Thoughts
This is why I love anecdotes about the past. You read documentation or people connected to the matter, and they're talking about random
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/
I can tell that some of you'll were very bad at the 'split this run-on sentence into two sentences' part of the SAT.
This is said jokingly. Tumblr grammar/style in particular uses the run-on sentence extensively, and I enjoy it.
The reason Gemini needs to be simple is that transferring responsibility for layout (& design & format) to the client means that the
client design needs to be capable of handling *any* semantically possible Gemtext document.
In short, this is reiterating one benefit of Gemini: it is impossible to have a Gemini site that looks bad.
But I had previously argued that this advantage is independent of Gemini's simplicity. That is, I'm imagining an interface (which I've named Actually Flowers) which allows for significantly more complex documents (read: Turing-complete applications) to be created, while not giving those applications any control over their own visual appearance or layout. I'm holding out that it might still be possible to achieve this, but I don't think I appreciated the difficulty of saying: every theoretically possible application has to look good. At some point you have to tackle that problem by limiting the scope of possible applications. Which Gemini does in an extreme sense.
Managed to open this post page in w3m and authenticate. I can't figure out to input text into the textbox. How do people make applications
this bad? I can select the textbox but typing doesn't let me insert and the manual for this app hasn't been updated in years.
This site renders perfectly in Servo, so that's another win for dead-simple websites, and I can check compatibility off my list.
I AM GOING INSANE. I AM GOING INSANE. ALL I WANT IS TO EDIT THE TEXT MYSELF. Saving in sublime auto-formats Zig files and I can’t figure out
how to turn it off. I want to write the code myself. I do not want the editor to write the code for me
Nevermind
Original content was "I think I got banned from HN for posting meta-commentary lol we're rolling boys."
I'm paranoid about being shadow-banned from websites in general, after my experiences on Khan Academy. And I have show-dead on HN on, and there are a lot of people there shadow banned. (If you only post links to your own blog, and never do anything else, you get auto-banned pretty quickly. And those people keep posting links to their own blog, ignorant.)
Anyways, what happened above was that I checked in a private tab if my most recent comment existed pretty quickly after I posted it, and it didn't and I freaked out. It can't have been flagged or downvoted, since I checked quickly. But if you access HN and you're not logged in, you hit a CDN with a cached version of the page. (If you're logged it, it can't cache since it has to put in your username in the top right.) So when I checked again just now my comments showed up, so I think I just needed to give the CDN a minute.
Tabs were a mistake. What is a tab. It doesn’t exist. Unicode has like 500 more invisible characters than it should.
Liberals be like "I'm not a tankie by any means but i've yet to see substantial proof" that the CCP uses wide scale forced labor.
The full exchange (didn't fit in the first line):
"the Chinese Communist Party is holding Uyghurs in concentration camps.”
"I’m not a tankie by any means but i’ve yet to see substantial proof that this is happening on as wide a scale as claimed from a source that isnt Adrian Zenz"
Like, okay, they're only using a little bit of forced labor? Oh, they shut down the re-educations camps when they claimed they did in 2019? You can claim that this is a conspiracy theory by the western media to promote capitalism, but I think that makes you a tankie.
https://micro.blog should be so cool. They were so close. They understand what I’m trying to do here. They’re just charging $5/mo for it.
It's just so f-ing depressing to me that we're never going to fix these bugs. Like this generation is going to grow up with the expectation
that bugs are bugs are just a normal, expected, part of using a computer. And the status-quo is never going to change.
Computers aren't the real world. We can do better. We can be better. Software doesn't have to have bugs, we just need to invest more resources into fixing them.
A lot of my strict adherence to a moral code—I don’t lie, I don’t cheat, I don’t drink, etc. is motivated by ego more than morals.
I stand by the idea that splitting code by type instead of function is a trap that is easy to fall into, but not ultimately helpful.
"Don't compare yourself to other people" means that if you're the best, you should beat yourself up about not being perfect, right?
Matthias's guide to getting started with Blaseball!
0. Decide you want to. Blaseball is a simulation where fake teams, with randomly generated players with made-up names play each other. You interact with Blaseball as a fan, watching games through a minimalistic text format. In addition to the rules of B*seball, there are lots of twists that Blaseball adds. For example, last season, one of my team's pitchers became a terrible batter, before they were killed a few games later. The value in Blaseball comes from being able to interact with other fans, much like being a fan of a normal sports team, but more exciting. Blaseball games are played every hour, Mon-Fri, with a postseason on Saturday, and elections on Sunday. This ensures that there's never a null moment, and there's always something weird going on to talk about.
1. You're convinced? Let's go. Head to https://www.blaseball.com and create an account. Then pick a team. I'm a big fan of picking teams with no information other than the name.
2. Join the official [Blaseball Discord](https://discord.gg/3uFgJhu). Read the rules and all that jazz, find your new team in #choose-your-team, and click it. This gives you access to your team's channels. Introduce yourself, this is your new family. Each team runs their channels slightly differently. For example, most teams have a watch-party-channel for discussing on-going games, but I don't know what the name will be for your team. The Discord is the best resource for up-to-date answers to your questions. Remember, no one else knows what's going on either.
3. As I'm writing this, we're on season 14 of Blaseball, there's a lot of history to get caught up on. I recommend [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQHBzZzaxzI) video for a recap of the first 8 seasons' lore. It's not perfectly up to date, but that shouldn't matter, because no Blaseball re-cap can be, the game just moves too fast. There's an official recap video [here](https://youtu.be/diAHuUV2Meg), that covers through season 11. It was out of date before it was even posted.
4. Watch a Blaseball game. During the season, games are played on the hour, and usually last around 30mins. You can check the [Place Bets](https://www.blaseball.com/upcoming) page for a countdown to the next game. Find where the other fans of your team are watching the on-going games, and cheer a bit.
5. Get to know your players. While watching a game and browsing the Discord for your team, see which players they talk about. The Blaseball Wiki (https://blaseball.wiki, there used to be a Fandom wiki but we don't use that anymore) is lore-based. It has background on every player, like physical descriptions and pronouns. It's put together by fans, through lore chats in the Discord (don't just edit it).
6. Ask your team about mechanics. Blaseball mechanics, like what does Flooding do? or what is the Ego+ perk, are things you can ask about. While they might be mentioned on the Wiki, the Wiki is primarily lore, and our understanding of mechanics is imperfect and changes quickly.
7. Set up your income. This is done on the official Blaseball website in the form of begging, betting, buying snacks, and idoling. The best money-making scheme is re-balanced every season. You don't have to Idol players on your team, and some players have serious perks. Right now, buying slushies is the best, but that's something you can ask about Discord.
8. Explore Blaseball in other ways! Want more background videos? Search Blaseball on Youtube. Want more lore than the Wiki gives? Seach Blaseball on AO3. Want to stay up to without reading message history in Discord? Start following your team on Twitter. Want more interesting live play-by-play? Find someone hosting Blaseball watch parties on Twitch. Blaseball is what you make of it!
Drinking milk directly from the jug is a singular experience, wholly different from drinking from a glass.
The funny thing about Rails is that when I go back to Django I miss the little things.
Like to get a object by ID from the DB in a shell, Rails:
```
$ rails c
> Thing.find(1)
```
Django
```
$./manage.py shell
>>> from app.models import Thing
>>> Thing.objects.get(id=1)
```
Like, why doesn't Django import my models for me?
For some reason when I have Better Touch Tool running, Minecraft freezes for about half a second when I left click.
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.
Quality Reddit content alert: /r/starterpacks has started making ironic and self-referential content.
If it's possible to develop memory-conscious apps in node.js I don't know how.
Also, this is why I haven't released Astronomical Theater
yet, this honestly doesn't surprise me.
The thing to recognize about web3 is that the transactions require transactions fees. Because of the way that the networks currently work,
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.
Spiders are so fricking cool. Like they just full on sew whole nets and we're like, 'heh.' Imagine if another animal started making nets!
I don't even know what I'm procrastinating from doing anymore. I think there was like a form I needed to fill out or something.
Thinking about fractions. Maybe moving entirely to decimal expansions of numbers was a mistake.
People ask me, imaginary people, but still, they ask me, they say, "Matthias, would ever consider a book published with all of your
Thoughts for easy coffee table or bookshelf enlightenment."
Well this is my answer to those imaginary people. No. My Thoughts cannot be squeezed into such a finite and rectilinear medium as a book. Rather, if my Thoughts made the difficult migration to the region of paper, it would be in the shape of a spiral. They would be printed on a single sheet of paper that spiraled back on itself infinitely.
It would further be supplemented with scratch-and-sniff circles dotted at convenient and intentionally chosen intervals, to cement the transition to reality.
The paper itself would be transparent, but that goes without saying, I hope.
I forgot how many times I've changed the colors of this site. Both the light and dark themes have gone through 2 major revisions and at
least a couple minor tweaks.
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.
"We flip the switch, and it releases the bees. *Not the bees!* Yes the bees."
"Your generosity so far also matches exactly an adversaries likely plan to entrap me."
(Spoiler, it was actually an adversary entrapping him. Too late.)
Another example of things that actually happened, but would never be believable in fiction.
I just fricking love body language. Body language gives me an analogue way for me to express how interested I am in talking to you, without
me having to say anything, and with you having the freedom to ignore my body language with complete plausible deniability.
