Thoughts
I feel like animated adult shows are absolutely terrified of being classified as kids shows so they feel the need to be painfully explicit
in every episode.
Screw it I'm installing VS code. It's getting uninstalled the first time it crashes or freezes though.
I can't.
Okay so you need context probably. I have fancy textboxes on the post page here that get taller when you type in them.
Well, the trigger for them expanding is dependent on whether or not I have a mouse plugged in. I don't want to get into all of it, something something, macOS displays scrollbars, etc. Is this a web problem? Can I blame this on the W3? Or this is a problem with software in general? Should I fix this? Can I fix this? Help.
One of my biggest mistakes was using MySQL or Postgres. I spent so long picking between them, I overlooked how perfect SQLite is.
You know it's serious because I'm double-`.bind`ing a function, once to bind its `this` and once to pass a property.
Did you know that `func.bind(null, a)` doesn't set the `this` value to `null` if the function already has a bound `this` value; it won't overwrite it.
Promises are so fricking opinionated. I can't. Javascript is so un-opinionated and then, Promises
My space bar has stopped working normally. The ugly side of this keyboard has finally reared its head.
I just, I'm going to have to get the keyboard replaced again. Apple's going to think I'm running an AppleCare scam but legitimately the TouchBar, screen, and now the keyboard have failed me. And since the computer is all glued together they really only replace the top-half or bottom half, so I'm going to have gone through 2 entire computers. How do you even make a computer with a life-expectancy of one year?
All I want in my life are bookends. Bookends are one of the greatest inventions of humanity and I don't have any of them.
I'm really uncomfortable being a leader because I don't like the responsibility for other people's outcomes. The problem is that that
extends to literally any form of giving advice or trying to convince someone that I'm right. I don't want to convince my friend to do something because if they do it and it ends poorly, I feel bad. But that's part of what being a friend is. I can't just let my friend do something that I think is dumb either.
Okay, so imagine you're Kelsier, and ask yourself, "what would Kelsier do in this situation?"
"Apathy's a tragedy and boredom is a crime"
-Welcome to the Internet, Bo Burnham
(I have a project in my notes with "Welcome to the Internet" as a working title. At the time no one else had used it.)
It's a miracle any code works.
We are constructing a tower of Babel and God can allow it to stand because it will fall to our own hubris.
This is about the codebase that is shared between my Gemini server and my website.
We’ve come a long way since 2006.
=> http://blogs.tedneward.com/post/the-vietnam-of-computer-science/
This post is bad. I don’t want to be rude here, because it’s well written. And I don’t know what this guy’s credentials are. And I don’t know what the ORM scene in 2006 looked like. But come on:
> On top of this, we have a more subtle problem, that of the reliance on developers' dicipline: both the table name ("PERSON") and the column name in the criteria ("PERSON.LAST_NAME") are standard strings, taken as-is and fed to the system at runtime with no sort of validity-checking until then. This presents a classic problem in programming, that of the “fat-finger” error, where a developer doesn’t actually query the “PERSON” table, but the “PRESON” table instead.
How is this relevant to the claim that “Object-relation mapping is the Vietnam of computer science.” I guess there weren’t any scripting languages at the time and the thought of not having a compiler to validate your terms was awful. Like, I’ve only ever used an ORM in JS and Python. I don’t except compile-time SQL errors. And that’s only one claim. Other “problems” include ‘what if you have two copies of the process running and one of them is paused by the OS and suspended to disk and the other process runs a database migration. Will your ORM save you then??’ Is there any solution to that problem? What the heck?
All of the issues are issues either with strict OOP (which is why I don’t write Java) or issues with having a database.
I almost forgot the part where he goes on about how the DB “instead is owned by another group within the company, typically the database administration (DBA) group.” And he acknowledges that this isn’t inherently an issue with the ORM, but still seems to think it’s relevant.
It's so hard to care about two incompatible things.
"How lucky am I to have two things I love"
-Christmas In June, AJR
As is frequently the case, while I enjoy reading about new topics in *GEB*, things that I already know about are more enjoyable still.
With exception, of course—I have to skim some of his explanation of recursive programming.
But when he introduces Cage’s 4’33” without explaining it, I think I get more out of it than if I waited for the author to explain it in a couple of pages.
This is my attempt at blackout poetry. It gave me slightly more appreciation for the medium, but I still think blackout poetry is dumb.
The source is some random book. I used exactly one page. I tried to persevere layout when transcribing for this site, but it’s obviously imperfect. “Mutilated and deformed” is the name of the chapter in the book, and I left it in at the top of the page.
Edit: uh I forgot the link to the actual post. It’s the one from a few days ago
The thing about the shortcuts app is that you can't actually use like a scripting language, because it's so fricking slow. It takes ~1
second to walk through the `for` loop, complete with graphical animation, for every one of my 1000 songs. So like it's not an alternative for cheap scripting in this use-case, or I imagine, any with more than ~100 items, at which point, why not do it by hand.
Growing up both of my parents worked for non-profits. It was humbling to know that, indirectly, almost everything we had came from donations
Survive through Europe. thrive, die, belief in something greater than yourself or even the sum of your parts.
Swift seems like it's very opinionated about things. Like there's a right way of doing things, and swift has no interest in making other
ways of doing things work, even when those ways are unambiguous and arguably just as intuitive. This wouldn't be too much of a problem except that the right way of doing any given thing changes every couple of years when Swift updates.
Docker containers sometimes stop responding to kill signals (or other signals) and the accepted solution is the restart the docker daemon on
the host. What the heck.
Apparently, the ideological fantasy portrayed in the Starbreaker universe was extremely commonly discussed in the 1990s-era internet.
Maybe I’m just not a theater kid. Maybe I just don’t get it.
