Thoughts
This new epistemology came to me when walking by the creek the other day. I may reject it before writing all of the aforementioned posts.
If I did reject it, it would be because it argues that there is a Platonic form to a chair, for instance.
The counter-argument is of course that my own inability to imagine the platonic form of a chair is in-line with the theory and doesn't disprove anything.
The different sub-posts of my new epistemology.
At the time of writing, only the first of these has been written. I may edit with others as they are written.
=> https://thoughts.learnerpages.com/?show=ebcd74be-f8a3-4763-a3c5-81750a8eb55a The frosted pane of glass
=> The arbitration of self II
=> https://thoughts.learnerpages.com/?show=84b071bc-23ac-4dd9-981e-9e264cb7ce4b I reject the number 1 as a knowable truth
=> Plato's allegory of the cave fails to recognize that our truth is not just a subset of truth
=> This is a fundamental part of human nature (edit: and not a failure of our sensory input)
=> Godel's theorem, infinite complexity, and again, our understanding is not a subset
Like compare
"We write code not just to be understood by the computer or other programmers, but to bask in the warm glow of beauty. Aesthetically pleasing code is a value unto itself and should be pursued with vigor." from Rail's doctrine page to "By using Black, you agree to cede control over minutiae of hand-formatting...You will save time and mental energy for more important matters." Black is a very popular Python code formatter. Django recently started using Black, for instance.
Considering rewriting this website in Rails after reading
=> https://rubyonrails.org/doctrine
Javascript has this terrible burden. It has to be everything to everyone. It can't have a design philosophy that is 'do whatever makes me the happiest' because it has to be backwards compatible with Internet Explorer 4.
I love JS. But I don't enjoy writing it anymore. Okay, that's not true, I still love writing JS. But it's not a well designed language. It has a lot of pitfalls. The ecosystem is a mess. There's a lot of incredibly ugly JS that has been written.
Ruby embodies JS's flexibly, the syntax sugar, the blending of paradigms from every other language in a way that is both flexible and familiar. It gives you multiple options in a way that isn't confusing but is natural and freeing.
Python's just there. It's boring. In a way I think it tries to be. It doesn't focus on performance or doing anything differently or letting you do everything. It just lets you write code. And that's powerful.
But sometimes when I'm writing code I feel like I'm writing poetry. (Every time I write Haskell.) And Ruby gives me that feeling a lot more than Python.
I will say the Ruby people use these DSLs and I hate DSLs. I do want to be able read someone else's code without trying to figure out if they've overloaded `*` to mean "throw a cabbage".
I love https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ because if you just assume that all of the graphs have a common cause you can argue that pretty much
any of them caused all the others.
This post brought to you by the HN commenter who blames the leveling-off in per-capita energy use for all of the others.
Humans perceived a filtered version of truth, like looking through a pane of frosted glass. Humans' imperfection doesn't mean that we
perceive a subset of truth, but that everything that we see is slightly 'blurry'. We don't perfectly know anything.
We create abstractions on our side of the glass that let us talk about the thing that do exist on the other side, but those abstractions are not the true objects.
This epistemology can be used as an answer to many philosophical questions. Is math invented or discovered? Is physics invented or a universal truth? What is the platonic form of a chair? Where does a person's body start and end?
For all of these, there is a real answer, which completely defies human understanding.
I'll need to break this into more thoughts.
The absolute wizards over at Trader Joe’s made a granola bar with buckwheat, quinoa, and a couple other grains I’ve never heard of, and it’s
absolutely delicious. I want to know what their secret is. Probably honey.
Also they labeled it “Trader Joe’s Raises the Bar” which is the reason I picked it up, honestly.
I don't think I ever disliked it, but ruby is really growing on me. Like I'd consider using it for a new project.
I think the webdev ecosystem moved to JS just because it lets you use the same language for front-end and backend, not through any fault of Ruby's. It seems to be a very strong, flexible language. It reminds me of JS in a lot of ways, or what I imagine a server-side-JS should be.
I fricking hate the Youtube thumbnail/title meta. I'm about to unsubscribe from Tom Scott because I'm sick of "And you can too!"
I clicked on a video today in my recommended from a channel I've never watched. The title was "Can I pass an AP Music Theory Exam?" Just such a good title. It poses a question. If you want the answer to the question, you have to watch the video. No text in the thumbnail. It doesn't try to be anything that it's not. I have to assume that the person is a professional musician of some sort. And indeed, the first 10 seconds of the video lists the person's credentials.
None of this "These tiny dots are people!" *big arrow*. I would click on the video if the title were "A giant mechanical elephant." And at some point I think Tom would have used that as the title.
It feels insulting, I guess, condescending.
Like, maybe the people browsing Trending on Youtube are your target audience and you need to draw them in as much as possible, but it annoys me.
"Tourists could ruin everything!"
Whatever
Oh yeah it's not just Tom, that's just, how you write YouTube titles these days.
Other than the fact that it's smaller than a credit card, I really like the magic mouse, more than I thought I would. I do wish it had a
tap-to-click option.
One of my toxic traits is that I really enjoy assuming that you know what I'm talking about, even if I know that you don't.
If I had a nickel for every time a girl told me I was autistic and should get tested, I’d have two nickels. Which isn’t a lot but it’s weird
Instead of sending the email that I want to send before bed, the mail app on my phone froze when I pressed the send button.
I'm so tired.
Working on a theory that I’m allergic to tomatoes.
Working on a theory I’m insane.
Working on a theory that I’m autistic and masking so hard even I haven’t noticed.
Working on a theory I’m a trans plural girl.
Working on a theory that all of human existence is meaningless and that our ability to deceive ourselves otherwise is an evolutionary trait.
Working on a theory that everyone hates me.
Working on a theory that I’m a bad person.
Working on a theory that I’m addicted to novelty.
Working on a theory that Ted Kaczynski was perfectly normal and average in every way except for his predisposition to violence.
Working on a theory that I love anaphora because it satisfies both my desire for consistency and my addition to novelty.
Working on a theory that I will forever be alone.
Working on a theory that no one is actually happy.
Working on a theory that I will die to myself and embrace the system and be dumb and finally at peace.
I don’t know of a satisfying way to end this. I’m trapped in the same loops.
Never seen this before.
=> https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Proxy MDN Proxy
The whole 'what's easiest' thing is weird because by definition the easiest thing is to do nothing. But for some reason when I ask myself
'what's easiest' I tend to answer along the lines of 'just do something quickly and consider it over with.'
Leaving Dracula Daily in my inbox for days at a time and letting them accumulate before sitting down and reading a bunch at once.
Hmmm.
Would you rather there be aliens, or would you rather that we be alone in the universe?
The question is not, “do you think there are aliens?”
As for me, I don’t really care one way or the other. I already treat most people like they are aliens, completely different from me. So aliens wouldn’t be any more scary. And if I knew we were alone in the universe I don’t think I would feel any more alone than I do now.
A little bit of angst before bed for you
Just finished watching The 2:51.
I think it will be come to be known as just The 2:51.
After finishing the run Feinberg put his head down on the desk and cried for the next 5 minutes. He's been working so hard for this.
I would not be surprised if it never gets beaten.
Feinberg has cemented himself as a legend. Saying he's the AA GOAT would be insulting, we all know that. He could be the greatest Minecraft player of all time, period. Like when it comes to skill I don't think there's a better test of MC skill than AA and no one can beat Feinberg.
I don't even love him or his content, but I just have so much respect for him, because I can tell he has worked so hard and knows what he's doing and cares so much. Not to mention he's so fricking good. Like since Feinberg is alone on the leaderboard, he has to motivate himself, and he did, so you can tell it means something to him.
He's not after the popularity or beating other people, he's grind-ed to push Minecraft to its limits. And as someone that cares about Minecraft, that's something that I love to see so much.
Seriously my phone goes in my hand so I want it to be smaller than my hand, and my hand goes on a mouse, so I want the mouse to be bigger
than my hand. Why are they the other way around?
"It's been decades since any phone designer gave a second, third or even fourth thought to ergonomics, truly."
-Solderpunk (the man the myth the legend)
One of these days I really want to try a mouse that's big enough to put my whole hand on.
I don't think I have abnormally large hands but I feel like computer mice are designed to be used with the finger tips and I want to put my whole hands on one.
What Django calls a view, Rails calls a controller, and what Rails calls a view, Django calls a template.
Is there a term for thinking everyone hates you? I don't feel what I would describe as depressed but sometimes I feel like everyone in the
world hates me and is conspiring against me. I don't think it's that uncommon of a thing.
Or, I've mentioned on here before, the feeling that one small mistake is just decimating. ("Decimate" historically meant "kill 10%" but here I'm using it to mean "kill 100%.") Like I was driving and went "I don't know if this is the right way" then "well even if it's the wrong way, I've only lost 5 minutes, no 2 minutes, no more like 10-20 minutes, no all day, no everything I've ever wanted in life." And like, for a fraction of a second I believed that if I was going the wrong way it would lead to me being late to work and losing my job and never doing anything productive with my life ever again. Luckily, it turns out that I was going the right way.