It’s weird to realize that 3Blue1Brown’s Linear Series barely scratches the surface of the concepts in Linear Algebra.
It's creepy to me how similar Death Cab For Cutie and The Decemberists are. Exactly the same sound
So originally, I was planning on turning off pagination before Dec 1, when we start "Winter 2020." But I'm lazy and still long for change,
so I think we'll just roll with it. A fresh start, if you will.
Maybe if you focus on "user experience" too much, you lose sight of the fact that the user isn't trying to have an experience, they're
trying to solve a problem.
If the software is a pair of scissors, it matters more to the user that the blades are sharp than that the handle is comfortable.
Now, if I get @matthias on Discord, that would legendary, and I would be ecstatic about the change to usernames.
We're still doing this.
Nostalgia hit, the first PR I ever opened,
=> https://github.com/Khan/live-editor/pull/585
Guess how old I was at the time.
In a video game, if I make even a small mistake, I die instantly. I for some reason expect life to be the same way.
I haven’t worked in a week. Why haven’t I been fired, run out of money, and starved to death?
I don't know if I have dandruff or if there's stuff falling out of my hair because I'm pulling my hair out with my head in my hands.
Safari on the front page of HN again. All the same points.
"PWAs from the beginning would have prevented Facebook from collecting data for the last decade in the first place"
Facebook–Cambridge Analytica scandal could have been prevented if only Apple had allowed PWAs to send push notifications 10 years ago…
(This is sarcasm.)
"Here I am still waiting for ES2018 regex look-behinds"
"Web MIDI? Still surprised that's missing on Apple"
Whataboutism at its worst. 'BuT whAt aBouT WebUSB?'
Don't even get me started on "Lazy loading images is at best user hostile"
Listening to the album Mink Car. Too good, too good.
"I'm only holding your hand, so I can look at your bangs" -Bangs, They Might Be Giants
Snapped, I'm installing Vivaldi
It was periodic tab reloading. Spamming the refresh button makes me feel like a pleb.
Today on, bad business ideas with Matthias, we will attempt to combine my newfound passion for zookeeping with stand up comedy.
Wait. Is this a circus?
I'm seriously debating doing a Harry Potter re-read. I just re-watched most of the movies.
The thing is, I've read Harry Potter so many times that I actually have an extremely solid grasp of the general plot. Watching the movies, at various times I could say "that's not how it happens in the books." As an example, in the beginning of the fourth movie/book, at the Quidditch World Cup, the movie includes a scene where Harry+Ron+Hermione are accused of setting the dark mark, but the book additionally includes at that point, them checking the previous spell used by each of them. IIRC Ron had lost his wand and it had been used to set the dark mark.
The last time I read these books was like 8th grade. It's been a minute. (But I also read them like three times in elementary school.)
Anyways, the point is, it's not like the Fablehaven re-read I did this time last year, since I had forgotten almost all the Fablehaven plot at that point. But Rowling's rhetoric is definitely admirable, so it might be worth re-reading for that. (I remember her use of the em-dash in-particular being fun.)
I just don't have tons of time. At ~100 pages/hour (which seems reasonable for Rowling's writing and a book I've read before. I might even be faster), it would take around 40 hours. I guess that sounds bad in one sitting, but that's only 4 hours a day for 10 days. My flight back is the 8th. Ooohh
Okay, we're going to pick a few of them. Maybe 1, 2, 3, 6, and 7? 4 is an easy skip since it's the longest and isn't great. The reason to do 5 is that it has some good bits that were cut from the movie: the coins that communicate meeting times, scenes in the Room of Requirement, the Quibbler interview and subsequent banning, Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes, etc. I just remember on the whole really disliking 5. There's a lot of tension that just feels manufactured, I guess. Like Umbridge is a great character but a bad primary villain. I could write 1000 words just on the 5th book, I'm cutting myself off here.
Uggh I just want to read all of them.
The problem with FPG is that it rejects a lot of assumptions (like 1+1=2) (on the basis that they’re just assumptions and assumptions are
bad) and then it proceeds to make a bunch of assumptions (like assumptions are bad, or there is a universal Truth which is complete and consistent).
I think I can close off some of the assumptions by making Pascal’s-wager-style arguments. But it still feels weak. Because you have to make assumptions in order to make any argument at all.
It doesn’t help that FPG is complicated. It describes like 4 different versions of truth depending on the situation.
"The future looks real good but I just can't seem to stay awake."
-Levitate, Capital Cities
Edited to fix the quote and attribute
My router uses clock.via.net as a time server. Look at this website. Look at it.
=> https://via.net
One of the interesting things about the push to move everything to declarative instead of imperative systems (Swift UI, Terraform, React)
is that it reveals how bad computers were previously at understanding declarative instructions. Programs that can understand declarative code feels like an important step before any sort of more traditional difficult problem in computer science (e.g. AI or natural language processing).
Why can’t I get me a girl who plays chess against herself in public like the love interest in the 2010 music video
for AJR’s Go On Take a Chance?
I recompiled mod_wsgi from source and it fixed it.
Sic no it didn’t
OurJSEditor is still down. I’m getting no error messages anywhere I have no idea what’s wrong.
I'm too powerful. It knows that if it runs my code, I will take over the world so it refuses to acknowledge that my code exists.
I just finished re-reading Harry Potter 6.
(Since my previous post considering re-reading them, I've re-read 1 and 5.)
Dumbledore's death is sad. Now I'm sad.
Ruby lets you leave off function parens, which I'm comfortable doing because of my time writing Lisp or Haskell. But sometimes you need to
then do something with the result of a function call, and to disambiguate evaluation order, you really need parens. Ex. `Thing.where name: "Matthias"`, but then you want to call a property of that, on the same line. And since I'm thinking like Haskell, leaving off parens, I go to write `(Thing.where name: "Matthias").exists?`. And while that works, the stylistic way of writing this Ruby is to add back the optional C-style parens: `Thing.where(name: "Matthias").exists?`
If we're living in a simulation, how do you explain "Jackson Hole Wyoming USA Town Square Live Cam"?
The computer science industry has gotten as far as it has by taking a bunch of simple things and stacking them on top of each other. It is
important we do not forget that.
.
Transcript
"There must have been a moment at the beginning, where we could have said no. Somehow we missed it. Well, we’ll know better next time."
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.
It's kind of incredible that we (humanity) found a single shape that aperiodically tiles the plane in my lifetime.
Congrats Smith, Myers, Goodman-Strauss, and Kaplan.
Kafka’s *Metamorphosis* is one of those things that you read, the feel proud of yourself for reading, and then reference it and try to get
other people to read it because you want them to experience the same emotions; not because you actually like the book.
It’s like a tragedy that isn’t sad. It’s a weird book, not necessarily a good book.
Huh, last night before I went to bed, I thought, “I’m not going to post at all tomorrow.” And aside from the one post I made before going to
bed, but after midnight, I didn’t. But I didn’t remember that until just now. Weird.
Of course, the reason I wasn’t going to post was so that I could be productive, and that didn’t happen either lol
I'm smarter than some people and not as smart as some people. And that's about the only interpersonal comparison to be made.
Stackoverflow does the thing where you lose karma yourself for downvoting someone, and I have to ask myself, ‘is it worth it to downvote
this jQuery user?’ And the answer is yes.
I’m laying down in a stairwell. There’s a long answer as to why, but the short answer is that I want to.
I just hate having to hold in my mind the way that the compiler/linter sees the world, in addition to how the program works, and what I want
the program to do.
I want to eat dinner tonight but it’s unclear if my executive dysfunction will allow me to. Or if I will be trapped here.
I’ve decided mixing wet and dry ingredients separately is a superstition invented by people with surplus mixing bowls.
The problem with hook-based React is that it forces you to enumerate your stateful dependencies and side-effects. This sounds fine, but it's
very hard to write because there are a lot of things that technically are non-pure but that you don't think of that way. It doesn't seems like you should need to list the current time or the network state, but if that's the dependency, then you need to.
If you can rewire your brain to recognize those as dependencies, okay. But if you can't, then you end up abusing state and dependency arrays in order to hack your way to equivalent code.
Just watched a Love Death and Robots episode about how the 0.1% are going to escape the climate disaster by flying to Mars and leave
everyone else to die, and then at the end of the episode they drop a QR code for their NFT
What timeline are we even in.
Is this what you wanted?
I'm bad at knowing what I want.
That's interesting.
Hmm. Is it true?
No one knows.
I think a lot about Graham's "The Blub Paradox."
I took me forever to find this again, I couldn't remember the name of the fake language, and it's actually a section inside a longer article.
=> http://paulgraham.com/avg.html
I have three takeaways.
First, I absolutely agree that people tend to think in the language that they're most comfortable in. I took a class that used a Lisp, and on the final I wrote a program in a functional style in JavaScript (like on the paper). And then I translated the Javascript syntax into Lisp syntax. People have a hard time understanding concepts from languages that they're not comfortable with. I make an effort now, when I read about a feature in a new language, to think past my knee-jerk reaction. Because most of the time my initial reaction is just "how closely can I map this feature onto a JS feature." I agree that the language you use does matter. I'm glad JS is the language I first learned because it's pretty powerful. It also makes me think that the language you first learn is more significant than people think.
