No functional language survives first contact with the user.
This is part of what makes React, or even Elm, so appealing. The functional bits are super useful for say, describing UI elements.
But while React handles updating okay, it struggles with updating dynamically from user input.*
* The example here is a textbox, a button, and a div, and anything entered into the textbox shows up in the div when the button is pressed. JS, piece of cake.
```js
document.querySelector("button").addEventListener("click", evt => {
document.querySelector("textarea").textContent = document.querySelector("textarea").value;
});
```
React,* Elm, the examples aren't worth including here. They're too long.
*You could golf a React example to a similar length as JS, because React *is* JS. You can access another component in the global scope and call .setState on it. But that's not idiomatic React, that's using React to render and writing JS same as you normally would. React, according to the docs and "good practice," state/information should never flow down, and should never flow sideways. This is an example designed to force React to flow state info sideways, but that's not something React is good at. Here's the React example: https://ourjseditor.com/program/VVr6PE. I haven't written one for Elm, that would take too long with my current knowledge of Elm.
Idris pulls types into the main scope, which is something that I avoided with Thu. But I still treat Types very dynamically in Thu, kind of adding dynamic operators to the type scope.
More selected messages from the 9front IRC (#cat-v)
13:45 <cinap_lenrek> motion control, like a CAR?
13:45 <cinap_lenrek> a TRAIN!
13:45 <taw9> I have four Beckhoff servo drives, the fc7502 card to talk to them and three servo motors.
13:45 <user51> a plane?
13:45 <Ori_B> cinap_lenrek: hahaha, so, yesterday on gridchat, someone wanted to try making trains run on plan9.
Please explain #cat-v on Freenode to me. What does it mean to solder a unix pipe?
05:50 <user51> when i was a kid i soldered a pipe between pcie slot and cpu pins because i didnt know how unix pipes worked.. i called the the pipe express
05:50 <user51> now that we have json requests i dont need to solder anything anymore :)
I want a service like a server, except I just give them a binary and they run it 24/7. And they have a database and handle port forwarding
and stuff. In particular, I want this to be so easy to use that I can create a binary, give it to a tech-questionable friend, and have them upload it and have it just work.
Self-hosting is one of the things that makes the internet great. But hosting these days requires either code or messing with web server configs or else using a template provided by some website generator.
Firefox uses `.columnNum`. Chome and Safari use `.column`. Why? It's just not standardized. No one knows what to do.
This is the issue with the web. There are no other issues. All bugs are browser compatibility bugs. If there was one browser, there would be no issues with Javascript.
It is 2020 and the specification is just like, eh. Who cares. No one uses the web anyways.
How sweet the love of the God of love.
How sweet the mercy of Justice.
How sweet the taste of certainty.
The confidence of knowing the Lord.
The taste of an ancient faith.
An ancient faith, alive, new, and fresh in me.
An ancient God, young to me.
His wisdom overwhelming my naivety.
Javascript deserved so much better than this. Such a beautiful syntax, beautiful type system. Alternatives like ReScript exist.
People understand what JS could have been. ReasonML, ReScript, or TypeScript. It's JS syntax, dynamic typing, but well-defined and strictly typed. Super clean and polished. JS is so ugly. It's tearing at the seams.
But I can't in good conscience write one of these languages which is going to be transpiled to OCaml that is going to be transpiled to Javascript.
Made some changes to the website, most visibly the date format. Explanation below
The purpose of including a date is to provide context.
Rather than provide the time in the client's (your) timezone, I provide the time it was for me when I posted it, and my timezone. This means that if you want to figure out the time I posted it in your timezone, you can do that. But more importantly, if I post something at 2 a.m., you can see that it was 2 a.m. for me when I posted it.
Unfortunately, the formatting on the date/time is bad. It's verbose and ugly. Trust me, I tried. I have spent 2 days trying to find a date+time format that is human readable and concise, and none exist. I'm trying to communicate too much information.
Aria Buckles is my second favorite (former+current) KA employee right now.
She's lurking #khanacademy on Freenode, she's maintaining simple-markdown, she's still alive. That's almost Matthias levels of dedication, considering she hasn't worked at KA for like 3 years.
