Thoughts

data to a function. But in making that transition easy, they emphasize that the transition is necessary. JavaScript doesn’t let you change from data into a function since from the perspective of the JS programer, functions already are data.

about treating functions as operators.

=> https://www.zlib.net/zlib_license.html

“Agree politely, but delete nothing. Never apologize for who you are.”

-Blank Space, T Swift of course

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.

like.

[Black text, not overlapping anything else:] No. I Who is. Your friend. right. Or. Surrender to the system. Become more than yourself. [An untranscribable scribble] U Europa. Somewhere else Someone else Has created And destroyed More than I will ever see. [Blue text, sideways, underneath red text:] Some say Life is about something. They miss that life is everything. This not poetry. This is prose. An essay. Of course [Black text, upside-down, underneath red text:] Pale flowers. Left for hours Sun above A dress. Stress [Red text, written over the last two blocks:] What is this if not me? Who am I if not this? To live for _____ Sorry. This is not poetry This is not art This is some words on a whiteboard. That shouldn't have been written. This is nothing. I'm sorry. Except I'm not And these words are everything These words are poetry and they are art These words are life They're me and you and the connection between us and they matter

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.

Like they just keep nerfing him, we’re on, what, IIIII. And he’s still cooler than he has any right to be.

Also these 3 htop screenshots are from 3 different servers. Also I don't understand what's going on, I don't think node.js is actually using that much memory.

yet, this honestly doesn't surprise me.

So aliases look like: ``` fn-l = "ls" ``` I think they did this so that functions could be syntax sugar for as follows: ``` fn l { ls $* } # Is the same as fn-l @ { ls $* } ``` Where `@ { … }` is already the syntax for a lambda. Still seems pretty bad.

=> 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.)

makes me a bit sad that things are moving towards Arm. We're in the x86-64 golden age of computers.

arbitrarily "complex" numbers. something something Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, "There is no recursively related notation-system which gives a name to every constructive ordinal" -Church and Kleene (from GEB)

```julia julia> parse(BigFloat, "0.1") + parse(BigFloat, "0.2") 0.3000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000017 ```

All I want is arbitrary precision numbers and it feels like `bc` is the only language that supports them.

-Acts 13:39, paraphrased

Let's just say that I no longer regret deleting it. (Note to self: the transcript is in my DMs with Robert)

Wanna guess which one I'm going to do?

Alt-J was how light their songs were.

different reasons.

It's like my mind and my heart expect or need to be in a fight or flight situation and so when I'm a bit nervous about a group project they're like, 'this is it!' and my heart rate is 103. I think I need to exercise more.

ajlwdba jlwndk;waln ldjan o;awipnb djnawip odnaipw dnao[wjnd aopinwdalksndklnalknsdklansdklnmklmklmkllkmlkmlkmkmaas alsdmsad mklamwdklm saklmmsakldmlk malkmsdlk malksmd klasmdlk msaklm klmadlkma alksmd lkasmd l/kasmndfl jajlnajklnefbjkaeln kf;anf lkanef ipoj[

I expected `[undefined].toString()` to return `"[undefined]"` but it instead returns `[]`. `(undefined).toString()` is an error but `undefined + ""` is `"undefined"`.

I'll give you a hint, the x-axis is unix timestamps

The source is some random book. I used exactly one page. I tried to persevere layout when transcribing for this site, but it’s obviously imperfect. “Mutilated and deformed” is the name of the chapter in the book, and I left it in at the top of the page. Edit: uh I forgot the link to the actual post. It’s the one from a few days ago

Honestly I probably just need to read more fiction, my standards are so low. But like, so many things don’t meet my standards. Like none of the *Check, Please* characters are great. They’re good, but the story and worldbuilding is amazing. One of very very few non-fantasy stories to do 5-star worldbuilding.

to create personality. He has to do it all with dialogue. And he does it so well. *insert Lunchables scene here.*

=> https://github.blog/2022-02-14-include-diagrams-markdown-files-mermaid/ What is this. This is why we need Gemtext. Like, *Markdown* has feature creep. There's actually a lot I could say here. This ties into *all* of the reasons Gemini is important. This is what I mean when I say you can't embed simplicity inside a complex system.

magically reverts them every time I do.

It's basically all rights reserved, but you're allowed to fork, modify, or use it (but not redistribute it). It allows derivate works, provided they are at least source-available. Basically, it's what people think they're getting when they blindly add an open source license to a project.

Honestly, I'm speechless. Donne just murdered her right in front of me.

and it's like 400 years too early to be arguing that virginity is a social construct. There's ahead of your time and then there's 400 years ahead of your time. Legend and a half. One of the things that makes the poem so enjoyable is that you can totally picture Donne's girlfriend smiling and rolling her eyes as Donne explains the grave injustice she has committed in killing the mosquito that he's using as a metaphor. Sorry for Flea-posting again. => https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46467/the-flea

such, they really don't want to complete with the "VPN" providers for some reason. Edit: Oh so you know what it is. Is they're really focused on encrypting your connection to HTTP websites and running DNS over HTTP. And in some cases, like if a website is hosted on Cloudflare servers itself, then they don't bother e.g. hiding your IP address. So they can't advertise it as a true VPN. But it works for me. No more unencrypted DNS!

=> https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/timeline/ Climate change is as concerning to people now as nuclear war was 70 years ago. The former is much less concerning to me than the latter.

arguments on justice critique the system based on injustive violating his own Similarly, to parish is violation companies operate "unjustly, capriciously, cruelly," people support the bad and wasteful Similarly unjust "tyrannic disposition" later observes love mortifies inferiors lord over that human dignity vir- tual ubiquity inefficient institution workmen are "always just and equitable" hours allow leisure efficiency issues, prompt masters to rest living stress justice besides cloath lodge share produce themselves Finally,

* 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.

Ahhh Apollo is a Reddit client btw

Corners pieced, stapled, sharp, Threaded, pull taunt, Edges, lines, angles angled corners pieced Threaded, pulled and tied taunt string pulls corners angled corners and lines threaded, tied taunt string slips through corners angles and corners and lines

Ranked Bedwars is like such a small community it seems like a wild coincidence.

I'm on track for most posts ever this season.

=> https://thoughts.learnerpages.com/?show=e858a7d7-fc3c-41eb-a1a5-5dc4c4a5d4c2 Something about 'humans act like NPCs' But the examples that prompted it were like, someone wearing the same jacket every day, or wearing a T-shirt for the club they were in. Like. I'm not wrong. But also. 'Humans walk places because that's the easiest way of getting there and they're lazy and therefore they are like NPCs.' I think there's something there… But it's not nearly as interesting as I thought at the time.

