Thoughts
Jon Bois in 5 minutes can make me a fan of Alabama football. Get me a Valentine Jones, UAB jersey. Roll Tide!
That's University of Alabama-Birmingham.
I am sick and tired of scrolling through VS Code settings trying to turn off popup ads (or "auto complete suggestions" as they call them)
The problem with adults is that they’re scared of falling down.
Children possess the ability to embrace the ground.
You know what I think I want is
```
Array.prototype.filter = (function () {
const oldFilter = Array.prototype.filter;
return function (f, ...args) {
return oldFilter.bind(this)(f ? f : v => !!v, ...args);
}
})();
```
Filtering for truthyness is a common operation when doing functional programming stuff. In JS I normally do it like `[1, false, 2].filter(v => !!v)`. (The `!!` is of course optional but I think it improves readability over the identity.) Ruby has a function for this called `.compact`, but I don't love that. I've been thinking about names and I just can't come up with something better. `.dropFasly()`, `.filterTruthy()`, `.removeUndefined()`, `.true()`? But honestly I think having it be a default behavior for `.filter()` makes a lot of sense.
Although `Array.prototype.extant = function () { return this.filter(v => v !== undefined && v !== null) };` would be pretty nice.
I'm a rule-following person, right. I like rules and structure. That's part of why I'm a programmer in the first place. Why, then, do I care
so much about run-time flexibility in programming languages? I can't stand strictly-type or type-checked languages. And the answer is that the only thing that I hate more than a lack of rules, is conflicting rules. And a compiler, to me, feels like an extra set of rules that sometimes conflicts with the runtime rules of a program.
It's such a bummer to me that Tom Scott deleted his "meme-based, gamer-adjacent culture" thread. It would have been such a good copypasta
Tom had the awareness to delete it like 2 hours after it was posted, before it became a meme. He evidently has some sense, but also, how do you post that in the first place? Maybe he was super specifically talking about the "gamersriseup" culture, but it would have behooved him to specify that, rather than tossing all "memes about video games" under the bus.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/tom-scott-i-am-at-x
If you had pitched me a book where sporadic words were capitalized I would have expected it to be weird. But it actually works.
Gearing up for NaNoWriMo again.
(I've geared up for it before, mind you, I've never actually written anything of note.)
I feel like everyone was like 'I'm so bored we should totally do an April fools joke this year' and then no one motivated to do any. (@me)
Still can’t handle Adam Rex. My word.
He introduces 5 characters in 60 pages and all of them are insane.
On the other hand, every time I've tried to open AWS I've concluded it's too complicated so mad respect to those who understand it
I'm working on a theory that people that say they're "grinding" aren't actually doing that much work.
Every lodash function is available as its own npm module. This is iconic.
=> https://www.npmjs.com/search?q=keywords:lodash-modularized
The other day I was thinking, 'why did I delete the KA organ harvesting roleplay discord server.' And I just found some chat logs.
Let's just say that I no longer regret deleting it.
(Note to self: the transcript is in my DMs with Robert)
Am I baiting someone into asking me why I've included a notice of modification at the top of the file? Yes. Yes I am.
This is malicious compliance with the GPL.
I say I'm not ambitious, but that's a lie. I'm way too ambitious. I want to do so much. But I also know I can't do one-tenth of the things I
want to do, so I stop myself, and moreover, I hide that I want to those things.
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
You thought I was real on here, lol no, my real thoughts apparently go into voice memos. I have some wild voice memos I don't even remember.
Nothing does worldbuilding like books. Even the dedicated worldbuilding people don’t communicate what it feels like to be in their world.
I really fricking want to be wierd. And in some ways, I'm sure everybody does, and I tell myself that I need to keep myself together and act
normal because everyone else does. But also, I go on Omegle and I say weird things, and they disconnect instantly. In a safe, anonymous environment, I can't think of people being weird. Like, I just want to scream gibberish and do a handstand and throw things. Does no one else?
Rigby is down again, RIP.
Do I have writing there that’s not backed up? Did I not learn from last time? Who knows.
OOoooohhh my word.
I don't trust anyone.
I don't want to see a therapist because I'm afraid.
I'm conflicted and I don't want to unravel my feelings because I'm afraid. I don't know what I'm afraid of. Rejection, I guess. Being known? Any of it? The unknown? People.
Maybe there's nothing there to untangle and I actually just have an irrational social anxiety that I just need to ignore, not understand.
I suspect that I move in cycles with the weather, but there is an insufficient evidence to prove that.
"How Do You Love?"
Like I really want to play around with sapling but I don't know when I'm going to be able to. It's not something that you can easily
integrate into an existing project.
Just set up Vivaldi on a new computer for the first time in, I don't know, four years. My word there are a lot of settings!
Two types of people in a Discord channel called #crimes, "I do not leave home without my carry pistol" libertarian and
"most police should be completely unarmed" liberal. They may disagree on gun policy but are willing to put that aside to insult the police.
I'm going to hold off on posting my 2021 music roundup for another week or two. I don't think it will change much, but it's possible.
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'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.'
It is my opinion that one of the most comfortable positions possible is sitting on the floor with your back up against a wall and I will
never survive in polite company.
I mean seriously, your legs are straight and not supporting your weight, you have something to lean back against. You can lean your head back, but it's not like you're in a recliner.
"the spacious days of the stately three-volume novel seem very remote indeed…both opportunity and inclination are now lacking for such
extensive indulgence in the printed page."
Me who binge-read 5 *Fablehaven* books in the last 5 days. Uh.
Sets are unordered, hold unique elements*, and are nest-able. Matrixes are ordered, do not constrain values, and are *not nest-able*.
Popularity contests are an interesting thing. Somewhere along the line I become a lot more agreeable to the idea of the wisdom of the crowd
Okay dang. It takes a minute to understand Tailscale's terminology, but once you do it's dead easy to use. Highly recommend
How can I possibly ever be known when so much of who I am revolves around my passion for unknown things.
I'm done. I'm so fricking done. All software is bad, and I can't even criticize it because the KA Extension is garbage as well.
Okay back to the seasons, I'm not vibing with them. It feels really disorienting and doesn't really give you a sense of scale. Like, how far
back is this? Is this from 10 years ago or yesterday? I wonder if that's just because I made the site? Because when I'm looking back on Hacker News, for example, it feels almost creepy, like walking through a ghost town or archives, reading comments from years ago. I don't get that same feeling here.
On the other hand, that's probably fine.
The functionality of this site was obviously inspired by Twitter, but a lot of the feel and aesthetic of the this site was inspired by bill wurtz's "questions". https://billwurtz.com/questions/questions.html I just opened "questions" again, and started reading, and was struck by how timeless everything was. I looked at the timestamps, but like I'm tired and I don't want to try to figure out how long ago any of them were posted. And it doesn't matter.
So in that sense, I wouldn't be unhappy if everything here was timeless and you could jump into the middle. (Like you can with XKCD for example.)
Now, I don't want this site to be confusing to navigate, like billwurtz.com. I do want you to be able to come to this site and immediately get a feel for "oh he's posted several times a day for a year…" Maybe numbered pages? e.g. 1-500, 500-1000, etc? I think that works well for XKCD.
They’re extending HTTP to add a whole new verb. Absolute nightmare.
I understand the use case. Working with graphQL is currently painful. I just kind of can’t believe that something so fundamental to the protocol is being extended at this point in time.
(Gemini is not extendable.)
Here's a pro tip for you: maintain your own libraries. Fork any library you use. Never update from upstream unless you have a reason to.
Libraries expand, and they add features, and most of the time you don't need the features. So end up spending extra updating the libraries to get features that you don't need. If you go looking for the feature, and the new version of the library has the feature, then by all means, update the library.
Anyways I'm trolling here, I don't actually do this.
I have 3 SSH connections open to Luther* right now.
*my Linode server, which hosts OJSE as well as other things, like Discord bots and this website.
It's been awhile, but thanks to the hard work of the people at t2linux.org, I am once again writing this from Arch Linux.
Super Thoughts is such a fricking dumb idea, and I'm excited to share it with all of you tonight!
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.
The main reason I'm doing NaNo is just to practice writing. I don't want my grasp on the English language to slip. If I get a novel out of
it, cool, but I kind of suspect I won't.
The cool kids just call it NaNo these days.
I'm also not like signed up for it or anything, I'm just chilling.
v1.1 of WhisperMaPhone is now live, that is, if I was using semantic versioning, which I'm not.
Titles, favicon, working timestamps, all good things.
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
Google has emailed me to inform me that this site is returning 500 errors and will be downgraded in search results. I don't care.
Undertale? Supernatural? Homestuck? Compound words denoting media I haven't consumed. They are all the same thing in my brain.
I think Supernatural is about vampires and I think Undertale is a game about a skeleton and Homestuck is a cartoon.
People who complain about architecture annoy me to no end. Architecture has to balance the practical and the beautiful and literally
any time any architect does anything interesting in either direction people mock it for not being enough of the other.