Sorry for spam-posting. I’m just trying to cope with this book. I’m not even half-way through. I might just go to bed.
I judge people primarily based off of how old their Discord account is. Pre-2017 and you're instantly cool.
"if your sentiments can be hurt so easily with facts, I'd like to advise you to work on your sentiments"
Fun fact, if you don't have a desktop picture set, macOS will make your desktop #527EB9, which is a pretty nice color.
I'm unimpressed with alt-j's new album. It feels like it's trying too hard to be deep and emotional. And what I historically liked about
Alt-J was how light their songs were.
GCS d- s !a C+++ M++ UL+ w-- E--- W++++ !N PS+ PE++ Y+ !PGP !tv b++ G e h+ !r
-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.1
GCS d- s !a C+++ M++ UL+ w-- E--- W++++ !N PS+ PE++ Y+ !PGP !tv b++ G e h+ !r
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------
On one hand, the concept of a geek code is like right in line with "20 | gay | they/them | autistic" in a Twitter bio. On the other hand, age is the only label that overlaps at all.
I wonder what happened to the types of people that would have unironically used this. Some Gemini users fondly remember their time on Usenet (I think there's a Gemini/Gopher Usenet forum that was recently created, but "!N"). But what about all the people that were cringy kids on Usenet and are now being cringy on Twitter?
Oh yeah I guess I should link: https://web.archive.org/web/20050210083932/http://www.geekcode.com/geek.html
I still sometimes type and get excited at how quickly and with such little latency the letters show up on the screen.
Guys, guys, I found my new favorite library a7ul/esbuild-node-tsc
"Please note this library doesnt do typechecking."
It's a Typescript compiler that doesn't do type checking. It just strips out the type symbols and returns JS. 0/10 for practicality. You just throw whatever fricking types in there and this is like, eh, doesn't matter.
Like, wait a minute, JS is loosely typed! We don't actually have to keep track of these types! "blazing fast" builds!
The reason surrealism? is so hard to do in any meaningful place is that it requires not just the aesthetic appreciation of nonsense but
also the belief that realism (or what most would call the truth) is actually not useful.
This is about 9front’s code of conduct and also the about page of this website.
I had my first hard drive failure the other week. It was very exciting. Having grown up in the age of SSDs, I had never had a hard drive
fail on me before.
Is it possible I have ADHD? I'm bouncing my leg, listening to breakcore, fidgeting with a rubber wrist band, and having trouble reading this
code.
"Maybe things will make sense if we kiss"
-I Love Us, The Regrettes
also, "I got so good at lonely"
I live my life absolutely consumed by fear of 3 things: other people, failure, and losing control of myself.
I thought Emacs scrolling was rough just because it wasn't doing pixel-based smooth scrolling (scrolling line-by-line instead), but now I
think it might be lagging? Like stuttering and not able to keep up with my scrolling? Absolute garbage from my "lightweight" editor.
Why does Ubuntu put things in my bashrc by default??? 0/10. I want to customize my own bashrc. Get out.
Me, like, 'I'm in the mood for some rap,' listening to "Monster," Eminem, followed by "The Resistance," Josh Garrels.
"I don’t know. I’m confused. Is this growing up? Watching all your feathers come off? And even though some of those feathers were the most
lovely things?"
Can we take a moment to appreciate the code that I wrote for OurJSEditor to track a line and column number through the inverse of a find and
replace? It took like fricking 2 weeks. Amazing.
WSB right now is like
\> I did an analysis of the GME trading data from December and I think there are millions of counterfeit shares
\> I think I would enjoy this post if I could read
*They don't know that the program that brute-forced the chests to expose Minecravenger was run on Feinberg's computer*
I love that I can be like “when I worked as an ASP.NET developer four years ago…”
Edit: it was four years ago, not ten
Re-reading the Thu design doc. I think it describes a really interesting coding style. It would be similar to writing code with a bunch of
`assert`s, with the intention of catching errors as quickly as possible at run-time. The Thu philosophy is to error as soon as encountering undefined behavior, but at runtime, not compile time. I don't see any other languages really doing that.
=> https://ourjseditor.com/program/S5ShEy
I'm just so tired.
I want to use Atom. But Microsoft bought Atom so that I would use Visual Studio Code.
Cancel culture is not letting your toddler watch Numberblocks because the BBC doesn’t let their journalists attend controversial marches.
I understand being frustrated that the BBC won’t let their news reporters publicly support political issues. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/oct/29/bbc-no-bias-rules-prevent-staff-joining-lgbt-pride-protests
But I don’t understand that conclusion that you should boycott a children’s show that is produced by a connected organization. Like, I’m not going to boycott Phineas and Ferb because someone on ABC said something offensive that I politically disagree with.
But I can’t argue with it. What am I supposed to say? ‘BCC is so big you should ignore them being homophobic sometimes’
I mean, at some point, just boycott the BBC because they are the product of an imperialist empire. Just boycott everything that is produced in England and support business in developing countries.
This is what’s weird about “cancel cultural.” It tries to define everything that’s bad but sets the bar so high that’s easier to define what’s good.
I love Python when it gives me tools to do what I want. When it doesn't, it's so painful.
Trying to flattening a list that I built with a list comprehension :/
Can you imagine the person from Hypixel that had to explain to the Cloudflare engineers that their users have the server ping displayed on
the screen at all times and that if the latency increased by so much as 30ms, users will notice and complain. Network engineering nightmare.
On people who watch Minecraft Youtube videos: "Many of the viewers are North American schoolchildren in the 10-13 age range, a lot of them
are behaviorally challenged, and the majority are dealing with some form of parental neglect."
42 votes, 2 awards. Posted by the moderator a subreddit about a Minecraft Youtube series.