```python def test(value=[]) return value a = test() b = test() a.append(1) print(a) # [1] print(b) # [1] print(a is b) # True ```

```js function foo() { let x = 0; return { inc: function () { x++; }; get: function () { return x; } }; } const obj = foo(); obj.get(); // 0 obj.inc(); obj.get(); // 1 ``` And this is obviously an ugly shim for OOP-style encapsulation that isn't needed. But this is just illustrative of the most common use for this feature. And this feature isn't something that I normally use, or that is good practice to use. But if you couldn't do this in a language, it would just feel underpowered. (This does require functions to be passable by value, which similarly I think it very powerful.) (You actually can do this in Python 3, with the `nonlocal` keyword, fun fact.)

=> https://tildegit.org/matthias/WhisperMaPhone It's not like totally un-ready. But it has lots of room for improvement.

I have a file without an extension. I want to tell Vim to syntax highlight it as markdown. In a GUI editor, that would be a button. But I've read the Vim help pages for `:colorscheme` `:language` `:syntax` and `:highlight` and none of them can be used to change the language Vim thinks the file is. (`:language` is for changing the interface language.)

Since Wordle is fundamentally about finding information, and yet, the information is right there in the source code if you're willing to peak behind the veil. So you end up with a whole spectrum of amounts of information that you can convey, in between knowing nothing to knowing tomorrow's word. And it's really hard to define a strict line between cheating and not cheating. Like, is using hints or guides in a puzzle game cheating? I think this gives rise to the more fundamental question of 'what is platonicWordle?'. Since you inherently come into it with knowledge of English words, and yet, everyone has a different list of five-letter English words in their head. Someone who doesn't know English very well is playing the game at a different difficulty. I think what I'm getting at is that cheating, and to a boarder extent, playing, puzzle games is a function of your mind. And no matter how tempting it is to turn the game into a black box of re-playability, that's just not the nature of the game.

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.

Obvious there's an attitude "half-full/half-empty" difference. But there's also logical difference. Saying that something isn't perfect doesn't imply that it can be better. Edit: Similarly, the second also implies a qualitative aspect that the first doesn't. It's not a binary, perfect or imperfect, it's about being better.

Focus on pursing excellence. Success and failure aren't ever in our full control. All we can control is what we choose to do right now, in this moment. Focus on better outcomes. Any real situation can always be improved. (Don't worry about making it perfect, that's not possible.) 52% is better than 51%.

This is a puddle.

“Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground outside your Father’s care.” ‭‭NIV‬‬

It’s not good poetry. But it’s there. And there’s so much of it. 10 poems being posted a day every day for 10 years. Most with 1 vote. Seen by no one. But that’s not why they were written. No one fishes for popularity on a subreddit with more posters than readers. No one hopes to kick-start a literature Nobel by opening /r/Sh*ttyPoetry. Just people with words filling their heads and overflowing. Just poems, crafted for the art of it, and shared because they could be, and maybe they could mean something to someone else. “But actually flowers”

Yeah that's about what I expected from dd-ing to the hard drive. Now the question is how to fix it. I didn't think this far ahead.

I know what I'm doing I promise /s I have no idea what I'm doing.

exactly the type of thing I'm talking about. A fun, marking gimmick. And it seems to have been created less than a week ago. But man I had to look for that.

You could view self-driving car R&D as a Marketing Expense. Instead it's listed as a loss in the "Other Bets" category of Alphabet's quarterly report.

I have no evidence to back this up of course. But it seems like Google had this great culture of experimentation. I'm just thinking back, Google did Google Maps in 2005 at a time when they were a *much* smaller company. Now they have a much larger budget, and they're not doing the same types of things. I think part of that is that Alphabet exists and Google has been relegated to handling the day-to-day operation of existing products. Google's not supposed to branch out and do self driving cars or anything radically different. On the flip side, Alphabet is the *parent* company. They're bigger and so they have to be operated like an investing firm. They don't have a "culture of experimentation"—they're trying to diversify a portfolio. I think Google would be in a lot better place today if they had created an R&D subsidiary instead of a holding company.

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

there's a female voice in here with me and I'm going insane. Sexist.

today and yesterdaya dn rails lines and fear and conjestion.

I'm calling her Mel. I'm think I'm going insane this time.

Installed lwm. I can't figure out how to open an application. I don't want a fancy fuzzy-finder application list with professionally made icons. But I NEED TO BE ABLE TO OPEN AN APPLICATION. IT has to be POSSIBLE. So I decided to try to ask for help in #linux on Libera.chat, right. Sounds reasonable. I don't have a window manager working, so I decide to install irssi, which is a very popular terminal-based IRC client. It open with, I kid you not, 'if you're new, open our website to learn how to use irssi' It is inexcusable in my mind to have to read online documentation to learn how to use software, period. I'm not learning a programming language. I'm trying to connect to an IRC server. I don't have a window manager installed. So I open, in `links`, irssi.org (luckily irssi.org doesn't have any JS, so it works), select "Read Tutorials" > "Startup How-To" > "First Steps." We're now a different program and 4 levels deep to try to learn how to connect to an IRC server. IRSSI doesn't *do anything* without walking through this. But it gets worse. It explains that it's configured with some default servers, and gives the example that we can use `/CONNECT liberachat` and `/JOIN #irssi` to join. That sounds great. That's all I want. I close `links`, open issri again. Enter `/CONNECT liberachat`. Doesn't work. Liberachat isn't found. It's not a preconfigured server. And like. I'm using a terminal-based IRC client. I want minimalism. This isn't "Discord is good because it has stickers." I want pure-text communication. And I can't figure out how to use. So I search for liberachat on my phone because I can't remember their domain name. And I open a second tab on my phone with the irssi docs because I now need to add a new server. I try it without the port, hoping that the port is standardized in 2022 but no. The examples given in the irssi docs don't specify ANYWHERE how to add a server including the port, for the record. So I try "irc.libera.chat:6697" and that doesn't work and then I try "/connect irc.libera.chat 6697" and that at least tries to connect but I get 'connection closed by remote peer' instantly. I give up at this point. I use neovim as a my primary editor. I'm no stranger to terminal apps. But I can't guess how to use your software.

used by libera.chat. It is virtually undocumented, and certainly unclear to me, how to add a server that doesn’t use the default port.

“all 16 personalities belong to myers-briggs. depending on which way i answer the questions, i get to read a different one of their personalities”

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.)

=> https://www.reddit.com/r/nonpoetry/comments/moge74/translation/ View transcription

A little bit of mutual respect goes a long way, and I think we have way too little online.

source code for MatthiasPortzel.com

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 don't even watch his videos regularly, but I have a large amount of respect for him.

Okay, the C standard requires it. It looks like GCC and Clang actually don't do trigraph replacement unless you request that they follow e.g. `-std=c17`

Not before. Meaningless and full despite. Free. Sky above. Me.

"Nobody beats the Jazzhands 20 times in a row"!

I want to throw up. I want to To quote myself, "Past like 10pm the solution to existential crises is simple; go to sleep, deal with it in the morning." Hopefully I was wiser then than I am now.

All I want is perfect software.

editor open."