Second, I think Graham understates the importance of a library ecosystem. He doesn't even mention it. This was written in 2001, so maybe libraries just weren't as important then. Maybe you could get away with rolling your own wrapper layers. But like I posted a thought the other night that Django isn't giving me as much support as I want and I feel like I'm writing hundreds of lines of boilerplate to handle user registration. I haven't checked out the CL ecosystem scene but it's hard to imagine more support than Python. If I was going to write a Discord bot, I would write it in JS because I know Discord.js is up to date with the latest Discord API feature and I don't want to re-create that work. (The Discord API is non-trivial.) Maybe this is where you end up writing Closure and integrating with Java libraries.
Third, Graham describes the "power" of a language as a purely linear scale. But there are things I can do in JS that I can't do in Lisp. This isn't like an argument, it's just an interesting point.
"I've been hunting for a kindly ear but couldn't find one near, and wound up talking to myself"
-Talking to Myself, Watsky
Transcript
"This is how they destroy countercultures: they tried arresting hippies and noticed it didn't work. What did work was stripping the movement of all values, making it fit corporate beauty standards and selling its empty, powdered husk of a corpse to the masses until it means absolutely nothing. They did it with the hippies, they did it with punk, they did it with grunge and they'll do it with any new subculture that dares challenge and oppose capitalism."
Sometimes I wish I were smarter, like I'm not smart enough
When I was a kid I knew that I knew less than many people
I wanted to learn but
only so much.
Now I want to learn everything. Or maybe now I have the hubris to think I can.
The thing about making your book stressful is that at some point you’ve made it too stressful and I have no desire to continue reading it.
I accidentally ran rsync with one argument and it happily printed a message about sending it. Where did it go???
=> https://thoughts.learnerpages.com/?show=497d0e7b-c3b9-4226-a768-bab2d30d3a77
I found my receipt, I bought 18 AA batteries.
Starting a job writing Ruby on Monday. Reading the Poignant Guide
=> https://poignant.guide
Apparently _why named Tumblr? I don't know, Wesley didn't elaborate.
=> https://wesleyac.thoughts.page/#1651815057
I am about to have a break down in the middle of this supermarket. I think I’ll put in some headphones.
sic; L; I left my headphones in the car
“But you, O Bethlehem Ephrathah, who are too little to be among the clans of Judah, from you shall come forth for me one who is to be ruler
in Israel, whose coming forth is from of old, from ancient days.”
Micah 5:2 ESV
“But you, Bethlehem, David’s country, the runt of the litter—From you will come the leader who will shepherd-rule Israel. He’ll be no upstart, no pretender. His family tree is ancient and distinguished. Meanwhile, Israel will be in foster homes until the birth pangs are over and the child is born, And the scattered brothers come back home to the family of Israel. He will stand tall in his shepherd-rule by GOD’s strength, centered in the majesty of GOD-Revealed. And the people will have a good and safe home, for the whole world will hold him in respect—Peacemaker of the world!”
Micah 5:2-4 MSG
The SwiftUI tutorials are all building these puny example apps that don't do anything. Their "handling user input" example just like binds a
boolean value to an instance of the `Toggle` view. Like. Okay I need to run code on user input, I'm sorry. How do I do that?
I almost think that Object Oriented code is nice because it lets you namespace utility logic to a type or class. But I don't feel any need
to include business logic inside a method.
The wild thing about the web is that it is the world’s most platform for apps, documents, or computer programs in general.
I binged the third season of Jet Lag today, that’s about it.
My address bar is still sideways, hasn’t gotten old yet.
An April Fools day prank from this website has been delayed indefinitely. Expect it (or don't) in a couple of weeks.
The problem with my ground-up approach to emacs keybindings is that I'm questioning my iTerm keybindings and zsh keybindings.
Maybe I should just swallow the whole pill and switch to using eshell in GUI Emacs and drop iTerm and zsh. It's not like I loved either of them.
My dreams ARE NOT DEAD. My dreams have been TEMPORARILY postponed due to the demands of society but one of these days...
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.
It’s not quite fair to say that society is an illusion.
It’s more accurate to say that society is a series of illusions stacked on top of each other.
The more I work on the Tweet migration, the more tempted I am to just refactor Thoughts on here entirely to support some sort of threading.
It's easy to complain about the Reddit hive-mind, but what really gets me is that Reddit is not a hive mind.
You can have a bunch of people in a conversation, who are all pro-choice, because it's Reddit. And one will be like 'even if unborn babies are people, the mother's body-autonomy takes precedent over the baby's right to live.' And 3 comments later, someone else is explaining how body-autonomy doesn't apply to anti-vaxers because, and I quote, "vaccines are free. Babies are not."
This is not a single, logical, train of thought. I can't understand it.
Frick every time I start thinking about the abortion issue I just end up laughing at Norma McCorvey's Wikipedia page. "She had quit her job at an abortion clinic and had become an advocate…to make abortion illegal." 100% chaotic neutral energy. And I feel bad for her, because I don't think she wanted to be that way. Truly cursed with an interesting life.
This website is actually just an IP-gathering honeypot. If you're not using a VPN right now, I've saved your IP into the Apache log files!
I'm like Dark's biggest hypeman. I've told all my friends about it. Paul should pay me for marketing for him. Which is scary because I hate
the editor. I think it's a doomed idea that will never get off the ground, and I don't know how Paul convinced investors to pay him to work on a ludicrous passion project for 4 years or however long it's been.
Paul is so nice. and I love that he's receptive to feedback. But Dark is crashing on me while I'm trying to do advent of code and it's
really frustrating. Like I've somehow bricked the entire fricking editor.
The scary thing about CleverDeck is that I have like 2 hours in the app already. Like it doesn’t save you time it just lets you squeeze
studying into smaller slices of time.
I used to say that I think in code. But that's not accurate anymore. As I learned more about code I understand that code is an analogue for
my thought, and not the other way around.
I wish psychology was like 180 years further along. At some point we're going to figure out what autism and ADHD are, right?
The do-not-pass-out-and-die challenge is kind of difficult today. I feel like I've been hanging upside down and all of the blood is in my
head, except that I haven't been hanging upside down and my body is just malfunctioning.
Today on cursed code with Matthias:
```python
def test(value=[])
return value
a = test()
b = test()
a.append(1)
print(a) # [1]
print(b) # [1]
print(a is b) # True
```
There's a complex idea that needs fleshing out, don't take it at surface level, but it has occurred to me that part of growing up is
realizing the things you imagine you wanted aren't necessary in the way you thought. Like, you can satisfy your desire for x with a small amount and it's not as black and white as a child sees it.
The child never buys themself candy. The child imagines that they would buy themselves candy at every opportunity. The child asks the adult why they don't have candy. The adult replies, 'oh, candy isn't healthy' or whatever. But that's not the real reason the adult doesn't buy candy. The child also knows candy is unhealthy. *In saying this, the adult has invalidated the child's desire.* But the adult has bought themselves candy before. I'm not exactly sure where I'm going with this.
My idea is that if you give a child unlimited money to spend on candy, they would end up with less candy than they originally imagined or intended. And I don't know if that's true. If it is true, it has serious ramifications, because it implies that "childhood" is inherently characterized by longing for what you can't have (as opposed to say, age, or personality).
Kind of excited to start a new season here, just a couple of days. I’m thinking about changing up the colors. We’ll see.
I think I previously posted something about my idea that online communication requires a totally different set of social rules than
in-person. To give an example of that; I can DM someone on slack with a direct question, and a polite amount of time for them to wait until replying is like over a day, if they reply at all. Whereas if I walk over to someone's desk and look at them, not saying anything, the polite amount of time before they stop what they're doing and look at me is about 5 seconds.
This is a dumb thought. I have proven that talking to someone in person is *different* from DMing them on Slack.
For some reason DuckDuckGo doesn't return song lyrics.
I can put, in quotes, song lyrics, and DuckDuckGo will find a tweet that contains the lyric and nothing else. And Google will return hundreds of song-lyric sites.
So emacs is definitely flexible enough.
The problem at this point is that I want a native-app experience, and emacs is not at all a native app. That's fine, I can work with that, but I have to decide what trade offs I want to make.
Emacs can either run in the terminal or as a GUI. The GUI view is super weird because it's just like a pop-up window with a terminal in it running emacs. But it's nice because it has native scroll bars (kind of) and native system popups (again, kind of), and, importantly, it can access the command key (which it calls super). And the intention is that if you want a GUI text editor, if you're not running emacs on a headless server, you're going to be using this GUI editor. All the support pages for emacs talking about getting the mouse working and getting command+c to copy (which actually works by default) are talking about the GUI editor.
Interlude, C-h C-h brings you to the help page for the help command, which directs you to C-h r for the emacs manual, which directs you to press h to open the help page for the info program, which is the program responsible for showing you the help pages, "Right now you are looking at one 'Node' of Information. A node contains text describing a specific topic at a specific level of detail." So we way off of the right side of the graph in https://xkcd.com/1343/
And I have stuff to do.
Have you ever created a narrative. Only to watch it fall apart and slip away
from you. and fall apart.
"When I program in other languages, even ones I know well, I feel like I’ve flown to Jupiter. Gravity is so strong that every step is a
struggle. In Lisp, you can dance."
I think the key is that there's a night and day difference between doing something in your spare time and doing something 40 hours a week.