Grant Sanderson is always #1, I'm sorry.
One of the things I tried to do with Thu was type-check at run time. The most interesting things about Julia is that it actually does this.
Type-checking at run-time is this thing that sounds really random and totally useless. In most compiled languages, the types are used to compile and then thrown away. Shouldn't there be a way to get benefit from types at runtime? This is one of the things that I noticed, and that frustrates me about OO languages. (A more detailed description of this problem can be found in the [Thu design document](https://ourjseditor.com/program/S5ShEy), under "Problem 2".)
It was very cool to see Julia identify the same issue that I had identified. I watched, in particular, [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kc9HwsxE1OY) video (which unfortunately assumes knowledge of Julia). The solution that Julia implements is called Multiple Dispatch, and it's not specific to Julia. Multi-dispatch is similar to function overloading, except that instead of doing Java-style logic to decide the type of an object, the type is determined, and matched against, at run-time.
It was also very cool to be able to compare my solution to that of multiple dispatch and Julia. I really like OOP, it's something that is relatively intuitive (as far as programming concepts go), and something that I've been using for a while. So Thu was definitely designed around OOP paradigms. While this has the obvious advantage of allowing you to write object oriented code, it means that the language probably wouldn't be able to take advantage of the looser type system. People would just end up writing OO code in Thu.
Julia doesn't try to allow OO code. It seems to take after a functional language much more. Using functions instead of methods is what allows multiple dispatch to be powerful. You can write functions that match on the object type instead of defining those functions as a method of that object. So instead of `Integer.add()` and `Float.add()` you just call `add` and it does the right thing, switching behavior to handle different types correctly. In this way, multiple dispatch allows for code re-use.
Lastly, I want to point out that I have never written so much as a line of Julia. This is purely a ~~academic~~ recreational exploration.

Edit 2021-05-01: I ended up with a space in my base64, so this didn't display as an image. I have trimmed it so that you don't have to see all the base64 data as text.
I would like to use the name Matthias on the internet, and since Matthias is fairly uncommon, you'd think I could get away with it.
Probably the most well known "Matthias" is a YouTuber. His popularity is the biggest thing that makes me hesitate when committing to using "Matthias" as a name on the internet. Ironically, his birth name is Matthew, and he goes by "Matthias" because "Matthew" is too common. Imposter Matthias stealing the uniqueness of my birth name!
It’s difficult to describe how awful the passcode entry field in settings on iOS is.
People have muscle memory for their phone passwords. The buttons are a weird shape and are in a different place on the page, for no noticeable advantage.
I would like to be an artist.
I have decided.
I feel unfulfilled writing code for its own sake.
Maintaining a web of wires, connecting me to myself.
Tying me down.
Uncreative. Unfulfilled.
I would like to be a designer.
Not a builder.
Not merely an inventor, or a problem solver,
or a go-getter, or a hamster on a wheel.
Creating for others' sake.
Original. Beautiful.
I would like to be something more.
Than me.
The logic is raw.
I lack meat. I lack skin.
I am bones and joints—a skeleton.
Code without art.
"Twice and counting" is
Just incredible.
Just amazing.
When I hear that a task is difficult, because it has never been done before,
I think,
but. "Twice and Counting" was the first.
The first piece of poetry to flow from the thought of a can
on a mat.
I snapped and installed Rectangle, a "window manager" for macOS.
My understanding is that window managers on Linux actually manage windows—Rectangle just lets me bind keyboard shortcuts to snap windows into positions.
Mark Rober feels like he should be an Middle school science teacher. His stuff is entertaining and technically correct, but it's so shallow.
That's kind of what you have to do when you're doing science for a mass appeal audience. In some ways it's very similar to Mythbusters (which I love). Both understand the scientific method, understand the science behind what they're doing, and are doing original science.
But their goal, first and foremost is to be entertaining. Since I can tell that, it makes the science less appealing.
Mythbusters didn't have to compete with the internet; Mark Rober has to compete with Youtubers are doing much better science (if less fun).