I’m Matthias.
I want to cry but won’t let myself. I feel so alone. I miss people. I miss myself. I love you.
Feinberg coming out of nowhere to casually shave 12 minutes off of Feinberg's world record and get a 2:51, the first ever sub-3 in AA.
I know I've said it before but Feinberg is goated.
Tailscale is using 400% of my CPU when my computer is idle.
All I want is software that works
(Please read this in an annoyed sing-song voice.)
"I don’t know. I’m confused. Is this growing up? Watching all your feathers come off? And even though some of those feathers were the most
lovely things?"
I say this site is done but like there are still 27 things on my TODO list. It’s just that none of them are very important
The difference between *Dirk Gently's Holistic Detetive Agency* and *The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy* is that latter creates this
huge world around ours that is weird and surreal, but the Detective Agency overlays an incredibly weird world on top of ours that is minimally different but impossible.
Edit: subbed nicknames for full names of the books
I have finished *Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency*.
Reading it in the middle of reading the *Poignant Guide* was perhaps a mistake. I remember a character living on the fourth level of a quadruple level bed (because of the flooding) which I believe was from the later book but I can’t imagine how it would fit into either.
The plot of the book, that is to say, everything except for Dirk’s character, is different from the TV show. But they both do things with the plot line that are unmatched except by each other. So in that sense I commend the show writers.
I solved Semantle #112 in 101 guesses. My first guess had a similarity of 10.51. My first word in the top 1000 was at guess #92. My
penultimate guess had a similarity of 31.53 (920/1000).
Had friends helping out. Semantle is saved if played as a group activity.
=> https://aberant.tumblr.com/post/167375099/a-letter-from-why _why on code style
Edit: finally found this link again
=> https://viewsourcecode.org/why/ _why's estate
Maybe I need to not be afraid to repeat myself.
I hate repeating myself. I hate it when people repeat themselves and I have to listen to them say the same thing twice. It just makes me cringe. I can't listen to songs on repeat. My ears crave novelty. But like. If I want people to listen to me I know that logically I should say the same thing in multiple places and if someone reads the same thing on Discord and on here, that's not actually a bad thing.
I’ve decided this website is done.
Or rather, would be done if this was the type of project that is it is possible to finish. I will of course continue to tweak and change things, but those things will bring us less decidedly towards a “finished” state and will instead be changes for the sake of changes.
Prominently, I still don’t have any markup support. I decided I cannot be faulted for merely displaying the text the user inputs.
Starting a job writing Ruby on Monday. Reading the Poignant Guide
=> https://poignant.guide
Apparently _why named Tumblr? I don't know, Wesley didn't elaborate.
=> https://wesleyac.thoughts.page/#1651815057
I know what you're thinking, I know what you're thinking,
'Matthias, you claim to be a typography nerd, yet when I open my favorite
webbedsite, thoughts learnerpages, it is filled, absolutely stuffed, with straight quotes.'
I apologize. The plethora of straight quotes on this website is as much an affront to my eyes as it is to yours, I just don't know how to fix it without spending like 30 hours writing Zig code to implement a proprietary markup specification. Which I still plan on doing at some point, but there's also a certain beauty to typing in text and then having the same text emerge unchanged out the other side. Maybe I should just manually curve all the quotes. Hm.
"for all other problems about life in general please use the questions page on billwurtz dot com."
People are like "I don't know who…is and at this point I'm too afraid to ask" and it's like, some internet micro-celebrity. I don't know who
Margaret Thatcher was. A Prime Minister of England?
JS actually just has really advanced first-class support for optionals. Every variable is an optional and unwrapping is implicit
Man it's been a long time since I've done anything on KA. I didn't mean for it to be this long.
Right, so the Mars-quantum particles post:
I was watching a video (BobbyBroccoli's *America's Missing Collider*) and one of the thing that the author claims is that the particle physics community does/did a bad job with public outreach and education about quantum science, and he contrasted that to the job NASA does with space education. And my first reaction was "but Mars is a real, tangible, object that I can see, unlike quantum particles." But like. I've never seen Mars. I can't touch Mars. My knowledge of mars as a planet comes almost entirely from cartoon drawings in space exhibits funded by NASA. Quantum particles are a little harder to explain; it's physically impossible to take a picture of one, for instance, but you totally could come up with a standard representation of quantum particles and push to popularize it like we did with the clipart atom representation. And again, it is more difficult since we discovered these particles more recently than we discovered Mars or atoms, so maybe it will get better with time. Quantum particles exist inside of everything, right here in front of us, and people know they exist, but we can't name them, don't learn about them, and can't picture them. It's difficult to conceptualize something that small, but it's also difficult to conceptualize an object like the Earth, so large it looks flat, or something like Mars, so far away that it can't be seen with the naked eye. Quantum physicists definitely could do a better job communicating.
When I don't have my phone I'm forced to engage more with the world around me, but I do so in weird and not necessarily helpful ways.
That is to say, without my phone, I, and people in general, tend to focus on things that are interesting solely/primarily because of their proximity.
This is both a good thing and a bad thing.
Thinking about fractions. Maybe moving entirely to decimal expansions of numbers was a mistake.
I can tell that some of you'll were very bad at the 'split this run-on sentence into two sentences' part of the SAT.
This is said jokingly. Tumblr grammar/style in particular uses the run-on sentence extensively, and I enjoy it.
Claim: modern art grew in popularity when people started using art to decorate the walls of their houses.
Youtube changed their font, they thought I wouldn't notice but I did because I'm a typography nerd.
I set up Tailscale initially last night and was like, 'okay this lets me connect my devices as promised' But it also does other stuff
It's difficult to tell what the other stuff is. There's a lot of really cool settings (like exit nodes) hidden behind a couple of menus. It can't do everything, but it seems like it can do most things you want. The one thing I'm missing is exposing a local port to the public internet (i.e. port forwarding). Not that I would use that, I think the idea is that Tailscale gives you better tools for the same problem, but it would still be cool, I can still think of uses.
Okay dang. It takes a minute to understand Tailscale's terminology, but once you do it's dead easy to use. Highly recommend
Dracula Daily is amazing because it feels like I’m part of a fandom. Like I can go on Tumblr and there are people talking about the
characters and what happened today and not really saying anything but experiencing the same thing. And that’s not really something that I have with most of my media interests.
Like Blaseball or HermitCraft come closest, but somewhat integral to those is that everyone has a difference experience. Everyone has a different Blaseball team whose games they watch, or a different different Hermit whose videos they watch. And since everyone’s been participating for a different amount of time, everyone’s experience is really pretty unique. With Dracula Daily on the other hand, everyone’s reading exactly the same book at exactly the same time and it’s fun.
Tailscale's whole fricking thing was that you installed it and it just worked. Well I installed it and it doesn't work.
Okay I had to re-authenticate my laptop. Now it just works!
“Seventeen months captivity to a sailor accompanied to the boundless ocean, is a worse punishment than human crime ever merited”
Ah! Dante would spend another 9 years in prison. My heart aches for him.
The app formerly known as iTunes won't play music. Have to use my phone or the browser version.
I realized my default problem solving mode doesn't take into account difficulty, like at all. I've been repeating to myself for the last 2
days, "what's the easiest way of doing this" because otherwise I ask, "what's the best way of doing this" and that frequently involves doing way more work than is necessary.
Oh yeah I changed all the audio files on this website to mp3's so they can be listened to in Lagrange.
Also I found out that since Astronomical Theater (my Gemini server) reads certificates into memory when it starts, since it's been running for three months, the certificates had expired. Hm. I'll need to fix that somehow.
Accidentally ended up on a toll road and had to use my 2019 War in the Pacific quarter. Kinda devastated.
I think I need to spend more time on Reddit. I think that would be great for my mental health. Yes.
I'm just going to say it. We NEED more unity, we need more acceptance, we need more moderate voices. (tw politics below the fold)
I respect you. I respect you if you're trans, if you're religious, if you're pro-life or pro-choice or gay or straight or democrat or republican or too preoccupied to vote.
And that respect is so important. And the rhetoric on the political left recently is, 'you need to disrespect everyone who doesn't agree 100%.' And I mean, this is because I surround myself with extremely left leaning media/content. I spend most of my time on Tumblr and Reddit. I'm sure the right is just as bad. But's frustrating to know that no one there respects me or my views. There are a lot of directions this post could go and just about all of them are me complaining and/or having a breakdown.
I guess what I'm saying is that I think about posting about politics on here a lot, and I don't, because I don't care that much and I don't want to offend anyone. But I don't want you to forget that I am a human being and I do have opinions and views on topics that I don't post. And it's easier for you to just assume that I agree with you on everything, but I won't.
(The subtext here is the recently leaked supreme court decision. The coverage I've seen (again, from Tumblr and Reddit) has showed no little or no respect for the pro-life side, which is a position that I respect. But, as a man, I don't have particularly strong feelings about abortion, and a lot of other things get to me more.)