I have a bad habit of posting quotes here unattributed,
most often because context doesn't matter compared to the power of the words. For example, this quote, https://thoughts.learnerpages.com/?show=cf045c64-f54f-423f-b682-52b99c7294d2, ("You may be looking at the last person in America not online") sounds so fricking good.
But it also means that I'm trusting myself to remember where the quote came from. I've been racking my brain, and I can't remember who the Last Person in America Not Online is. It's not indexed by Google (except for this page). Nothing in my browser history from that day is promising. (Except for me searching for that phrase?) Yet the quote was definitely written out online in some context. (Probably an image posted to Reddit, then?)
The Internet is a weird place.
Like, on one hand, I know I'm not a bad person. On the other hand, bad people don't think that they're bad people.
I’m afraid that I’m actually going insane this time. My desire to form coherent English sentences is deteriorating.
Might learn ASL so that I can cut off my ears. I can't take the noises. The sounds overwhelm me. I wince as the sound of each keyboard
stroke assaults my ears.
I like to think I can handle the death of people, or the idea of my own eventual demise. But the death of an idea destroys me.
This needs elaboration and clarification in the future.
WAIT A SECOND! "Vibin'" just means sitting around on our phones.
Silly gen Z creating words to disguise the fact that they're doing things that older gens disapprove of.
If I ever mock people for binge-watching television, remind me that I will sit down and read a book for 6+ hours.
When you sign up for Tumblr it forces you to choose tags to follow to get your feed started, so I started following #tech. So my feed is
constantly full of Bad Batch fan art, since there’s apparently a character named tech.
Under “Top tech blogs”
The official NASA Tumblr account. Fan art of The Bad Batch where the characters are drawn as horses.
I hate the woman in the background of the LassPass login page, mocking me as I fail to type my 20 character master password.
Talking about books is just so messy because everyone insists on comparing every book to capital-L Literature. And I think that if we let go
of that, then it would allow books to occupy a space in our society more like that of Youtube videos or social media.
At the same time, there's a lot of quality forced into the medium because of people conflating every book with Literature. And maybe if we built an algorithmic feed of stories to maximize engagement, the quality of those stories would decrease.
The thing that makes "Reversing the Technical Interview" and the rest of the series so good is that it's a social commentary. It's not about
the code itself. The absurdity of the code exists to emphasize the absurdity of computer science as a whole, socially and technically. It describes someone who fails to conform to the computer science industry's social ideals about how code should be written. Importantly, it's written from the perspective of that person, so we get to see that their ideals are (at least mostly) internally consistent. And since the code that they write works, and since they're particular about it (they have a personal style-guide), we're reminded that the style of code that we write is a social construct. Which isn't to downplay the more obvious tone that makes fun of the main character. They're dumb for not being able to adapt their style to the environment.
It just feels like no one has looked at a website talking about Ruby in the past 5 years. Like all of the links are dead and all the
information is out of date. Which is just such a shame.
Sapling is so buggy this is incredible. It feels like using 1.0 software except that apparently this has been in use for 10 years inside
Facebook? And apparently no has tried to open the web interface in Firefox in that time?
Does Facebook give all of its employees a pre-configured laptop with identical software?
Edit: It's not a browser bug, it doesn't work in Chromium either. Based.
One of the beautiful things to me about modern, abstract, or surrealist art is that it creates an in-group just by virtue of who is willing
to embrace it.
Lint errors will be like "you're writing too much code" "this is too complex" like okay I'll delete some of it, thanks.
Just used control+shift+e for the first time. I fricking love this.
For a tiny bit of context, macOS implements some emacs text manipulation shortcuts in their native text entry fields. (control+a to jump to the beginning of the current paragraph, control+e to jump to the end of the paragraph, control+t to transpose the characters on either side of the cursor, etc.) I just tried control+shift+e to select to the end of the current paragraph and it worked and I'm surprised.
Ladies it took me 10 minutes to find a meme I saw once over a year ago, does that make me a boomer?
I’m glad to see towerofglass is posting content actively. Mostly VHS recordings, which is an amazing aesthetic.
I use https://learnxinyminutes.com so fricking much. It's amazing.
Is it "bool" or "boolean" or "Boolean"? Who knows. cmd+f "bool"
Pretending to be insane because I don't how to interact with people. (This is about a Khan Academy comment I just made.)
I have a love hate relationship with Ruby, because it's flexible enough that you can create a method on a single instance of a class, but I
hate that it's object oriented and that's a meaningful distinction.
WHY. WHY. Why can't we make software that works!! !1‽‽‽? Please! Someone explain to me! There's a bug open in MultiMC that has been open for
2 years! And there's a PR that will fix it open on Github and the maintainer won't merge it! Because they insist that it's Apple's fault and not their fault and they shouldn't have to fix their application. And I just want to be able to CLICK the BUTTON in MultiMC without the application freezing!!!!! I'm so done. I want to delete the KA Extension but Luke won't let me. Because I'm part of the problem. My code is awful garbage too! Please.
Okay, this is actually a lot better. Safari is slower with the dev-tools open. So I've closed them now and I think the couple hundred ms
time to first byte is fine.
I feel like Rex would delete *Fat Vampire* if he could. I’m kind of glad you can’t delete books.
I think I'm dealing with four distinct bugs.
* Sometimes (~1/10) Lagrange will fail to open Thoughts. I think this is a problem with Lagrange, but it's also totally possible that Astronomical Theater is failing to send a TLS close or something. Update: yeah this is happening even with `openssl s_client`, it's definitely a problem with my code. Update: When this happens, Jetforce gets the request and I'm pretty sure it sends back a response.
* Node.js appears to be leaking memory; as astronomical theater is currently at 12 GB of RAM. This is the one that interests me, that I wanted to debug, but I keep distracted by these other problems. Update: It's just a know Node.JS bug that it takes 11GB virtual memory to import a common-js dependency.
* I can't get openssl 1.1.1f to print the content of a Gemini page. `echo 'gemini://matthiasportzel.com/\r' | openssl s_client -connect 'matthiasportzel.com:1965' -servername 'matthiasportzel.com' -ign_eof` works if openssl is Openssl 3 or Openssl 1.1.1q or LibreSSL 2.8.3, but it doesn't work with the Openssl version on Luther.
* Astronomical Theater's reverse proxying is dropping or screwing with query parameters, or Jetforce for some reason doesn't reply if you make a proxy request with query params. Update: Jetforce seems to be behaving as expected. Update: I've fixed the issue where AstT wasn't passing through query params. The 1st issue is happening a lot more though, when navigating between these pages. It's happening in amfora too, not just Lagrange. Uhhhgg.
To restate my thought about book complexity; it's weird to complain about someone playing a video game on Easy mode when there are other
video games that are always easy.
"All computers are just carefully organized sand. Everything is hard until someone makes it easy."
I almost feel like I'm bad at context switching. Like I cannot stop myself from doing something that I'm in the middle of doing.
This is a theory.
Fleet just dropped.
I've played around with it for a little bit.
My expectations were very high; I think I knew I was being unreasonable. It's still beta software, they still have a long way to go.
The customizability that I expect isn't there. There are a couple of settings that I like, that are non-standard, like showing white-space characters. Fleet has a setting to show tabs, but not spaces, which is weird. There's no way to remap keys (at least not in the GUI), so while the defaults in Fleet are very reasonable, there are a couple of keyboard shortcuts that I'm missing. It auto-saves files by default, which I am not a fan of. And the setting to turn it off is per-project (or per-file for files not in a project).
I'm trying to edit this file which is indented with 2 spaces, and it's struggling. It's just not a polished experience yet. (It doesn't have a per-file setting for indent size, it's definitely not detecting indent size, and I've changed the global setting and restarted the editor and it's still trying to indent with 4 spaces. Probably just early-day bugs.)
It's in a really weird position where it is very clearly trying to compete with VS Code. They styled the scrollbar to look exactly like VS Code's scrollbar. Which isn't bad, but it's very obvious what they're trying to do.
While it's open, it feels much more responsible and lightweight than RubyMine, so that's good.
The syntax highlighting seems less vibrant than Vim or VSCode (sorry, I'm actually using Neovim and VSCodium, but same idea). But that's not really a fair criticism since I'm using third-party themes in both of those editors.
Okay so one thing that I'm very happy about is that in promo material they had a very small list of supported languages. I was worried it wouldn't support syntax highlighting other languages at all, but it does. The short-list is for languages that support "smart mode," which I don't really care about.
Or rather, I do use RubyMine when I want jump-to-declaration for Ruby, or the ability to debug and set breakpoints. I didn't expect Fleet to compete with that IDE experience. I want a lightweight editor that I can use to replace vim for quickly editing single files (for example, editing my .zshrc). I had hoped Fleet would work for that. It falls short there in two areas: ability to customize the core editing experience (keyboard shortcuts, syntax themes, indentation, showing whitespace), and the fact that it takes 4 fricking seconds to cold open. `vim ~/.zshrc` takes like 200ms and `fleet ~/.zshrc` takes 4,000ms, and up. Lightweight editor my left
Oh my word I miss Xi so much
There were a lot of scenes in *Polar Express* that pushed the boundaries of how I conceptualize human interactions.
I think one of the things that makes the flea so iconic to me is that it's like satire. Like it's not only funny, and the time period and
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.