I've been watching a lot of magic recently, just like clips on Youtube. It's really frustrating how non-existent explanations of tricks are.
Don't be thinking 'oh yeah that's the point of magic.' I know that obviously. But as someone who wants to know everything, I still want to know how the trick is done. I don't want to spoil it for other people, and I don't mind admitting that was fooled originally. But I would like to know how it's done.
It's like a joke. When I hear a joke, I find it funny, I laugh, and then I remember the setup and the punch line. So I could tell that joke later, or if someone else later tries to tell me the joke. Most people when they hear a joke do not try to memorize it. In the same way, I would like to see the magic trick, be surprised and amazed, and then memorize how it it's done.
And most magicians aren't supremacists, hiding their secrets, but they're performers. There's no reason for them to reveal the trick. And the people who develop magic tricks are trying to sell them. They don't want to tell you how they're done (unless you pay money).
1. Dark themed
2. Assumed to not be maximized—content is constrained to a short horizontal line length.
3. Predictable content displaying mechanisms.
4. Displayed content is non-interactive
I think I may be in love with Dark. It's **so powerful**. So little boiler plate. 100% functionality. The Dark website is bad, don't listen
to it. They seem to think that Dark is a language, when it's a whole platform. "Build in Dark" should be "Build on Dark." They're hosting everything for free. It's insanity. I spent what, 8 hours on this website? I could have done it in half that with Dark, no joke. And it would have SSL.
People will be like, oh *X* language isn't that bad and then I'll find out you close `case` blocks with `esac` or some trash.
That's actually bash BTW. You close `if` blocks with `fi` and `case` blocks with `esac`. Insanity.
People defend JavaScript, and I have to be like, um, JS is objectively a bad language. I love JS, it's my favorite, but it's bad.
I watched the piece of art that is *Frankenstein Island* (1981) last night. Highly recommend.
I mean, it was bad. Really bad. But I’m pretty happy with it—it wasn’t as bad as I expected. It was like a high school play. Zero production value, zero acting skills, but somehow entertaining. It was like one of my Minecraft videos, but with less talking.
IRC is funny. I think it's in an Eternal September phase, where it's used by people that are desperate for software support, and senior devs.
I set up the The Lounge a little bit ago, which is an IRC client server, it connects to IRC servers for you and store messages, so that you get a traceback like a modern app. This is legitimately one of my problems with IRC. I don't want to have to leave an IRC client open, I don't use IRC at all. I just want to pop in and check it everyone once in a while.
“The problem with catboy culture is that it tries to erase dogboy culture and detract from it whereas dogboys have no choice but to be aware of and surrounded by catboy culture. it’s very unfortunate and exhausting to live in a catboy-geared society as a dogboy when no one will acknowledge that dogboys are the ones holding all the pieces together.”
Jon Bois just published the last chapter of 20020. Absolutely beautiful.
I highly recommend checking it out, even if you haven't read or didn't like 17776. Jon understand what I might call "art." The beauty of being human, of imperfections.
He lets us peak at his morality and worldview, which I don't agree with (but that's a longer Thought), but it doesn't take away from the story.
https://www.sbnation.com/secret-base/21410129/20020
So I have a long term goal of passing the Twitter user currently named carlita_express in number of Tweets.
Obviously, I’m now using this site instead of Twitter. The question becomes, do I get to count these as “Tweets” for the purpose of this goal?
At the time I made [that goal](https://twitter.com/Matthias_4910/status/1135757530406146048), I was on pace to overtake him, but he has accelerated his tweeting.
People for some reason think that ultra minimalistic or old fashioned themes ‘allow you to focus on the content’
If you’re obnoxious in your minimalism, or your lack of styling, just like anything else, that distracts from the content. The medium is the message. You cannot escape.
I can only conclude that having 2.5 billion dollars changed Notch.
2012 (after he's stopped working on Minecraft, but is still at Mojang), he says "every character and animal in Minecraft is homosexual because there’s only one gender to choose from. Take THAT, homophobes!"
2017 he says, "If you're against the concept of a #HetrosexualPrideDay, you're a complete ******* **** and deserve to be shot."