Me: Haven’t you heard the good news of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem? Formal logic is dead.
Mathematicians: That’s not really–
Me: LOGIC IS LOGICALLY FLAWED! SURREALISM WINS AGAIN!
I missed the two year anniversary of this site. I guess it doesn't matter. I started this site September 5, 2020.
It just drives me insane knowing that I'm an irrational, illogical person. Because I'm doing things that are dumb because I can't come up with a better alternative.
Oh my word. My nose is going to explode.
The question is whether we need to tuck our shirts into our pants anymore.
'Just write simple HTML'
*Simple HTML is 100X more complicated than Gemtext!*
*Markdown is 10X more complicated than Gemtext*
The central paradox of the internet is that it's possible for you to have your own space, but it fundamentally relies on lots of
infrastructure created and controlled by other people.
I have discovered the superior storage method for clothes. In a pile on the floor.
These are clean clothes, mind you.
Help I can't figure out how to close `sbcl`.
Yes I am learning lisp. Every lisp programmer acts like every other language is hell. And like, Rust has fanboys who tell you that your language is worse. The lisp people are like, 'go for it, but I would rather write it in lisp' and that sounds powerful.
The MusicKit API actually seems like, good, so I'm increasingly tempted to make my version-controlled-playlist website.
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.
Hermitcraft TCG is doing a print run. I'm a little sad about that, because it seems to be geared towards people who are used to paying money
to collect cards.
I've never played a trading card game before, never even had Pokemon cards as a kid. But I was enjoying watching the hermits play, because it was pretty chill. Every hermit that was taking it seriously seemed to be able to find the cards to build the deck that they wanted.
When the only way to get cards to play the game is by gambling with your real-life money, that's kind of screwed up in my opinion. That's not a game that I could ever imagine myself having fun playing. Haha I win because I have more money than you and I bought 10 booster packs.
And here's the thing. I'm not saying it's impossible to make a collectable card game that doesn't do that. I'm saying Beef has completely and utterly sold out by encouraging people to spend literally hundreds of dollars to try to get signed, holographic cards. Beef's video is literally 'you have a chance to get a signed holographic card in every pack!' Instead of, 'here's a cheap, fun, game to play with your friends.'
To put that another way, it's not all about the card game itself. I'm having trouble getting over that. Part of the game experience is "how well" you can collect cards to build your deck. And the primary factor that controls how well you can collect cards, is how much money you're willing to spend.
One more time, I think that the fact that there are aftermarket stores where you can buy card packs for other collectable card games is screwed up. I view that aspect of it as a distraction or a necessary evil, with the real challenge being developing your deck strategy and playing the the game well. But Beef and the other Hermits are trying to create an aftermarket ecosystem. They see that as a feature.
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.
The problem with IQ is that it's one dimensional. (Aside from other obvious problems.) I think a 2-dimensional IQ test could be really
interesting.
Screw it, I'm switching back to Safari as a default browser. I can't take this. I just want perfection.
Talk about garbage API design `threading.Thread(target=my_func, args, kwargs)`
Passing a function and its arguments to a second function is a communist party of red flags.
It's interesting, since I've added a search page here, I've started to use this more as a personal knowledge repository. Which was really
not how it was built, but like, if it functions like "for free," then why not?
Apparently I can mirror my phone to my computer, so that’s pretty cool.
When I was a kid you had to pay like $$$ to the people that had an app that let you do that.
Re-reading "On the Arbitration of Self" which I haven't read since I wrote it, and like, wow. Rhetorically I'm off the wall.
"Though intuition cries out in protest, logic ignores it."
If I forgot that I wrote that, and you showed it to me, I wouldn't believe you that I wrote it. It does not match any writing style that I've used for anything else as far as I can remember.
=> https://rigby.krikorian.ca/post/8410098d-b13e-44e2-a244-b59fdaf080cc
(Let me know if this link breaks, I have a backup.)
Okay so we're changing something. Previously, I said I was going to clearly disclaim content-effecting edits. However, I'm going to add the
exception that within 5 minutes of the Thought being posted, I'm free to edit it to hell. For example, the last Thought, I wrote the first line, hit Edit, and then typed in the extended text immediately. This is mostly just for readability purposes. Adding "Edit:" is ugly and if I created a new Thought, it would go above, not below, the thought I'm appending to.
"Here" is so fricking good and Alessia Cara cannot match herself.
You really played yourself there.
I think I would love and adore Rust if it were a high level language.
I don't know what I mean by that.
There are just some things that it does so well. Native slice type.
Other things it does really poorly.
I listened to all four of AJR’s albums in order over the weekend. They were good. You can hear to progression of the band.
The author of *GEB* describes a graph from his own PhD thesis as “a picture of God.”
> An agnostic friend of mine once was so struck by Gplot’s infinitely many infinites that he called it “a picture of God”, which I don’t think is blasphemous at all.
- Gödel, Escher, Bach, p. 142
There’s too much here to unpack right now. But heck.
I've never been like, "man, I regret making a git repository for this."
On the other hand, there are lots of times when I'm like, "man,
should have made a git repository for this a long time ago."
Okay okay, the conclusion of the trilogy, what if you had a language with no symbols and an operator to check string equality, wow
Programming is a kind of fantasy land, in that it is a world distinct from our world, with its own set of rules.
I wonder how often a give bank processes payments for $0.01? That aren’t refunded obviously. What amount of money is moved most frequently?
More selected messages from the 9front IRC (#cat-v)
13:45 <cinap_lenrek> motion control, like a CAR?
13:45 <cinap_lenrek> a TRAIN!
13:45 <taw9> I have four Beckhoff servo drives, the fc7502 card to talk to them and three servo motors.
13:45 <user51> a plane?
13:45 <Ori_B> cinap_lenrek: hahaha, so, yesterday on gridchat, someone wanted to try making trains run on plan9.
I am a circle when I feel like I should be a square.
A round peg in a square hole, if you will.
I'm happy I managed to pull off the colors here. I probably should have gone for something more modern, but for now I like this.
I miss the Blaseball wiki.
I wonder if there's something like wiki but with a better or different interface.
Nothing makes me happy and everything makes me unhappy. Existence is suffering.
Every piece of criticism I’ve ever received is bouncing around in my brain, 10x louder than the person who said it. I hate myself.
Twitter is just Tumblr 5 years ago, that's fairly well established, but with the addition that everyone is cramming their takes into as few
characters as possible.
Tumblr, in the meantime, has settled, is less radical (or at least less aggressive) than Twitter or Tumblr 5 years ago.
One of my personal mottos is “always more nuance.” Truth is fractal, and the more detail you can provide, the closer you get to the truth.
"We don't need a sweatshirt. You're in San Diego and I'm in hell."
-[Jon Bois](https://youtu.be/4qKWMgs4HG4)
I'm binge watching boating vlogs in preparation for when I leave society and live in a boat in international waters alone.
Having to stop myself from listening to the 3 *OK ORCHESTRA* songs on repeat because they're too hype for the current vibe.
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'm very tired. I nap now.
Something something my standards are too high I'll never motivate to get a girlfriend.
My problem with a titling window manager is that I don't have keys available on my keyboard to bind to moving windows around.
Escaping a single-quote in a single-quoted string, in C, and most languages: 'they\'re'
Bash (and other shells): 'they'"'"'re'
Kinda missing the expansion era NGL
Re-reading the Blaseball wiki page for the Turntables mod. "Any Win earned from a non-loss during the Regular Season will be converted to an Unwin." One of the most beautiful things I've ever read.
I can’t get over Gemini. I’m sorry. It’s been close to 3 weeks now, and it’s all I can think about.
Am I the only one who thinks node.js is a mess? I guess no one is using node.js? Or something? I don't get it.
Yo. 12.7% (percent of U.S. that's Black) of 365 is 46. Yet we only get 28 days for Black history month. Scam.
The JavaScript ecosystem (i.e. npm) is so screwed up that it's not even worth commenting on anymore. If it bothers you, don't use JS.
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 love Goncharov because it is "art that disassociates with reality, but associates with itself."
There's no way around this popup. I can't finish exporting my documents from Craft without first restarting it. What if I was in the middle
of writing a sentence? I don't think it would care.
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.
I think part of why Potterwatch appeals to me so strongly is that it is imperfect. It’s not just about there being an in-group and an
out-group, but there are people like Ron who very clearly belong in the in-group, but who are locked out by the necessity of the imperfect heuristic that defines access.
It’s easy to create an in-group and an out-group, but the definition of the in-group has to be something other than the tautology.
Programmers are generally anxious.
I think it’s something about debugging that encourages you to question everything. But it may also be something about the logical nature of programming itself. Anyways, programmers like guarantees, things that don’t change, and rigorously defined behavior. Not only does that structure make us comfortable, the lack of structure scares us.
It’s surprising to me that etymology is a popular or successful field. Obviously it’s interesting, but there are a lot of interesting things.
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.)