I changed the default font in Vivaldi from Times to Helvetica and it makes sites that don't have CSS look much better
Mojang patches AFK fish farms. Earthcomputer, Cortex, PseudoGravity create a client-side mod that cracks fishing RNG.
AKF farms let you automatically get all fishing loot if you wait long enough.
Cracking the RNG lets you just pick whatever loot you want and then get it. It does require client-side hacks. But it likely wouldn't have been worked out if Mojang had left normal AFK farms in the game.
"You've been making choices out of desperation for too long"
"Break the pattern. Take control of your life, Todd. The instant you take control, interesting things will happen. I guarantee it."
-Dirk Gently (S1E1)
The mere act of summarizing or omitting information can be problematic.
60 Minutes cut an interview with DeSantis in a way that has caused me to re-lose a fair amount of faith in the main-stream media.
(I really don't like PolitiFact's "If Your Time is Short," I recommend skipping down and reading both transcripts.) https://www.politifact.com/article/2021/apr/07/unpacking-edits-60-minutes-report-ron-desantis-flo. I couldn't find clips from either 60 Minutes or The Florida Channel that were free from biased analysis, but I recommend watching the full clips if you can.
The media has not learned from their poor coverage of Trump and is continuing to value a narrative over sharing facts. Please just give me the facts and let me decide for myself. I will continue to reject headlines at face value.
You know what's really scary? Almost all of these thoughts still exist in my head, along with a bunch of other thoughts that aren't here.
Is there a name for the phenomenon where women are unrepresented in a group, but are disproportionately represented in authority positions?
I still can’t believe they gave Toothless teeth.
The whole point of the book is that every other Viking values having a big dragon with lots of teeth and lots of fire. And Hiccup is in an entirely different mindset because he is the only one that values understanding the dragons. And you completely undermine that point by giving Hiccup a dragon with more teeth and more fire than every other dragon.
Okay downloaded AltTab and it's much nicer.
My complain in particular, I guess, is that switching from a full screen app A to app B, where B has multiple open windows, will prioritize an app-B window on a second monitor over the previously-focused app-B window. For example, I'll have firefox dev tools in a pop-out window on a second monitor with Slack. Looking at Slack and pressing cmd+tab will show the Firefox dev tool window, instead of focusing Firefox on the main monitor. Similarly, if I have my main terminal and Firefox on my laptop screen, both full-screen, I want cmd+tab to switch between them. Instead, cmd+tab switches to the secondary terminal open on my secondary monitor that I haven't touched in minutes.
There are lots of other ways to fix the underlying issues (workspaces? virtual desktops? a better algorithm for selecting windows when switching to an app) but allowing me the control to select exactly the window I want to see helps.
This is a reminder that search here is still in beta. Hopefully I'll be able to add a link to it soon.
Culture really is a wild thing. SCP-3999 is one of the primary inspirations for my About page. But to understand SCP-3999 I think it helps
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.
Added a link to the about page. Enjoy!
It's intentionally incomprehensible, but now I feel like I need to write a director's commentary explaining it.
It just occurred to me that Mull could have put Paton in the 4th Five Kingdoms, and that would have been iconic.
I forget sometimes that Mac has spotlight and I can use it search for files in a pre-indexed way. I try to craft complicated `find` commands
I have no problem reading serif fonts on paper, but for some reason I much prefer san-serif fonts on a screen.
Oh my word, I want a Thomas-the-Train-universe, dark, possibly horror, story, about a train that figured out how to leave the track.
I am slightly concerned about the magnitude of the site. It works well when it’s used like Twitter, being checked frequently, but I can
imagine that someone who hasn’t been here would be completely overwhelmed by the amount of content that’s built up. (Let me SSH in and count the number of Thoughts I’ve posted here so far.)
Huh, only 792. I expected more, but I guess my Twitter was only at a couple thousand. Okay, we have space.
Just realized that this page has been at this URL for too long and I basically can't ever change it.
I’m beginning to think that all the people complaining about capitalism in my Twitter feed aren’t actively researching alternatives.
One of the big differences between conservatives and liberals is that if you're liberal you're expected to be liberal in every sense, but
the vast majority of conservatives are
– okay wait I think part of this is a terminally online thing, and most liberals I interact with are online and most conservatives I interact with in-person –
more frequently have beliefs that aren't aligned to a political or social spectrum and don't expect you to agree on all subjects.
You only have to be racist or sexist to be a conservative, but if you want to be a liberal you can't be either. (This is a dumb example but it gets the point across I think.)
Can we talk for a second about how `npm init -y` just licenses your code as open source? Like, ya this code's free for anyone to use, thanks
I might have to stop reading *Without Bloodshed* because it’s like this libertarian cyberpunk fantasy.
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.
I was born at the wrong time, but like, by a couple of years. If I had been born 5 years earlier I would be such a chad.
The inversion of everything we don’t know. The downward spiral surrounded on all sides by broken panes of glass in empty window frames.
No one watches but you. This isn’t right. This isn’t my fight. There is no light.
Fun date idea: Open https://thoughts.learnerpages.com and read my thoughts. There's guaranteed to be some conversation starters in there
somewhere, right?
Follow up to
=> /?show=b0ef6053-3937-4e70-8bfb-2d6a9ee6af3e The halting problem and supernatural numbers
I think the halting problem is still undecidable for all finite-length programs, even with an infinitely long tester-function.
No wait shoot. If you have an infinitely long program then you can enumerate all finite length programs as string keys in a hash map inside of it. So then the question is whether or not, for any given finite length program, you can encode an algorithm for whether it halts for any input. But I think theoretically that's possible. I think super-natural programs (infinitely long programs) have an expressive power greater than turning completeness. And you can't create the halt-ing problem paradox by passing our tester-program to itself, because it only claims to know things about finite length programs.
If you're reading this and are confused, this isn't like a super niche area of computer science or anything, I'm just making stuff up. Like I don't think these are the technical terms.
me_irl
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’m so disappointed in this soup. It looks so good and I’m in the mood for soup but it takes like drinking lemon juice.
In defense of the soup, it is labeled as a lemon soup. I should have foreseen this possibility. It’s got good flavors they’re just overpowered by the lemon. Maybe it will be better once it cools down.
Fundamental browser rendering compatibility issues discovered while developing OurJSEditor: 2.
One of the hand-waves that Gemini does is assuming that the other side of the pit of success doesn't exist.
I have a reoccurring dream where I can hold a large exercise ball and jump and kick my feet like I’m swimming, and fly.
"Why do you need Gemini? Just write simple HTML??"
Because HTML collapses adjacent white-spaces.
I had a paragraph here about how the way browsers did this was dumb, but I tested it and was wrong. However, I think the fact that it is impossible for me to understand these rules is just as effective an argument as criticizing the rules themselves.
(I think browsers collapse U+0020 and then convert U+00A0 into U+0020, without collapsing. But the question then is, is it possible to get U+00A0 into a browser? I don't know, let me know if you do.)
Apparently it's rude to post existential thoughts without context, "vague blogging." Heck that I do what I want here
I know I can't be like 'you're sleeping on Imagine Dragons' because they're one of the most popular bands. But Mercury is really good.
Beautiful.
=> https://medium.com/s/story/how-to-be-polite-9bf1e69e888c
In some ways, I'm exactly like Mr. Ford. I would never touch someone without their permission. I have a list of rules built up in my head governing many different expectations of social behavior. I try to very open-minded and very empathetic. But I'm also completely different. Most of the time I walk out of a conversation with the take-away that I don't like the person and that I regret talking to them.
Vim tip! In 2021, Vim and neovim come with mouse support disabled by default. Run `:set mouse=a` to turn it on!
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.
.
Transcript
“A wave. A great and terrible wave of darkness will swallow us. Eternal night. An end to hope. Where do you hide from a shadow bigger than the world? Can we fight the night? Can we outrun darkness? The wave looks over all, growing as it consumes, engulfing everything.”
Maybe I should start using spaced en-dashes. I use em-dashes a fair amount, but I like putting spaces around them, which isn't proper.
Force-quitting Firefox for the second time today.
Maybe I'll get around to creating a minimum reproduction. Maybe it would even qualify for a CVE, that'd be cool.
The Dymaxion Map might be my new favorite map projection. My old favorite map projection was "a globe, all map projections are bad".
The difference between *Dirk Gently's Holistic Detetive Agency* and *The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy* is that latter creates this
huge world around ours that is weird and surreal, but the Detective Agency overlays an incredibly weird world on top of ours that is minimally different but impossible.
Edit: subbed nicknames for full names of the books
The emacs daemon is using 66% CPU. I don't have any emacs clients open, what is it doing?
Nothing notable in the *Messages* buffer and no files open :thinking:
`M-x server-mode` closes the current frame but doesn't seem to stop the daemon like it's supposed to.
I wish I had time to debug this but I'm just going to kill it.
It's possible server-mode is stopping it and it's being managed by launchctl (via brew services) and it's being auto-restarted.
I wonder who I should vote for. I'm going to open Youtube and vote for the candidate that first shows me an ad.
I'm trying to use VS Code's remote editing ability, but it's failing with an error. Researching the error brings me to a Github issues page,
but Github 500s for requests made from logged in users right now. AAhhhhhh. Please Microsoft.
The people over at Pillsbury are doing some great work. Bread rolled up and put in cans was a good idea.
So roughly 1/2 the reason I want to learn toki pona is jan Misali, of course. And part of the reason is jan pona Alex.
