Thoughts

and women must keep their left hand covered in public. Like normal modesty rules weren’t strict enough so he invented additional ones. What could he have possibly included in his children’s book to get it banned. The book I’m talking about is *The Way of Kings* which I’m currently reading. Which is different from the book that was removed the shelf of a school library in Tennessee. I want to reread *Firefight* to figure out why but I gave it 3 stars so I also don’t want to.

I'm working on an Actix (Rust web framework) code base for a client. Auto-reloading requires a 3rd party tool and serving static files requires a second crate and is listed under "Advanced". Like. What can you do? => https://actix.rs/docs/static-files => https://actix.rs/docs/autoreload

The only reason you would start a new series is if you were going to do something ill-advised.

including across age groups. He’s not the author I most want to post about. I want to continue my insane train of thought on Brandon Mull’s obsession with wiping people’s minds, but Mull is writing like bad Fablehaven fan fiction at this point. Might check out the third Candy Shop War at some point. I wonder if any author has successfully done a spin-off series with the original characters. I think Percy Jackson does eventually, once Percy and Annabeth are reunited, Riordan successfully writes them as a teenage couple for a couple books. I was going to say, the seventh Star Wars is not bad in this regard. Dragon Watch fails though. Seth and Kendra are so flat in that book. I don’t think he succeeds in writing a more mature version of the same characters, but maybe I’m being too harsh.

takes place in a different location. And his plot a lot of the times is bad. It almost feels like he doesn’t want to write an overarching plot. He just wants to write a bunch of action sequences in a row.

Society doesn’t even care about having human programmers. Companies just want the computers to do what they want as cheaply as possible. That sucks because I’m someone who wants to be a skilled programmer. Right now I’m being paid for that, but I’m not primarily concerned about the logistical difficulty of losing my job or having to change industries. Even if you offered me 500k to be a security guard tomorrow, I would be still be sad to not be programming. I’ve invested into practicing and learning computer science, getting a degree in it. Writing good code is something I care about and something I’m proud of. And so if society values that less, it bothers even beyond the amount that it affects me. Some comments are unsympathetic because this has happened to other jobs before. Society used to value skilled weavers and skilled carpenters and skilled cobblers, and we don’t anymore. The skills still exist, but they’re not seen as important: most people don’t care. In other careers we still value skill. We still value skilled lawyers and doctors, or at least pretend to until robots get better at surgery than human doctors, and it’s revealed that we don’t actually care about having skilled doctors at all, we actually care about getting the best treatment possible. Skilled sports players will probably be valued longer than skill in any other area because it’s impressive not to get the ball to the other side of the field, but to do it as a human within the rules. Jon Bois in his sci-fi story 17776 predicts that in the future, after all problems are solved, we will do nothing but play and watch football. We’re watching AI move several fields—programming, writing, art—from the realm where skill is valued to the realm where it is not. And that hurts to watch. Again, not because people might lose their jobs, but because I care about humans being experienced and having the opportunity to care about their work. And perhaps that’s irrational. Perhaps human skill has no inherent value when arguing from first principles, and perhaps we should let machines do the work. And perhaps it’s hypocritical that I lament the lack of value for programmings skills that I have, but I don’t lament the lack of value for carpentry. I buy flat pack furniture and I’m glad that we have power tools and factories. But when they come for programmers I can imagine a world where no skilled labor is valued and everyone either oversees the factories or works in the factories or plays sports. (And that obviously won’t happen to “everyone”, because today there’s still a man in a trailer park who makes his living fixing wooden chairs and in the future there will still be programmers.) But it’s weird and uncomfortable to realize that, even as a skilled programmer, my work is not important. Now, after the invention of LLMs, even if no one on the planet wrote another line of code ever again, civilization would be fine because we could prompt AI to write it for us. In conclusion, even the “best case scenario” where AI ushers in a post scarcity society, I’ve still lost something because my skill set would no longer be important to that society. And that would suck.