It has motive, which most conspiracy theories lack. Not just for Fox but for corporate America. That's the angle /r/AntiWork should be taking. Like you could sell that so hard. Ban that one person from the subreddit, and post an announcement about how they were bribed to throw the interview. It's like they haven't even read the instruction manual on how to start a communist revolution. Oh yeah context I guess is important: https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/sd9ohb/whats_going_on_with_rantiwork_and_the_fox_news/

So I've said before that Reddit is a left wing cult. I retract that statement. My new theory is that the vast majority of Reddit users are moderate/centrist, but lack the critical thinking skills to realize that there are members pushing an incredibly left-wing agenda. "I checked out the sub a few times, and I didn't realize that it was supposed to be anti-work (against work) [I thought it was just people talking about] bad bosses, bad companies to work for, and advice for people that are facing conflict" (+389) You joined /r/AntiWork, and didn't realize it was about the abolition of work? They're not exactly subtlety about it. The description of the subreddit is "A subreddit for those who want to end work." The sidebar links to /r/Anarchy. And they get publicity, they get a radical leftist on TV making communist talking points, and suddenly, the subreddit backtracks? Why? This goes back to me taking everything literally. If you say you want to abolish work, I'm honestly surprised that you have a job at all. Next you're going to be telling me that Tumblr user @death2america doesn't want to abolish the United States.

Remind me to decline if I’m ever offered a Nobel prize.

Note 7s and posted a huge loss for the quarter. So Apple made more money than every phone company (including Apple), combined.

even if I don't have anything else that they connect to. So it's really weird to do code analysis on my programs before I'm done writing them, because they're not complete, and they're not even internally consistent. (I don't want to sound like I'm the only one that thinks this. There's some really interesting work being done to try to design editors and type checkers around "holes." But it's all experimental for now.)

next line, so I jump down and write that line before I forget it, and then I go back and finish the line I was originally working on. I think this is why I get so frustrated to with like anything that tries to analyze my code as I'm typing, either to give syntax errors, or even auto-indent it. Like your auto-indenter is going to be wrong if I took a break in the middle of writing my function, and I'm writing the line that calls the function. I don't mind it if I can fix the indention obviously, but like some editors *force* indentation, and I have to go back and add closing brackets to the function declaration above.

It's like these people have never read https://gemini.circumlunar.space. Which opens with 'Gemini will not replace the web.'

Like how do you teach someone about HTTPs and not HTTP? But you also have to make clear that websites in 2022 probably shouldn't be using HTTP.

"Weeks is readily identified by his nine eyes and nine hands, each carrying a bat. The bats are named after the nine days of the week"

Confused? So is everyone else. You can learn more about Blaseball, but it's structured such that you're pretty much always confused. The people that don't know what Blaseball is, provided they know *of* it, are just as much participants as anyone else.

And like, since there's so little substance to Gemini, you really can't criticize it for anything but being different, but man, people do. Like, there's no argument you can make against Gemini that you can't make against either a) Twitter having a character limit or b) any protocol that is not HTTP(s)+HTML.

-Chemical Angel, Watsky "But baby maybe it's a problem when you got a problem / and you get addicted to the cure" -Tears To Diamonds, Watsky Anti-anti-depressants is such a take.

"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.)

-Only Connect - Series 10 - Episode 5

not how it was built, but like, if it functions like "for free," then why not?

They decided on following the capitalization of official media, but no other Wikipedia page follows “official” portrayal over rules of grammar. See, e.g. the Wikipedia page of any band or company that stylized their own name in all lowercase. But like, I’m sure there’s a reason that they decided the way they did and I haven’t read the 40,000 word argument or the Wikipedia style guide or anything.

Which is kind of ironic, since TP is supposed to be “polite by default.” Like, I don’t need to end all my sentences with “sina pona” but I want to. sina mute li pona.

This post brought to you by /r/nonpoetry

board with more interesting pronouns. (Unfortunately, I’m not about to guess what pronouns, that’s a slippery slope to retconning the gender of historical figures.)

*Always more nuance.*

It’s not that they don’t like it, but Sanderson just has written so much that there has to be something missed.

In other news, I crafted a master infusion crystal.

I’ve been whittling them down.

the rest of my life and just pass of things I've read on the internet as my own ideas. And like, I'm not Googling the question and copying an answer. I mean, I saw someone discussing this point on the internet 4 years ago and internalized their opinion and I honestly don't know if their opinion is mine or not because I haven't researched it myself but I somehow know enough to have a conversation about it. Like, I could pitch you 30 different video games, which are just blatantly stolen from Khan Academy, but I know that the original programs were unpopular or deleted and the games have taken on a new life in my head. If I wrote a cross-over fan fiction between two works that have probably each been read by ~1000 people, and I change the names of the characters, at some point does this become an original work? If every line of my poem comes from a different Reddit comment, is it my poetry?

everything, but also, it implies the existence of a very different poem, which makes more legitimate arguments. And Donne didn't write that other poem. possibly the GOAT.

interesting.

There are a lot of Ask HN posts made, most of which seem to take Hacker News as a divine bestower of knowledge. It's like Quora but a super specific demographic. Ask HN exists to function like Ask Reddit. But it gets used like StackOverflow or worse, /r/Relationship_advice. 'Ask HN: How to deal with join pain?' 'How to stop people from stealing my SD cards' 'Should I buy my 4 year old color blind glasses' A whole bunch of questions that technically fit because they're tech, but should really be Google searches. 'Where to buy cables?' 'What YouTubers make JS tutorials?' Ah. The internet.

Can you imagine if we didn't have arrays?

For an example, let's say Mark is working as an engineer adding a smart assistant to a microwave. Mark has been effected by the disease of feature creep. (Whether Mark uses his own product, or is passionate about microwaves, or particularly cares about his job doesn't matter.) When most people see a normal microwave ("base" microwave), they're bored by it. They've seen it before. When Mark sees a base microwave in his friend's house, because he's been effected by feature creep, he thinks "this microwave is bad because it doesn't have a voice assistant." I'm being very particular with my wording. It's possible that Mark uses and loves his voice assistant microwave. But it's possible he doesn't. It's possible that he would be legitimately inconvenienced by the lack of a voice assistant. But the "feature creep" disease doesn't care about practicality. It effects the way Mark thinks about his friend's microwave, which Mark has never used. It's not about liking features or missing them. You can be a smart-home enthusiast, of the opinion that all microwaves are best with voice assistants. But if you don't spend all your time around voice assistant microwaves, like Mark does, you can walk into your friend's house, and see a base microwave and not think anything of it. Feature creep isn't about wanting more features. That's the other point. Mark doesn't want a camera or a TV or a laser projector in his microwave. Feature creep doesn't make you want more features. Mark isn't dumb. Mark knows that not everyone has a smart microwave. He still calls a base microwave a "normal" microwave. It's not that the goalposts have moved. But a voice assistant microwave is not impressive to Mark anymore. And a base microwave is actively unimpressive. Like, a golfer who starts passionately playing golf, practicing every day, and getting better, still knows that par is the standard, and knows that they're getting better. The first time they get better than par, they get a certain rush from it. The 100th time they get under par, they still know that they've a good job, but they don't feel the same way. It's not an addiction either. Addictions cause you to suffer withdrawal or negative effects. Feature creep doesn't have negative mental effects, not really. It's just desensitizing you to existing features.