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).
You want to check if a number is between 400 and 599 (inclusive). Do you, option A, `value >= 400 && value <= 599`, OR
`value.to_s.match('\b(?:4[0-9]{2}|5[0-9]{2}|599)\b')`.
I can't get over this line of code because not only is it using a regular expression to check the value of a number, the regular expression it's using is awful. It's equivalent to `'[45]\d\d'`.
I've been using Firefox for the past couple of months, but I'm going to go back to Vivaldi. Do you know why? Control+t in text inputs
doesn't transpose characters like I expect it to. Also, mouse gestures don't work in a couple of places since they're not a native feature.
But that's, conceptually, in my mind, I have to remember that Firefox's text inputs are not native text inputs but merely inferior clones.
I'm just going to say it. We NEED more unity, we need more acceptance, we need more moderate voices. (tw politics below the fold)
I respect you. I respect you if you're trans, if you're religious, if you're pro-life or pro-choice or gay or straight or democrat or republican or too preoccupied to vote.
And that respect is so important. And the rhetoric on the political left recently is, 'you need to disrespect everyone who doesn't agree 100%.' And I mean, this is because I surround myself with extremely left leaning media/content. I spend most of my time on Tumblr and Reddit. I'm sure the right is just as bad. But's frustrating to know that no one there respects me or my views. There are a lot of directions this post could go and just about all of them are me complaining and/or having a breakdown.
I guess what I'm saying is that I think about posting about politics on here a lot, and I don't, because I don't care that much and I don't want to offend anyone. But I don't want you to forget that I am a human being and I do have opinions and views on topics that I don't post. And it's easier for you to just assume that I agree with you on everything, but I won't.
(The subtext here is the recently leaked supreme court decision. The coverage I've seen (again, from Tumblr and Reddit) has showed no little or no respect for the pro-life side, which is a position that I respect. But, as a man, I don't have particularly strong feelings about abortion, and a lot of other things get to me more.)
I guess, this is about me. Everything I post here is about me. I NEED more unity, more acceptance of moderate positions, etc.
I'm so tired and I'm procrastinating from doing work I can't take this aaahahhh
I couldn’t help myself, I grabbed an epub of 7 so I could continue. It’s just so much lonelier than the others.
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
I had a shocking coherent dream that I hired a contractor to build 2 apartment buildings on land that my parents owned.
It's difficult to describe the number of projects I have running at once right now if you're not in my head.
* NaNoWriMo prep
* Ideas for MatthiasPortzel.com
* Spancakes
* Update nodejs for Alex
* Rewatch
* Write something up for mod_md
* Modern Minimalist
Hm like 4 of those are long-form writing.
I can’t stand people whose old experience with satire is The Onion. The Onion did not invent satire. *Utopia*, Thomas More, was 1516
Also, I had to fix the spelling of More and look up the date, but I know *Utopia* was written by Thomas More, so I’m hoping that comes up in trivia at some point.
There are a lot of reasons that I don't always want to allow comments on posts here, but one of them is that I extensively use "help" and
rhetorical questions, that I don't mean as genuine. See for example the last post. I'm transcribing the questions that are running through my own head, not asking you these questions.
The rhetoric here is incredible. This is what it's about.
It has a Dr. Seuss like cadence, at least the way I read it.
Transcript
But above the grey land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic—their retinas are one yard high. They look out of no face, but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness, or forgot them and moved away. But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days, under sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground.
“But Justo wasn’t crazy. He was just unwilling to submit to what most people considered normal.”
And
“He didn’t believe in perfection. How could he? Perfection was God. Unattainable. Perfection was really only the mask of ambition, and Justo wasn’t driven by ambition.”
Getting emotional at the thought of how some people create, from nothing, music, and then other people learn how to play that music.
Maybe I need to not be afraid to repeat myself.
I hate repeating myself. I hate it when people repeat themselves and I have to listen to them say the same thing twice. It just makes me cringe. I can't listen to songs on repeat. My ears crave novelty. But like. If I want people to listen to me I know that logically I should say the same thing in multiple places and if someone reads the same thing on Discord and on here, that's not actually a bad thing.
A strictly-typed language, but it's possible to define fields that exist if and only if another field has a given value.
“only The Rithmatist remains. (I almost don’t want to get back to that one now, if only for the memes…)”
This is the only good website.
Honestly the amount of carthartic release I get from just thinking about the simple beauty of this young website would be difficult to understate.
I want to add things, make it better, but I’m scared of ruining the simplicity. (Rigby went downhill after markdown support was added, really.)
"And though I once preferred a human being's company, they pale before the monolith that towers over me"
-The Statue Got Me High, They Might Be Giants
Bellion could be giggling, drunk, in front of a beat, and stans would call it a musical masterpiece.
```js
async do {
// code here
}
```
would be a cool bit of JS syntax sugar, equivalent to
```js
(async () => { /*code*/ })();
```
‘She was attractive in the way that hot stoves attract curious children’s hands’
What a line!
https://glumshoe.tumblr.com/post/653003912976171008/i-love-when-fantasy-worlds-have-some-nonsensical
There's this guy on Youtube that posts railcart videos, and the comments are all "is this safe?" and like, your alternative is trainhopping
I still know who I want to be but I don't know who I am.
Is there perfection? Is there imperfection? Is it minimalism?
2016-2017, Technoblade went from 100k to 400k subscribers, and was all, '4x channel growth is not sustainable'. 1M to 4M this year.
“Riches I heed not, nor man’s empty praise
Thou mine inheritance, now and always
Thou and Thou only, be first in my heart
High King of heaven, my treasure Thou art”
AHAHAHAHAHAAAHAAHHA! Browser compatibility bugs!!!!!!
What the hell. It's 2020. Why is my website doing different things in different browsers. I'm using vanilla HTML, CSS, and ES5 Javascript. I'm using features that are available in IE, not css grid layouts or next gen custom HTML elements. Chrome and Firefox can't agree on how to render a table. This should not be painful. This literally renders differently in Chrome and Firefox:
```html
<table style="height: 1px;">
<tbody>
<tr style="height: 200px;">
<td>
<div style="height: 100%; border: solid;">
This renders differently in Chrome and Firefox.
</div>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
```
I reported a bug to someone on the internet, probably going to get roasted because I reported it in the wrong place or something.
“You could see your surroundings best during the day, but when could you see the farthest? At night. The stars.”
Sometimes I just feel like I'm invisible. I just have to be so loud and obnoxious in order to get anyone to react to what I'm saying.
I want to go parties l, meet people, start a secret society, steal a shopping cart.
Shopping carts are way more expensive than they should be. I would legitimately pay like 40 dollars for a shopping cart, but they cost like $100! I can’t take it. A shopping cart is a bucket list item for me, as soon as I have a place large enough to store a shopping cart.
Man it's been a long time since I've done anything on KA. I didn't mean for it to be this long.
I’m always like, ‘I want banana bread. I will make banana bread’ and then I do, and then I put it in the oven and have to wait an hour and
fifteen minutes. I’m just sitting here longing for the banana bread that I made but cannot eat for another 60 minutes.
It’s so funny to look at my old Tweets where I ceaselessly allude to leaving for some other platform. It has happened!
"I feel like me and 3D space aren't meant to be together"
"I feel like a two dimensional creature that just lives in a three dimensional world."
Matthew Bolan is streaming himself scrolling up and down in a linear algebra textbook without talking and he has 6 viewers.
I'm actually glad that C has the staying power that it does, and that there are legitimate reasons to learn and write C in 2023.
It serves a common-denominator, a bridge between older and newer code. I don't know.
No one uses F#
Dark moved from OCaml to F#, citing that the OCaml community was too small and that the F# community felt huge. So I'm like, okay, I can find resources for F# and I start looking, "libsodium f sharp" and nothing's coming up and I'm like, clearly I don't understand how to refer to this language. Is it "f#" or "fsharp" or "fs" or something else. But I think no, there's just actually no resources on it
Edit (2022): F# runs on the .NET runtime, so it can access modules written for C#. “libsodium dotnet” is the correct search.
Youtube changed their font, they thought I wouldn't notice but I did because I'm a typography nerd.
Hot take: from a language design standpoint, it's an anti-pattern that `{} !== {}`. The end-user-programmer should have to create and
attach unique id properties if they need to be able to tell two objects apart later.
I don't know, the alternative is weird too.
The alternative is that it's a language-implementation-detail how many copies of your object there are in memory, and if the language wants to collapse two objects together, then it can. But that's obviously wrong because the same data in two different variables shouldn't be collapsed into the same memory region.
Like look at how Python handles `is` with numbers. Something's obviously wrong there. Is it going too far to say that `is` shouldn't work with numbers at all?
"I would fight a duel for a trifle, for an insult, for a blow;"
> 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
Tumblr posts are either, ‘all Republicans deserve to die a painful death’ or else ‘bi women, not just lesbians, can be feminists.’
I just finished the second Mistborn. My Dad was like, 'no it doesn't end on a cliffhanger.' Sanderson, in the last chapter:
everything we know is a lie
we just accidentally unleashed an unknown evil on the land
please buy book 3 if you want any answers :)
I love how in simple projects `git log --graph` looks like a line on the left but with just a little more complexity and activity you end
up with
If I lied I think I would lie about my age. Systematically tell everyone that I'm 5 years older than I actually am.