Getting emotional thinking about the interview with POI-6897 on the SCP-3108 page.
> I'm sure he's a busy guy, wouldn't want to bother him, lol.
> Pierce, did you really just say the letters lol out loud?
SCP is about humanity's relationship with these unknown eldritch beings, but it's also about the authors: a group of young internet-users who didn't fit into the world. Kids who say "lol" out loud are as foreign to the SCP foundation as the unknown beings.
And SCP is about the contact between the foundation and these anomalies, but it's also about the contact between the foundation and these kids. (I've only read some SCPs, I don't follow the lore or anything, but there are a number of SCPs, not just 3108, that have been created by a group of internet users. It's not a main plotline or anything, but it's a theme.) The writers of SCP knew that their culture was different. And they also knew that the separation of their culture and the professional world was not indefinitely maintainable.
And to a large extent, they were right. The internet as a culture has had an impact on the world which is arguably more significant than the impact that the monsters have on the SCP world.
I can't quickly find a date for 3108 but I assume it was late '00s.
This topic fits in the same area of my brain as "The Hacker Manifesto"
Edit (8:08pm): looks like 3108 was written in 2017 and nothing I'm saying above holds true. 💀
Hey look an emoji on my Thoughts Learnerpages
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.
So I'm working on a website with Next.js, and the beauty of Next.js is that it server-side renders static content. But even with a wholly
static page it includes React and about 63.8kb of JS. And the Next.js people are like, that's not a lot, but it's insane when the page content is a 1kb static html page. Like, I'm going to "switch to Preact" which is insane, because I'm not rendering *anything* on the client side.
Just learned `ZZ` is the best way to save and close Vim. I was using `:x` before. `:wq` is for n00bs
Misali's sentence structure is awe-inspiring. I feel like the scripts for their videos are just poetry.
I'm tired I don't know if you can tell.
In my opinion the weirdest git behavior is that if you have uncommitted local changes and try to pull, you have to stash, pull, then pop.
So I like was bored a bit ago and impulse-read the first third of *Without Bloodshed*. But now I need to decide if I'm invested enough to
force myself to finish it.
It's fine, the problem is that I was reading it online on my phone. Not exactly the best experience.
If people start using `*/*` for “any pronouns” I’m taking credit for that. I came up with that. No one is doing that today.
I hate doing code review because 100% of the time the code is not written the way I would write it
I have social anxiety. That makes being around or talking to people incredibly uncomfortable and stressful for me. But. That doesn’t stop me
from becoming lonely if I spend too long without talking to anyone. I can’t win. I just suffer.
Dracula Daily Tumblr is wildin and we haven't even gotten to the action yet. Oh my word they're not going to be able to handle it. I'm not
going to be able to handle it.
There's a voice in my head that isn't mine.
I'm calling her Mel.
I'm think I'm going insane this time.
Just saw a post claiming that if we had just stayed home for 2 months, COVID would have been eradicated.
Everyone stayed home for a year and wore masks in public for close to two years and it didn't matter. Don't try to retcon that COVID restrictions were too lax or weren't followed.
'If Biden had only implemented a UBI then COVID would be eradicated.' People were going to meet up with friends anyways. I guarantee you COVID was spread through parties and hang-outs more than work, because many companies had and still have mask requirements for customer service workers. Yes it is a failure of the human condition that we cannot live in solitary confinement for 2 months.
At least this is different from the last liberal take I saw on COVID, which argued that wearing a mask is a moral necessity, indefinitely, in order to protect people with immunodeficiencies.
I operate in a heightened plain of existence that you can only dream of.
This comes off super elitist if you take it seriously. I recommend imagining me asleep, slurring my words, muttering about other plains of existence.
Reflexive build word dump brain freeze declogged and free and fly and me and life to the end of the full cup. Inside and outside, behind but
Not before. Meaningless and full despite. Free. Sky above. Me.
“I think what we’ll remember most about BeReal is that we were so desperate to find a decent place to connect online that we were willing
to play by even the silliest rules of engagement. For the moment, it’s been pretty nice. I can’t wait until we ruin it for everybody else.”
Hot dang 😭
A Stackoverflow developer survey respondent is more likely to say yes to "Do you use SVN" (5.18%) than "Are you a woman" (5.17%)
Only the hardest hitting analysis on Thoughts Learnerpages
I wish I could write a poem to do justice to Matthew 10:29.
“Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground outside your Father’s care.”
NIV
Absolutely quality HackerNews text posts today.
* A tor link to a black market site literally advertising a hit man for hire.
* ‘How do you cope with wasting all your potential?’ …I have an “IQ higher than 99.8% of people”…
* ‘How many calories am I burning sitting in my chair writing code?’
* “What’s the ultimate technology stack that top-tier hackers use?”
Absolute insanity. Who are these people?
Some quality runner ups as well but I can’t post everything.
The Lisp people are all, 'There's no point writing lisp unless you're writing it in emacs'
"Common Lisp should be used with an IDE made for interactive development, otherwise you lose a key feature."
Iconic. I'll stick with the REPL for the time being
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?
Gemini is a multi-level-marketing scheme.
When I say MLM here, I’m referring more broadly to a growth strategy sometimes called “incentivized sharing.” It covers MLM schemes, but also things as basic as ‘get $5 dollar credit to refer a friend.’ Twitch has used it successfully—streamers are incentivized to get viewers onto Twitch. This term/model doesn’t include normal word of mouth recommendations, like Rust evangelism, for example.
Gemini evangelists are rewarded with an expanded Geminispace, and more content that is readable from the comfort of browsers designed to render text documents.
I think this page isn't the imperfections but there's a broken link the spacemacs docs and I need to remember to fix it.
Uh, here's my reading of the about page.
I'm sure it's garbage and there's a reason I didn't publish it earlier, but I want to do something, you know.
Transcript
Just me reading the text from https://thoughts.learnerpages.com/about
Listening to *If I Left the Zoo*. Amazing, past me was a genius...
So Jars of Clay is one of my favorite bands. The problem is that they stopped making music around 2014. So unlike, AJR, where I aggressively collect old AJR without restraint, I restrained myself from binge listening to all Jars of Clay. I have a couple albums in my music, but there are a couple more Jars of Clay albums I've never listened to. One of them is *If I Left the Zoo*, which I just started listening to today. It's very good and it's making me very happy. "Unforgetful You" starts like a Green Day song, quality alt rock.
I wish JSX had a better way of optionally including components than the `{condition && <Component />}` pattern. I mean it's not awful...
I want NOTHING highlighted, VS Code. Unless I select it by dragging my mouse, there should not be any highlighting happening.
I click on a word and VS Code is like 'Oh! Let's make that word a different color! And we can highlight every other instance of that word! And let's highlight the enclosing brackets! And make the indent-guide for the current indentation level a different color! And draw a box around the current line!'
Me: "Please move the cursor and then stop!"
This is a reminder for me to update my phone and watch and computer to the latest OS's. 12-year-old Matthias would be unhappy.
I have made lots of bad decisions. But! I have made some good decisions. I don't remember them, actually, but um, they should be there.
6 hours into a project, getting burned by JS's type system. Who would've guessed
All I want is multiple dispatch.
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 manually went in and deleted the build folder, and that worked. What the hell. How do you create a build stack so bad and so convoluted.
Somehow I didn't notice it before but the font-rendering in Lapse on my retina screen is *wrong* somehow.
Man that was infuriating. It took me a couple of tries zoom in and out but I figured it out. Lapce is doing sub-pixel anti-aliasing, which is generally considered a no-no on retina screens. MacOS doesn't do it, WebKit (and therefore Blink and therefore all Electron apps) don't do it.
The weird thing about the GPL is that it can't guarantee you, as an end user, any rights. It guarantees that contributors that their
code contributions will not become part of closed source software. But if you're not taking contributions, then that doesn't matter.
(*I am not lawyer and this is not legal advice. My understanding of the GPL is imperfect, this is just what I've pieced together.*)
The more I think about it, the more I want to find a way to dump all of my old Tweets on to this website. Because while they were certainly
posted in a different context, most of them came out of the same mindset that led to this site (quick meaningless thoughts). And it would be nice to have them all in one place.
Being trapped inside of the GNU Info info-page would be torture. I'm reading it ironically and enjoying it but like. Ugghgh
I'm reading it out loud (a recording may be posted at some point), which is fun because the rhetoric is not bad. Like it's almost perfect English. Which is just another level on top of it doing a terrible job explaining things, and the fact that the things that it is trying to explain are so dumb.
"While you are typing the item name, you can use the DEL (or BACKSPACE) key to cancel one character at a time if you make a mistake."
(I had to restrain my self from laughing when I got to reading that line.)
I wonder if it was written in the 90s, or possibly even earlier? It's written with a sort of innocent attitude that you can describe software by describing the list of actions that you can take to interact with it. And it leaves it up to the reader to comprehend the implications of those actions, and at the same time, it doesn't attempt to build up a practical model of how to use the software.