I guess, this is about me. Everything I post here is about me. I NEED more unity, more acceptance of moderate positions, etc.
I'm so tired and I'm procrastinating from doing work I can't take this aaahahhh
> In those days Peter stood up among the believers (a group numbering about a hundred and twenty) and said,
> "Brothers and sisters, the Scripture had to be fulfilled in which the Holy Spirit spoke long ago through David concerning Judas, who served as guide for those who arrested Jesus. He was one of our number and shared in our ministry."
…
> "For," said Peter, "it is written in the Book of Psalms: 'May his place be deserted; / let there be no one to dwell in it,' and, 'May another take his place of leadership.'
> "Therefore it is necessary to choose one of the men who have been with us the whole time the Lord Jesus was living among us, beginning from John’s baptism to the time when Jesus was taken up from us. For one of these must become a witness with us of his resurrection."
> So they nominated two men: Joseph called Barsabbas (also known as Justus) and Matthias. Then they prayed, "Lord, you know everyone’s heart. Show us which of these two you have chosen to take over this apostolic ministry, which Judas left to go where he belongs." Then they cast lots, and the lot fell to Matthias; so he was added to the eleven apostles.
-Matthias Chosen to Replace Judas, Acts 1:15-26
This is a reminder that search here is still in beta. Hopefully I'll be able to add a link to it soon.
Search is fixed.
The issue was that I didn't specify a home directory for Django when launching it from Apache, so when it went to lookup the search template it looked it up relative to `/`. (Search is the only thing effected since the other template lookups are preformed relative to the `thoughts` app.) (This wasn't caught locally because locally the working directory inherits from the working directory of the terminal.)
Here's the weird thing. The commit that made this change renamed things, sure, but shouldn't have effected this behavior. I have no idea why it now decides that it needs a working directory set. I'm going to look into it more, will edit if I find anything.
One of the things that's so nice about interpreted languages to me is that they have a 0-complexity build process.
I'm still not over what a good game *World of Goo* was. Like top 5 games all time IMO. Not even gameplay wise, but the aesthetic, the story.
Tried a MoonPie. Tastes like they haven’t changed the recipe since 1917. I couldn’t force myself to finish it.
Absolutely incredible Wikipedia page:
=> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_films
You're like, 'this is a conspiracy theory or a coincidence' and then there are like 500 examples of movies about exactly the same thing released the same year. "Zzyzx" and "Zzyzx Road" both released in 2006 and "Both are thrillers about people trying to hide a dead body."
For some reason when I have Better Touch Tool running, Minecraft freezes for about half a second when I left click.
I just hate that complex software, like Minecraft for example, there are just these huge, easy to reproduce bugs, and we just accept that
they will never get fixed. If you start a Minecraft hardcore world, move outside of the spawn chunks (~500 blocks), and die, attempting to re-open the world will freeze/softlock the game. This behavior has existed since 1.14, released 3 years ago.
MC-157812 and MC-248926, having priority Important and Very Important.
(Before 1.18 you could open the world, but no terrain would load, so you could at least close the world again. In 1.18 the application just freezes and you have to quit it.)
And I can't even complain. Because this isn't even that bad of an issue. There are literally thousands (>8,000) open bugs. But Mojang's devs aren't working on fixing them, or if they are, they're working on the bugs in the snapshots that effect the new features and not the unglamorous bugs from 5 years ago.
There are some projects, like the micro text editor, for example, where there are hundreds of open bugs and the project is unmaintained. But the bugs are most weird, difficult to reproduce edge cases or feature requests, or the types of things that aren't a big deal. Like there's a very real idea of a "stale" bug report that just needs to be closed at some point.
But iTerm2 has almost 3,000 open issues and some of them are clearly not stale.
At some point humanity has to slow down and fix some bugs, right?
I really want an operating system that doesn’t include any applications but does include all the tooling to make applications.
I don't know if this is a hot take but Oauth seems like a bad idea and I'd rather create a new email+password account for every website.
It is now time for Silly Songs with Larry, the part of the page where Larry comes out and sings a silly song.
Okay uh if you're a lawyer from Big Idea and you want to serve me a take down request please contact me at Matthias.Portzel at gmail, I just love following the law and I'm not willing to have this site taken down for copyright reasons.
Description
Literally just an entire silly song ripped from https://youtu.be/tpcf_qD3GW4.
You don't even know how much gets filtered from this site. Like The Count of Monte Cristo is so over represented because I'd rather admit
I'm daydreaming about him than that I'm daydreaming about any number of other fictional characters.
I can't decide if it makes or undermines the point if I don't mention other characters.
Like did Hermione really capture a woman and keep her in a jar for like days? What the hell is going on in Trevor's, *A Day*? Is Rachel's treatment of torivors inhumane?
I realized that one of the problems with my life philosophy is that it's very easy to lose track of progress.
Going back to
=> https://thoughts.learnerpages.com/?show=c62d40fd-2d69-49f3-bdb7-61238c26c90b "the first item on my
TODO list is: 'Make every piece of software in the world perfect.'"
Someone used the analogy of climbing/digging out of a hole, and it's like, I don't even feel like I'm in a hole, I feel like I'm in the middle of an endless, bottomless, pit. In my life philosophy there is no "good enough" and there is no "too bad" there's just this infinite vertical tube stretching above and below me.
And somewhere, miles above me, is "make every piece of software in the world perfect," but like, that's not what I'm going to do today.
So I need to focus on moving upwards even when it's not clear that I'm making progress, because the tube is so long, or because there aren't nice landmarks.
I'm just waaayy too black and white as a person. Like the reason I have to say "always more nuance" is because I forget that there's nuance.
Tumblr was bought for 1,000 million dollars, and sold for 3 million dollars. Elon's looking at 54,000 million for Twitter.
Version just gave Tumblr away for free, for all intents and purposes. Wild numbers.
I use https://learnxinyminutes.com so fricking much. It's amazing.
Is it "bool" or "boolean" or "Boolean"? Who knows. cmd+f "bool"
Here's an unpopular opinion. Having Show Invisibles on in your code editor is just better. I see mixed spaces and tabs so often
in coding projects and this wouldn't happen if people didn't use settings that made it visually impossible to tell them apart. Every editor has an option to allow you to see the whitespace in your code, and if you're using a good editor theme, it should be faint enough to be completely unobtrusive.
Okay okay, the Count of Monte Cristo is an alias that is currently convient to use for the Matthias who has a similar personality.
So I created the council of Matthiases (inside my head) in the hopes that one of the Matthiases would have a life philosophy that worked
and solved all my problems but so far none of them have.
They make good arguments and can help me solidify and enumerate options, but it's really a garbage decision making technique because after listening to them I still have to make a decision.
Some of the Matthiases (because I think you'll find this funny):
Matthias Portzel
Matthias 1.0
Matthias 2.0
Saihttam
The Count of Monte Cristo
Mel
Christian
The Matthias that wrote the about page (I'm not sure how to refer to him. System 1?)
What would make this better?
Would I be happier in a culture that encouraged positive feedback? Where people complimented me. Or would that hurt too?
What is my real problem?
I was really fricking confused when learning LISP because I kept trying to understand the datatypes and like the differences between them.
Like I'd see Lisp code use `hello` or `:hello` or `'hello` or `"hello"` and I was like, oh, it's got this special "token" datatype that you offset with `:` and it's got strings and it's symbols and they were all different things in my head. But no. Lisp has lists, and it has symbols, and that's it. And there's some syntax sugar/parsing rules where some symbols evaluate as values and some variables don't. `:hello` is just the symbol `:hello` (`:` isn't a special character at all as far as I can tell). The quote character means "don't evaluate the following symbol". Similarly `"` seems to indicate just that the symbol including `"` isn't evaluated. `(eq? '"hello" "hello")` is true.
This is a dumb post because I still don't know what I'm talking about and I'm kind of talking about common lisp and kind of talking about scheme/racket.
The point is, Lisp is wild. It's almost more like writing JSON than JS.
Wait VS Code lets you diff every time you save a file, even without Git or a dedicated SCM. Wild
Oh my word there is a canonical recording of 4'33". This is incredible.
It's got like a metronome sound and the occasional background noise. Not to mention the white noise. It feels like I'm there in the orchestra pit.
=> https://music.apple.com/us/album/433/406490689?i=406490698
=> https://thoughts.learnerpages.com/?show=4e7bee6b-dfdc-4775-89fa-cb97cff1a9c3
I'm tired of living here. I don't want to exist in the universe anymore! I want to exist in the alternate universe where jan Misali uploaded
toki pona lesson three in March like they said they were going to!
I do not trust linters or auto-code formatters. `autopep8` is disgusting to me.
PEP8 is impossible to programmatically enforce.
PEP8 is ambiguous.
PEP8 defers to human judgment about what makes code look good.
You CANNOT implement a tool that programmatically enforces PEP8.