Like this website, for example. Is pretty simple, but is also more interesting than a blog.

I've had "nothing means, nothing only means" stuck in my head for days. Source is https://www.reddit.com/r/seventhworldproblems/comments/pisi8g/runprotocolsoul_mate/hbsprqo/ View transcription

understood by everyone here, while acknowledging that they aren't universal. I'm not describing that well, but it makes sense, trust me.

View transcription

Words in a loop like a lasso attempt to capture leaves. The words describe ourselves, Evoke emotion unbounded And feeling and meaning. Pain and joy alike Poetry is words given power, words brought to life.

estimate from late 2022 to 2024. Oh my word I thought that was conservative. But somewhere else on their website they say "we no longer expect to be ready to launch Hytale before 2023 at the earliest, and it could very well take longer." They were acquired by Riot in 2020, and the FAQ says > Will this acquisition delay Hytale? > We’re still aiming for Hytale to be playable by everyone in 2021. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that the acquisition has delayed Hytale. We'll be lucky to see it before 2025 at this point.

the screen at all times and that if the latency increased by so much as 30ms, users will notice and complain. Network engineering nightmare.

being a total tongue twister. I was proud of it after finishing, I only really paused once, but listening to it again, I end up hesitating on every fifth syllable because cummings has invented a word. Might post it tomorrow if I remember.

I talk to myself a lot. And even if I'm not talking out loud, I have a constant narration in my head. And so almost everything I write is first said, and so is intended to be said.

number of drugs that I am not doing.

like Google and I have other things to do so I'm going to try to convince myself that I don't care, so that I can move on.

View transcription

Let's say, I can fix typos. Because that's why I added editing. And I can edit content with a disclaimer (like "Edit:" or "Edited at [time] for [reason]"). And I can edit stylistically/formatting whenever I want. (Like if I invent a custom markup format I might need to go back and update links that are currently Gemini or markdown formatted). I'll try to avoid editing content.

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.

"Transparent Soul" fricking slaps.

Tom Scott on why he won't make a video on a video game: > I'm not writing off video games. I was on a charity Among Us stream yesterday, it was fun. But I am writing off that gamer-adjacent culture, and trying to avoid the perception of even being _remotely_ connected to it.

It also partially inspired a lot of the previous Thoughts, but that should go without saying.

This is the end of an age. I want my life to mean something. Not to other people, but to myself. I want to have meaning. But I don't want a small meaning. I want an infinite meaning. I want the world in the palms of my hands. Or at least to be a finger of the hands that hold the universe. Every moment has meaning. Would it really be worth it, to save a world if I couldn't remember it? Would I go home? "Do you fear being shaken by the shoulders like an etch-a-sketch. Being mugged for your memories? I do. They are my first most prized possession." I want my memories to be valuable. I want to see the stars. "Do you feel it in your bones?" Not 'what do I want'. I want everything. I want infinity. I want infinite perfect worlds with infinite perfect things and infinite perfect people. But who do I want to be? Do I want to be a god? Do I want to be more? Anything I create will be less than me. And I am imperfect. I want to be perfect. I want to spectate. I want to fly. I want to be Matthias. I want to be weird to be memorable. I want people to remember me. But who do I want to be. I want to know. I want to know what I am doing. I want to have confidence that I am right. Not to fly, but to fight. For a cause. For the right cause. I am nothing without other people. "He just needed saving from himself." I want to be powerful.

filenames.

the world? Can we fight the night? Can we outrun darkness? The wave looks over all, growing as it consumes, engulfing everything.”

time.) It looks like I won’t be able to read the 5th book before tomorrow, unfortunately.

editor. After I configure some iTerm key re-mappings so I can use command instead of control.

Hunter reveal in the third Five Kingdoms. It happens way later in the book than I expected (still not at the very end like in Dragonwatch, though *glare*.)

“Contains less than 2% uranium, cyanide, cobwebs, magma, polio.”

> understand me, I would fight a duel for a trifle, for an insult, for a blow; and the more so that, thanks to my skill in all bodily exercises, and the indifference to danger I have gradually acquired, I should be almost certain to kill my man. Oh, I would fight for such a cause; but in return for a slow, profound, eternal torture, I would give back the same, were it possible; an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, as the Orientalists say,—our masters in everything,—those favored creatures who have formed for themselves a life of dreams and a paradise of realities. -The Count of Monte Cristo

I got rid of the code referenced in my second ever Thought. => https://thoughts.learnerpages.com/?show=d90ad16e-df3a-437f-b4fc-be2c9539b9d2

authentication, suddenly I can't render UTF-8 characters. \*sigh*

Bit of downtime there, I got frustrated. I tried to move the login page to HTTP Basic auth, and it worked locally, but on the server didn't authenticate me, without any error messages. So I took the website down for a bit out of frustration. I've reverted to a working state. ``` Why the fricking hell is logging with Apache so fricking bad! So me the fricking error log!? What the frick? 18:33 Sorry for the downtime. I'm not smart enough to make a website I guess. Sorry. 18:33 AAADAHWDUAHDAHAHAHAHAHAHHHHHHHAHAHHHHHHHH 21:18 If you have an endpoint that returns 401 Unauthorized and a Basic Auth prompt, Firefox doesn't log it in the network console. 21:24 "You need a plot. What you wanna witness with this life you got?" 11:14 ```

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!"

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.

I can’t remember why I can’t go to sleep. Hm.

(At least Linux users don't take WiFi for granted.)

=> https://blog.codinghorror.com/falling-into-the-pit-of-success/ The idea behind the pit of success is there's some metaphorical "gravity" pulling you down, analogous to doing whatever is easiest, and in some programming languages that pulls you down into traps, and in other languages that pulls you into the best possible scenario. The Pit of success wasn't meant to be graphed. But I like to graph things, so let's make some tweaks. ```Graph of Quality vs. Effort, showing a hill-shape Q u a / - \ l / \ i / \ t __/ y Effort ``` Suddenly, instead of a pit of success, we have a hill of success. This way of graphing things makes sense Quality is the dependent variable. "Gravity" is pulling us left, towards as little effort as a possible. What makes the pit of success really interesting is that you end up in a place where spending more time leads to a worse product. And this way of graphing make this really obvious. Increasing effort, past a certain point, gives an actually worse product. This might be hard to believe, but it's because we're really good at recognizing when there's not sufficient payoff and not continuing to work in that way. The basic example is re-implementing some library yourself. It takes more time and you likely end up with a worse result, when compared to using a pre-existing library. The further point to make is that most languages and programming environments don't look like this. They don't have a pit of success. Instead, what you often see is *diminishing results* for increasing Effort. So instead of this nice peak, that gives you a nice stopping point, you end up with a flat area. And this where a lot of projects die. When you get to the point where it doesn't make sense to continue putting in effort. But! There's an even worse scenario! In the case that an environment is very developer hostile, it looks like a logarithmic graph. There are no local maximums, no nice stopping points. It's always possible to make your product better, but more and more effort is required to do so. This is why creating Minecraft maps is hell.

I still think about code, of course. I'll never stop thinking about it. But writing it? Oooh, I don't know.