"The only thing that all these banned books have in common is the fact that they’re banned." Obviously the like Shel Silverstein or Ancient Greek books which have been hit because of non-sexual nudity are bad, but the one that shocks me is Firefight by Brandon Sanderson. Like when you're banning f-ing Sanderson books something's very wrong. Sanderson has never cursed in a book I don't think. Fireflight is a book written by someone with very conservative personal values, with a target audience of middle schoolers. And so it's illustrative that it's not a matter of acting in good faith as an author or sharing values with these people and it's really not about writing books that are appropriate for children. The law is just a checklist of things that you can't talk about. Authoritarianism is fundamentally flawed. The thing about library-level book bans is that it's not hard to find books that no one has read in a library. People read and focus on the same 2 John Green novels, but weird/explicit material is just as likely to occur in a book from the 80s that someone donated that no one has ever heard of. Unless you have someone read every book with the content standard open next to them, it's just not going to be enforced constantly or completely. There's stuff in the Bible that's much worse than stuff in a Sanderson novel.

Program Scribe's Veney! Program Scribe's Veney! You know you want to create a digital video game adaptation of the unpublished chess-inspired rock game Scribe's Veney! No one's played it because they don't have a computer to implement the rules. You've made lots of video games including a turn-based multiplayer card game! It would be easy! Program Scribe's Veney! You could use Zig or Lisp! Program Scribe's Veney!

permission does an O(n) lookup to see if the permission already exists; so adding n permissions is O(n^2). This is 25% of our request time at least on newly logged in request (I think we cache it sometimes). => https://github.com/chaps-io/access-granted/blob/b9de1888c8eca5d3e04756682beda95dac7649dd/lib/access-granted/role.rb#L57C7-L57C23 Edit: I don't think we cache it.

if we had a best selling artist who’s a man down on his hands and knees with his gorgeous locks being held by a woman. This is why we need Weird Al Yankovich to

Context: Fulham is asked by a chatter if they should learn zero-cycle (a strategy for ending the game, if you have no context, think of checkmate in chess). And Fulham pulls up their game history. => https://youtu.be/vXVoToLrRBY?t=28 (content warning strong language/yelling in the whole video)

Like witty replies that appear devastating at the expense of actual argument integrity, that only work because the opponent doesn’t have a platform. I haven’t watched a Ben Shapiro video in like 10 years but I’m not afraid to admit that he’s funny. Just not in taste for political issues. Northernlion, on the other hand,

* Results — like Zig's error sets — things that are an error condition but need to be recoverable / handleable — control flow issue. Has Ok / Err variant. `unwrap()` maps to a panic. .ok() maps to an optional. * Options — optionals, for when being "null" is a value / expressible data state — data issue. .ok_or can be used to provide a result. Has Some / None. `unwrap()` maps to a panic. * panics — program issue, if you will, your program is designed under the assumption that it will never happen. Visible to the end user. The ? operator can, like Zig's try, syntax sugar the "else return null" or "else return error" pattern. Importantly, this only works if the calling function return value is compatible. => https://corrode.dev/blog/rust-option-handling-best-practices/ Outstanding questions: What can you do with a result? (i.e. can you provide a default or convert into an option?) Presumably Results usually have an Error as their second type or failure type. Is that true? Similarly, can you try/catch/return an error without a Result? What is expect()?

We're 40 minutes into a meeting discussing whether to remove the second setting and fix the first setting or remove the first setting and fix the second setting.