I have about 5 years more programming experience than you would guess if I told you my real age. And it would give me a bit of a buffer in case I ever feel like I haven't done enough for my age.
I'm interested in a sort of futurepunk, call it "computerpunk" if that's not taken, where computers have been integrated into every aspect
of our lives in an ugly way. Cyberpunk and whatever Black mirror is doing glorify the computer systems themselves too much. And as someone who works with tech a lot, it's not very believable or interesting to me that a well-functioning computer system either is used for bad purposes or else fails to integrate well with humans. Because that's what Black Mirror is, is computer are these different, ethereal things, almost beings, that can't co-exist with humans. But like, humans are broken, flawed systems too. But Black Mirror isn't actually interested in making a point about computers, they're making a point about humans and society and values.
So to restate the prompt, what if everything we owned was made out of circuit boards and wiring, and it didn't effect our lives at all.
People are like, 'no one uses functional programming in the real world' except for Jane Street, who also happens to be one of the most
successful high-frequency trading firms. They traded 10% of the entire ETF market in 2020. Like what the hell. Dream job right there.
Edit (1:37): Jane Street is technically a HFT firm—they don't "invest" per-se, rather quickly buying and selling to take advantage of market imperfections.
Part of my problem with other social media is that this website is just about my ideal text-to-picture ratio.
I just love words so fricking much.
Tumblr really gave us a Blorbo for April Fools day. What we really wanted. Brb connecting with Brick Whartley on LinkedIn.
Ooooohhhh cursed language idea. Okay so you know how JS has Instantaneously Evaluated Function Expressions? I like them because they offer a
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.
I recognize the bell with a circle as the AT&T logo, which is kind of insane. They haven’t used that as a logo for 40 years.
They should go back
What's so funny to me is that, while the front page of HackerNews has a clear bias and topic and hivemind and echo chamber, people just
submit whatever the frick they want to /new. Like this is just some girl describing how wild the party scene was at her High School.
There are people, accounts, who just submit things to Hacker News all day every day. Like there's no way they are reading these articles, and thinking, 'yeah that fits on HN', they're just posting for the fun of it.
It's just hard to feel like I have no one to talk to.
Part of my problem is that my standards include perfectly meeting everyone else's standards as well so that no one can fault me.
A lot of my problem is that I haven't eaten dinner and I'm really fricking hungry please
Nate Ruess just stopped making music, retired? Luckily I know he’s still alive because he’s posted to Twitter 50+ times in the last 24 hours.
The problem is that humans will push until we hit a limit. I complain about Vivaldi lagging with 100 tabs open so I switch to Safari. Well
I have 56 tabs open in Safari right now (in different tab groups so I can manage them). And you know what, I'm going to keep opening tabs until Safari starts lagging.
Ya'll don't know how much work I put into this website. No major changes in months, but I keep tweaking things.
Tom Scott’s production team going back and adding clickbait thumbnails to 5 year old videos nooooo
I want to talk to the person that implemented the algorithm that macOS uses to spread out and display all open windows.
I am failing to do laundry. My system 1 tells me that "the shapes are wrong." I don't know what that means.
All languages should have a `constrain` function somewhere in their standard library.
It's simple enough that I should be able to use it in one line, but `min(max_val, max(min_val, val))` is ugly and unreadable.
Google just emailed me complaining about this website.
If you find the text on this website too difficult to read on mobile, I officially recommend downloading a mobile Gemini client and connecting to
=> gemini://thoughts.learnerpages.com
Okay so I opened up port 1973 on Luther. My computer can make a Gemini request to Jetforce on that port. So I'm guess the problem is with
openssl as I'm using it on Luther. My Mac has LibreSSL 2.8.3, and the server has Openssl 1.1.1f.
Grabbed @matthias on https://cohost.org but I don't have an invite link. If you have one hmu
hmu stands for "hit me up." That's what the kids are saying these days.
I'm honestly so upset right now that I can't make this website faster. I mean I'm not that upset. But I'm definitely not happy or satisfied.
If it were network latency, I'd be like, sure, what are you going to do. But it's not it's fricking processing time. For a website that is basically static.
This isn't a bit. I actually was like "wow it would be really easy for someone to get accidentally bitten by that clause" and then I looked
and sure enough I hadn't payed enough attention to the license when forking xapian-haystack.
Thinking about our value of candidness. There's definitely a trend in making things seem spontaneous. That's something that I kind of wish I
had pushed back against in making this website. My Twitter was originally conceived as an experiment in spontaneity, which proved to be successful and was translated here, but at some point that morphed into a more intentional desire for the Thoughts here to be unrefined, which I would be uncomfortable applying more generally.
This is about YikYak, which is just this site but scoped by location and publicly available.
=> https://thoughts.learnerpages.com/?show=f6dd8ad9-0910-4a54-bee1-94b5232a8561 "poetry is dead in part because we value candidness"
One of the ways that I cope with my perfectionism is by being aggressively respectful of your territory.
There's something else, some other problem that I have. Not just the desire for perfection, but some sort of anxiety. I'm so stressed.
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.
I actually kind of love how Slack has "calls" and "huddles" which are basically the same thing. Sometimes I want to huddle with someone and
sometimes I want to call them and those very different vibes. They deserve to have different icons and be called different things. Even though both of them are actually just a voice call.
I don’t think most people realize how uninhabited most places are, once you move away from areas that are inhabited.
The web standards committees show no sign of slowing down.
I legitimately think the addition of features to the web platform will stop when:
* a browser like Chrome gains enough market share that it can start vender-locking websites until it gains 100% market share
* a browser like Safari uses its platform advantage to capture enough market share that it can refuse to add features and hold the other browsers hostage
* JS becomes so bloated and unmaintainable that it becomes impossible to write bug-free websites (sic, we’re here already and no one cares)
* something radically different (ten times better than the web) comes along and the web dies
One of the things that I like about Sci-Fi or Fantasy, as opposed to realistic fiction, is that it allows you to describe a character that
I view differently from the people of the universe.
I love Valentine Jones because she's so different from the current conception of a football star. But in-universe, she's just a football star. So I wouldn't be interested in a story about a football star today, but I am interested in Valentine Jones's story.
I'm going to re-write Thoughts in a fricking Lisp dialect and you're never going to hear the end of it.
I need variety in my life so the light theme looks like this now.
Color picked from an American Animals (2018) poster. I haven't seen the movie but man that promo art is an aesthetic.
In this Thought I will explain how the shoe companies invented sneakers as a way to market shoes to men, when women are really the only ones
Hipsters are like nerds except they don’t like technology and have gone outside.
A little like me.
Like 95% of how much I like someone is the sound of their voice. Annoying voice—limited ability to listen to you.
I hate apache config files. I changed literally nothing and now every website I’m hosting is giving a 500 error and there are no errors in
the Apache logs.
*This is from earlier, since this site was down as well*
“Johnny Boy” by Twenty One Pilots speaks to me, even though none of the individual lyrics would seem to describe me.
A couple of quick Thoughts about Hofstadter's AI predictions.
He makes three predictions on page 678 of GEB that I want to talk about.
This is written in '79, before computers had beaten humans at chess. Hofstadter predicts that computers will not beat humans at chess until computers achieve general intelligence.
General intelligence is a milestone in AI referring to an AI program that mimics the level of sentience of a human. It's not been trained to do one task, but it is generally-intelligent enough that it can learn anything that a human can learn. This also implies the ability to formulate distinct sub-goals. So more than just being able to pass a Turing test or carry on a conversation, a general AI is able to, seemingly, create goals and desires for itself, and presumably express them.
Hofstadter makes the distinction between algorithmic thought, and pattern-recognizing thought. He claims that chess can't be beaten without pattern-recognizing thought. This prediction was wrong, only in the last year or two have the chess engines started to incorporate machine learning. Computer were able to beat humans at chess using purely algorithmic solutions and a lot of computing power.
However the point Hofstadter is making holds very true for Go. Go is an open-ended enough game that pure algorithms aren't enough to solve it, and you need a computer that has learned to recognize patterns and apply them in a creative way. In this sense, Hofstadter is right that there is a level of intelligence above straightforward algorithms.
On the other hand, Hofstadter is wrong that this pattern-recognition is enough to create general intelligence. A computer that can win at go has one of the ingredients of general intelligence—the ability to recognize patterns and respond in ways that appear more intelligent than even a human. It's like we've sliced diagonally through a problem that Hofstadter thought of as linear. We're still no closer to creating an AI that has a will, or is capable of being bored of playing chess.
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There are hundreds of things I could do in this moment and I don't know which ones are important or which ones I want to do.
Thinking about downloading all of Tumblr.
I wonder if The Linoleum Club can capture some of Tumblr's aesthetic?
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*
Does a perfect Gemini site mirror its content to HTTP? does it respond to HTTP at all? Does it serve different content to Gemini and HTTP?
Javascript is extremely flexible and I know it very well. It doesn't make much sense for me to do anything but double down on using it.
Trying to convince known communists to invest in the stock market, like, this is a pyramid scheme but it’s supported by the US government.
This is too controversial for a HN comment, but my two-sentence thoughts on Ladybird:
If they're trying to hit the sweet-spot where they've done 20% of the work and 80% of websites work, they're already there. If they're trying to compete with Chromium, well, not even Firefox or Safari can do that.