Like, that is something you say. You can say 'most people who watch Minecraft videos are abused, autistic, children.'
I'm struggling here.
"The moderation structure and policies are not intended to be an example of an anarchist society; an internet forum is not a society."
I'm still not over what a good game *World of Goo* was. Like top 5 games all time IMO. Not even gameplay wise, but the aesthetic, the story.
I'm trying to remember the name of that minecraft mod that take over the character for you and controls it automatically.
guillotine
gilliford
buford
birthday
baratone!
Got it.
I ran through like 30 other words that started with b or g before I even started typing this Thought. "barista" etc.
I was like "how on earth can the Dewey Decimal System be homophobic?" but then
"topics relating to homosexuality were first added to the system under 132 (mental derangements)"
Oh.
CLI tools auto-opening applications, including other shells, is extremely annoying.
The react native CLI will open Terminal.app in order to run a build service server, before then opening the iOS simulator.
Also throwback to the last time I used React Native.
Why would I reconsider my bad decisions now when I could stay up for another couple of hours and then have a break down and reconsider my
bad decisions.
"The percentage of normal users that know how to (and are willing to) setup self-hosted instances of something is definitely far below 1%"
The world is divided into 2 types of people. "Folx" and "cismen"
I cannot describe how seriously and in how formal of a context, the "folx" vs. "cismen" distinction is being made.
Reading the Infra WhatWG spec and lost a few brain cells. I found the MDN article on the topic and now I understand it and I'm fine.
The picture of a man standing under an apple tree. The ground is littered with large juicy apples. He bends over to pick up the smallest of
them, but it's too heavy for him to to carry.
I hate this. I want to represent the data `[[1], [1, 2], [1, 2, 3], [1, 2, 3, 4]]` in Zig and I cannot figure out how to do it.
* People who are complete fools and don't even try.
* People who have working knowledge.
* People whose brains can think in a Turing
complete way, but they don't enjoy it.
* People who think like a programmer.
I'm not sure where the line between 1 and 2 is.
So the ultra woke neoliberals have cancelled Asperger's, and I think we can apply similar logic to cancel autistic. Which just I would think
would be fun.
The cycle:
* a new word is created to describe a shared experience
* the word becomes popular and its usage increases
* the meaning of the word becomes more broad, as it is used in new contexts
* the word loses concrete meaning
* the word is used in undesirable contexts or to describe things that are undesirable (or as a slur)
* there's backlash against the word, as it is associated with these undesirable things
* the word stops being used
* repeat at step 1
* in parallel, the word is reclaimed
Like sometimes "autistic" is used as an insult and therefore it can be a slur and therefore we should create a new word that doesn't have the same negative connotation. I'm so based.
I sometimes fall into the trap of thinking that my sanity is correlated with my productivity, which is not the case.
I'm considering adding a flicker/blur affect to the whole site, *Gilded Dagger* style, to more accurately convey the mood I envision.
Other than the fact that it's smaller than a credit card, I really like the magic mouse, more than I thought I would. I do wish it had a
tap-to-click option.
Happening upon trigonometry at a young age, before it is taught, while special, is not impressive.
I asked my 6th grade math teacher for a function that would take a slope and return the number of degrees you would need to rotate a line in order to end up with that slope. (I needed it for a programming project.) She was unable to answer me. I remember looking at a staircase in my middle school, and thinking, this goes up at a slope of 1, and a 45º angle. What's the relationship between those numbers?
It's like, congrats, you've stumbled upon one of the most important fields in math. It's impressive that I was wandering from the curriculum, but stumbling onto trig is relatively unsurprising.
Why would I read the documentation? All the documentation tells me is that it's impossible to do what I want to do and it's out of scope and
I need to write an extension.
So, I can't paste into the Chromium browser console.
*All I want is software that works.*
I'm sure the anti-paste thing has forgotten that I opted into that years ago and is now in a corrupted state where I can't paste but also don't see the prompt that tells you how to allow pasting. (Or maybe it's only FF that has that prompt, IDK)
I think I might have ADHD.
I mean, I don't know what ADHD is. I don't have trouble focusing, focusing just feels weird.
Like, my brain has so many sources, so many pieces of media that I've consumed, that like, I could never come up with an original idea for
the rest of my life and just pass of things I've read on the internet as my own ideas. And like, I'm not Googling the question and copying an answer. I mean, I saw someone discussing this point on the internet 4 years ago and internalized their opinion and I honestly don't know if their opinion is mine or not because I haven't researched it myself but I somehow know enough to have a conversation about it. Like, I could pitch you 30 different video games, which are just blatantly stolen from Khan Academy, but I know that the original programs were unpopular or deleted and the games have taken on a new life in my head. If I wrote a cross-over fan fiction between two works that have probably each been read by ~1000 people, and I change the names of the characters, at some point does this become an original work? If every line of my poem comes from a different Reddit comment, is it my poetry?
I think I don’t trust people because I hold them to unreasonably high standards and then they consistently disappoint me.
They do not understand. We HAVE to Iterate ALL of the words! Every combination, every sentence must be said. ALL OF THEM.
I’m stating the obvious but Toki Pona has a tiny vocabulary. If I want to say “good morning” the closest I can get is “tenpo pona”
I’m Matthias.
I want to cry but won’t let myself. I feel so alone. I miss people. I miss myself. I love you.
I want to do a column where I just spew out internally consistent systems of belief and invite people to guess whether its satire or not
I don't understand why people get so emotional about Gemini.
This is about Drew and Sean, of course. Kinda don't respect either of them.
I literally just found out T Swift released a second album this year, I'm great at following pop culture, 10/10.