The greatest advancement humanity has made since 1954 was realizing that Turing’s death was a tragedy.
Edit (10:32 pm):
=> https://thoughts.learnerpages.com/?show=97a82374-a097-4bf0-b70f-7eb98491382e Turing invented and then solved computer science.
I was laughing and crying and my heart rate was probably 100 and now I have a sharp pain in the middle of my chest when I take deep breaths.
Lastpass updated and a) the annoying girl is gone, 10/10, and b) there's an option to show my master password, 10/10
*Now why, Matthias, would you want to show your master password?*
Well, it's secure, which means it's very long and difficult to type in, so I frequently mess it up. Being able to visually check it (when I'm alone in my room) saves me time and prevents me from being locked out of my account for too many incorrect password attempts (yes this has happened to me multiple times).
Watching comments flood in live:
=> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35114009 (posted 7 minutes ago)
I'm not going to look up an explanation for lyrics of "Cyclops Rock." There's probably a metaphor or a reference but I don't want to know.
"I taught you how to cyclops rock, and then you turn around and break my heart. You waste my cyclops time and mess up my cyclops mind" -Cyclops Rock, They Might Be Giants.
I'm still alive.
I know we're all more concerned about whether or not Alex is still alive, and not necessarily whether or not I'm alive, but I thought I'd update you anyways, just in case.
Vivaldi lets you put the address bar in the sidebar, this is innovation. How did I ever leave this browser.
I understand that my problems are smaller than other people's problems, or even smaller than problems I've faced in the past.
But that doesn't mean it's easy for me to deal with them. And it doesn't mean I have energy to deal with other people's problems.
Matthias's first rule of Reddit: unless a given subreddit has rules that disallow posting political screenshots, it will eventually be
overtaken by screenshots of political tweets.
I do not understand why in 2022 you can get thousands of upvotes for posting a screenshot of a tweet insulting Trump on a tangentially related subreddit. It's just a force of nature. Redditors just can't help themselves.
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.
For some reason I've just assumed Lorde's "Tennis Court" is a reference to the Tennis Court Oath in the early French Revolution but I don't
know where I got that impression so it's possible I'm completely wrong.
The people who did Improv Everywhere apparently now have a show on Disney+. I’m unsurprised that they are stepping up their game.
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
Can't believe they delayed the Blaseball broadcast. I'm so excited. I want Blaseball to be back.
It is unethical to create buggy software. It is impossible to create perfect software. I just suffer.
I really do believe that configurations of words that sound good together are valuable, regardless of what they represent.
I can't do this, I'm so stressed.
I wonder if I have anxiety, or like, acute onset stress* or something.
(*This isn't a real thing, I just made it up, and I don't even know what "acute" means except in regards to angles.)
Had a dream Pamela joined OJSE.
Also, I just woke up. I guess this is what happens when I go to bed at 10pm.
If I could change one thing about JS I would make it throw key-errors when doing lookups on objects instead of returning undefined.
People complain about the fact that all values in JS are null-able, but that doesn't bother me that much. It's not a strictly typed language, I want to be able to assign any data to any variable at any time. But it's really weird and not-obvious to me that `({}).key` should return `undefined`, I think it should error. This is what Python does, and if you want to optionally get an item from a dict, you can either check for presence beforehand, catch the KeyError, or use `.get("key", "default value")`. I think the three of those are more than flexible enough, and more explicit and readable. In my experience, I hit a lot of errors as a result of assuming a key exists, and it would be easier to locate and fix these errors if it failed-fast, and errored at the source, instead of propagating into an error later.
I'm employing a sophisticated debugging technique known as 'running the code and seeing what happens.'
Tomorrow is going to be something but I’m not sure what. Maybe it will also be nothing, who knows.
It has been a couple of days. I have finished part 1 of G.E.B.
I have decided its genius lies in daring to venture closer to insanity than any other work of reason.
These fricking emails without unsubscribe buttons...
All emails from the The New Times and Upwork now go straight to trash. Should have given me an unsubscribe button.
Maybe this is just a me-thing since I learned on Django, but I really expected an integrated view-model-controller story from a web
framework. Maybe I'm just missing it. Astro.build, Fresh.deno.dev, Remix.run, Next.js all look cool for the frontend, but they don't try to do models or user-authentication or hardly anything on the backend. If I'm writing a CRUD application with Next.js, like how? And this is more generally just directed at Jamstack apps. If I'm deploying to the edge, where's my database.
I've just never done it before, I can't picture it, you know.
(Side note, I absolutely love Dark because it's serverless but it has a beautifully integrated, first party, ORM feature. You just create an object it persists pretty much automatically.)
I guess you just use a separate ORM library and web framework and it's fine. And you have a database with a different host then your edge-functions. And it shouldn't actually be any more code
Still doesn't answer the question of whether you're writing your own user-authentication. But you can find a third or fourth library for that.
People spend a lot of time talking about economic growth, but frequently leave out the context of population growth, which I think would be
relevant. This isn't a thesis yet, merely an observation.
I don't love the About page, in that it represents a time in my life that has passed. It no longer resinates with me in the way that it did
when I wrote it. But am very happy with it and proud of it because it is a long, and written in a consistent tone, and I think it captures the tone of this site overall.
I can't work through my problems until I've justified to myself that I'm allowed to have problems.
Right now I'm in an absolutely trashy cycle where I have a problem (even super minor things), and then I fault myself for having the problem. So I now have 2 problems, the problem, and the fact that I'm a bad person who created the problem.
And I feel like I can't fix the problem until I can find out how to stop the problem from occurring again.
Just unwrapped a copy of GEB, get hyped!
*Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid* is a fricking meme of a book. You have to be such an iconic type of nerd in order to read it. I once said that I wanted to talk to the type of people who have read it, and now I could become one of those people.
Unfortunately, it’s 700 pages of non-fiction so I’m not super optimistic about finishing it.
I opened to a random page and it was talking about my favorite artist, Rene Magritte!
People criticize Gemini based off of how well it fixes their problems with the web. And it's like impossible to describe to them that Gemini
was designed to fix Solderpunk's problems with Gopher.
If you want to fix your problems with the web, make your own protocol.
This HN user is like 'Gemini does nothing to fix the problems with embedding LaTeX on the web!' And I'm like. No. It doesn't. Did you expect it to? Sorry?
I don't love Google, and I give them a hard time, but I will happily use their products if I have to.
Youtube is great, Google Sheets, Drive, are all good. But I'm not going to use 8.8.8.8 because there are other DNS providers that are just as fast or faster, and I don't need Google knowing what sites I'm visiting. I use DuckDuckGo because their results aren't noticeably worse than Google's. I don't like Material design, as I've said previously, which turns me off from some things. I will use Google Fonts (although I have gripes) and Google Translate is amazing. I use Apple Maps by default, but use Waze when I'm in a hurry, etc.
Google is the big company, and I'm going to support smaller companies when I can. I like to know who is competing with Google, even if it would be easier to use the Google recommended service all the time. But if Google's product is better, I don't have a problem with using it.
The other day someone mentioned taking a Myer's Briggs personality test and so I asked them what type they got, and they said something that
started with "N..." And I just had to smile and nod but I wanted to be like 'um acktually, Myer's-Briggs types start with E for extroverted or I for introverted, that's not a valid type.'
“Learning how to program is hard but most people can do it. There are two requirements, really: emotional regulation and patience.”
Maybe I could handle the fact that we're in the universe where computers are slow, if computers worked. But they don't do that either.
Also somehow I never noticed that there’s an AJR song called “3 O’Clock Things” and one called “3AM”.
Finished *Without Bloodshed*.
He does a *lot* with the worldbuilding. I don't love Sci-fi, so I don't love it. I think he either should have toned it down a bit (e.g. cut a lot of the pure sci-fi: AIs, maglev's, etc. that don't effect plot), or else put it on a planet that's not Earth. Because half the worldbuilding is technological, but there's also a cultural element to the worldbuilding. And the culture of the people in the book really is not the same as Earth today. So it might have been helpful to separate that. Like, there was some big event, "Nationfall" that pushed their society to the way that it is. But Nationfall is never discussed, he's too busy discussing other elements of the worldbuilding. Yeah. There was an apocalyptic event that happened during the lifetime of some of the characters in the book and it's only ever alluded to. He's too busy talking about the history of the band or the symptoms of being a cat-person. Luckily for him, weird worldbuilding doesn't effect my enjoyment of the book.
I actually really like the pacing of the book. The characters are always under a little bit of tension, but still find to stop and chill. And that has a lot to do with writing style. The book takes place over a couple days, and most books with that timeframe are too fast-paced for me. But he does a good job of varying which character is under stress, for example. Or making short interludes time-wise, feel longer for the reader.
I'm neutral on the characters. Which is really the shame. He tried so hard, and I kind of see what he was going for. But like, 3/5 characters. All the characters except Morgan feel shallow. And he does a good job of developing Morgan over the course of the book, but it almost happens too quick for me to appreciate. I feel like we needed an extra bit at the start to introduce Morgan to me before Morgan starts to question everything.