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. View transcription

possession”

exist" maybe someone should have paid attention…aside from making a comment about her appearance. Might have been a good idea…

I was under the impression, for some reason, that *Dragonwatch* targeted the same, younger, demographic that *Fablehaven* does. (Maybe because Mull has said as much multiple times. Honestly, that's part of the reason that I didn't read *Dragonwatch* earlier.) But I'm getting ahead of myself. The first book is pretty bad. I gave it like 4 stars when I first read it, but 4 stars for Mull is embarrassing. That's like, he's in exactly the genre that I want to read, but he's writing too poorly to get 5 stars. (Everything else by him that I had read was 5 stars.) What the frick happens in *Beyonders* that this is less scary? I'm terrified of the end of this second *Dragonwatch*. This is a nightmere twist ending. This is like, 'Mull got bored and got Brandon Sanderson to ghost-write' levels of twist ending. Like, I never expect or enjoy brutal twists at the end of books. But I really don't expect it from Mull. Wow. I guess there are some brutal betrayals and twists in *Fablehaven*, but those feel largely foreshadowed, don't effect the main cast of characters, are largely actionable (the characters can do something about them), and! they don't! happen at the very end of the book! This is honestly feels like Brandon Sanderson. What the hell. I am *so glad* I didn't buy the second Dragonwatch at publication, because I would have been traumatized. Still, traumatized is better than bored. Might just be because I've been re-reading, but I did appreciate the increase in action. I'm going to wait until morning to rate it because maybe this isn't actually a horror-story, and I'm just tired. but man!

"topics relating to homosexuality were first added to the system under 132 (mental derangements)" Oh.

extensive indulgence in the printed page." Me who binge-read 5 *Fablehaven* books in the last 5 days. Uh.

Background info, TLDR, there's a "standard abridged version" of The Count and it sucks. => https://abbreviatedmontecristo.blogspot.com/2021/08/section-one-supplement-how-to-identify.html View transcription

that experience. The most obvious example in the digital age is screen size. Designing something for multiple screen sizes is next to impossible, and yet, has to be done. How can you do that? Design a piece of art with the knowledge that the user can come along and resize the window to literally any size they want, from 50-pixels wide to 5,000 pixels? You can't. So so often you see webpages or apps that only look good at a certain resolution, and you know, oh, that's how big the designer's screen was.

I'm bad at knowing what I want. That's interesting. Hmm. Is it true? No one knows.

Like, this was the original color scheme during my first dev sprint ``` --background-color: #2E2A39; --text-color: #E3D096; --accent-color: #53929B; ```

Vanessa is one of the best characters from any piece of media. Icon.

If you're not able to guess, all the issues arise from the fact that we'll be in "Winter 2021" until March, and there were still a couple of places where I was using the year of the last Thought, without adjusting for that 2-month offset.

(I'm not excited about it. Make anything a requirement and I run from it.) (Then maybe I'll fix the front page so it doesn't show "Winter 2022.") * AJR * Sylvan Esso * HONEYMOAN * half•alive * They Might Be Giants * The Regrettes * twenty one pilots * Jars of Clay * Saint Motel * Imagine Dragons No real surprises here. The first half of the list preforms well on plays/day, releasing hits like "Monday" that I listened to often. The last four artists contribute more of my hours of listen-time, but I rarely seek them out. AJR, of course, is an outlier by both metrics.

second to walk through the `for` loop, complete with graphical animation, for every one of my 1000 songs. So like it's not an alternative for cheap scripting in this use-case, or I imagine, any with more than ~100 items, at which point, why not do it by hand.

continues with Youtube, it will be either because of his love of it or for the money. Not for further subscribers. He'll give us the second elbow reveal, but I suspect he'll take a long break after that.

From 2017 > People laughed at me when I said it four years ago. We're going for ten million. Okay. That's always been the dream. People laughed at me four years ago. They'll probably laugh at me now. I'd laugh at me now. It's a pretty stupid goal to have right now. 'cause you know, I'm at 100 thousand. > Not saying we'll hit it tomorrow, or this year, or the next three years, but possibly the fourth year, if I'm really lucky. The future is bright, who knows. We'll get there eventually. We've made it. He's there.

I want to see if I can find the video where Techno hits 100,000 subscribers and says "only 1% of the way there." But I don't *really* feel like binging all of Techno's Skywars content tonight.

have another 5 hours.) Ah.

Power was out for a while, most of today.

echo in my head incessantly, even after I've posted them. But eventually, in the future, I won't be able to remember, and then I'll have this record. I might shift tone slightly, being more factual, instead of cosplaying as an immaterial being like I normally do on here. It also lead to me adding an option to post privately, something that I've avoided, since the whole point of sharing is kind of lost if it's not public. But if this is for, not an audience, but myself in the future, then private Thoughts is a good idea.

View transcription

I do tons of thinking, but it's pretty light thinking. Like the difference between re-reading a middle-grade fantasy novel and reading a non-fiction book on the brain. I do lots of the former, thousands and thousands of words a day. But I've been stuck on the same brain-books for a year.

the main character is doing nothing and has no idea what's going on. It's technically a re-read, I read it when I was probably in middle school, but remember nothing. Then again, that might be because there's nothing to remember.

Might take my phone number off of my business cards so it's just "Matthias Portzel • MatthiasPortzel.com"

to understand the other SCPs, including series 1, and the 4chan culture that produced them. And like, that's only one of a dozen bits of culture and media that I reference in the About page.

fix them, but maybe we'll get there eventually.

the buck has to stop somewhere. It might as well stop with me. It might as well all be my fault. It's probably not, but some of it is my fault. I can't fix all of it, but I can fix all of it, and I need to fix as much as I can. And I can't do that so I guess it's my fault.

TODO list is: "Make every piece of software in the world perfect."

it on the front page for some reason?

compared to other books. Makes me want to Rereead Beyonders honestly. to see how good those were.

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.

least a couple minor tweaks.

There's no crash report. At least my screen is fixed.

Is there perfection? Is there imperfection? Is it minimalism?

A lot of the times when I read a bad book, I start thinking about ways to improve it. But the premise of *Fat Vampire* is so problematic that there's just so little you can do with it. The premise is basically: "sucking blood from someone is sexual. Wouldn't it be screwed up if someone who doesn't have sex, like a 15-year-old nerd boy, got turned into a vampire?" And the problem is that you end up with this incel-like prompt where sex is basically required for this 15-year-old to live. (He can suck blood from animals, and does for a while, but it leaves him very weak, not able to live a normal life. Now you might be thinking, "is sucking the blood from animals not-sexual." And of course it is. He's unwilling to suck blood from a pig, but enjoys sucking blood from a deer a lot because a deer is sexy.) I can't do a logical breakdown of this book. Every person and thing that he sucks blood from throughout the book is problematic. There's no good way out. Honestly, screw it, the one thing you needed to change was to make these adults. He would still be a jerk and the characters would all still be dumb, but like at least then it's an adult abusing his girlfriend. Instead of a 15-year-old abusing another 15-year-old. I don't know what Rex was going for. Okay okay. The inside flap calls it "satirical." Maybe it's a fine book and I'm just operating on a level far beneath it. I guess? Like, maybe the point is that the main-character is a jerk and you should use him as role model as how not to live your life. And it's a satire of incel-culture. In which case I'm having exactly the reaction I'm supposed to. But there's nothing in there that implies that the author disagrees with it. It's not overboard