Like compare
"We write code not just to be understood by the computer or other programmers, but to bask in the warm glow of beauty. Aesthetically pleasing code is a value unto itself and should be pursued with vigor." from Rail's doctrine page to "By using Black, you agree to cede control over minutiae of hand-formatting...You will save time and mental energy for more important matters." Black is a very popular Python code formatter. Django recently started using Black, for instance.
Good morning.
Saw a post claiming CS doesn't make that much money anymore. Like baby how much money do you want.
I’ve solved it. I’ve solved wtfhappenedin1971. The sharp rise of dual-income families and the normalization of women in the work force
caused the changes in every other graph.
=> https://thoughts.learnerpages.com/?show=057a2bac-b2cc-4797-ba1d-6415aefbca4a
=> https://thoughts.learnerpages.com/?show=2086d0ff-80ea-4205-ad35-e8fb52ac8ae5
From what I can tell, Deno Deploy just runs your code, which is supposed to start an HTTP server to listen on port 8000 to respond to a
single request.
We need a standard like CGI but for modern serverless scripts so that you can move code between platforms. Something like JSON piped to stdin.
I don't know how to communicate how hard it is for me to maintain this website. Like. Maybe I'm just an idiot. but like.
I removed the rss page but didn't remove the `link` tag pointing to it, so Google is emailing me about how I have broken links on my site.
The rest of my problems are with the gemini version of the site, so I guess producing Gemini content is too hard, sorry. Maybe they should have made the protocol simpler.
I suspect there's a memory leak in nodeJS around pipelines, I'm trying to look into it.
I had to fix the Astronomical theater reverse proxy to pass query parameters.
Jetforce in prod isn't responding to queries when I make them from the command line in prod. It's working because astronomical theater can find it to make queries against it. And the command that I'm using is right because it works locally.
I just.
Like.
I don't know what to tell you, computers are too hard.
Hacker News comment defending that goats are less than 2 feet tall.
Because if you Google “goat height,” it gives you the Wikipedia page for Pygmy goat. Googling “duck height” gives you the height of the tallest ever duck, 30 inches. And now since Google is an authority, people are using and defending those numbers. I’m having none of it. Pygmy Goat height and Indian Runner Duck height is completely irrelevant to the conversation. I mean a normal duck and a normal goat. And if you think my definition of a duck is wrong, you can argue with me, but don’t pull in Google’s Wikipedia scraping algorithms to do it.
I feel like a huge amount (maybe 20%?) of programming is converting between declarative and imperative data (AKA `diff`ing)
If this is what that looks like, then I’m not interested.
Remind me to decline if I’m ever offered a Nobel prize.
Just opened my window and got a very nice breath of fresh air. It took me by surprise, how cool and fresh the air smelled. 10/10
Can you imagine if getting in bed was hard? I’m glad I just kind of have to flop down onto it and close my eyes.
I'm like almost ADHD when writing code. I'll start writing something, and be half way through a line, but my mind has been working on the
next line, so I jump down and write that line before I forget it, and then I go back and finish the line I was originally working on.
I think this is why I get so frustrated to with like anything that tries to analyze my code as I'm typing, either to give syntax errors, or even auto-indent it. Like your auto-indenter is going to be wrong if I took a break in the middle of writing my function, and I'm writing the line that calls the function. I don't mind it if I can fix the indention obviously, but like some editors *force* indentation, and I have to go back and add closing brackets to the function declaration above.
I'm shutting down my KA mod action logger ("Programs KA doesn't want you to see"). I'm not maintaining it, and it's breaking.
It gave a couple of interesting take-aways:
0. The hot list doesn't move that fast. Only 2,000 programs in 4 months.
1. KA hides around 2 programs a day, ~14% of programs that spend any time on the hot list.
2. People are confused. Many programs had edits questioning what had happened
3. The most interesting IMO: Of all the programs "caught," none were malicious or explicit. I expected at least a little bit of language, but most programs were hidden just for being low-quality.
I scraped the first page of the hot list every 10 minutes (right after it updated), for 143 days (over 4 months). I logged 1,973 unique programs.
275 programs were hidden from the hot list.
168 programs were completely hidden.
239 programs were marked as definitely not spam.
127 programs were deleted by their owners.
166 programs were hidden from the hot list and completely hidden.
61 programs were hidden from the hot list and marked as definitely not spam.
18 programs were completely hidden and marked as definitely not spam.
I shouldn't need to explicitly disclaim this, but these numbers are amateur—they didn't come from KA. In particular, it's possible that I manually entered programs into the database for testing purposes and then forgot about them. (I don't think I did, but I wrote code at one point to let me.) Also, it's possible there were bugs around users deleting programs.
This should really be a KA Hearth post, but I need to go to sleep.
I realized earlier today that I would rather be around people who insult me than people who compliment me because I can trust that the
former is being honest.
Who hurt me as a kid? I don't trust anyone.
Someone needs to do to technology what Moneyball did to Baseball.
Unfortunately, Amazon's doing the best job.
Thus far, I have found in math only 2 fundamental concepts: matrixes and sets. Everything else is syntax sugar.
I could be swayed to allow ordered pairs, if an argument was found to sufficiently distinct them from a 2x1 matrix.
"The Lord has broken the staff of the wicked, the scepter of rulers, that struck the peoples in wrath with unceasing blows...
that ruled the nations in anger, with unrelenting persecution. The whole earth is at rest and quiet; they break forth into singing."
-Isaiah 14:5-7
One of my greatest weaknesses is that I can sum up my thoughts on any subject in less than a hundred words.
That's a lie. I do care. I care about everything. I want this website to be perfect. But I don't know where the 500 errors are and I don't
like Google and I have other things to do so I'm going to try to convince myself that I don't care, so that I can move on.
The thing I don't like about Twitter is that it's people-focused, not topic focused. I really enjoy Twitter right now, but because I follow
people that I'm friends with.