The fact that you think that you can, tells me that you fundamentally do not understand PEP8, fundamentally do not understand the concept of aesthetically pleasing code (which by definition subjective), and are either dumb or arrogant to try to implement it anyways.
We've been through this already. There was linting tool called `pep8`. And they CHANGED THEIR NAME because THE CREATOR OF PYTHON asked them to because PEP8 is not programmatically enforceable. And it was causing confusing from people who looked at the tool called "pep8" and assumed that it would output things that were consistent with PEP8 (which is impossible because PEP8 is subjective).
=> https://github.com/PyCQA/pycodestyle/issues/466 Please rename this tool
But now, years later, someone else comes along and they've figured it out! They've got an auto-code formatter that actually implements PEP8 correctly! And so they're going to call it autopep8! Despite the fact that it like, has open bugs, from years ago, where it syntactically changes the behavior of your program!, as is clearly required by PEP8.
=> https://github.com/hhatto/autopep8/issues/539
I've blocked the creator of auto-pep-8 on Github. I have no interest in interacting with them.
I have more respect for Black. I'm not opposed to the entire category. But the two paragraph introduction to Black does not mention aesthetics or PEP8 at all. Black's position is 'code should not be formatted by humans. Uniformity is more important than human judgment.'
I do not agree with Black's position. I think that code should be beautiful. And I do not use a linter because I do not believe that it is possible for the linter to recognize beautiful code.
Edit: The post was written under the assumption that autopep8 was a newer tool, which in fact it pre-dates the mentioned request to not call things pep8.
I tried to turn off the pop-up boxes in VS Code when you have hover over something, and it kind of worked, but now there's an empty box.
Javascript has a lot of annoying corner cases, but it makes up for it by being the most powerful programming language currently.
Apache 2.0 License requires that "You must cause any modified files to carry prominent notices stating that You changed the files"
It's trivial to find pull requests on Apache 2 licensed software that don't include prominent notices stating they changed the files.
Why is that in the license? Do you really mean that? Like.
At some point open source-software licenses are just like a way to virtue-signal that you're not going to sue people. Especially for the FSF's recommended licenses (like Apache 2) which have 10 clauses that nobody reads. There's a patent infringement clause that I don't understand! but I think means that if you sue for patent infringement it opens you up to copy right lawsuit because you're not respecting the terms of the software license.
I don't get it. Why is it not enough to say "I waive copyright on this software." Why does it have to be "you can use the software AS LONG AS you CLEARLY INDICATE if you modify anything." FSF talks big about "unconditional right to modify" and then they stick a fricking condition on your right to modify. I could go on for a while. The point is. If I can't read and understand your software license, then I'm just trusting that you're not going to sue me and you might as reserve all copyright.
Hofstadter's sense of humor in *GEB* reminds me of *Sideways Stories from Wayside School*.
I guess *GEB* is much less surreal. But the wordplay!
I haven't picked up *GEB* in months and I'm still not over "central dogmap"
I am Matthias. I'm Matthias. Ahhh. Brain empty no thoughts just air. I wonder if getting 4 hours of sleep last night contributed to that.
Had some wild dreams last night. Your mind just kind of makes stuff up.
The problem with the Free Software movement is that it's trying to fix socioeconomic problems with a software license.
I think even when I "succeed" I still feel like I've failed if I haven't transcended. Probably a lot of my problem.
It's difficult to describe how cracked Feinberg's AA gameplay is.
AA is like Minecraft's 100% category. It's basically 'do everything in Minecraft'. And no one runs it because it's so hard. It's random seed, a random world, right. So you have to keep track of everything in the game and route these like 100 advancements, dynamically. RSG Any% is hard to route and you have to keep track of like 5 things.
Illumina, the undisputed GOAT of Minecraft speedrunning, got the AA WR a year ago with a fourteen (14) hour time!
It's impressive to watch, as a Minecraft player, because it looks like someone playing Minecraft normally, just super fast. Any% looks so different from normal gameplay, and AA doesn't.
So it seems like anyone could be the best. Or like, it requires so many different skills that no one can handle it.
But somehow Feinberg just wins. Feinberg has nine (9) runs between 3 and 4 hours. It's just insane.
I don't even like Feinberg. But it's just so impressive to me.
How do you get suspended from Mastodon? Please The_Quantum_Alpha what are you doing?
The_Quantum_Alpha was a user that hung out in the Vivaldi Discord server for a while. He and his fiancé used #off-topic as a group chat instead of like, texting each other. I think he eventually got banned for picking fights with other users and generally being rude. If you told him he was wrong, he'd bring up his multiple PhDs. There was a second woman who followed him around, I think it was like another girlfriend but I'm not sure, and it could also be like his daughter. There's a high likelihood, I guess, that it was a single person engaging in an extended role play. But I also like to believe there are people just that unhinged. Anyways I tried to find his Mastodon but apparently he got banned (from multiple instances), so yeah. Looks like he's hanging out on MeWe.com these days, but I'm not signing up for that!
"Global cooling" is a great Wikipedia article. It wants to ensure that you do not believe anything there, but it comes across too strong
and is only convincing me that global warming is a conspiracy and that the climate scientists are trying to cover up global cooling, the real crisis.
=> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling
>be me
>9:30pm
>haven’t eaten dinner
>hungry
>remove 2lb of chicken from fridge
>use by: Mar 31
>dice
>throw in pan for 20 minutes
>add BBQ sauce
>dinner
Thinking about *Eli* by Bill Myers. It's really hard to do present-day Jesus, and I think Myers does a pretty good job. Although he cheats a
little bit by setting the story in a parallel universe which is more similar to biblical times.
I have no problem reading serif fonts on paper, but for some reason I much prefer san-serif fonts on a screen.
I'm just now learning that Java uses the *compiletime* type of a variable in order to do field lookups.
Transcript
"To me, gratuitous linguistic mimicry is sometimes a sign of a weak independent thinking capability."
'You can call this a class and you can call me a teacher but we're on a learning journey together.'
-Josh
I just want to shout-out modern food preservation techniques. I sometimes eat food that's weeks after its expiration date.
One of the goals of Thu was to eliminate the distinction that Java makes between compile-time type and run-time type.
(It's difficult to draw the same line in Thu, since Thu has "variable type," which is like Java's compile time type, in that it can be determined semantically. But in Thu, it also exists at run-time in a meaningful way, whereas Java throws the compile-time type away. I don't mind having typed variables and untyped data.)
Unfortunately, I felt that static methods, or what Thu calls `typefunction`s, were necessary. Which means that any given keyword-property lookup could be in reference to a Type-function or a data-function, depending on how the data was declared. Maybe you could fix that just by requiring type functions to be called with e.g. `:` instead of `.`.
Edit! Nevermind, Type-functions are only callable by the language, i.e. there is no syntax to call them. I don't know if that's better.
Re-reading the Thu design doc. I think it describes a really interesting coding style. It would be similar to writing code with a bunch of
`assert`s, with the intention of catching errors as quickly as possible at run-time. The Thu philosophy is to error as soon as encountering undefined behavior, but at runtime, not compile time. I don't see any other languages really doing that.
=> https://ourjseditor.com/program/S5ShEy
Somehow my escape key broke. In software. It's not a keyboard or TouchBar issue; I've plugged in an external keyboard, and my computer
refuses to acknowledge that the escape key is being pressed. Happens across multiple applications. I guess I'm going to restart my computer but I don't know what would cause this.
Feeling sane enough today to do laundry and fold and put it away, which hasn't happened in a single day in, a long time.
RFC 791 (IPv4) (1981) avoids "byte" in favor of "octet," which they define as an "eight bit byte." Ya' know, unlike those other-length bytes
I'm sorry, Atom is too buggy, I can't take it, we're moving to VS Code.
I love everyone who has ever worked on Atom <3
I want to print out each panel of "Choices", Monroe, and arrange them around around my wall in a non-linear fashion.
Thinking about our value of candidness. There's definitely a trend in making things seem spontaneous. That's something that I kind of wish I
had pushed back against in making this website. My Twitter was originally conceived as an experiment in spontaneity, which proved to be successful and was translated here, but at some point that morphed into a more intentional desire for the Thoughts here to be unrefined, which I would be uncomfortable applying more generally.
This is about YikYak, which is just this site but scoped by location and publicly available.
=> https://thoughts.learnerpages.com/?show=f6dd8ad9-0910-4a54-bee1-94b5232a8561 "poetry is dead in part because we value candidness"
WSL is going to kill Linux on the desktop. The future that we're *very rapidly* headed towards is Linux running natively in servers and as a
subsystem for development on Windows, which allows you to develop software targeting those servers, but it's recognized as a platform in its own right.
It's possible I'm wrong and WSL users are brand new Linux users, and the same number of people, or more, will use Linux as a desktop natively.
But I'm very concerned about the possibility of a majority of Linux users being WSL users, in which case Microsoft would have a lot of influence over the direction the Linux project goes.