Single-player, AR, interactive, exercise experience. Pick a “route” (a continuously runnable/walkable stretch, around 2 miles) Setup around 200 “landmarks” (trees, stop signs, utility access hatches and rocks along the route) Start a “session” in the app Have the app randomly “link” around 10 pairs of 2 close landmarks (around 100-300 ft apart) (You are not told where these links are) Travel along the route (discovery—looking for links) Have the app trigger a “sprint” automatically when you arrive at a landmark with a link Sprint to the landmark which is linked to your current landmark Have the app score you based on your speed End the session once you’ve discovered all of the links The goal here is high replayability. I get really bored doing runs along the same stretch of road. I get locked in to looking at the ground, and my brain starts thinking about other things. This would be new every time, because the links would be in different places, and it would be interactive, you would have to pay attention to where the links the are and where you’re sprinting to. I’m trying to avoid Ingress and Pokémon Go, which are interactive AR, but you’re interacting with your phone. I want to interact with the world, which is hard to do in a single-player constraint. I think geohashing gets close with ‘you have to go to this place’ but it misses any sense of urgency or excitement. My third inspiration is Flags (my conception of a 1,000 flag scavenger hunt). I never got to run Flags because of COVID (which is ironic because it was conceived as a game that was playable outside while social distancing). Flags has excitement when you find a flag or find out how many points it’s worth. But even a scavenger hunt doesn’t have “interactive excitement.” All of the skill is in the “discovery phase” and so the exciting part—when you actually find the flag—is actually the least interactive part because you just collect it. If your heart rate goes up when you find a hidden flag, that’s irrational. Of course, this is all an attempt to mimic the excitement of my fourth (one true) inspiration, HvZ. I don’t see any obviously flaws—which could just mean it’s consistently bad. The biggest issue is I have 0 time to program a new app.

> There is no ideology that can replace a neighbor. No tax plan that can replace a friend. No grocery bill that can replace community and connection. No amount of budget cuts that can replace kindness. No amount of suffering from people I hate that will ever make more love. I don’t know how to make America great, but I know how to make my America great and it is not by selling out integrity and compassion and community and ******* humanity to make eggs and gas cheaper. It is by seeing and hearing the people around me. I’m not Mormon anymore, but I still know the value of mourning with those that mourn and comforting those that stand in need of comfort. I’m not Christian anymore but I still have Eyes That Can See and Ears That Can Hear.

"iTunes Match requires iOS 5" — I don't think that's an issue. "you can listen to iTunes Radio" — No I can't, iTunes Radio shut down in 2016. => https://support.apple.com/en-us/108935 iTunes Match was (well, I guess, "is") a service where you'd pay Apple a yearly subscription, and they'd take songs that you had on your Mac (normally from burned CD's), "match" them with the listing of the song in iTunes, and let you download the song from iTunes on other devices without having to buy it again. If they couldn't find a match, they'd upload the song to the cloud so you could still sync it. The concept is simply completely superseded by Apple Music. (In addition to allowing access to songs on iTunes, Apple Music today allows you to upload songs downloaded from e.g. Bandcamp and it will sync them to all your devices.) Unlike other Apple Music predecessors, like iTunes Radio and Ping, iTunes Match is a paid subscription. This means that if Apple shut it down, they'd lose the revenue from everyone who subscribed in 2011 and then forget what it was. But it's also still possible to subscribe in 2025, if you want to, if that's your jam. Just in case you really want to pay a subscription for songs that you already bought. (If you cancel the subscription you keep the songs, so you're technically paying for the syncing not the songs.)

idea of popular fantasy is very different from mine. Kelsier is in Fortnite.

Sometimes I just wish that people would care about the same things that I do. The older I get the more I realize that no one else will ever care.

Since it was so hyped, I don’t know if I just had unrealistic expectations or if it was actually bad. I enjoyed reading it so I don’t think it was bad. But it’s hard for me to articulate something I like about it. I want to be nice and give it 4 stars but I also want to be sure I’m not being biased by the fact that I know it’s popular. I think the tiebreaker is pacing, and it’s paced really well, so I’ll give it 4. The reason it’s surprising it’s at 4 stars is because I have no desire to read the sequel right now. It’s weird. If I liked it, which I did, why don’t I want to read the sequel? I like it more than other 4 star books that have had me hooked on the whole series. My theory is that the shorter two-novella format ruins my ability to get hooked and engaged. The other big issue, I’ve decided, is that the “conflict” for the main character is its identity and how it fits in with humans. And the “plot” is a completely tangential action plot about trying to stay alive. I want to watch murderbot continue to evolve its relationship with others and its conception of itself. But I don’t actually care about the action scenes because they’re not actually related to that.

to do something and Safari's like, eh.