It's difficult for me to follow like, topics, on Twitter. I'd be interested in some recreational mathematics content on Twitter. And so I follow @standupmaths, @Ayliean, and @3blue1brown. But Matt tweets about their dog and Ayliean tweets about about Scottish school Covid restrictions and I don't really care. And Grant only tweets when he releases a video.
Like I actively do not want to see political content. And that means that I can't follow any tech journalists on Twitter because all of them will retweet political content.
I'm not trying to criticize these people. I understand that this is how Twitter works. I'm just pointing out that this is how the system works, and that the system could work differently.
Tumblr has a similar problem. I told Tumblr at some point I was interested in Math, so it recommended I follow a blog with "mathematics" in the name. Well, it was just some person's blog. And they re-posted a lot of cool math, including a fair amount of original art. But they also have some mental health issues and they used this unassuming "mathematics" blog to share life updates. It would honestly be comedic, the juxtaposition of "cool fact about the Fibonacci spiral" with vaguely-suicidal ramblings, were they not of course vaguely-suicidal.
I suppose, then, that Hacker News and Reddit suffer from the opposite problem, dedication to a topic at the expense of the human element. But at least I know what I'm getting into.
I am going wild with creating these themes. Version based on the Melodramatic album art I did, 9/10.
The drop near the end of "The Way It Was" (Coast Modern) is so unnecessary. I'm not saying it's not fire, just that it's unnecessary.
Reddit: 'Trump is evil and Biden will save us soon as he takes office'
Tumblr: *Straight anachronism*
"It's the little things that I can't handle, and we're still in July"
-Life Must Go On, Quinn XCII
What I could do is configure WhisperMaPhone to output gemtext from Django and then write a Gemini to HTTP proxy.
You make a Gemini request to some website, it gets translated into an HTTP request, sent to an HTTP server, and then content gets sent back over Gemini. Kinda solid.
I just, I suck at using the computer. I'm awful at it. I can't make a good website, I can't make a mobile app, I can't play Minecraft. And
like, this is what I do. The thing that I'm best at is programming and I'm bad at it.
Easy fix, thankfully. s/(width|height)/min-$1/g
=> https://ourjseditor.com/program/k2cvZM Minimum reproduction case on OJSE
At some point I convinced myself that wanting to have a relationship with women is misogynist.
Like, if the interest is one-sided, then that's more than just awkward, I've actually been sexist. A little like https://xkcd.com/642/, but not just for random girls on public transport, but also for literally anyone. They have a right to professionalism and if I try to bring my personal life into the conversation, I've violated that right. I guess I've only talked to 4 girls in-person in the last year, but that's mostly due to COVID.
On the flip side, if I try to start a romantic relationship with someone that I've known longer than 3 months, then I'm scared of https://xkcd.com/513. Man xkcd is too accurate with these things.
"Am I ready for love? Or maybe just a best friend, should there be a difference, do you have instructions?" -Turning Out, AJR
‘I want to draw a headshot of my favorite Minecraft YouTuber but he’s a generic looking white boy with no defining characteristics.’
Solution: Wings coming out of his ears.
“Do you fear being shaken by the shoulders like an Etch A Sketch? Being mugged for your memories? I do. They are my first most prized
possession”
Girl in the book just asked for help installing Linux. The year is 2010.
I’m howling. I’m now reading to see how bad this can get.
The insane thing is that Rex did characters well in Cold Cereal Saga. Two years later and he can write characters super well. But in 2010 he thinks normal flirting is asking for help with Linux. (This is not like an especially nerdy girl. The guy is established as a nerd. But the girl is described as a theater girl. Maybe 2010 was just a different time.)
There’s a lot more I could say I’m not getting into everything. I’m so bored of the book at this point, nothing has happened. But I don’t have my computer and I kind of want to finish it now so that I can rate it, because it’s on track for like 2 stars.
What the heck? Tubbo is playing Minecraft to 80k viewers on Twitch. Jack Septic Eye has 15k viewers playing Cyberpunk
page 98 of *The Mysterious Benedict Society*
Transcript
The missing aren't missing, they're only departed
All minds keep all thoughts, so like gold, closely guarded
Grow the lawn and mow the lawn
Always leave the TV on
Brush your teeth and kill the germs
Poison apples, poison worms
Hate Dracula Daily on days like today.
I got all excited when I saw it in my inbox and then, it’s a receipt.
All people want to do is tell me that I'm wrong. Like I get it. I'm dumb, you're smarter than me.
You know more about the KA API than I do. You know how the internet works and I don't. And KA's processing-js finally has it's source available. And OurJSEditor looks ugly as hell and I'm not managing it right.
Rust is fascinating to me not because of the borrow checking features, but because it has a modern standard library.
I blamed strictly typed languages for having auto-generated "documentation" but Ruby does it too. It's utterly useless.
=> https://thoughts.learnerpages.com/?show=6df0758b-1669-4eec-a729-dffd7c96a9e3 "auto-generated docs that list the types of your values does not count as documentation."
Thinking about the time I had "INTJ" in my Khan Academy nickname. Humans like labels.
I think that's one of the reasons I obsess with my name. I introduce myself and describe myself with "I am Matthias" not just as an introduction, but as a descriptor. "Matthias" is by far the most accurate label I have found for myself.
/r/notinteresting is at times more interesting than other subreddits, because since it doesn’t have a single theme.
Binge-read a comic about a gay hockey player. I don’t think I’ve ever read a comic, or anything about a gay man, or a hockey player, so I’m
a little surprised.
https://www.checkpleasecomic.com/comic/01-01-01
It’s funny, you don’t realize how much worldbuilding goes into a story until you sit down and it’s like, ugh, need another character name.
Wow, this song sounds just like Jon Bellion.