Plot is fine. No complaints really. He tees a sequel pretty aggressively, which I don't love because I don't think I'll read a sequel. But he ties up enough for me to feel satisfied.
Oh, he does this interesting thing with a bunch of "string-pull" characters. They don't add anything. Doing string-pull characters is really hard because kind of by definition they aren't interacting directly with anything. And because of that it's hard for me to care about them, even when they're interacting with the story indirectly, or else interacting with each other. Like you could have cut all of the parts from the perspective of the devas and just told it from Morgan's perspective and I think it would have been fine. But that's the part that I think is just setting up the next books.
I think some of these points, where like I don't appreciate the characters or the world in the way that the author does, is a result of this being the second book written. But the website requests that I start here and not with *Starbreaker* so that's where I am.
Overall, 4/5. Weakest bit is the characters. Which again is a shame because I love the characters, but the book just doesn't use them very well. (Matthias's book rating scale reflects *only* my enjoyment of the book, not my evaluation of the book's quality.)
I almost want to write a second About page. I like the length of the current one and don't want to keep updating it, but I also feel like
there are a number of important cultural elements that I didn't know or forgot to include.
This is impossibly such a garden. This is distributed as an informational message by The Library of Nomad. This is a sparrow, falling.
Oh my word if I get emacs working I can forward the emacs client socket over ssh and use it on remote servers for free. That's pretty sexy
Hyper (https://hypercore-protocol.org/) is a p2p protocol that's almost web-like. It's really cool, a lot easier to use/setup than most.
(Golem, BitTorrent, Ceramic, etc are all confusing as hell.) Hyper is super simple, there's a browser called Beaker that lets you open `hyper://` webpages and seed your own content just by giving it a directory.
*There's no fricking content*. I'm in the Discord server with these people and they're posting all these Github links to mirrors and browser and tools and I'm like okay, is there any content currently being served on this protocol? If there is, I cannot find it. My own Hyperdrive is: hyper://dd33a1d922616afa2c94b220fa20c097d15b7be1e2f0db5a71f0f1639999cd3e. No one else has linked to theirs.
(Gemini doesn't have a lot of content. There are maybe a few hundred operational Gemini pages. But there are half a dozen pages that list active Gemini capsules or recommend pages. http://geminiquickst.art doesn't even recommend gemlogs, it recommends sites that curate lists of gemlogs.)
I FOUND ONE! I found a single blog hosted on hyper, here you go: hyper://94f0cab7f60fcc2a711df11c85db5e0594d11e8a3efd04a06f46a3c34d03c418
Wait I found a second. Only this page is being seeded right now: hyper://6900790c2dba488ca132a0ca6d7259180e993b285ede6b29b464b62453cd5c39/blog/the-free-speech-dog-whistle.md
This Thought is now the premier curator of Hyper content.
A small part of it is of course that since it's p2p what people are seeding is limited. But a lot of it is that I can't find addresses. There's got to be a list somewhere, right? Or a way of discovering things?
These fools in 2018 be all, "when Hytale releases" like it's right around the corner. Isn't going to happen for another 2 years at least.
Oh you know I did test it. But it uses UTC times so I think it’s extremely difficult to change. Call it intended, it’s December in London.
Art is a myth.
My problems:
I don't have enough time.
I'm not an artist.
My nails are too long.
I'm not a good enough writer.
I haven't read the material.
I don't have enough time.
My parters don't share my vision.
JS actually just has really advanced first-class support for optionals. Every variable is an optional and unwrapping is implicit
Bucket list item: walk into a Barnes and Noble, pick up a book, read it all the way through without paying for it.
Inspired by https://xkcd.com/294/ obviously, but it wouldn't be that hard to do intentionally. It only takes me like 2 hours to read 100 pages. Take a Saturday, save yourself the cost of the book.
The amount of information my brain is processing has increased faster than my brain’s throughput has.
It’s interesting, because I think it’s pretty clear that my current mindset is unsustainable. But I am less willing to reinvent myself,
really, than I was 4.3 years ago when I invited Matthias 2.0. Matthias 1.0 had ambition, and that ambition allowed him to change into Matthias 2.0 in an attempt to better satisfy those ambitions. But somehow the ambition didn’t get carried over, or something. (I’m not currently Matthias 2.0, btw. Matthias 2.0 worked well for a little while, although in retrospect there was foreshadowing of future problems. But somehow it broke down, around 1.7–2.6 years ago, and now we’re here. Also, some numbering schemes start at different places, this Thought defines Matthias 1.0 as starting 11 years ago.)
I love the conversations I have created in Fireside Chats. Weather corrects Alex on JS operator precedence, 10/10.
(Edit: name)
Stackoverflow is so fricking brutal. You can misunderstand something, get flagged out of existence, ask a genuine question on StackOverflow
Meta about how to improve your behavior, and get downvoted to -5 with no reply.
The cookie banner on nature.com is literally larger than the anti-nicotine warning on a vape store. How did we get here?
A lot of people view escapist fiction as inherently not commenting on our world. They think that since it's describing another world it
cannot be talking about our world.
But to me, a story about a world without children says so much more to me about the role of children in our lives than a story which is about children. And a story about children says so much more about adults than a story about adults.
About a week or two ago I started running all my web traffic through an SSH proxy tunnel. It's surprising nice to know just that my IP can't
be used to track my location. It hasn't noticeably affected my internet speed either, but I have fast internet.
I finally got around to conducting a survey all macOS Desktop mail apps (15+), and decided on [Spark](https://sparkmailapp.com).
I love grains of sand and motes of dust and single hairs and things that are big enough to see but too small to think about.
If *GEB* passes the Bechdel test, I quit. If *GEB* does not pass the Bechdel test, I will never quit.
My head hurts.
I wish I could say that is abnormal.
I suspect the culprit is having my eyes focused on the screen a few feet in front of me. BobbiBroccoli and Nintendo recommend taking breaks to focus your eyes on objects far away. One of my favorite parts of [redacted] was looking for other people on the horizon, sometimes hundreds of yards away. I might go outside in order to look far away for a minute.
The questions of temperature and location are so closely linked that it is impossible to ask one without the other.
Thinking about the Dream/Technoblade fight again following my binge of Mr. Beast's videos.
Knowing more about Mr. Beast allowed me to say with more confidence what I originally chalked up to poor editing. Mr. Beast is incredibly hungry for attention. He gives money to people because the reaction of the people, the attention he gets from it, is worth more to him that the money is. The lie Mr. Beast tells you is that his videos are about the contestants, the participants. The videos are about Mr. Beast.
This isn't a problem, when the contestants are random people, that's perfectly fair. That's true for any gameshow—you're there for the host and the questions, who the contestants are doesn't matter. But when that one guy that was amazingly good shows up on Jeopardy and breaks the game, Jeopardy doesn't shut him down. Alex (the host, I think. I'm not looking things up), is good enough to roll with that. When Technoblade starts makes jokes in Mr. Beast's video, that gets edited out. And that's bad editing sure, but that's also Mr. Beast's fault (even if Mr. Beast isn't editing the video).
Thinking about whether I can go live with the Amish. Like, do they want me? Or would they kick me out?
Does anyone want me?
I can't believe people don't love jazz. Jazz is the fricking best genre. Your average jazz is just amazing.
Pop and alt-rock and rap have their outliers, sure, and those outliers are better than jazz. But I'd take an average jazz song over an average pop song any day of the week and twice on Sundays, because Sundays are great for jazz.
Anyone want to place bets on how long it takes SharkFin to be banned from KACC? I give it a month.
The original sprint of development for this project was done in Arch Linux.
I am now back in macOS because I can't handle not having every keyboard shortcut perfectly configured.
The reason why people don't like answering my questions* is because most of the time when I'm confused it's because something that someone
has told me is wrong and I'm normally asking the person that I think told me the incorrect thing.
*I don't think I have any evidence that people don't like answering my questions I just have anxiety.
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.
I love Ben Burrill. 10/10. Easily my favorite KA programmer of all time.
```js
var ast = win.esprima.parse(code);
win.walkAST(ast, null, [win.ASTTransforms.rewriteContextVariables("module_context", context)]);
return win.escodegen.generate(ast);
```
What does this mean? What does it do? Only Ben Burrill knows.
I shouldn't have technical debt on this website; it's like 500 lines of Python. And yet, when I rewrite the 10 lines that control
authentication, suddenly I can't render UTF-8 characters. \*sigh*
Atom is being so laggy as to be unusable. I'm looking at close to a second of input delay after my keystrokes.
I'm seriously about to switch back to fricking Xi because all I want is syntax highlighting and the ability to type and have my letters show up.
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.
If my watch is connected to WiFi it can download and play songs from Apple Music. Which makes sense but for some reason I assumed you had to
pre-load songs on it.
Last short circuit the Moist Talkers beat us 18 times in a row *but* we won 2 consecutive games this short circuit, breaking the streak.