My problem is that someone mentioned Kant's *Critique of Pure Reason* like a week ago and now I have a tab open with a PDF of it.
I do not know when, if ever, I will close the tab.
Why would I go to college, work hard, get a job at reputable company, when I could just make software that DOESN'T WORK and get paid for it‽
The Better Touch Tool buttons stopped working again. And then Vivaldi crashed.
Thankfully both are working now, but like. I pay money for these softwares for a reason. It seems reasonable to expect a minimum of functionality from them.
Just realized `pacman` is short for *pac*age *man*ager and is not in fact named after the video game character.
Apparently the search page on here `-term` to remove `term` from the search results. Huh. Advantages of using a pre-baked search library Ig
Per-season numbers
```py
[('Spring 2022', 231), ('Winter 2021', 692), ('Fall 2021', 386), ('Summer 2021', 375), ('Spring 2021', 317), ('Winter 2020', 410), ('Fall 2020', 584)]
```
This is the first one of these to show Winter 2021 with the new record of 7.7 Thoughts/day, beating out the first season of this site.
First version of the HPL is done. I don't have any software to release with it right now, however.
XKCD 45 gets funnier the more times you read it. You’re a true XKCD fan when you find #45 funny.
Being able to mute audio on a per-tab basis is so fundamental to modern browser use that it's hard to believe it was added like a couple
years ago.
All I want. Is to be able to write React and SSR it. Gatsby is like using GraphQL for something. Like if you have data in the filesystem
Gatsby will import it into a graphQL database and then you can create pages based off the result of querying that database. But there's no docs on how to use that. I quote:
> A GraphQL query is made in the second half of the file to get the Markdown data. Gatsby has automagically given you all the Markdown metadata and HTML in this query’s result.
>
> Note: To learn more about GraphQL, consider this excellent resource
And then it links to a 45 minute video course on GraphQL.
I switched to VSCodium from VS Code and it didn't keep any of my settings.
I'm still mostly using Atom, but there are some things Atom doesn't do well, like in-line git diffs or remote file editing.
It is, it's like there's a monster above, looming over me. I just want to curl up into a ball.
A little bit of anxiety and little bit of stress. But it's like mostly dread.
But I still find plenty, or at least enough, happiness down here in my little blob. I don't know. I want the new Regrettes album.
To follow up on "Monads and Promises are the same thing", apparently his claim is that Monads and Promises and Optionals are all equivalent.
I see where he's coming from. Promises implement optional-style features. But they're also frequently used as a way to implement async functionality.
Edit (5:59pm): I am unclear on whether Monads in Haskell are frequently used for async tasks.
Apparently there's no `Math.sum(a, b, […a, b])` in JS? What is this?
```js
(…args => args.reduce((acc, v) => acc + v, 0))
```
"I feel like me and 3D space aren't meant to be together"
"I feel like a two dimensional creature that just lives in a three dimensional world."
Let me try to say something about literature fiction, that is, the short story. It lacks plot. But plot I of course don't mean plot. I mean
momentum. It lacks flow. One sentence comes after the next in a steady beat but there's no crescendo.
Edit (2:52pm): This is, of course, not true.
Somehow I just learned that Josh Wardle of Wordle is /u/powerlanguage, the Reddit admin in charge of the original 2017 /r/place (edit:
and like a bunch of other stuff at Reddit).
Something about the internet being small or there being a social elite.
I'm working on a theory that people that say they're "grinding" aren't actually doing that much work.
"Maybe things will make sense if we kiss"
-I Love Us, The Regrettes
also, "I got so good at lonely"
The thing that just tears me up every day is that I enjoy writing. I have things to say, this website is my proof. But no one is interested
in listening to me. I want people to listen to me. My love language is you listening to me.
Because I say I hate myself, and in a way I do. A part of me does. But there's another part of me that loves, not who I am, but something.
Copium
It's so hard to care about two incompatible things.
"How lucky am I to have two things I love"
-Christmas In June, AJR
I was today years old when I realized U2's albums *Songs of Innocence* and *Songs of Experience* were a reference to William Blake's poetry
collection, *Songs of Innocence and of Experience*
For some reason there are multiple Hytale logos on /r/place. Like the game isn’t even out yet. I don’t get it.
April fools RFC for this year
=> https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9225.html
"The universal deployment of IP networks on Avian Carriers [RFC1149] is facing a multi-decade delay. After operators discovered that birds are not real…"
I regret making that Thought. I listened to a single Lorde song and I'm over it. No Lorde phase for me.
I'm the type of person who saves my receipts to add them to the growing pile of receipts on my desk.
I'm so good at staying away from things that make me angry that it's easy for me to forget that I have anger issues.
It's difficult for me to describe how much content Tumblr put out for this April fools prank. There's like what would be 7 "normal" April
fools pranks in one.
- A bunch of random buttons that light up or make sounds or do nothing
- Crab button that adds crabs to the page. Clicking on crabs captures them and spawns money. Crabs display little textboxes of what they're on top of. If they stay alive for long enough, hovering over them gives a "Friend <3" textbox.
- Sponge button that covers the page with dirt and gives you a sponge to clean it off.
- A button that opens a tiny minigame with bars that you move up and down for points (I can't play it because the hundred crabs on my screen keep getting in my way)
- Wizard button that generates emoji spells, and a gravestone button that generates quotes
- Brick Whartley, a brick in a suit that is behind this click-a-thon. They have a Tumblr account and a LinkedIn account.
- Typing in the post box makes Honking sounds.
- I'm even sure how I got on this page: https://www.tumblr.com/humans.txt No idea how much content is here I haven't bothered going through it.
- There's a button that adds a train to the bottom of the page. Started that and forgot about it.
Tumblr really gave us a Blorbo for April Fools day. What we really wanted. Brb connecting with Brick Whartley on LinkedIn.
I want a functional programming language like Haskell but with Julia's Multiple Dispatch.
Haskell *kind of* has this. Types in Haskell can have different constructors, (which can be almost completely different, almost like subclasses or classes implementing an interface or something), and you can overload a function to work with different constructors of the same class. But what's beautiful about Julia is how much the language embraces overriding methods and using them for every different type imaginable.
An April Fools day prank from this website has been delayed indefinitely. Expect it (or don't) in a couple of weeks.
Okay, so the problem was that w3m wants to edit textareas in an external editor, but it couldn't find vi.
This was throwing an error to stderr, but I can't see that when I'm inside of w3m. What's dumb is that my $EDITOR was set to neovim, since I don't have vi installed, but w3m ignored that. (You might be able to argue that you need vi to be Unix complient, but Linux isn't Unix compliant, so I don't think that's what's going on.) Anyways, apologies for the spelling errors, this was written inside Neovim from w3m.
Okay so for some reason I can edit <input type=text> in w3m (by pressing enter), but I can't edit <textarea>'s, obviously.
Managed to open this post page in w3m and authenticate. I can't figure out to input text into the textbox. How do people make applications
this bad? I can select the textbox but typing doesn't let me insert and the manual for this app hasn't been updated in years.
I'm having to restrain myself from clowning on APL because the extent of my criticism is that APL385 is an ugly fricking font.
Like having it set at 13px is a bad idea, and forcing me to recognize characters that I've literally never seen before is super painful. But that only exacerbates the real problem which is this font. Look at that W. Who allowed that? It's like Comic Sans. 'This is my programming language, guys, you have to write it in comic sans.'
Shoot! I forgot Haskell has a native composing operator when I made this Thought.
=> https://thoughts.learnerpages.com/?show=22c65757-d280-4714-abb4-13fc97dfa4fb The Thought in question
Combined with Haskell's implicit Currying, nothing is as true as
=> https://thoughts.learnerpages.com/?show=ea61e9ea-f6a9-408a-9497-7f572eda8519 "Every so often I re-invent Haskell."
Hey fun fact my (and everyone's) SSH public keys are available from Github
=> https://github.com/matthiasportzel.keys
Apparently learnerpages.com still redirects to a placeholder site? Just updated it to point to the (unhelpful) Luther landing page.
I was bored so I laid down and fell asleep, just out of boredom and I just woke up ~10 minutes ago and my eye is watering and my nostril is
running and I don’t know what I did to my sinuses
Edit a minute later to add I’m not congested, my throat feels fine, I don’t have other symptoms of illness.
Have you ever driven yourself insane? Thought without thinking, wrote without writing? Consumed without consuming and read without reading?
I have. I do every day. This is my purgatory. My boulder. My pain. My cross.
It is a small cross, a light cross, and I carry it. There is something to be said for universalism. There is something to be said for anarchy and for death. There is something to be said for life and for everyone who lives it. There is something to be said for "the latest and closest plural approximation to singular prenatal passivity which science,in its finite but unbounded wisdom,has succeeded in selling their wives."
If there's a line, there's going to be people on the other side of it.
A mountain is a mammal. A soul that keeps singing long after it should have stopped. A voice that starts singing long after it should have started.