The song is Girl Named Summertime (feat. Jon Bellion)
I guess I'm probably being too harsh, and I'm just not hearing about things like I used to. I found https://colors.withgoogle.com, which is
exactly the type of thing I'm talking about. A fun, marking gimmick. And it seems to have been created less than a week ago. But man I had to look for that.
Honestly, it's so refreshing to browse XKCD.com and not have to worry about "sure, this comic is good, but is it good enough to like/voteup"
I've been using ssh for years and I learned today that it has escape characters.
Enter/return, then `~`, then `?` to list escape sequences.
This is my 1177th thought here. Someone should do the math to figure out when I’ll pass my Twitter.
Python 2.7 and Ruby 2.7 both sticking around long after the respective version 3s have been released is funny to me.
Some people understand the power words have. Those people tend to be LISP programmers.
“Agree politely, but delete nothing. Never apologize for who you are.”
I still have not found a situation where it makes more sense to use a `switch` statement than a bunch of `if`s.
*Maybe* in Java if you can switch on the values of an Enum, that's kind of nice.
And of course I love pattern matching in functional languages. But C-style switch statements are ugly. (I think they're only there because some instruction sets have assembly instructions for switching, but I hope you'd never have to worry about that.)
"Something Wild," Lindsey Stirling (feat. Andrew McMahon In the Wilderness), is really good. Genre-wise it's probably folk,
I don't love folk, but there are some songs, like this one, that are very good.
It is once again time for one of the best Youtube videos of all time.
=> https://youtu.be/ywWBy6J5gz8
This is “camels, microscopes, yams, hydrogen, coral reefs, mannequins, poems, comets, mousetraps, sarcasm, cacti, labyrinths”
“Contains less than 2% uranium, cyanide, cobwebs, magma, polio.”
Just finished watching The 2:51.
I think it will be come to be known as just The 2:51.
After finishing the run Feinberg put his head down on the desk and cried for the next 5 minutes. He's been working so hard for this.
I would not be surprised if it never gets beaten.
Feinberg has cemented himself as a legend. Saying he's the AA GOAT would be insulting, we all know that. He could be the greatest Minecraft player of all time, period. Like when it comes to skill I don't think there's a better test of MC skill than AA and no one can beat Feinberg.
I don't even love him or his content, but I just have so much respect for him, because I can tell he has worked so hard and knows what he's doing and cares so much. Not to mention he's so fricking good. Like since Feinberg is alone on the leaderboard, he has to motivate himself, and he did, so you can tell it means something to him.
He's not after the popularity or beating other people, he's grind-ed to push Minecraft to its limits. And as someone that cares about Minecraft, that's something that I love to see so much.
Moving Tweets over here has stalled since many Tweets have pictures associated with them. (I posted pictures more frequently on Twitter I
think.) So I need to write code to download those from Twitter. And of course some Tweets or threads (I wrote a neat bit of code to unroll Twitter threads into a single Thought) have multiple pictures, and I have no idea what to do about that (this site only supports one piece of media per Thought).
A lot of movies make the mistake of having the mildly deranged character become very deranged over the course of the movie.
What would you pay to not go insane?
A house sits abandoned
in a forest
surrounded by trees
and leaves
and by dark things unspeakable.
A shadow
looming over the left side of the world,
stealing,
never freeing.
Is importune instant impertinent death a murder? Merely because the innocent were killed in cold blood?
Outside
inside
together for warmth and
safety of others.
Fears and tears.
One of the subelties that I missed in my post on a block-based language earlier is that `while` statements in C-languages are weird.
Here, what if you wanted to create an infinite loop if x was less than 5, and not run your code if x was greater than or equal to five. `while (x < 5) {…}` You couldn't do that in one line, you would need to store the result of `x < 5` into a variable outside the loop. There's no way to tell the language, "evaluate this expression once, please." In that sense, `while` loops are a kind of macro in that they define a syntax that doesn't exist anywhere else in the language. (And mean, they're not a "macro", that's just a language feature, but it's still interesting.)
I think one of the problems with moderation is that you always have people who legitimately think it’s okay to post X or Y or Z content. Who
just can’t read the room. People whose only experience with the internet is 4chan and waltz into your forum and you have to spell out your expectations for them. And that person looks like someone acting in bad faith, but they’re not necessarily.
Like if you’re the one that made the rules, the rules seem obvious to you. But it’s easy to underestimate the extent to which other people’s expectation of “reasonable” behavior differs.
"Hello.
We haven't talked
in quite some time.
I know
I haven't
been
the best
of sons.
Hello I've been traveling in the deserts of my mind.
And I
haven't found a drop
of life."
I'm self-diagnosing with ADHD.
Which is dumb because I very clearly do not have ADHD.
I don't know what ADHD is. I sometimes, like now, enjoy a little bit of chaos. I like doing multiple things at once, and switching between them rapidly. I rely on habits and rules to avoid executive disfunction. I'm indecisive. I'm capable of relaxing but sometimes I don't want to.
Why has no one written a WYSITUTWYG editor yet?
*I found one from 7 years ago written in closure and probably abandoned*
Part of the reason I find doing laundry hard is that it is awkward and it is outside my room. Like what if someone comes up behind me
There have been days that have seen me better.
In other news, I crafted a master infusion crystal.
Man, the half of the #cat-v IRC channel that I understand is pure gold.
> literally the only reason to use git is peer pressure. therefore I assume that all git users are also addicted to drugs
Statistics depress me. I can handle failure. But quantifying my failure gets to me.