enough to imply to me that it's clearly all a joke. This is seriously the best I can do. The best way to fix this book is to make it worse so you can justify the satire label. Maybe it's a satire of *Twilight* and I haven't read *Twilight*. Aging up the characters also would have helped my expectations a lot. It's described as Young Adult, but it has a *lot* more language and other adult themes than most stuff in that category. I just read a couple of Goodread reviews. Most of them agree with me that it's bad, but one or two mention the "second level" that I missed. That is to say, the book tees up to be about a nerdy, awkward, boy gaining confidence and getting a girl. And it fails if you expect that. But there's another view that the main character is an unreliable narrator, and the story is actually about how he goes from being a weird jerk to be a bully. Which is certainly an interesting perspective. But I think Rex lays it on too thick, and it comes off as "nice boy is suddenly being mean to everyone for no reason." Honestly, I don't think Rex knew what he wanted to do with it. I think it's like at half a layer of irony. He's kind of aware that what he's describing is weird, but he's not willing to commit to it being a weird book. So it all just comes off as awkward. It's like he thought that by writing a bad vampire book he could attract both people who liked vampire books and people who didn't.

there’s also nothing good. There are a few funny jokes. There are other books that I’ve given 2 stars to because they only get 2 stars on the things that I care about. But normally those books have something else going for them. I don’t enjoy tragedies, so when I’m rating books I don’t take into account how good of a tragedy it is. And *Fat Vampire* (Adam Rex) is a tragedy so it gets rated the same as other tragedies, but it’s bad. It’s a bad tragedy. Also, somehow the ending is more homophobic than the rest of the book. Which is kind of impressive. It is one of the worst books I’ve ever read. The first half is bad and funny, so at least I had things to say about it. But the second half is bad and not funny. I don’t read books this bad unless there are unusual circumstances. I don’t understand how Rex turns it around and writes one of the best books I’ve ever read 3 years later. I guess this is a romance and a tragedy strung along by jokes. And Cold Cereal is an adventure and a comedy. And Rex is a lot better at one of those things than the other. I don’t think this book would have been published if it wasn’t in the middle of the Twilight movies coming out.

Rex is not doing that in this book. He does in some of his other books, but in this book everyone is screwed up and they’re only hurting each other.

There’s a whole paragraph in here about how he’s not homophobic he just thinks there are too many gay characters in comic books these days. This is the main character, ostensibly a 15-year-old in 2010. Who used the f-slur to describe umbrellas earlier in the book. To Rex’s credit, we made it half way through the book before there was a “lesbian porn” joke, so that’s better than some things. I just. I thought this was supposed to be about vampires why are the characters debating the quality of Neil Gaiman’s comics?

Sorry for spam-posting. I’m just trying to cope with this book. I’m not even half-way through. I might just go to bed.

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’m howling. I’m now reading to see how bad this can get. The insane thing is that Rex did characters well in Cold Cereal Saga. Two years later and he can write characters super well. But in 2010 he thinks normal flirting is asking for help with Linux. (This is not like an especially nerdy girl. The guy is established as a nerd. But the girl is described as a theater girl. Maybe 2010 was just a different time.) There’s a lot more I could say I’m not getting into everything. I’m so bored of the book at this point, nothing has happened. But I don’t have my computer and I kind of want to finish it now so that I can rate it, because it’s on track for like 2 stars.

that better? The main character’s attempts at flirting are so bad that the best case outcome is that he comes out as gay.

Bare minimum context: I’m reading *Fat Vampire* by Adam Rex. The central conflict of the book is that the main character, a vampire, needs blood. But for unexplained reasons sucking the blood from someone is a sex act and the main character is very homophobic.

He introduces 5 characters in 60 pages and all of them are insane.

That post is long, but the rest of their posts are short. Someone else creating a Thoughts page. Although they may fall outside of a standard deviation of the mean.

> Freedom is a concept. Freedom from wanting to be free. > Freedom to experience. Freedom to experience confinement. > Freedom from the concept of freedom. > The rain sings songs of longing as it hurls itself towards the hard rock asphalt. The heat from the road evaporates blissfully with each drop of moisture. Each drop of molecule, a world within itself, experiencing the bliss of being a drop of water, embracing the the heat of beingness.

My computer is in the shop so I'm using a web terminal on a computer that I can't install things on.

My problems are inside my own head

scrape 4 stars. Probably 3 though. Very good as far as books go, just not my style.

my thought, and not the other way around.

, but nested infinitely. So you see the headline on Reddit or HN, but clicking comments shows another list of headers ("Jokes", "Off topic", "Refutations", "Context", etc). (And then maybe you click a joke and it has sub-threads for "more jokes" or "anecdotes.") The obvious con being that most posts don't have enough to say about them for that to make sense. But it would theoretically help me navigate the conversation in the direction I want, and avoid some of the frustration that comes as a result of the comment section taking the conversation a completely different direction than I want.

a translation making sense.

And today I open my computer and it's working fine, no issues with the screen. No joke I have lived without a tenth of my screen for 3 months, and as soon as I make an appointment it fixes itself. It'll probably break again in a minute.

But a part is jan Tepo, who is apparently active in the toki pona kulupu (community), but who I on follow on Twitter because of their work on iSH (an emulated Linux terminal device for iOS).

My brain hurts so much and I've learned like "pona" and "sona." Here, let me try to say, "I'm learning toki pona": "mi sona toki pona." Woohoo! I'm so good. Edit (Apr 10, 2022): That translation is wrong, it should be "mi sona e toki pona"

I'm typing this from Firefox. But like nothing fixes the fact that my screen is physically broken. I feel like I'm surrounded on all sides by pain and bugs.

I hate the web. Quizlet is literally unusable without an adblocker. I don't get it. How is that good for business? Is it that hard to load a single ad?

I think not having the ability to support any "normal" software and expecting everything to be designed as an integrated part would actually be really interesting. That's what Apple software is supposed to be but in practicality that advantage is lost by the time you're using Vivaldi and and Atom and Python. In particular, what leads to 95% of bugs in software is the exponential number of configurations. Every setting increases the number of possible combinations of settings exponentially. So if I didn't have any settings and only had to support one configuration—my configuration. I think I could eliminate a large number of bugs. Of course, it's next to impossible to get there, but that's a different point.

The Orion people are like, 'let's make a web browser that's exactly like Safari.' And it's like, so buggy. I'm not trying to diss them here. I think that's a great goal and I think that that should be achievable. But it's really not. Like, what is this? Why is there a black bar here?

It just looks painful. This guy's like 'I think this app should look like the Notes app did in OS X Lion.' Okay. No one else agrees with you, I'm sorry.

suprisingly difficult. I want to be indexed, right, for that sweet, sweet O(log n). And there like theoretically are libraries to do it for you. But I search for “GEB” and get posts about “Algebra.” And I have to figure out how to update the index when I make a new post and it’s kind of a mess. I might just throw away the index and say O(2000) is fine. Because it would be. But the binary search!

Instantly 🅱️illed the meme.

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.

people would ask me, "Matthias, why do you get here so early." And would reply to the effect of "because otherwise I would always be late." And I was right. Routine really was the only thing keeping me on the tracks.