He's said some stuff on Twitter that I don't agree with, but moreover, the way that he says it is so tactless. He doesn't post often enough on Twitter about himself for me to be able to judge him well.
"Is it in our nature to want to sacrifice ourselves to the wringer in order to win?"
There is a beauty in 'stop worrying and love the bomb' that is not pure, but a combination of a number of human instincts. I do not yet fully understand it.
10: "David Attenborough energy. I like it."
Juice: "is that the set it and forget it guy"
I'm dying here, Juice, "Set it and forget it" is the motto of the Showtime Rotisserie & BBQ, created by Ron Popeil. David Attenborough is a voice actor famous for nature documentaries. How? Jon? Please?
Back in 2016ish, I wrote 6,000 words of a book. The plot hinged around a huge game. I found out about Jon Bois years later.
I understood when writing *TAOM* how a game could provide sufficient motivation to push a story forward, and could create conflict without necessitating evil. In many ways, this sort of conflict (that doesn't threaten the fate of the world) is much more similar to the kinds of conflicts normal people face in our every day lives. The characters can have emotional responses to the conflict of the game, and in some ways, these responses seem more real.
Most people, and most authors, do not understand the way that games link to stories. They think that the value in a game is only in being interactive, or else in being physically impressive. What Jon Bois understands is that any time you have a game, you have a story. Jon Bois has dedicated his life to telling stories about games, historical, modern, and fictional. He's found incredible stories from seemingly inconsequential moments in sports, and he's used sports to tell incredible stories about humans.
I didn't realize how similar this was to my own goals with *TAOM* until *20020*. *20020* is just a story about a fictional game, and I think this is the first time Jon has done that. *The Tim Tebow CFL Chronicles* went for humor, *17776* tried to do a lot with big themes of human nature, and with everyone else, Jon Bois has pretended to be informative, more than just a story.
*I highly recommend reading 20020, a story about a game (that includes footballs, I don't want to mislead you by calling it a "football game"): https://www.sbnation.com/secret-base/21410129/20020*
Reddit is a shell of its former self. The more people you have trying to get in on an inside joke, the less complicated it can be.
Reddit won't let 69,420 die; the meta-meme "haha funny sex/weed number" has been incorporated into the original joke by people who don't understand satire, and who now use it un-ironically.
I am ***** and I am the author 5 books and a professional journalist and the best I can do to describe my main character is "brown and ugly." But "I have many, many people who are my friends in real life who are darker-skinned than I am."
He has apologized profusely and I believe him that he was 16 and didn't know what he was doing but it doesn't make it less funny.
"Smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better than the other way around." Context and analysis below the fold
The line before is "especially in languages like C that don't naturally do dynamic typing."
I think this idea is key. I'm frequently caught up in the strict/dynamic typing conflict. But the key is "smart" typing. Type checking things that need to be type-checked. Creating standard interfaces that allow for code re-use. Not checking properties that aren't important.
Source is still The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Eric S. Raymond, http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/ar01s04.html
> Although debugging requires debuggers to communicate with some coordinating developer, it doesn't require significant coordination between debuggers. Thus it doesn't fall prey to the same quadratic complexity and management costs that make adding developers problematic.
- The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Eric S. Raymond, http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/ar01s04.html
I use Reddit in part out of nostalgia for 2016 me_irl, which was just amazingly high quality. 2020 Reddit is trash.
3 types of Redditors today:
- Doesn't care, wants some memes; Low effort content creation or re-posting.
- Compares everything to the ideal meme, nothing matches up. Tries to start new, obscure memes, but no one else is on board.
- Remembers good memes, knows today's memes aren't as good. Oh well.
"I use vape so it only contain nicotine as harmful substance not any other things"
This fool is like 'oh yeah, nicotine's addictive, I'm addicted to my vape.' And you're a kid. That's a *bad thing*. I don't care if it doesn't kill you, I still wouldn't want to be addicted to anything.
I cannot work with a modern web stack I cannot do it. I change my code, it works until I create a production build.
YOU CANNOT DEBUG MINIFIED PRODUCTION NPM PACKAGE CODE THERE'S NOTHING THERE.