I don’t make things for other people, I make things for myself, for me to enjoy. And if I don’t think about other people’s reaction, then I’m fine. But if you tell me, ‘that thing you made, 2 people like it,’ that hurts. I just want people to like the things that I like and appreciate the things that I do. In my life I’ve probably made 10 things that have made more than 100 people happy, and they are all Khan Academy programs. I just don’t exist. I live in this bubble and I can make the bubble better for myself indefinitely, but I need validation from the outside world to confirm that what I’m doing matters.
I once said, everything that you want in this life you have to fight for. And that applies to other people liking your content. You can’t just make cool things and expect other people to spontaneously like them. You have to force them upon people until they have to like them. You can’t expect people to subscribe to content they enjoy, you have to ask them to subscribe at the start of every video. You can’t expect people to come searching for content, you have to advertise it. And I don’t mean advertise so that they know about it, I mean market it as the greatest thing ever. You can’t just make something that people want to use.
OurJSEditor has 13 stars on GitHub. I spent 4 years of my life for a dozen people to look at OJSE and go, ‘that’s neat’ and then never use the website again.
I’ve considered adding a views counter to this website, but I’m sure it would only depress me. I add a little bit of friction by not using Twitter, and suddenly no one cares.
In my mind I’m special, and people should care about the things that I make merely because I made them. I don’t like everything. I like few things. So in my mind, me liking something makes it special and other people appreciate it as well. ‘Oh this is the thing Matthias likes’ or ‘Oh I’m going to go play the game Matthias.’ I put a lot of work into it. I think my game is fun. That doesn’t matter. People aren’t going to play it if they don’t like it.
For a lot of my life I do not share things that I like, as a general rule. Conversations just go better that way, 90% of the time. But there’s a point where that wears on me. Where it hurts to not be able to relate to others.
And then even if someone expresses some interest, it’s not uncommon for me to jump at them and go off. The reply is usually ‘oh I’m not that much of a fan, IDK’
This is all very informative. I’m learning. Hopefully at some points in the future I can make something that people like.
The stuff I’m saying here will not be true forever. I will eventually learn how to be happy about things other people like. But it hasn’t happened yet.
One of the things that I can do with this website that I can't do with most other mediums is pretend that my experiences are shared or
understood by everyone here, while acknowledging that they aren't universal. I'm not describing that well, but it makes sense, trust me.
I really wish there was a way for components in React to expose read-only information about their state to their children.
This doesn't violate the "state flows down" but it isn't possible right now, without having the children be a function (which is a pattern that exists, but I don't love it).
Edit (12:43): this is contexts.
The thing about GitHub copilot that no one is talking about, is that it's developed by "GitHub," ostensibly, but is available for VS Code
and not Atom.
I feared the GitHub acquisition would spell the death of Atom, as Microsoft pulled the Atom team to work on VS Code and I'm taking this as confirmation that that has happened.
I haven't written code in days.
Other than like the couple of lines of assembly I wrote yesterday...
I haven't like, committed, in a couple of days, if not longer
At some point I need to sit down and unpack all the creepy thoughts in my head and see if I can figure out where they come from.
Game of Thrones was on track to be one of the greatest TV shows of all time.
I'm sorry Rust libraries, but auto-generated docs that list the types of your values does not count as documentation. Please please write
some documentation. I want a usage example. Is that too much to ask?
(This goes for every other strictly typed language. TypeScript, Java, you don't have documentation either.)
I realized I spend a fair amount of time trying to stop myself from being passionate about things that I'm passionate about, and I think
that's dumb.
I feel like there's something really profound to be said about the generation/group of people who grew up on Discord and continue to use it
today (including me). But I don't know what that is. I think it might be something about being able to define a culturally specific or private space within the broader internet.
I think that feeling is what I was trying to capture with my conception of the Linoleum Club.
"Command" is easily my favorite key on the keyboard, I love it so much. I'm enjoying myself way too much rebinding all the native Emacs
keyboard shortcuts to be command-based. You've heard of "M-x", well, let me tell you about "s-e".
Thinking about how physical books still outsell ebooks. Digital has a long way to go as a medium.
The reMarkable tablet was very impressive because it *replicated* (for practical purposes) the feeling of writing on paper. But it still hasn’t surpassed paper.
This recording is from like 4 months ago. Apparently my standards for readings were higher than or something, so I didn't post it.
I've had "nothing means, nothing only means" stuck in my head for days.
Source is https://www.reddit.com/r/seventhworldproblems/comments/pisi8g/runprotocolsoul_mate/hbsprqo/
Transcript
I was unprepared to see it. This scene, although chronologically in the middle and unimportant, serves to convey a defining tone that sets fire to the frame. To reveal what became, a man claiming to be the son of the atheist, master of the lost road west, to nowhere, nothing means nothing only means, a sketch of time, of a time of dust.
I waited by the last standing pillar. She's haunted me half my life. Nothing came. Some external words, or other, profane, but the text must be legible.
I might do why not? Might take a chrysalis form, a germ plasm, and then and again, one might hazard, reorganized, a bloody ghost when I arrive.
"Are we truly doing things from a space of joy or merely because they once brought us comfort?"
“What you have said in the dark will be heard in the daylight. What you have whispered to someone behind closed doors will be shouted from
the rooftops.”
Shouted from the rooftops
The rooftops, the rooftops, the rooftops
> Error-driven development works like this: you write a piece of code and try to run it. If you get an error when you run the code, you
> write just enough code to fix that particular error, and nothing more. You repeat this process until you have the result you want.
This is exactly how I code
Love how I can open Snapchat for the first time in weeks and I have one snap and it's from Team Snapchat
This is normal. This is a normal website. This is a normal website with normal thoughts. Filled with the normal thoughts of a normal person.
That's me, a normal person, with normal thoughts. God is good. I am something else. The small pain of finite meaning in the face of the infinite truth of everything.
Insanity.
Freedom.
I can do whatever I want. I have complete control. complete and perfect control over myself.
Right?