Cars haven't radically changed in the last 100 years. They have four wheels, a windshield, a steering wheel, an ICE, etc.
We've changed the shape of the body and some of the underlying technology. Power steering, automatic transmission, etc, but these were improvements to the existing thing, nothing radically different. And moreover, we haven't had another radical innovation in the transportation field. Sure, some people commute on one-wheels or motorcycles or roller blades. But the majority of people today have a car that would be instantly understandable to someone from 1910 who drove a model T.
So the question is, was Henry Ford or whoever invented the modern family-automobile a super-genius who got it right the first time? Is there not a better input mechanism than the steering wheel?
No. Ford jumped us to a new area, and we've been iterating on cars since then. We're still looking for the local-maximum of all things that look like Ford's car. We haven't jumped again, but that's because jumping is hard. Inventing something radically new is hard.
The thing that makes this interesting to me is that there's a certain extent to which there exists a car design, call it car-prime. And Car-prime was invented by Ford in 1908 instead of the model T in a parallel universe. And Car-prime looks different from our cars in a way that is radical, but not significant. Maybe it has 3 wheels, or the engine in the back, or is one-person wide, or has a joy-stick instead of a steering wheel. And let's say it's technically, objectively better than a normal car in some small way.
But if you invented Car-prime today, it wouldn't take off. You wouldn't be able to convince people to use it. It's better, but it's not radically better, so you can't overcome it's radical differences. And this isn't just about "people don't like things that are different." If it was half as wide, or didn't run on gas, or whatever, it wouldn't make sense to switch because we have years of infrastructure established surrounding our version of a car.
This is about the web.
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.
> 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.
Why are people using Latte dock? I've found the KDE task manager bar to be perfectly customizable.
I just feel so sick to my stomach, so lonely. I have a headache every night. I'm too tired to do anything that I want to do.
I don't know, it could be worse. It has been worse. I just. uh.
XKCD 45 gets funnier the more times you read it. You’re a true XKCD fan when you find #45 funny.
"Are we back?"
The start of The Incomparable 2021 Clip Show is so good. They just open with the clip loop. Off the bat.
The prior thought builds on an underlying realization that is perhaps just as profound. Books as a medium are, generally speaking, a lot
"better"; or perhaps, more Literature-y than many other types of media.
People argue *a lot* about the quality of books, but on the whole, the worst published children's book imaginable has more themes, more character development, more moral than any meme or Tweet or Youtube video or TikTok clip.
But that's not an insult to Youtube videos or Tweets. On the contrary, I think it's weird how arbitrary our criteria for judging stories is, because we don't, universally judge any other media by the same standards.
Yeah KA Discord is cool, but have you tried KA Art of Problem Solving forum?
I’m really excited to see how TIES does this season. They’ve built some impressive infrastructure (mob farm, sky net, ender pearl villager);
I’m hoping it pays off for them.
Like I paid thousands of dollars for this computer and I would pay thousands more if it didn't have any bugs.
"Using Lynx is like wearing a really good pair of shades: cuts out the glare and harmful UV (ultra-vanity), and you feel so-o-o COOL."
-- Henry Nelson, March 1999
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.
I love Hacker News because the people are like 'this is all obvious because of the concept of reincarnation.'
And the reply is 'what scientific evidence is there for reincarnation?'
“The real God taketh heed lest a sparrow fall; but the God created from human vanity sees no difference between an eagle and a sparrow.”
-*Dracula*
(Reference Matthew 10:29)
I believe I once promised someone, if only myself, that this website would concentrate my insanity and allow me to be more sane elsewhere.
That was a falsehood.
I started working on OJSE a bit. Wow. That code base is a mess. Multiple authors over the course of 5 years! It works, because I’m in charge
and I won’t let it literally fall apart, but stylistically, it’s all questionable.
God is good!
My soul is asleep. Although my mind should probably be sleep as well. But that’s okay, because God is good.
I don’t know what radio station I’m listening to but it just went from “Monday”, The Regrettes, to “We Are Young”, Fun. 10/10
I have no doubts that I would not have these problems if I was a different person, but I do not want to be a different person.
Tapping on Cycle Tracking in the heath app on iOS 14 crashes my phone. I'm sure no one noticed, not that important of a feature, really. /s
I have over 900,000 pixels in my web browser that Twitter.com can control and it shows me one (1) Tweet.
Watch out, I have started brainstorming a new programming language.
Codename: May
Estimated date of completion: 2030
Made this earlier, inspired by a Reddit comment
(Did you notice this image has `alt` text? Big things are always happening behind the scenes here.)
"But the fact is I would not have spent a decade doing this, if I did not believe I was at least tiny bit ridiculously filthy at it"
-Don't Be Nice, Watsky
If you never intend on reading all of *Gödel, Escher, Bach*, I highly recommend finding and reading the dialogue “Contracrostipunctus”.
I feel like the world can be divided into competent people and incompetent people. Some people possess the ability to solve problems and
other people don't
Apparently my Apple Watch has 32GB of storage space??
Brb downloading my entire 1000+ song library onto wrist so that I can leave my phone
at home.
Somehow I got it in my head that there was this cool new JS framework for dynamically server side rendering React, when like, it was Next.js
I spent like an hour searching for vague terms like "server side rendering javascript framework" before I searched for a specific comment I remember seeing on the Hacker News post I had read about it. I found the comment quickly on a post about Next.js. Funky.
Zoom updated their web client so you can actually see other people (instead of just the person talking). 10/10
No reason to download the native app now, get hecked.
My parents always supported me and taught me to be true to myself. They gave me the confidence to argue with strangers on the internet.
Idris attempts to solve the same problem as [Thu](https://ourjseditor.com/program/S5ShEy). They're just doing it very differently.
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.
This new epistemology came to me when walking by the creek the other day. I may reject it before writing all of the aforementioned posts.
If I did reject it, it would be because it argues that there is a Platonic form to a chair, for instance.
The counter-argument is of course that my own inability to imagine the platonic form of a chair is in-line with the theory and doesn't disprove anything.
Playing Minecraft to distract me from my problems. I got a Discord notification and my body spasmed as a result of an anxiety rush.
I talk a big game with my whole "I don't lie" thing, but like, it kind of doesn't matter if I'm not trying to communicate effectively.
Like I'm not going to give you false information and then encourage you to reach false conclusions. But sometimes I will falsify facts in order to lead you to a correct conclusion in a more direct way, or I may present you with misleading (but true) facts and then encourage you to reach a false conclusion.
"I know I'd rather lose my life / than have to lose myself"
-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.
People assume that since Gemini doesn't have a lot of users it's free game to suggest things, and they don't understand that the protocol is
finished, people are using it, there is no intention to attract users, and there is no path to make breaking changes.
And the Gemini mailing list is called rude but I guarantee you if you go on the mailing list for any other project which is done and is in maintenance mode and suggest adding features the reply is going to be "no" in about that many words.
Merry Christmas!
Remember that time a couple thousand years ago when the God if the universe was born as a human, that was pretty cool.
There are still open bugs in OJSE I hate this.
=> https://github.com/OurJSEditor/OurJSEditor/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+label%3Abug
Some pieces I did on tixy.land
[Basic Wave](https://tixy.land/?code=%28sin%28%28x%2By%29%2F9-t*2%29%2B1%29%2F2)
[M, one](https://tixy.land/?code=%22%C2%81%C3%83%C2%A5%C2%99%22.charCodeAt%28y%2F2%29%262**%28x-4%29)
[M, two](https://tixy.land/?code=%221%C2%95%11%11%22.charCodeAt%28y%2F2%29%262**%283-abs%287-x%29%2By%252*4%29)
There are so many Tumblr posts about Jerma and many of them make him out to be weird or unhinged in some way, but I watched like
half a Jerma video once and he seems like the most basic white guy twitch streamer imaginable.
One of the weird things about this website is that I allude to projects that I conceptualize but haven't implemented. And boy are there are
a lot of them.
And this is after I try to avoid mentioning them. There are even more that I haven't mentioned.
Make a user-friendly CLI-app (impossible)
But seriously, the terminal is just monospaced and doesn't have mouse support. That doesn't mean it has to be unintuitive. Or maybe it does, what do I know
The 5S was the perfect size phone. The iPhone 12 mini is back to iPhone 6 size, which is good; better than the XR I have now, but still big.
How sweet the taste of certainty.
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.
I lamented a little while ago that I don't read more code. I think I remembered why. It's because like all code is bad.
I have no idea why VS Code is unhappy with me. I'm turning smart code completion back off, I take back what I said about wanting some types,
IDEs are dumb.
I wonder if the reason I don't put any art on my wall is because I'm afraid other people won't like it.
I've really enjoyed using Rectangle. It still sounds dumb to me, none of the things it does are things I would say I want, and yet, I do.
It takes just over a second to load Winter 2021. For a sane person that would be perfectly fine, but I'm not sane and that's not fast enough
Caching the HTML content from every thought instead of rendering them on-demand lets us save close to 400ms.
I've been working on getting this working for the last 7 hours.
It's still not fast enough for me, but I think this is close to the max I can get out of Django. Might need to re-write this as a static site at some point.
I'm about half way through the Info reading, by number of pages. We're at 28 minutes. I could give up and post this, but I kind of want to
read the GNU document license down in Appendix A. I think that would be fun.