A cave, and in the cave, a mine, and in the mine, something, something indescribable, something valuable, something more than you and me, and yet nothing without us.
A nose. A nose and The Nose and in a piece of bread and above our heads. I'm tired of not being able to say what I mean. I being unable to describe the angle through which I view the world.
A movie to end moving.
When developing, fixing bugs, a lot of the time that looks like deleting a big block of code and rewriting it. I find myself getting
addicted to that mindset. This works for single bugs, but there's a temptation to apply this to whole projects, to just replace whole code-bases, or even to real life (e.g. just 'reorganize everything in my room' or 'reinvent myself'). I've generalized this as 'trying to jump from imperfect to perfect.' It makes sense at a super small scale. You can take a single bug from 'broken' to 'fixed' without intermediate steps. But with complex software or anything analog, like real life, you have to iterate incrementally. You have to take small steps at a time. The exception of course is when your current system doesn't let you increment anymore. When you've hit the limit of what the current system can handle, only then does it make sense to tear down the system and start over. To rephrase: people often re-write apps because they have too many bugs or don't have enough features. Instead, you should rewrite an app when you *cannot* fix bugs and *cannot* add features.
=> https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/ The Excellent "Things You Should Never Do, Part I"
Hur dur I don’t even know. I changed the password back because I had changed it to 4 characters because I kept having to re enter it because
I hadn’t set a max_age on the authentication cookie. Just kind of funny, since you can see source now I don’t need to use this as a change log for the website itself.
I've decided caring about what 'is' and 'isn't' a 'word' is dumb and if I end up contributing to the invention of a new word that's a good
thing. This is about "unironically." Also reading Donne and seeing the number of words that are no longer "words" but are still perfectly understandable. "Emparadised" Also e.e. cummings, of course, "mostpeople"
/r/unixporn is fricking wild because of the absolute variety of window managers. There are just always window managers I've never heard of.
One of these days I'm going to really go through drawabox.com. I started it once but gave up when they expected me to like practice drawing
things for hours. Although that sounds strangely appealing now. I need a hobby like that…
I could make Linoleum Club in like a day if I made it an invite-only Discord server with a web portal instead of making it a whole website…
The problem is that there aren't words in my head struggling to get out. My head is crammed full of emotions and ideas and transcribing them
is a chore. But I have to do it because otherwise the ideas, they would overflow and start spilling out sloppily.
It's shocking how refreshing it feels to me to open this website with new colors.
These colors are based on ones color-picked from my driver's license. I had to adjust the beige, such things are terribly hard to get right.
The fact that I've lost respect for so many other people means that I've lost a lot of respect for myself and I assume that other people
don't respect me.
There are still open bugs in OJSE I hate this.
=> https://github.com/OurJSEditor/OurJSEditor/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+label%3Abug
I'm TERRIFIED of my own hubris.
I'm terrified of another OurJSEditor. Of thinking that I know better, that I can make something better than anyone else and then committing myself to it. And sinking hundreds of hours and thousands of lines of code and years of my life into it. For nothing.
I'm thinking about *Primer*. What terrifies me about that movie is the unlimited hubris of the characters. (Spoilers may follow. I recommend watching the movie unspoiled for full effect.) They just keep thinking that they can fix things, that they can make everything perfect if they just go back in time one more time. And it just introduces so much complexity so quickly and they were really in over their heads before they even started. And I honestly don't know if the directors intended for the point of the movie to be that you don't understand what's happening. But I didn't understand what was happening by the end of the movie, and that just made the apparent confidence of the characters so much more impactful. They couldn't stop. They couldn't let themselves believe that they had already lost, and so they just stayed trapped in the same impossible, infinitely complex, puzzle. I don't fear being trapped in a time-loop Groundhog-day-style, at least not any more than the next person. Like it would terrifying but I know it's not going to happen. But trapping myself? Wasting years of my life dedicated to a puzzle that everyone else can see is impossible? That scares me because it could happen.
Sometimes I wonder if my motto, "always more nuance" is a cop-out. But I don't think it is. I can find more nuance in anything, and I crave
that nuance. Once I've found it, I always feel more satisfied, like I have a more complete view.
“But even when you’re on the side of less power, you can have agency within that. You’re not automatically a victim, you’re just more likely
to be one.”
What's so funny to me is that, while the front page of HackerNews has a clear bias and topic and hivemind and echo chamber, people just
submit whatever the frick they want to /new. Like this is just some girl describing how wild the party scene was at her High School.
There are people, accounts, who just submit things to Hacker News all day every day. Like there's no way they are reading these articles, and thinking, 'yeah that fits on HN', they're just posting for the fun of it.
Just jumped to the middle of *Without Bloodshed* again because I was thinking about it. There's like 2 paragraphs of a vegan "indulging"
in a ham and cheese sandwich.
> he fought to muster the will to eat. His choice of a meatless sandwich did nothing to help matters.
…
> He dropped the meatless sandwich into a trash bin and found a ham and cheese on rye. His eyes widened and his mouth watered as he unwrapped it, took half, and found its heft was due almost entirely to meat and cheese. Instead of being stuffed with lettuce and tomato, the sandwich consisted of what appeared to be a dozen slices of ham, three of Swiss cheese, and a thin layer of Dijon mustard. Rapture radiated from his tongue as he took the first bite.
This guy's been a vegan for 5 years and there no explanation of why he's decided to eat meat now? Not to mention this person gets shot like 5 paragraphs later. If I were the editor of this I would cut not only this paragraph but the entire fricking character.
Bad social media ideas with Matthias. Something like Tumblr, but you're only allowed to post original content.
It's wild how humans still haven't run out of things to do with the idea of functions.
The idea of a function is really weird when you try to define it. Fundamentally it's about re-naming variables within a given scope. And all of modern mathematics and computer science rests on how powerful that concept is.
I don't know if I did this one justice.
Transcript
How many days of sadness must I spend
To get hatred into gladness?
And tell me how much sorrow must I spend
To get a future for tomorrow?
This must be a proud nation of crudeness.
This world used to mean so very much.
Why did you change my happiness to misery and heartbreak?
How must I be lonely?
Why can't you love me and want me
Until the end of time?
Someone needs to do to technology what Moneyball did to Baseball.
Unfortunately, Amazon's doing the best job.
Like, if you locked our views on technology, (which generally is that more technology=better), and didn't allow society's view on technology
to change, and didn't allow the engineers working on the technology to significantly change their approach, what does technology look like in 100, 1000 years?
How does the smart assistant in my microwave communicate to the smart assistant in my toaster oven? How big is my iPhone L (pronounced "50" of course)? Is there a subscription service that lets me order ballpoint pens?
I'm interested in a sort of futurepunk, call it "computerpunk" if that's not taken, where computers have been integrated into every aspect
of our lives in an ugly way. Cyberpunk and whatever Black mirror is doing glorify the computer systems themselves too much. And as someone who works with tech a lot, it's not very believable or interesting to me that a well-functioning computer system either is used for bad purposes or else fails to integrate well with humans. Because that's what Black Mirror is, is computer are these different, ethereal things, almost beings, that can't co-exist with humans. But like, humans are broken, flawed systems too. But Black Mirror isn't actually interested in making a point about computers, they're making a point about humans and society and values.
So to restate the prompt, what if everything we owned was made out of circuit boards and wiring, and it didn't effect our lives at all.
I think you have to realize that Tech is a bubble.
The number of Computer Science majors can't and won't increase exponentially.
It is, of course, very difficult to say how it will be before that bubble pops. It may not happen in my lifetime. But at some point the rate of technical increase has to slow down (at least when referring to computers as we know them). Then question then becomes, is a given piece of technology (or code, in my case), useful outside of the current rising tide.
"I don't really make content, I'm more of a performance artist"
Listening to breakcore ironically but like also with the distinct knowledge that I could see myself listening to this unironically.
Me aggressively disabling like every VS Code setting.
Yes I caved and switched to VS code. I just want (perfect) syntax highlighting for every language.
I'm going to stop going through Aphyr's internet presence now.
Literally shaking and crying right now.
I should have stopped at Unifying the Technical Interview.
I should have stopped at 'author of Jepsen'
I should have stopped at his LinkedIn account username
I should have stopped at "A History of Leather at Pride"
But nooo I had to open his mastodon.
AAAAAAAHHhhhh
Like the code written in those posts is bad. But in order to say that it's bad, you can't argue that it's aesthetically ugly or difficult
for the author to maintain or that it's buggy or slow or stylistically inconsistent. You *have* to appeal to other code that has been written. It is bad because it is different.
In "Typing the Technical Interview" the programmer implements a program in Haskell using only types, never instantiating the types or creating variables or values. But it works. You have to appeal to the fact that there's a way that you're supposed to write this type of program, as ordained by the creators of the language and endorsed by every other person who's ever written Haskell.