I deleted ALL OF MY CODE. And rebuild and refresh, and it STARTS WORKING. WHERE IS IT GETTING THE CODE FROM?
Lastpass updated and a) the annoying girl is gone, 10/10, and b) there's an option to show my master password, 10/10
*Now why, Matthias, would you want to show your master password?*
Well, it's secure, which means it's very long and difficult to type in, so I frequently mess it up. Being able to visually check it (when I'm alone in my room) saves me time and prevents me from being locked out of my account for too many incorrect password attempts (yes this has happened to me multiple times).
It is difficult for me to describe how painful it is for me to work with a modern web stack.
It feels like I'm playing operation, like the debug tools just aren't there yet and I'm poking blindly into a beast. There are so many layers on top of normal JavaScript to create errors, because I don't understand them.
Statistics depress me. I can handle failure. But quantifying my failure gets to me.
I don’t make things for other people, I make things for myself, for me to enjoy. And if I don’t think about other people’s reaction, then I’m fine. But if you tell me, ‘that thing you made, 2 people like it,’ that hurts. I just want people to like the things that I like and appreciate the things that I do. In my life I’ve probably made 10 things that have made more than 100 people happy, and they are all Khan Academy programs. I just don’t exist. I live in this bubble and I can make the bubble better for myself indefinitely, but I need validation from the outside world to confirm that what I’m doing matters.
I once said, everything that you want in this life you have to fight for. And that applies to other people liking your content. You can’t just make cool things and expect other people to spontaneously like them. You have to force them upon people until they have to like them. You can’t expect people to subscribe to content they enjoy, you have to ask them to subscribe at the start of every video. You can’t expect people to come searching for content, you have to advertise it. And I don’t mean advertise so that they know about it, I mean market it as the greatest thing ever. You can’t just make something that people want to use.
OurJSEditor has 13 stars on GitHub. I spent 4 years of my life for a dozen people to look at OJSE and go, ‘that’s neat’ and then never use the website again.
I’ve considered adding a views counter to this website, but I’m sure it would only depress me. I add a little bit of friction by not using Twitter, and suddenly no one cares.
In my mind I’m special, and people should care about the things that I make merely because I made them. I don’t like everything. I like few things. So in my mind, me liking something makes it special and other people appreciate it as well. ‘Oh this is the thing Matthias likes’ or ‘Oh I’m going to go play the game Matthias made.’ I put a lot of work into it. I think my game is fun. That doesn’t matter. People aren’t going to play it if they don’t like it.
For a lot of my life I do not share things that I like, as a general rule. Conversations just go better that way, 90% of the time. But there’s a point where that wears on me. Where it hurts to not be able to relate to others.
And then even if someone expresses some interest, it’s not uncommon for me to jump at them and go off. The reply is usually ‘oh I’m not that much of a fan, IDK’
This is all very informative. I’m learning. Hopefully at some points in the future I can make something that people like.
The stuff I’m saying here will not be true forever. I will eventually learn how to be happy about things other people like. But it hasn’t happened yet.
On second thought, I understand that not everyone wants the same things I do. It's interesting that that is a fundamental difference in
desires and not a difference in circumstances. You have 2 stoplights and don't need one; that makes sense. You don't want a stoplight? That throws my mind for a loop. It makes me uncomfortable. I start questioning whether I should want a stoplight, or else if you *should* want a stoplight.
Norma McCorvey, the Roe from Roe v. Wade is a legend. It's impossible to describe her in an unbiased way because she was so chaotic.
Just when I'm like, it can't get more wack, it does. Summaries are like, 'Norma's first child was raised by Norma's mom' and then you read the story and Norma's mom kidnapped her granddaughter and tricked Norma into signing adoption papers.
"At the age of 10, Norma robbed the till at a gas station and ran away with a girlfriend. They took a motel room in Oklahoma City, but were caught when a maid walked in on the two girls kissing and reported them to the police." What am I supposed to do with this information?
I can't even get into the fact that the pro-life movement claims that she was pro-life and the pro-choice movement claims that she was pro-choice. She made many statements supporting both positions.
