal with normal people like this. What the hell do you want me to do. Somebody's like "[just] compare to a hardware timer." and they're like "Yeah that's what I'm going to have to end up doing. I guess" How dumb are you. You need something to run in a predicable amount of time. Option 1: hardware timer. Option 2: complain about Zig programs running in different amounts of time with and without optimizations. Oh my word my mental health is so bad.

This is radical for me because for so much of my life I've avoided acting on decisions until the last minute, to give myself time to second guess myself. Which has also been very effective for me, so I don't know.

horrors m The the the clock. I haven’t hung the clock I. Need to hang the clock. But first I have to move the box and the bookshelf and the stoplight and maybe buy a new then I can hang the clock on the correct part of the wall okay okay play

a better programming language.

Someone's mentioned this before, but LLMs solve the X-Y problem by always giving you the solution you ask for. I asked ChatGPT if there was a way to parse JSON with comments in the Ruby standard library, and it spit out some regular expressions. => https://gist.github.com/MatthiasPortzel/4978c1188537d9bf280ad41a30a86b7a#file-working_package_manager-rb-L78 And I audited these. I didn't just blindly copy-paste, I tested them, went through the regular expressions character by character to make sure I understood what they were doing, etc. The regular expressions are not a hallucination. But it doesn't change the fact that Regular Expressions are the wrong approach. It treats `//` in strings as comments. The correct answer to the question is "no, don't do that." And I have a good intuition for this stuff. I never in a million years would have said, "ah yes I am now going to parse this JSON file with regular expressions" because I understand at a deeper level that that's the wrong approach, even if it happened to work.

HermitCraft permit office plot line is influenced by Severance.

It was EOL in 2017. Python 2.7 received updates more recently than Python 3.3. You could run Python 2.7 and it would be an upgrade.

One thing I find helps is (over)estimating how many times you think you're going to fail, and then counting how many times you do. It's useful when you've failed 0 times or you've failed once and you're demotivated—you can look at your prediction and say, hey, failing is expected.

Homebrew so it gets updated with the rest of my system.

something else. I stopped enjoying myself 3 hours ago. But I'm not going to close the computer or go to bed I'm going to write a package control replacement program in Ruby. Woohoo.

Edit (12:28): Removed manifold link; gambling is lame,

I feel so helpless around other people. The feeling of suggesting something or asking for something and being ignored or rejected devastates me. It's absolutely terrifying to remember that I can't control other people and I am completely at their mercy.

> your long lives. Then, using that mental menu, TELL ME WHAT YOU WANT TO ORDER! This has the exact same energy as Fienberg's, 'it looks like I read really fast but actually I just take a screenshot in my mind and then read it while doing the next thing.' The same, "that makes sense, I could do that, but why." => https://youtu.be/k5oL4QKb6Sk?t=98 => https://thoughts.learnerpages.com/?show=a75da268-65cc-4bd7-882a-d42724fe4806

I'm imagining a Zig -> JS compiler. It would be written in JS and would require a complete implementation of Zig's comptime engine. Zig's "comptime engine" roughly speaking, is implemented in the 40,000 line Sema.zig. So there's a small chance that this actually happens. I guess it could be interesting to write a JS backend for the existing Zig compiler, but that's not what I'm imagining. I'm imagining something that would also be useful as an independent implementation of Zig, on the theory that implementation would be possible by deferring much of the complexity in behavior to JS. Also it would be really fricking funny benchmarking it against Zig itself. Like 8,000 times slower or something.

Everything in a single file. Introduce algorithms, introduce most programming concepts, functions, recursion, variables, arrays, etc. I think people scoff at this, and focus on "real code" but I suspect this is actually a great way to learn the programming language concepts. Second half of the class would be "project programming", actually organizing and using the tools to build cool things. Maybe be a mistake.

I had one teacher who would ask, "is anybody lost?" Intro chemistry, 150+ people in the classroom. Someone would nod or raise their hand, and he'd point at them and ask "Where did I lose you?" It was unreasonably effective. You lose people in weird places, and oftentimes going back and connecting topics is more effective and more helpful than re-explaining them.

(Although I don't know if I recommend it. Will take some getting used to.) If you want a license to my content you can

Thoughts refuses to address anything that may or may not be happening regarding any videos that may or may not be about toki pona.

dinner) because iOS has rolled out automated email categories despite the fact that they don't work. And emails like "[Action Required] Mandatory multi-factor authentication" are "Updates" not "Primary" so the categories feature is unusable. Because only the primary inbox can be filtered, so even if I flag an email and mark it as unread, it's gone forever unless the automated magic BS black box has decided that it's "Time Sensitive." I can recategorize the *sender* but that's useless because "Google" sends me both "New sign in from unrecognized device" and "Mandatory 2FA for access to Google Cloud Console." So my only option is turning off the categories feature for all accounts. Anyways this will never get better because there's a super easy way to turn it off in the upper right. This honestly makes me so mad. It's just garbage product design. Why is the button to turn if off in the app? Because you know it sucks balls and everyone will want to turn it off. And no will use it and no one will spend time to make it better because no one's using it. If you didn't ship garbage you wouldn't need 14 settings to "customize the user experience" because it would be good. It would be possible to use the app without having to go through settings. Can someone email this post to Craig.