Oh yeah, I made a Rigby post earlier today with something I had posted here.

friendly" is hard. Really hard. And like, that's the criteria. For whether your software actually gets used.

I quote: > No NOT use eval() > Executing JavaScript from a string is an BIG security risk. > With eval(), malicious code can run inside your application without permission. > With eval(), third-party code can see the scope of your application, whitch can lead to possible attacks. Okay; so, I try to avoid mocking English-second-language speakers on here, it's one of my off-limits topics. And I don't know the context of the person who wrote that. But read that excerpt again out loud. Yeah. And this is published content acting as an authority on the subject. I expect better from this page than from a random person or internet comment. The MDN's page is a little long-winded, I'll admit. There are some phrases in the middle of the MDN's description that could be misleading. But there's so much more useful information in there. Performance, comparisons to `JSON.parse` and `new Function`, the behavior when `eval` is given a non-string object. Etc. Like, I don't know how to respond to people on HN that are just wrong. > [W3Schools is] criticized by the vocal newbies who are chasing the newest and shiniest. Really? Then why is there an open letter from 2011 saying that "their faulty information is a detriment to the web"? => https://web.archive.org/web/20110412103745/http://w3fools.com/ Which has since been rescinded because W3School has improved on the addressed issues. => https://w3fools.com (They went from not mentioning that eval could be harmful to "No NOT use eval()".) I don't get it.

=> https://youtu.be/u6WV6z6KPD8?t=774

you clearly have never designed a website for an IE version before 9. Oh no! Safari's IndexDB implementation isn't spec-compliant (as of 2016). I have to use a library to store large amounts of data persistently on my user's devices. My website can't send phone users background notifications! What ever will I do‽ And Firefox gets a pass because they invented tabs 10 years ago.

stuff, feature support or some weird bug or something. But the anecdotes give you gold like: > [Firefox] was quick, it was simple, it was much more standard-compliant, and absolutely none of that mattered. > No, Firefox really got a foothold because it had tabs. IE 6 did not have tabs; if you wanted to open a second webpage, you opened another window… > Firefox wasn’t the first tabbed browser, of course; the full Mozilla Suite’s browser had them, and the obscure (but scrappy!) Opera had had them for ages. But it was Firefox that took off, for various reasons, not least of which was that it didn’t have a giant [censored] ad bar at the top like Opera did. In 2021, talking about why Firefox is losing marketshare, no one points out that the reason it gained market share in the first place was tabs. Like. That's very interesting to me. => https://eev.ee/blog/2020/02/01/old-css-new-css/

=> https://eev.ee/blog/2020/02/01/old-css-new-css/

I’m almost angry at the AO3 authors paring Mira/Jace. You’re wrong and you do not understand the characters the way I do. Mira/Cole is still my OTP.

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.)

=> https://www.unite.ai/training-computer-vision-models-on-random-noise-instead-of-real-images/

any money from me I'd run in the other direction. I own Minecraft from before Microsoft bought it. I use Atom as one of my main editors. They own Electron, of course, which I can't escape from. And of course, Github. But I would stop using any of those if Microsoft tried to make a penny off of me.

particularly like it. But if you look at time to start, cross-platform availability, and syntax highlighting in a variety languages, Vim has Atom beat by a factor of 2 it feels like. And those are the only constraints I care about. Vim does lose major points for not supporting normal Mac keyboard shortcuts. Maybe I'll make a list of Matthias' Requirements for the Perfect Text Editor.

I don’t know, like this site is where I want it to be for myself, but if I want someone else to run, or it I was going to run it for somewhere else, I’d target a different set of features. Like, not add additional features but remove features like Gemini support or tweak settings. Maybe I’ll open-source it as is, with a heck ton of disclaimers, so people can take inspiration from it but like, I’m not giving you setup instructions because you should make your own site.

Not tonight though. I’m about 2/3 through it, just got to chapter 19.

I’m like halfway through the book. Don’t get me wrong, it’s great. But it’s like so unrealistic that it is breaking my immersion. Like full on, hacker girl protected by an international online anonymous decentralized organization. Private organization that makes money selling sex drugs which it uses to finance city operations so that they can be spared from the theft of taxation. But it’s not like he intro’s with that. The world building is very good. You’re like a quarter of the way through before he describes “congenital pseudofeline morphological disorder” and you have to realize, wait. This is just an excuse to introduce cat-girls.

Did you know that `func.bind(null, a)` doesn't set the `this` value to `null` if the function already has a bound `this` value; it won't overwrite it.

Reading an /r/WritingPrompts thread that alludes to fricking Roko's Basilisk. And I'm cursed in that I know what that is. And I know that Elon Musk and Grimes met because of it. And I can't take this. My mind is a network of ideas and all I do is run this O(n^2) operation to look for links between them and it gets harder and harder. But I'm also more and more likely to find links which makes it so much more satisfying. I'm addicted.

I get it, you think you're a terminal-based editor. Here's the thing. The single biggest frustration for me getting used to the terminal was that the mouse did nothing. And in 2021, terminals support mice. For `vim`, sure, there's some random backward compatible reason. But Neovim and Nano aren't supposed to be bogged down in that. Your system will have a POSIX compatible `vi`. If someone's opening Nano it's because they want a better experience than that. I'm extremely disappointed.

Add `set mouse=a` to your "~/.vimrc" for vim, or to "~/.config/nvim/init.vim" for neovim to persist this setting. I cannot comprehend why this is off by default. They have support! It's compiled in most of the time? Why not turn it on? Also! If your "vim for beginners" tutorial starts with "use hjkl to move around" instead of "use `set mouse=a` to turn on the mouse," you need to make sure that you are very clearly disclaiming that you are teaching a harder way of doing things in exchange for incredibly small productivity gains that will be realized years in the future, if ever.

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.

Here, what if you wanted to create an infinite loop if x was less than 5, and not run your code if x was greater than or equal to five. `while (x < 5) {…}` You couldn't do that in one line, you would need to store the result of `x < 5` into a variable outside the loop. There's no way to tell the language, "evaluate this expression once, please." In that sense, `while` loops are a kind of macro in that they define a syntax that doesn't exist anywhere else in the language. (And mean, they're not a "macro", that's just a language feature, but it's still interesting.)

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bedsheet around my waist and confuse my roommates.

doesn’t directly pertain to me, for a couple of days at least. No more Twitter, HN, Reddit, Blaseball. I’m never bored anymore.

the price of bitcoin or ETH increasing means that transactions are more expensive. This is also inherit in all systems—more transactions means more computing power needed. So as the price of bitcoin or ETH increases, moving small amounts of cryptocurrency is disproportionately discouraged. This creates a conflict of interest where an increase in web3 users is not always a bad thing. Most of the time, an increase in popularity is good for crypto people, but there is a downside. The thing to watch out for is Crypto becoming a luxury product. In practical terms, this will look like when an asset (that is legitimately "valuable", by some definition of that term) is locked behind a crypto transaction fee that is prohibitively expensive. This is one success pathway for web3. But it's really hard to do that and also prey on people with less money. In order for web3 to succeed in the other sense, where it becomes used more popularly than the web, then the price of ETH and BTC need to go down* so that normal people can actually afford to interact with it. *Of course, people are trying to come up with other solutions, like side-chains or just super low transaction fees, but like, it's basically impossible to avoid richer-people having more control in your decentralized system, which ends up hurting poor people in one way or another. I feel like I'm not explaining myself very well because I'm relying on implicit assumptions that I'm not stating. Hm.