She was lesbian, except for the 3 times she got pregnant, and the 20 years that she lived in the same house as her female best friend, platonically of course, because she was a Roman Catholic and had publicly denounced homosexuality.
I am never doing ads. We're not doing it. Ads are giving up the art of development in favor of monetization.
Specifically putting someone else's image, that they have designed, inside of your content that you have designed, seems dumb. They end up competing and it hurts both.
Sponsored content, where you're designing some aspect of your content (for someone else in exchange for money), make more sense.
While we're on the topic of Penrose, he won the Noble prize in Physics yesterday (for unrelated work on black holes).
I was a Penrose fan before it was cool! Woot woot!
And while we're here, shoutout to [@Ayliean](https://twitter.com/Ayliean/status/1313450440269475843), who introduced me to Penrose's work. Here's her video on a similar topic: https://youtu.be/uAfEVtYGfkM
Alone, but for the sun. The sky hangs above, and the dirt hangs below, and the grass flies up between them.
The clouds drift in the currents of the sky, sitting in a field of blue. The wind pulls and stretches and whisks the fluff into strands and swirls, which adorn the dome above.
The ground sweeps away, rolling forward in all directions, moving inexorably towards the horizon.
Heat falls from the sun, sharply and flying into the grass.
There is more, and yet, nothing more.
Grian: It is very important to not leak the location of the secret base.
*immediately shows bedrock*
It's not common knowledge that you can find locations in the world from bedrock patterns, but I am always surprised when I know something that a professional Minecraft YouTuber doesn't.
Okay, 5 minutes and some Googling later, a bunch of nerds have already found the coords, this is old news. I love the internet.
Thinking about the Dream/Technoblade fight again following my binge of Mr. Beast's videos.
Knowing more about Mr. Beast allowed me to say with more confidence what I originally chalked up to poor editing. Mr. Beast is incredibly hungry for attention. He gives money to people because the reaction of the people, the attention he gets from it, is worth more to him that the money is. The lie Mr. Beast tells you is that his videos are about the contestants, the participants. The videos are about Mr. Beast.
This isn't a problem, when the contestants are random people, that's perfectly fair. That's true for any gameshow—you're there for the host and the questions, who the contestants are doesn't matter. But when that one guy that was amazingly good shows up on Jeopardy and breaks the game, Jeopardy doesn't shut him down. Alex (the host, I think. I'm not looking things up), is good enough to roll with that. When Technoblade starts makes jokes in Mr. Beast's video, that gets edited out. And that's bad editing sure, but that's also Mr. Beast's fault (even if Mr. Beast isn't editing the video).
It is absolutely striking to compare Mr. Beast with Improv Everywhere.
So I've been super antisocial the last day or so, and I've been binge watching Mr. Beast. I don't like and am not subscribed to Mr. Beast, but some of his prompts, his ideas, are really good. The video style just ends up being more of "Mr. Beast REACTS to stranger that he gave $100" than anything else. And I don't enjoy those reaction-style videos, where a large portion of the content is really the emotional response of Jimmy and Chandler and Tyler, more so than content about what's going on. To me as a viewer, I don't care about the amount of money involved; the money is only there to elicit an emotional response from the people in the video.
(Background for Improv Everywhere. They peaked in fricking 2008, 12 years ago, with a 37M view video. Sure, Mr. Beast gets millions of views on every video, but to get that many views 12 years ago is insanity. The iPhone had come out less than a year ago; Twitter less than two. People didn't have Youtube accounts so the video had like a handful of likes. They didn't build a dedicated audience, because that's something people didn't know how to do on Youtube in 2008.)
On the other hand, Improv Everywhere does some similar prompts. They don't do giveaways. They do public skits/pranks but some portion of their content is the other people in public that are reacting to their stunt. But they very intentionally do not have a "face." If you dig through their stuff you find the guy that leads it at the beginning of most of their videos, but I don't know his name, and they cut all prep time out of some of the more recent ones. Since the stunt isn't giveaway-style, their stunts create audio/visual contrast to the normal. This gives you more time to react to it personally, and imagine what's like to be there. Your experience is much closer to the experience of someone randomly on the street, with the notable exception that you know that it's staged.