=> https://aphyr.com/posts/342-typing-the-technical-interview
The thing that makes "Reversing the Technical Interview" and the rest of the series so good is that it's a social commentary. It's not about
the code itself. The absurdity of the code exists to emphasize the absurdity of computer science as a whole, socially and technically. It describes someone who fails to conform to the computer science industry's social ideals about how code should be written. Importantly, it's written from the perspective of that person, so we get to see that their ideals are (at least mostly) internally consistent. And since the code that they write works, and since they're particular about it (they have a personal style-guide), we're reminded that the style of code that we write is a social construct. Which isn't to downplay the more obvious tone that makes fun of the main character. They're dumb for not being able to adapt their style to the environment.
I don't even write Haskell. I've used it once or twice. But in that short time it introduced me to so many features that I love and that
are so intuitive and useful that I feel like they should be in every programming language.
`where`/`let` clauses that are expression-scoped!
Guards!
Pattern Matching in general!
Implicit Currying/partial function application!
The ability to create your own infix functions!
And the ability to call native operators as not-infix, and pass them around as values!
List comprehensions!
Infinite Lists!
Any of those could be added to any language. They don't require a strictly-typed, functional, language to use.
At some point in the past I made my phone’s vibration pattern (e.g. when someone calls me) “Matthias” in Morse code and then forgot about it
The more I program in other languages, especially LISPs, the more impressed I am with Haskell's partial function application.
And their ability to make any function infix, man I just really like Haskell. (Except for its type system, I have no idea what a Monad is and I have no desire to learn.)
Another word dump
Okay fine we can word dump sheep yellow flowers, actually poe and edger and summing s and aah my mind my brain is full of thoughts thaat don't have meaning and yet are more thaan the sum of their parts and thier soul and their fingers overflow with light and with meaning.
I don't know if these word dumps are interesting to other people. They're low effort, even for this site. (I use them like a pre-writing exercise, like warm-up.) But I kind of enjoy coming back to read them. I'll probably keep posting them, but clearly labeled like this one.
I really like daylight savings time and I’m unhappy that we might get rid of it. It’s so interesting and fun.
I love systemd. It's like the perfect mix of like, user friendly and high-level, but super fricking powerful.
I use systemd instead of `network-manager`. I use system instead of `cron`. Etc.
```
$ systemd-analyze calendar '*:00/15'
Original form: *:00/15
Normalized form: *-*-* *:00/15:00
Next elapse: Thu 2022-03-17 18:00:00 EDT
(in UTC): Thu 2022-03-17 22:00:00 UTC
From now: 8min left
```
You have to earn your happy ending (in literature at least).
In contrast, you don't have to earn bad endings.
I'm trying to use VS Code's remote editing ability, but it's failing with an error. Researching the error brings me to a Github issues page,
but Github 500s for requests made from logged in users right now. AAhhhhhh. Please Microsoft.
Hipsters are like nerds except they don’t like technology and have gone outside.
A little like me.
Ad blockers are a myth. Ad blockers promise to "remove the ads from the website." But the ads are an inseparable part of the website.
What the ad blocker does is create a new website that approximates the real website, but without ads.
I'm not interested in the version of the web created by extensions. I'm interested in the real web, as created by the authors of the websites.
If a website has ads, either I respect the author and I value the content enough that I'm willing to endure the ads for the content. Or I don't, in which case I clearly don't value the content very highly and the burden is and should be on the author to improve their content or remove the ads.
If a website is an ad-infested piece of garbage, I don't want to pretend that it's not. I want to know that it's an ad-infested piece of garbage, so that I can close it.
In the web paradigm, websites have complete responsibility for their functionality, content, and appearance. The text and content of a website is 100% determined by the website author. But so too is the appearance, with CSS. The website author can of course abstain from using CSS, but a web browser doesn't step up and provide styling. It provides *defaults*, but those defaults are an implementation detail. The client, the web browser, has to implement a mechanism by which website authors can style websites, and as an implementation detail, they have to set defaults. At no point is the browser *responsible* for styling the website—the browser is responsible for providing a mechanism for the website to style itself.
Extensions change that. With a browser extension, suddenly the extension also has some responsibility for the appearance of the page. Which might not seem like a big deal, but it is. The extension could break the page. The extension could fix any number of infinite things that are broken on the page already. The extension is responsible for deciding what is an ad and what isn't. And to their credit, ad blockers do a really good job at this. I do trust and respect uBlock Origin. But I don't want to have to trust uBlock Origin; I don't need another thing that can fail. If a website's bad, I should blame the website. If I see ads on a website, I should blame the website, not blame my ad blocker.
I intentionally avoid making the "support creators" argument here because a lot of time ads are not a viable or healthy long-term monetization strategy. And moreover, if you take pride in your content, it's very hard to do ads in a way that preserves the quality and tone of your content. Ads are, by definition, someone else's content that you've been paid to interject into your page.
But at some point, when I read a website that has ads and has content that I value or enjoy, I am glad that I'm supporting that content by viewing the ads along with it.
Like, if you can't be bothered to watch a 30 second ad before your Youtube video, why are you on Youtube? Find something better to do with your time. Read a book. (And I say that to myself.)
114 open tabs. This is near the most I'll have open before closing the window. There's no way I'm going to scroll up to tabs more than a
couple hours old. (I use Vivaldi, which has a vertical, scrolling, tab bar.)
“If you could transit between the web and gemini space seamlessly, gemini capsules would become little more than curiously retro-looking
web sites.”
Safari on the front page of HN again. All the same points.
"PWAs from the beginning would have prevented Facebook from collecting data for the last decade in the first place"
Facebook–Cambridge Analytica scandal could have been prevented if only Apple had allowed PWAs to send push notifications 10 years ago…
(This is sarcasm.)
"Here I am still waiting for ES2018 regex look-behinds"
"Web MIDI? Still surprised that's missing on Apple"
Whataboutism at its worst. 'BuT whAt aBouT WebUSB?'
Don't even get me started on "Lazy loading images is at best user hostile"
Seriously this is the best I can come up with
```zig
const data_one = [1]u8{1};
const data_two = [2]u8{1, 2};
const data_three = [3]u8{1, 2, 3};
const data_four = [4]u8{1, 2, 3, 4};
const data = [4][]const u8{ data_one[0..], data_two[0..], data_three[0..], data_four[0..]};
```
In JS this is `[[1], [1, 2], [1, 2, 3], [1, 2, 3, 4]]`.
And I recognize that JS is allocating that on the heap and I want Zig to allocate it on the stack so that I don't have to worry about memory management. But it's clearly possible, I don't understand why it's so verbose.
I can't let myself use that code because I don't know Zig and I have to assume there's a better way of doing this, so I've been researching for 3 hours now.
Do these people not include data in their code?
I'm constantly looking for ways to abstract data out of code. Having a global constant with
data that the rest of the program acts upon is a super common pattern in my code. But apparently, the system programming program never do that. Or I mean maybe they just do it in n lines and don't complain.
I feel like I can't complain between C is not any better. Like, the "solution" is to define everything ahead of time and take pointers.
I hate this. I want to represent the data `[[1], [1, 2], [1, 2, 3], [1, 2, 3, 4]]` in Zig and I cannot figure out how to do it.
Zig doesn't have generics per se, but it allows you to pass around types as compile-time values. Which is basically the same thing.
The reason Gemini needs to be simple is that transferring responsibility for layout (& design & format) to the client means that the
client design needs to be capable of handling *any* semantically possible Gemtext document.
In short, this is reiterating one benefit of Gemini: it is impossible to have a Gemini site that looks bad.
But I had previously argued that this advantage is independent of Gemini's simplicity. That is, I'm imagining an interface (which I've named Actually Flowers) which allows for significantly more complex documents (read: Turing-complete applications) to be created, while not giving those applications any control over their own visual appearance or layout. I'm holding out that it might still be possible to achieve this, but I don't think I appreciated the difficulty of saying: every theoretically possible application has to look good. At some point you have to tackle that problem by limiting the scope of possible applications. Which Gemini does in an extreme sense.
All I want, is to retreat into a remote cave, and spend my time looking into the future and writing down prophecies, to be found by future
heroes in their time of need.
I'm really not interested with defending my points, in structuring an argument. If you can't see what I'm saying, moreover, if you're not
willing.
No.
Something else
I believe ugh well rip.
There are a couple of interesting things about Random.org
* The service provided is so simple that anyone could implement it.
* It's marketed for reasons that are technical gibberish that are pointless and no one cares about.
* The interface is quite bare-bones and unremarkable.
* People (users) feel a need to bestow personality upon it.
* (The domain name Random.org is a single word. I'm not yet sure if this is interesting.)
I finished my *Beyonders* re-read. It's wild, difficult to describe. Mull does very different things than some of his other books, and yet I
don't think he does what he thinks he's doing. He's said at a couple of points that *Beyonders* is intended for more mature audiences, but that doesn't really come across to me. He juggles perhaps more characters or plot devices, but the detail of each suffers proportionally, so it's not significantly more complex. And the stakes are no higher than *Five Kingdoms* or *Fablehaven*. The plot feels very out-of-control, but that just makes it cheesier when everything falls perfectly into place.