the summer of 2038. Down 24%.

Welcome to, Matthias makes unsubstantiated long term predictions about the future. 2041 seems pretty soon, but that's the way the elections shake out. I feel like it might be closer to 2040: 3rd party, 2044: Republican, 2048: Democrat, 2052: Republican, 2053: War. But that's way too long. Also unclear if it will be a civil war or a world war. I don't think it will last very long. In the case of a world war, 6 years, civil war could be 2 years though.

Update: I can confirm that the second one doesn't work.

like it’s going to be a know baby her sheep. Wow. Okay. So this is where we are. My brain is a network of ideas and connections between them. 12 is a number but is perhaps not the number that it appears to be. Oh my word. Uh

single link from Reddit or Hacker News. I want to read that one article, not sign up for a re-occurring monthly subscription. The issue is that in order to do this, you also have to offer me a good user experience. You can't open a full-screen popup after I've scrolled half-way down the page. It needs to be more pleasant than reading the site with ads (because ads are the other option for monetizing drive-by users.) The thing news companies need to recognize is that they can't do content curation anymore. Like, the music industry did an amazing job in letting Apple sell individual songs for the iPod. We're skipping that for some reason, and trying to jump straight from "buying physical collections" (records, or newspapers) to fragmented subscription marketplaces. Apple Music/Spotify works because a, both platforms have all music, and b, people already know what artists/songs they want to listen to. The news industry right now looks like if the free tier was Pandora with ads, and every record label has their own subscription service. Unfortunately, this is also how streaming video platforms look right now. So I don't have a lot of hope that news will figure out how to fix it.

If nothing mattered, if I were an atheist and a nihilist, I think I would build a tower. Or maybe a tree house. I'd run into the woods somewhere and build a tree house. And I might die but that would be okay because nothing would matter.

nice mix of encapsulation without having to create a dedicated value. What if you had "blocks" as one of the only first-class language constructs. Okay I'm thinking about it more and I think what I'm describing is just a function with scope. But let's re-invent it anyways. So a block defines any variables it needs at the top, and then runs a bunch of code after that. Like counting to 5 would look like ``` {int i; //other variable declarations up here somewhere while (i < 5) { i ++; } } ``` No C-style for loops. Obviously this is weird because what is the {} brackets after the while if not a block? Maybe that is a block with scope? I think we need to be weirder, more fundamental, I don't think the while loop works as-is. But we need some fundamental constructs. How do we call a function? There are no functions, only blocks. Blocks can be nested. Blocks can be nested by name. Oh this gets good. Blocks have a return value. The only 2 types of expressions in the language. Creating blocks and inserting blocks. Blocks can be inserted literally (ie nested) or by name (think, calling a function, but merely referencing a block's name executes its code and returns its value). Blocks have a return value. Variables are nothing but blocks that only return their value. Wait a minute, all variables are functions? Functions are called without parentheses? This is just Haskell. Wait! Ok so the question at this point is just, are blocks values? That is, can I pass a block by value to be executed later in time? Well, that's assuming that blocks are actually functions and that they can take values. Uh. The alternative is saying that there are special `macro` blocks. And what this would do, is that, for example, ``` //option 1, blocks are a 1st-class type: while {x < 5} { console.log x; x = (x + 1); } ``` ``` //option 2, there are special macro blocks while {x < 5} { console.log {x} x = {x + 1}; } ``` So to clarify, in option 2, `{}` are used just like grouping. You can nest them without any consequences. `x = x + {1}` creates a block that returns 1, executes it, takes the value, and adds it to x. For something `while {x < 5}`, `while` is defined as a macro, so the language knows not to execute `x < 5`. In option 1, `{x + 1}` creates a block, always, and only executes it if it is the first thing on the line. So for example `x = {x + 1}` would break, since it would create a block, and then assign x to the block. That is to say, it would be equivalent to the JS `x = (_ => x + 1);` This sounds like LISP. Hm. Hmmmmmm. So the question, really, is when are blocks evaluated. Because in normal languages (JS), functions are values, and they're evaluated when you parens after them. And what I'm trying to do here is hand-wave something, to make these blocks sound like they're not functions, and a lot of that is that you don't put parens after them. So we have to decide when to evaluate a function based on other things. I think option 1 is the way to go. So that a given snippet is unambiguous. Because in option 2, you have to know whether `while` is defined as a macro or not to know how it will evaluate. So to "implement" an example, let's write a Fibonacci generator. (Oh yeah, this should go without saying. If not mentioned (e.g. no functions), assume JS. So we have native lists, objects, strings, booleans, etc.) ``` while = block (conditionBlock, execBlock) {…native code...} if = block (conditionBlock, execBlock) {…native code...} console.log = block (value) {…native code...} etc. values = [0, 1]; while {true} { // Could values.push (values[-1] + values[-2]) in a single line { //Define variables as the first thing in the block lastValue = values[values.length-1]; secondLastValue = values[values.length-2]; values.push lastValue + secondLastValue } console.log values[values.length-1] } ``` This is kind of a boring example because everything just works. The key thing to recognize, that makes this radically different from JS, is that the first block on each line in implicitly executed. And that's the only way to execute blocks. Which makes this language literally unusable because there's no way to get the return value of a block. (e.g. `.push {add a b}` would push an unevaluated block on to the end of the list.). So I'll need to go back to the drawing board, but not tonight.

of writing a sentence? I don't think it would care.

Because if you Google “goat height,” it gives you the Wikipedia page for Pygmy goat. Googling “duck height” gives you the height of the tallest ever duck, 30 inches. And now since Google is an authority, people are using and defending those numbers. I’m having none of it. Pygmy Goat height and Indian Runner Duck height is completely irrelevant to the conversation. I mean a normal duck and a normal goat. And if you think my definition of a duck is wrong, you can argue with me, but don’t pull in Google’s Wikipedia scraping algorithms to do it.

When I say Universalism, I mean attempting to bifurcate the word into things that are true and untrue, in the philosophical sense, but also in a more practical sense. I think about things that are "popular" or "unpopular" or "known" or "unknown" or "good" or "bad" or "meaningful" or "meaningless," by some objective, universal criteria. Like, maybe the formula for determining whether someone is a good person is lenient. But it's hard. Because I want to be a "good" person in some un-arguable way. And I really want my life to be "meaningful" in some objective sense.

have to worry about that.

And the reply is 'what scientific evidence is there for reincarnation?'

I stand by that length, the About page, like this website in general, is supposed to be a little awkwardly long. But man, it is awkward to read.

Life is a finite cube. I am a red pulsing box. The end of the age may come soon, but probably will not. There is only doom.

You'll be glad to know I consulted Merriam-Webster for the correct usage of `et al.` there.

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.

*Maybe* in Java if you can switch on the values of an Enum, that's kind of nice. And of course I love pattern matching in functional languages. But C-style switch statements are ugly. (I think they're only there because some instruction sets have assembly instructions for switching, but I hope you'd never have to worry about that.)