Improv Everywhere treats their work like art. Their goal is to do a performance, whereas Mr. Beast is running a gameshow. If Mr. Beast treated his videos like IE does, he and his friends wouldn't have any lines, it would just be classical music over the reaction of someone getting money. I'm not trying to say that's why Mr. Beast is successful—Youtube success is a different question to content-style. I think it's interesting to compare the content of these channels that have similar success in different time periods.
Is there a *single* features it has that JSDelivr doesn't? Is it more ethical? Easier to use? I don't get it. Unpkg was founded 4 years after JSDelivr. How do you look at JSDelivr and say, I *need* to do that in black and white, and then get end up with 50 billion requests a month? ??? ?
Listening to *If I Left the Zoo*. Amazing, past me was a genius...
So Jars of Clay is one of my favorite bands. The problem is that they stopped making music around 2014. So unlike, AJR, where I aggressively collect old AJR without restraint, I restrained myself from binge listening to all Jars of Clay. I have a couple albums in my music, but there are a couple more Jars of Clay albums I've never listened to. One of them is *If I Left the Zoo*, which I just started listening to today. It's very good and it's making me very happy. "Unforgetful You" starts like a Green Day song, quality alt rock.
Matt Parker using "she" to refer to his friend in a video.
What is this? Why are Jame Grime and Einstein are "they" but Eugénie v Tunzelmann is a "she." I don't understand. What are Matt's pronouns? What are pronouns?
Guys, guys, I found my new favorite library a7ul/esbuild-node-tsc
"Please note this library doesnt do typechecking."
It's a Typescript compiler that doesn't do type checking. It just strips out the type symbols and returns JS. 0/10 for practicality. You just throw whatever fricking types in there and this is like, eh, doesn't matter.
Like, wait a minute, JS is loosely typed! We don't actually have to keep track of these types! "blazing fast" builds!
Why do people take drugs? Is the world not perfectly exciting and perfectly boring? Does your body not wrap you up in feelings
which your mind can comprehend and understand but could never create? Does the light not dance along the walls in new ways, ways it never has before? Why must you pretend the light is brighter or newer or more exciting than it is? Is light not perfect and beautiful, and the essence of light and energy, without drugs.
Do you need your mind to sleep, to rest? Why not a light sedative then, to help you sleep in your bed? Why do you wish for your mind to sleep while your lips are awake? Does the fear of the consequences of actions without thought not paralyze you?
Everyone wants to be the next Martin Gardner. Everyone wants to do recreational mathematics.
You can't read Gardner, and make a Youtube video, and be the next Gardner. Gardner *invented* recreational mathematics. He found things Mathematics had never heard of and introduced them.
I love Vi Hart and her content, and she introduced me to Gardner. Her following and reputation is deserved. But she's not, and shouldn't be, a famous mathematician. She's making mathematics accessible to the public, but she's not doing new math. The same goes for Numberphile, and 3Blue1Brown, and all the other math Youtube channels.
My concern is that Recreational Mathematics is a "field" of math, and the topics discussed are the same topics that Gardner introduced years ago. Recreational mathematics should be a philosophy of math. Recreational math should be people *doing* math for the fun of it, and right now it is people *learning* about (or else teaching) math for the fun of it.
Matt Parker is one of the few channels that gets this, and Matt makes a point of trying to do new math, for the fun of it. He has made videos responding to 'dumb' questions people have sent in. Questions that *don't matter*, but are still super important in furthering our understanding of math, and demonstrating the mathematic process.
I don't love Google, and I give them a hard time, but I will happily use their products if I have to.
Youtube is great, Google Sheets, Drive, are all good. But I'm not going to use 8.8.8.8 because there are other DNS providers that are just as fast or faster, and I don't need Google knowing what sites I'm visiting. I use DuckDuckGo because their results aren't noticeably worse than Google's. I don't like Material design, as I've said previously, which turns me off from some things. I will use Google Fonts (although I have gripes) and Google Translate is amazing. I use Apple Maps by default, but use Waze when I'm in a hurry, etc.