"Nobody beats the Jazzhands 20 times in a row"!
I am once again trying to turn off IntelliJ's rainbow tag highlighting.
For future reference, the setting is called "HTML/XML tree tag highlighting"
s/IntelliJ/RubyMine/, same idea
*Ben Shapiro voice*
'Curious how your blog post about how Gemini is good, is shared over HTTPs.'
It's like these people have never read https://gemini.circumlunar.space. Which opens with 'Gemini will not replace the web.'
It is 80° (not like right now obviously, but during the day). It is too hot to be outside unicycling.
I still can't get over the quarter that Apple made up over 100% of the mobile phone industry's revenue, because Samsung recalled all the
Note 7s and posted a huge loss for the quarter. So Apple made more money than every phone company (including Apple), combined.
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.
I am on so many drugs, and so to reflect that, I'm updating the color scheme again, to back to the prototype color scheme.
Some follow-up, I found "The Last Person in America Not Online"
I posted May 15th (https://thoughts.learnerpages.com/?show=cf045c64-f54f-423f-b682-52b99c7294d2), “You May Be Looking At The Last Person In America Not Online.” And then on May 30th (https://thoughts.learnerpages.com/?show=4ade4aea-3914-4605-bb6d-40dbfba63b77) I commented that I didn't remember where that had come from. Well, I searched for it again, and this time Google gave me this reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/nd1cbl/just_a_bit_of_dust/, (an image of an AOL disk with a reflective surface under the words.)
Just a bit of closure.
I love ads for gaming products. They're so universally bad. No company understands the motives of teenagers playing video games.
I'm only at 2,066 total posts here. (A total of 59,508 words.) Still haven't overtaken my 5,000+ Tweets.
I leave words out so fricking often oh my word. Like half of all my edits on here are because I just forgot to type a word.
Help, we are on page 4 of Rex describing the characters in the theater watching *The Rocky Horror Picture Show.*
If someone later in the book pulls out LSD, I think the score goes negative, wraps around, and becomes a 5-star book, for the meme.
I used to listen exclusively to bands with absolutely raw lyrics.
“You’ve got a face not spoiled by beauty” -Song for Someone, U2
I have like these depressive Moments. It’s really hard to remember that they’re temporary, not normal, and I just need to ignore them as
much as possible.
Downvoted to -4 the other day for commenting on Reddit that telling kids about the existing of heaven and hell didn’t constitute child abuse.
If Conway didn’t want to be remembered for his game of life, he shouldn’t have made it so cool.
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 think I need to spend more time on Reddit. I think that would be great for my mental health. Yes.
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.
All I want is for the Lock Picking Lawyer to actually pick the locks. I don't care that you found a lock at walmart that you can open by
shoving a bent bit of plastic into its keyhole. If he doesn't say "little click out of one," it's not worth my time to watch the video.
One of the interesting things about learning toki pona, since I don't know it yet, is that since it's vague, it's easy for me to justify
a translation making sense.
The problem with the eat-the-rich ideology is that it supposes you can find the people that are successful under the system and that they
are responsible for the system screwing over other people.
Like there's actually a huge middle-class in America of people who are surviving and are successful in the current economic system. And those people are not the rich and are not responsible for the way that the system is. But the presupposition of the ideology, of Marxism, is that there are only two groups of people: people who profit off of the system (and are responsible for the continued existence of the system, and can be held responsible for the system's actions towards others), and people who are oppressed by the system.
Honestly that last Thought is so true. I'm working on a KA game and I keep being lonely and thinking, "I just need to finish this game."
Part of that is because social interaction and making things are both things that take energy, so I have to choose where to spend my energy. Right now I want to finish this game more than I want to talk to people.
Part of it is that making something and then showing it off is a way to get easy positive attention. People praising something I've made is possibly my favorite type of social interaction.
Part of it is that making something that I'm proud of gives me a long-term joy and pride, whereas hanging out with friends does not. Maybe that felicific calculus is wrong. But sometimes I think that if I just create something cool enough, then the pride of having made that will serve as a substitute for loneliness.
There are some bands that understand that music is not meant to be constrained by genre. Yes, give me a 30 second orchestral intro
before your hip hop.
Javascript has a lot of annoying corner cases, but it makes up for it by being the most powerful programming language currently.
It’s easy to look at popular culture and miss that they’re portraying a hyper-sterilized version of even the groups they are portraying.
There’s a scene in Agents of Shield (which I haven’t watched all of, only bits and pieces, but this scene stuck with me), where some character declares ‘I am a god’ and is met with the reply ‘there’s only one God, and He doesn’t look like that.’ Which is an extremely sharp contrast to the very similar famous scene in Avengers; “I am a god” / Hulk throws Loki against the ground / “puny god.”
And what’s very interesting to me is that my reply to Loki even in the Avengers movie is “these people are blaspheming.” And even within the Marvel universe there are people who agree with me.
My point is that Christians are no by any means an un-represented group in media. Yet, in the Marvel cinematic films, they go out of their way to avoid giving any of the characters religious stances and all. Blockbusters like that are designed to appeal to literally as many people as possible, and to avoid making anyone uncomfortable.
It’s like, in the same way that characters in movies don’t leave to go to the bathroom, they don’t go to church or do their prayers, and at some point you’ve gone beyond just “cutting out controversial topics” and you’re really portraying a character that doesn’t represent anyone.
I’m not even saying this is a bad thing, but it is definitely something something to keep in mind.
I'm enamored with the idea of a team that uses git but syncs up by sending patchsets over Slack.
GEB is just like, ‘let’s imagine a computer with words of 36 bits.’ I’m so confused. Why not 32?
“When a computer program is running, it can be viewed on a number of levels. On each level, the description is given in the language of computer science, which makes all the descriptions similar in some ways to each other...” 287
I'm very interested to see GitHub Copilot on the top of HackerNews, and surprised at the glowing comments.
There's a quote that goes, “Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.” Even supposing that GitHub could auto-generate a perfect solution to the problem for me, it's more difficult (even if it's not more time consuming) for my mind to parse, read, and verify that code works, than for me to come up with the solution myself.
I guess, people are comparing this to an improved, complicated, tab-completion. I use tab completion very rarely. In the last year, I've written more code in Vim (with minimal plugins) than IntelliJ. So a lot of the arguments come back to that, whether any sort of assistance is a good thing. My stance is that if your language or library has so much boilerplate that autocomplete is useful, then your language/library is bad.
I don't know, I'm tempted to download VS code and give it a shot, because I do want to write code quicker. I guess what I'm saying is that my bottleneck is not the speed of my keystrokes, so I don't know if this will speed anything up. On the other hand, GitHub claims that working with this assistant is a good way of learning an unfamiliar language.
I would bet money that Astronomical Theater (my Gemini reverse-proxy/server) has a directory traversal bug.
Pro tip for Men: Women have claimed purple and pink, but there are some nice shades of magenta you can use and still be manly.
After examining many static site generators, I've landed on NanoJSX for my rewrite of MatthiasPortzel.com
Of course, NanoJSX isn't a static site generator, it just renders JSX to a string and I'm having to build all the loops to iterate over files and directories myself. :|
But it should give us very close to feature parity with cleaner code and 1/10 the page size.
I wonder if positional function arguments is just an anti-pattern.
Oh my word oh my word: a functional language without positional function arguments. Because really that's what rubs me the wrong way in Lisps and Haskell, more than anything. And it lets you do magical things with currying; it makes currying even more powerful.
I get imposter syndrome sometimes, when it comes to life. Like everyone else is a real person obviously, but am I?
Spent longer than I should have trying to convince ChatGPT to spit out AMC 12 questions that I think it has seen before, but without success
Me explaining why I haven’t been brushing my teeth: Well, I never *decide* to go to bed. I just stay up until I’m so tired that my mind
shuts off and there’s nothing to do except fall onto the bed. I can’t exactly decide to brush my teeth at that point.
So I'm going down the emacs rabbit hole and it is so funny to me how many of the emacs people just use Vim keybindings. Like based.
> It is a story as old as time. A stubborn, shell-dwelling, and melodramatic vimmer—envious of the features of modern text editors—spirals into despair before he succumbs to the dark side.
- Doom Emacs Readme
(The text "dark side" is a link to the "evil" package for Emacs, which provides Vim keybindings.)
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.
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.)
I think Luke is the only person I know who uses a hecking RSS reader. Like, I used an RSS reader back in 2016 before they removed
the RSS reader from Safari. https://twitter.com/Matthias_4910/status/872951284583682048. Who knows, maybe if they ever get around to adding an RSS reader into Vivaldi I'll use that. They keep saying they're going to do it.
My sitting in bed with my laptop, Vim open: You need to get to know your code, get intimate with it.
People are all "just use Rust for your GUI apps, we don't need Electron." Can you get text rendering working perfectly in a Rust app?
My perception of songs is hugely influenced by their album artwork.
I greatly wish I could listen to all of Lorde’s music for the first time again, unbiased by the album artwork.