Wow, Siri is really bad. Like 1/10 times she just doesn't answer me or otherwise fails to execute the command. What the frick. Can you
imagine if a software button didn't work 1/10 times? Ridiculous
Remind me in three years to submit GRIBFILE #1 to Hacker News.
Edit: I've decided 1.5 might be a better place to start.
"Your laptop screen has turned a gorgeous mix of purples, owing to the extreme cold, but the code is still dimly visible within. It reminds
you of a frozen lake at dusk. A liquid crystal."
I'm still not over this. How can you have such mastery of both the English language and Java bytecode.
> “But… those aren’t even the same type. That’s… that’s illegal.”
> “If it were meant to be illegal,” you remind him sagely, “Sun Microsystems would have made it unrepresentable.”
I have been informed that Rigby is not down and Luke just changed URLs without telling anyone.
Had to edit the link on the Thought from Jan that referenced it.
The thing I don't like about Twitter is that it's people-focused, not topic focused. I really enjoy Twitter right now, but because I follow
people that I'm friends with.
It's difficult for me to follow like, topics, on Twitter. I'd be interested in some recreational mathematics content on Twitter. And so I follow @standupmaths, @Ayliean, and @3blue1brown. But Matt tweets about their dog and Ayliean tweets about about Scottish school Covid restrictions and I don't really care. And Grant only tweets when he releases a video.
Like I actively do not want to see political content. And that means that I can't follow any tech journalists on Twitter because all of them will retweet political content.
I'm not trying to criticize these people. I understand that this is how Twitter works. I'm just pointing out that this is how the system works, and that the system could work differently.
Tumblr has a similar problem. I told Tumblr at some point I was interested in Math, so it recommended I follow a blog with "mathematics" in the name. Well, it was just some person's blog. And they re-posted a lot of cool math, including a fair amount of original art. But they also have some mental health issues and they used this unassuming "mathematics" blog to share life updates. It would honestly be comedic, the juxtaposition of "cool fact about the Fibonacci spiral" with vaguely-suicidal ramblings, were they not of course vaguely-suicidal.
I suppose, then, that Hacker News and Reddit suffer from the opposite problem, dedication to a topic at the expense of the human element. But at least I know what I'm getting into.
GCS d- s !a C+++ M++ UL+ w-- E--- W++++ !N PS+ PE++ Y+ !PGP !tv b++ G e h+ !r
-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.1
GCS d- s !a C+++ M++ UL+ w-- E--- W++++ !N PS+ PE++ Y+ !PGP !tv b++ G e h+ !r
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------
On one hand, the concept of a geek code is like right in line with "20 | gay | they/them | autistic" in a Twitter bio. On the other hand, age is the only label that overlaps at all.
I wonder what happened to the types of people that would have unironically used this. Some Gemini users fondly remember their time on Usenet (I think there's a Gemini/Gopher Usenet forum that was recently created, but "!N"). But what about all the people that were cringy kids on Usenet and are now being cringy on Twitter?
Oh yeah I guess I should link: https://web.archive.org/web/20050210083932/http://www.geekcode.com/geek.html
Apparently, the ideological fantasy portrayed in the Starbreaker universe was extremely commonly discussed in the 1990s-era internet.
I'm pretty sure Ender IO is incorrectly calculating bonus items from a SAG Mill with a grind ball.
Language without lambdas or functions, only a set of standard library functions that allow chaining and composing.
Something about the README for EnderIO saying it's licensed under CC0 despite the fact that the LICENSE.txt is the Unlicense. Quality.
Matthew Bolan is streaming himself scrolling up and down in a linear algebra textbook without talking and he has 6 viewers.
Rigby is down again, RIP.
Do I have writing there that’s not backed up? Did I not learn from last time? Who knows.
The reason surrealism? is so hard to do in any meaningful place is that it requires not just the aesthetic appreciation of nonsense but
also the belief that realism (or what most would call the truth) is actually not useful.
This is about 9front’s code of conduct and also the about page of this website.
I need to eat food. it is very important i am falling askleep because i not have any energy byecause i not have any food thaink you
"I have a statistics minor and some proficiency in R, so I am the most qualified person to solve this problem."
Thinking about downloading all of Tumblr.
I wonder if The Linoleum Club can capture some of Tumblr's aesthetic?
Blackout poetry is weird because you either blackout negative words and say the opposite thing from the original author or you blackout
superfluous words and say the same thing. It's hard to use blackout poetry to add nuance.
Youtube keeps fricking serving me ads in Spanish. Why? I only speak English. I've never watched anything in Spanish. What? I'm signed into
the same Youtube account I've had for 15 years. Google has 15 years of watch history. And not a single video in there is in Spanish because I don't speak Spanish. I'm watching a video in English. And yet. Google decides to show me an ad for the Pixel translating Spanish into French. Which I also don't speak, for the record.
Why is Google collecting all my data, ostensibly to show me better/targeted ads, and yet they can't even match the language of the ad to the language of the video I'm watching. This just seems like such a dumb, basic, failure of the system.
It is March.
Also I just woke up and I’m not sure why I was asleep or what I should now be doing. Perhaps making waffles?
I am no longer angry at the editor of the abridged version of The Count of Monte Cristo. I forgive them, and I feel sorry for them.
I should write a manifesto. For my life.
I tried but it would be very long. Without explaining, much less justifying, it would look something like:
I think therefore I am; there is a God; God is good; Truth is absolute; Truth is infinitely fractal; human perception is inherently finite; pragmatic analysis must be used; logic is useful, but inherently limited; people are good; people are inherently flawed; independence is good; creation is good; etc.
My ideas are not linear I hate the linear nature of the English language I want something else.
My utter disinterest in the question of identity is striking. Made more so by my fascination with the answer.
This is my empire.
This is art created by someone with something to lose.
You and me are in this together. We're doing something.
"You've been making choices out of desperation for too long"
"Break the pattern. Take control of your life, Todd. The instant you take control, interesting things will happen. I guarantee it."
-Dirk Gently (S1E1)
Writing and programming and art and creation are about control. (Whether they should be or not.)
My space bar has stopped working normally. The ugly side of this keyboard has finally reared its head.
I just, I'm going to have to get the keyboard replaced again. Apple's going to think I'm running an AppleCare scam but legitimately the TouchBar, screen, and now the keyboard have failed me. And since the computer is all glued together they really only replace the top-half or bottom half, so I'm going to have gone through 2 entire computers. How do you even make a computer with a life-expectancy of one year?
I hate the OSI's response to public domain. It's literally just vague fear-mongering.
They provide no examples. They're just 'this is confusing. I'm not a lawyer and you're not either. It's impossible to know what "public domain" means. Anyone who wants to use public domain software should talk to a lawyer. You might not actually be able to use it. If you're still confused, read 3 months of mailing list archives from 2012. You think that's unreasonable? Then trust us, just use an OSI-open-source-approved license.'
They do argue you shouldn't CC0, since a) CC0 explicitly disclaims that the author may hold a patent on the content and b) CC0 doesn't include a disclaimer of warranty. (Which is a result of CC0 being intended for media, not software.) But like, there's no mention of the Unlicense or Zlib or BS0 or similar.
Sources! Because I apparently I hold myself to a higher standard that the OSI ("if the thought of reading all those conversations is daunting, please take that as more evidence that it's just better to use an approved Open Source License if you can!").
=> https://cr.yp.to/publicdomain.html One of the prominent anti-Public domain lawyers retracts his statements when it's pointed out that he is contradicting the Ninth Circuit.
=> https://unlicense.org The Unlicense. The Unlicense is verbose, and claims that its verbosity is necessary to safely public-domain software. Which doesn't exactly help. But it does address all of the concerns of the OSI and is OSI approved. The list of sources at the bottom is also pretty good.
There are other OSI approved licenses that are also effectively public domain: 0-clause BSD, Zlib, etc.
=> http://harmful.cat-v.org/economics/intellectual_property/ Libertarian Propaganda (please read) (Also see links at the bottom of this page.)
=> https://opensource.org/faq#public-domain The OSI's 1000 words that say nothing in their FAQ.
=> https://opensource.org/node/878 Another 1000 words on the OSI's website that repeat the same bland talking points. "It’s probably safer to use a license like MIT instead." (Just in case I haven't made my point well: This quote is dumb. If I want to public-domain my code, saying "just don't" isn't helpful.)
(This post was inspired by the Gemini user who claimed that most people who don't support the OSI are trying to profit off of open source.)
List of things I hate in order of how much I hate them:
Myself
Everything
Everyone
I hate VS Code I hate Microsoft I hate everyone who said VS Code is good I hate open source I hate GitHub I hate everything.
I may be married to JS but every weekend I go out and have an affair with a different functional programming language.
I almost feel like I'm bad at context switching. Like I cannot stop myself from doing something that I'm in the middle of doing.
This is a theory.