Google is the big company, and I'm going to support smaller companies when I can. I like to know who is competing with Google, even if it would be easier to use the Google recommended service all the time. But if Google's product is better, I don't have a problem with using it.
Hot dang! Black, bold, large point Helvetica on white.
Normally, the emotional response that comes from seeing something diminishes with repetition. But some letterforms just never get old.
Also, the font stack for this page and OurJSEditor is `Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif`. It's not quite the same here, with less contrast and fewer pixels, but I'm fan.
I know Helvetica is basic and overused, but also, have you seen it?
Fricking quality from SparkNotes, acknowledging Chronicles of Narnia as the iconic piece of literature that it is.
There are like 7 books. Aslan shows up like a handful of times. If you say that the theological references significantly impact your enjoyment of it, you sound like the conservative Christians who won't read Harry Potter because witchcraft is bad.
Tom Scott's videos on there are fine, but Tom is carrying hard. The other computer scientists, they're not good at explaining things in a practical way.
I can't believe people don't love jazz. Jazz is the fricking best genre. Your average jazz is just amazing.
Pop and alt-rock and rap have their outliers, sure, and those outliers are better than jazz. But I'd take an average jazz song over an average pop song any day of the week and twice on Sundays, because Sundays are great for jazz.
This shooting pain in my heart kind of concerns me.
I might be having a heart attack. Then again, I would probably be dead by now, it's been an hour. Maybe it's an hour long heart attack. That would be fun.
I have already significantly violated The Guidelines.
It was for a reason I would argue is reasonable; I made a good faith attempt to follow them. That being said, it was still my fault. I'm still unhappy. If I can turn my life around at this point it is going to very incredibly clutch.
Wow, I just had a weird shapes-are-an-illusion, moment.
Like, I can say I≠l, those are different Ascii characters with different binary representations. But in real life, handwriting, how do I know I've written the correct thing?
There are a lot of shooter games that are 3D-1st person, but it's not universal in other genres. Portal is one of the only 3D-1stP puzzle games, and Minecraft similarly is one of the only sandbox games to use 3D-1stP.
Happening upon trigonometry at a young age, before it is taught, while special, is not impressive.
I asked my 6th grade math teacher for a function that would take a slope and return the number of degrees you would need to rotate a line in order to end up with that slope. (I needed it for a programming project.) She was unable to answer me. I remember looking at a staircase in my middle school, and thinking, this goes up at a slope of 1, and a 45º angle. What's the relationship between those numbers?
It's like, congrats, you've stumbled upon one of the most important fields in math. It's impressive that I was wandering from the curriculum, but stumbling onto trig is relatively unsurprising.
I wish I was a leader.
I wish I could inspire the hopeless, and shed light on great mysteries, and share complex emotions.
I wish I was Steve Jobs; I wish people listened to me.
I am Steve Wozniak. I am alone.
The problem with Mastodon is that it doesn't provide standard flexibility between instances.
All mastodon instances are the same from a technological standpoint, differing only in moderation. And moderation variances are an advantage of the distributed web, sure, but the other advantages are that if I make my own website, I can disable likes or remove the character limit, for instance. As far as I know, I couldn't have forked Mastodon to make this website. And I think it would have been cool if I could have.
I can’t debug config file to save my life. Anytime I’m working with something with config files, be it Django or Apache or Babel/webpack/React, I spend more time struggling with config files then I do writing code.
Compose screen still looks a little weird, like I'm just typing characters into the middle of an otherwise green page
and I have no idea when I'm going to hit 140 characters, but overall I'm very happy with the CSS. While this wasn't mobile-first design per-se, it was definitely designed with the idea that it was going to have to work well on mobile, so no sidebar or anything. I have like 10 color schemes I tried that are commented out in the CSS for you to play with, and I still don't love what I ended up with, but the 3-color CSS variable set up makes it addicting-ly easy to change. It will switch to a dark color scheme with an ugly yellow if your browser requests it, which Vivaldi apparently doesn't, so I'll have to work on that.