(Business card with frustratingly little information) is such a great trope. Iconic.
Might take my phone number off of my business cards so it's just "Matthias Portzel • MatthiasPortzel.com"
“There is no longer Jew or Gentile, man or woman, slave or free. You are one in Christ.”
-Galatians 3:28, paraphrased
The part of my brain that is a compulsive completion-ist really wants me to finish *Good Omens*, right now!
HN comment saying the government should take over the miltary industrial complex because it’s uneconomical to mass produce weapons in peace.
I picked up a computer from like 2006, but it's 64 bit, so I can just put modern Arch on it. Which I think is kind of beautiful, and it
makes me a bit sad that things are moving towards Arm. We're in the x86-64 golden age of computers.
I have authored Guidelines of Productivity which go into effect at 8am tomorrow.
In a week, I'll either be very happy, or very depressed, depending on their effectiveness.
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.
Watching the Safety Third with Tom Scott. It’s reminding me how much I like William Osman as a person. (By which I just mean that I don't
like his videos anymore.)
I cannot work with a modern web stack I cannot do it. I change my code, it works until I create a production build.
YOU CANNOT DEBUG MINIFIED PRODUCTION NPM PACKAGE CODE THERE'S NOTHING THERE.
I deleted ALL OF MY CODE. And rebuild and refresh, and it STARTS WORKING. WHERE IS IT GETTING THE CODE FROM?
If, on the other hand, none of my posts make sense, then that is likely because you are in the wrong timeline, in which case I can only say,
good luck.
'Woah the Matlab `plot` syntax is *exactly* like Matplotlib!'
Where do you think the "mat" in "matplotlib" comes from, exactly??
"The young lady in the back with the 'I heart Jamie Grace' shirt on"
-Lights Shine Bright, TobyMac
You don't understand how high quality William Osman used to be. He used to be a maker channel. He used to make things. It's okay though I
now have Make it and Fake it and Ian Charnas so I'm surviving.
=> https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3L9AcM6TxfLjpr6YzVVp8Q Make it and Fake it
=> https://www.youtube.com/user/iancharnas Ian Charnas
Everything exists to do one thing
And nothing does its thing well
The bluetooth won't connect
the left earbud is dead
the microwave beep
can wake the dead
The car won't start
The house will burn
We will all stumble
*Who, in the vast domain of humanity,*
*Has the power the will the reason to*
*Fight the broken dark scary imperfections*
There exists more than we can imagine today
But it will exist at the end of time
The world is full of problems but
The world is full of people
I'm pretty sure Ender IO is incorrectly calculating bonus items from a SAG Mill with a grind ball.
Tumblr is still so fricking funny to me. "You seriously can’t call yourself a leftist or a progressive or whatever if you can’t treat other
people like actual human beings."
About giving up your seat on the bus to disabled people.
Like in what universe is this even English. 'leftism is when you give your seat on the bus to other people.' Yeah, sure. Normal.
When I was a kid, we called that "being a good person" and "loving your neighbor" but if we need to resort to political party lines to convince people to be nice to other we can do that I guess.
If anyone reading this could invite me to https://lobste.rs, that would be great, please HMU.
This website should be testament to my sanity /s
Rigby is down again :(
I made a post just the other day, entitled “imagine escaping from the confines of this space”
If I remember correctly. I don’t have it backed up, keeps things interesting.
Rigby might not actually be down, it might be my internet. Got a 502 for a minute.
Artists have it so easy. They put work into art and their feedback is all, ‘that’s amazing’ and ‘good job.’ I put work into a program, to
get feedback like “There are so many ways we could make this more fun” and ‘doesn’t even support mobile’ and *silence*.
I guess that’s the curse of making things that are actually useful as opposed to just wall decoration.
Okay I just had to push again to fix timestamps because I didn't fix all my problems the first time.
I keep committing this code without testing it. So if you see any problems let me know (either on Twitter or a Discord DM).
It just seems like everyone expects me to be boring. It feels like every day I restrain myself from doing the things that I’m passionate
about.
People talk about how little functional programming is used in the "real-world," but I don't think they realize just how functional React is
Like there's the first-level, obvious things, like React being declarative instead of imperative, and emphasizing pure components, but Facebook recommends avoiding any class inheritance, and straight up defines functions that return components. Wait a minute, functions that return other functions are a hallmark of functional programming. What the heck.
I kind of hate how you have to get rid of stuff to have more space. The mechanic just feels boring.
Listening to breakcore ironically but like also with the distinct knowledge that I could see myself listening to this unironically.
Just learned about the Oroville Dam spillway collapse
I recommend looking up it up on youtube, it’s pretty cool.
Before, during, and after pictures of the spillway, that I screenshot from 3 different Youtube videos and hastily combined.
I've been watching a lot of magic recently, just like clips on Youtube. It's really frustrating how non-existent explanations of tricks are.
Don't be thinking 'oh yeah that's the point of magic.' I know that obviously. But as someone who wants to know everything, I still want to know how the trick is done. I don't want to spoil it for other people, and I don't mind admitting that was fooled originally. But I would like to know how it's done.
It's like a joke. When I hear a joke, I find it funny, I laugh, and then I remember the setup and the punch line. So I could tell that joke later, or if someone else later tries to tell me the joke. Most people when they hear a joke do not try to memorize it. In the same way, I would like to see the magic trick, be surprised and amazed, and then memorize how it it's done.
And most magicians aren't supremacists, hiding their secrets, but they're performers. There's no reason for them to reveal the trick. And the people who develop magic tricks are trying to sell them. They don't want to tell you how they're done (unless you pay money).
Playing around with Volta. It's a node version manager written in Rust. It's so fricking fast compared to nvm. It's insane.
I don't want to "hur dur bash is slow Rust fast" but like. The tool designed to be fast is faster than the tool designed to be a shell script. wow!
Meanwhile the nvm users are like, 'I can speed up shell loading time I only invoke nvm if I use zsh's pre-hook command to test if the command that I'm about to run is `node` and then initialize `nvm`.' Like I ran `volta setup` and then had to check if it worked because I didn't believe it. Volta setup runs once and takes 26ms. nvm runs every time you open your shell and takes 600ms.
And that's not Rust vs. Bash, that's a fundamental architecture difference, of which the language choice is just a symptom.
I finsihed the first two Five Kingdoms books. I realized I had 4/5 of them so I decided to re-read the series. I was orignally going ot skip
the third since I don't rememeber particularly likin it but I think the Hunter reveal happens in it and I'm kind of lookin gforward to that. The Hunter was mentioned a couple of times in the second biook, whihc I cdon't know if I picked up on my first time through. SDo now I have to decide if I'm finding a copy of the third book or skipping it or just giving up on re-reasing the series since tommorrow is christmax. Also I'm still sick so you don't get any spellchecking sorry.
The Magician poem
I once saw a man do a magic trick
Misdirection, he didn't say
He did nothing with one hand that looked flashy
While with his other, he suffered
So too, these words.
I wish someone had told me that `import foo from "hello";` is just syntax sugar for `import {default as foo} from "hello";`.
Just finished *Good Omens*. I gave it 3/5 stars. I took off a star for style, half a star for the ending, and half a star for blasphemy.
I've read only a short story by Pratchett, and *The Graveyard Book* by Gaiman.
My three critiques blend together. The style of the book is very erratic, it reads like a bunch of short stories concatenated. Like the whole book is introducing the characters, and building up to something, but it feels like nothing actually advances the plot. The characters have very little agency. The human characters are written as powerless and ignorant, and the supernatural characters are written as mysterious and vague. There's a lot of passive voice. The humor is fine, but far from the funniest thing I've read. If it's supposed to be a comedy, then that would explain why I didn't enjoy it.
It's definitely not boring. I understand why someone would like it a lot, or why it would receive critical acclaim. It does a lot of interesting things, ambitious things, and it pulls them off, for the most part. It just doesn't do the things that I would want it to do. The 4 horsemen are very well written; they're aloof, interesting, and terrifying. But they're not relatable, and I would prefer a book with relatable villains. The book is, in large part, written from the perspective of 2 side-characters. This is something most books don't do, because it's not easy. The problem here, is that the main (side) characters are well-developed and relatable, but they don't do anything. I don't care.
Without going into spoilers, the ending is anti-climactic. There's no final battle, everyone just kind of stands in a circle and half of them talk.
When *Good Omens* constantly refers to Christian terms ('angel', 'demon', etc), as well as the Bible, I end up with certain expectations. And the authors were constantly subverting those expectations. It just left me off guard for a majority of the book. They don't just re-define a few terms, they operate in a completely different system ('what if good wasn't actually good?!'), and it took me most of the book to realize that. It's not a whole-star issue, but it combines with the plot issue and the fact that the authors avoided saying anything outright.
It's a good book. And in some ways, the 3 stars doesn't reflect that. The 3 stars reflects my enjoyment of it. I wouldn't re-read it.
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.
My word, CSS variables are beautiful.
I might have to fricking implement a theme selector on this site because it's so easy to re-style literally everything.
One of the most important realizations that I've had is that mindless content consumption, reading Reddit, watching TV, requires mental
energy *afterwards* to process it. Even if I'm too tired to do anything except read Reddit, doing so keeps me tired after I've put my phone down and stopped.
Love auto-generated documentation
=> https://ruby-doc.org/stdlib-3.1.2/libdoc/cgi/rdoc/CGI/Util.html
Edit (:49): actual docs are here:
=> https://docs.ruby-lang.org/en/3.1/CGI.html
I don't even know
I have to solve the path problem.
The path problem is named for a specific instance of the problem that arises when manipulating paths in a webserver. The webserver has to take a URL-path (e.g. `/static/images/example.png`) and know that static files are served from, for example, `/var/www/example.com/`. And so it has to return the file at `/var/www/example.com/images/example.png`. Now the problem is not that this is hard. There are std library functions in most every language to do these kinds of path operations.
The problem is that "a path" has several different meanings. It could refer to the entire raw URL-path from the client, or the URL path after it's been sanitized to remove any directory traversal attempts (e.g. `/static/../../../../etc/passwd` needs to be rejected at some point), or the relative path to the image (e.g. `/images/example.png`) or to the entire file system path. Not to mention that all of these have variants with or without trailing or leading slashes. These are all very different semantically.
But despite their semantic differences, they're represented by the computer in exactly the same way. They're all strings, or maybe in a language with a generous type system, they're all `Path`s. And you want to have utility functions that can work on all of them, right? There is similarity there.
But this means that if you're writing a static web server you have to keep in mind the intended semantics of every path-style value at all points in your code, because otherwise you could end up passing something that starts with a `/` to a function that expects a relative path and end up with a path traversal vulnerability.
That's not to say "coding is too hard," this isn't one of these posts. This path example isn't even a hard problem, it's quite possible for one person to solve. The larger problem is that there are always, in coding, these larger, undocumented, semantic, understandings about the behavior of functions. Even functions that, at first glance, look to be composable in every possible way; even functions that your type-checker says are compatible. (If one function expects a serialized file system path starting with a slash and you ever pass it something directly from the URL, that's a terrible error.)
I'm not sure what the solution is. Possibly a more powerful (Thu-like) type system. Possible a different style of coding from the functional or object-oriented paradigms. Possibly better documentation or comments.
You have these ideas based on facts that enter the public consciousness but then the facts change and changing the idea in the public
consciousness is a fight.
It’s a fight that has to be fought, though because truth is important.
So yeah, after the Ethereum merge in September, NFTs are no longer bad for the environment.
I'm going to have to re-do how I do seasons and pagination, it's kind of stressful right now. The volume.
Yeah okay, Sublime is pretty beautiful.
It doesn't have a delete-line command, but it comes with a delete-line macro in `Packages/Default/Delete Line.sublime-macro`. Obviously.
I posted a comment this morning to Cohost saying I was a fan of brew. So of course the Zig homebrew formula is broken.
Re the previous post I’ve coined the term tomato party, but to explain what I mean will take another 800 words and I’m tired.
I don't support separating the art from the artist in general. But I think that should be a lens to view the art with. And it seems like
sometimes, especially recently, it's become common to use the fact that someone has made art (or is otherwise a public figure or celebrity) as an excuse to analyze them as a person.
Clive really argues that two people who f and then get married because they don't want to desecrate that sacred bond, even if they don't
really like each other, have a more solid relationship than two people who get married because they've fallen in love.
Remind me to edit with source/quote once I'm back near my copy of *The Screwtape Letters*
Edit (Jun 16, 9:05 a.m.):
For background *The Screwtape Letters* are an imagined collection of letters from one demon to another, so when it says "thanks to us" Lewis means "thanks to the work of the devil" and when it says "the Enemy" it means "the Christian God"
> The Enemy described a married couple as "one flesh." He did not say "a happily married couple" or "a couple who married because they were in love," but you can make the humans ignore that.
…
> The truth is that whenever a man lies with a woman, there, whether they like it or not, a transcendental relationship is set up between them which must be eternally enjoyed or eternally endured.
…
> Humans can be made to infer the false belief that the blend of affection, fear, and desire which they call "being in love" is the only thing that makes marriage either happy or holy. This error is easy to produce because "being in love" does very often, in western Europe, precede marriages which are made in obedience to the Enemy's designs.
…
> humans...can be deterred from seeking marriage as a solution because they do not find themselves "in love" and thanks to us the idea of marrying for any other purpose seems low and cynical. Yes, they think that. They regard the intention of loyalty to a partnership for mutual help, for the preservation of chastity, and for the transmission of life, as something lower than a storm of emotion.
-p 82-84
I think what's going on here is that Lewis is using a definition of "being in love" which today would be closer to "love at first sight." I don't think Lewis is saying that you shouldn't love your wife/husband. (Notice how he always quotes "being in love," I think to make it clear this isn't real love.)
Rather, I think he's defining "being in love" as the inherently childish, transitory, "storm of emotion" which exists only at the beginning of a relationship. And he further argues that basing a relationship on *that* feeling is a recipe for disaster. At another point, he describes how a new couple might be spontaneously moved to do things for one another which would be unreasonable and unsustainable for the entirety of a marriage.
But I just can't stop laughing at 'there's nothing wrong with getting married for the "preservation of chastity."'
Apache has like thousands of lines of C dedicated to parsing and sorting and creating quality values based on heuristics.
I suspect other web servers just don't support content negotiation at all and ignore the header.
I love it when programmers claim to have solved a hard problem but then it's just a wrapper function around a function that does something
completely different.
"implement secure random generator...what we do here is simple, we wrap [the standard library random number generator.]"
What if you pretended to fall and when I helped you up you slipped a note into my hand that said "I love you." Haha jk. Unless...
My problem with fan fiction is that it doesn’t exist for the media I want. I can search AO3 for anything and all I get is Harry Potter
I'm not a lawyer, but I think the "notice of modification" clause (5.a) of the GPLv3 can be met by distributing the repository with
a git repository showing history. On the other hand, the corresponding clause of the GPLv2 (2.a) and Apache 2 (4.b), requires you to "cause the/any modified files to carry prominent notices," which I interpret as meaning that you have to include that notice in a comment at the top of every file itself.
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!
Communist subreddit:
Rule 2: "This is a space for all leftists."
Rule 3: 'Rule 2 does not apply to liberals.'
I'm so tempted to make call out posts for people on here with their full names. Because like, what are they going to do.
But Google has found this page before, and I'm a coward.
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
"I am brown and ugly"
I am ***** and I am the author 5 books and a professional journalist and the best I can do to describe my main character is "brown and ugly." But "I have many, many people who are my friends in real life who are darker-skinned than I am."
He has apologized profusely and I believe him that he was 16 and didn't know what he was doing but it doesn't make it less funny.
I'm a little worried Disney doesn't understand how fricking cool Wanda Vision could/should be.
There's demand for those characters. But the show doesn't look good.
Not things that are possible to use correctly, but things that are impossible to use incorrectly.
Safety.
AJR has been popping off recently. Used in an Apple ad, #1 iTunes Charts, in the Macy’s Thanksgiving parade. Just need them to drop music.
So I theorized about this block-based language. And ES has "program fragments" that are basically just my blocks.
=> https://thoughts.learnerpages.com/?show=55b51146-2a55-471b-8957-6ac3dc929427
```
{ echo "hello"; echo "world"; } # prints "hello\nworld"
x = { echo hello, world }
$x # prints "hello, world"
myfunc $x # Calls myfunc with the block x as a parameter
```
Since ES is a shell, it can get away with doing what I didn't want to do, which is conditionally expand and evaluate the block based on position, since you have to use `$` to reference variables in ES anyways.
(ES is based on rc, it's possible rc does the same thing, I don't know.)
You cannot embedded simplicity inside a complex system.
You cannot embedded a simple system inside a complex system. Your system is only as simple as the most complex part.
Yeah I think I can get this done in about 2 hours
*Two hours later*
Okay I got the JS build toolchain configured.
Thank good there are software updates available for my computer so I have to reboot and can’t do work. Sounds great.
Just bought business cards. I couldn't sleep so I got up to get water. Supposed to get here in October.
The thing I don't like about writing tests for code is that it's really hard to write good tests and too easy to give yourself a false
sense of confidence.
If there's an edge case you're forgetting about, you can write 10 tests covering basic cases
```
assert(sum(1) === 1)
assert(sum(1, 2) === 3)
assert(sum(1, 2, 3) === 6)
```
And that tells you nothing about the behavior if the last element is `NaN`.
And if you think, "oh I wonder if this works with `NaN`" you can try it or look at your code without importing a testing framework. The hard part about avoiding bugs is predicting the edge cases, not testing if it works in the edge cases.
I don't know, I don't get it.
I really want to try a programming style where you just add hundreds of `assert`s throughout your code.