Surrender.
I spent probably 45 minutes wrestling with CSS, and all I got out of it was `width: fit-content;`.
Okay, I’m bored of penis jokes. All the penis jokes have been made, there shouldn’t be any more.
People will be like, oh *X* language isn't that bad and then I'll find out you close `case` blocks with `esac` or some trash.
That's actually bash BTW. You close `if` blocks with `fi` and `case` blocks with `esac`. Insanity.
People defend JavaScript, and I have to be like, um, JS is objectively a bad language. I love JS, it's my favorite, but it's bad.
Thinking about markup formats.
I found a case even against italics, the one thing I was going to allow. https://letters.temporarystate.net/entry/4/
I feel comfortable saying at this time, after the novelty has worn off, that the Touch Bar was a bad idea and my computer is worse off for it
I want to do nothing and have it feel like something. I want to knock over a chain of dominoes every day
I hate the web.
I just learned that there's such a thing as a "URL-parameter" that goes on the end of a URL, proceeded by a semi-colon.
```
scheme://netloc/path;parameters?query#fragment
```
From the Python urllib reference.
What did I do to deserve this.
One of the good things about Dracula Daily is that it forces the people on Tumblr with ADHD and/or poor reading comprehension to read and
think about a small segment at a time.
Figured out you can move the address bar back to the top of the screen in iOS 15
From the aA, Show Top Tab Bar
The legends over at Github looked at Markdown and went, 'nah, not complicated enough.'
=> https://github.blog/2022-02-14-include-diagrams-markdown-files-mermaid/
What is this.
This is why we need Gemtext.
Like, *Markdown* has feature creep.
There's actually a lot I could say here. This ties into *all* of the reasons Gemini is important. This is what I mean when I say you can't embed simplicity inside a complex system.
Thor was supposed to be the dumb one, and Loki was supposed to be the clever one. In the Loki series, they couldn’t stop themselves from
turning Loki into a himbo.
Trying to explain to the Vim users how I have optimized my text-editing to type as little as possible. Trackpad, doubleclick,
highlight, copy, trackpad, paste. This is why I can't use Vim.
According to the 2020 IEEE Taxonomy, the only three "Web sites" are Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube.
Dark is “pivoting to AI” which sounds like 4 L’s to me. I don’t know. Paul is ready to gamble that typing code is going away.
Which just doesn’t make any sense to me because we’ve had Scratch for decades. If you want to not-type-code, you don’t have to. But that is not the problem people actually face.
Are you a Conlang Critic jan Misali fan, or a “Wario Faces Consequences for His Actions” jan Misali fan?
Someone took ffmpeg and compiled it to Javascript to run it in the browser. I have no words. https://github.com/Kagami/ffmpeg.js/
`things.map(thing => <Thing thing={thing}>)` is a very verbose React pattern. I wish there was a better way of doing that.
Going to see if I can get away with `things.map(Thing)`
Yes I did code this in like 26 hours from start to finish, although there were only 4 or 5 hours of actual coding.
I think a lot about the decision to add `let` to JS instead of changing the behavior of `var`. That’s what backwards compatibility looks
like.
The problem is that it's really hard to code passionlessly
One of the most important parts of coding is knowing what you want. You have to know what you want before you can problem-solve to get there. But if you don't want anything, then you're done.
cmd+shift+f to open Github Code Search on the current Github repository is amazing, just try it
So many fools aren’t familiar with the concept of health insurance paying your bills. Yes, the hospital has sent you a bill for vast sums of
money. You don’t get to make a Reddit post complaining about the American healthcare system unless you don’t have insurance. Don’t know if you have health insurance? You probably do. 90% of the population does.
The hospital is not trying to screw you over with ridiculous prices, they’re trying to get paid by the insurance company. One of the reasons the hospitals charge what they do is because health insurance companies will negotiate. If you don’t have health insurance, you need to go back to the hospital and tell them that. Tell them that you can’t pay the sticker price, and they will work with you lower your costs.
If you are a college student, in most cases, your college will require you to have health insurance. In some cases, it will be included in your tuition. And in most cases you will covered by your parents’ health insurance.
Do not refuse treatment because you aren’t sure if your insurance will cover it.
There a lot of bad things about the American healthcare system. It is a mess. It is not intuitive. But please do that research before making a Reddit post with your 5 figure hospital bill.
I think it is logical to extended the axiom that you shouldn't trust a computer you can't throw out a window to cloud hosting.
If I can't see the computer, I shouldn't trust it.
Huh. It’s been a couple of days. Possibly the longest I’ve gone without posting. I’m still alive. I’m traveling.
Kind of sick of people typing in all lower case to be hip. Like I never jumped on the trend because I kept expecting it to pass but
it's like the amount of lowercase required to be hip just keeps increasing.
Would it kill you to hit the Shift key?
(This is about the antisoftware.club manifesto which is 1,400 words of prose without any capital letters. If your Twitter username is lower case I don't care)
"Smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better than the other way around." Context and analysis below the fold
The line before is "especially in languages like C that don't naturally do dynamic typing."
I think this idea is key. I'm frequently caught up in the strict/dynamic typing conflict. But the key is "smart" typing. Type checking things that need to be type-checked. Creating standard interfaces that allow for code re-use. Not checking properties that aren't important.
Source is still The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Eric S. Raymond, http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/ar01s04.html
It's impossible to update Django. I'm switching to storing user data in files, writing scripts in lisp, and running them with werc.
“Self right? More like self wrong”
Visible on the bottom of Hypershock after it lost due to not being able to self-right.
1. Recognize that you live in sin and cannot escape it alone
2. Accept the mercy of God, made just through the sacrifice of his perfect son
The Count of Monte Cristo: *makes a philosophical comment*
*Paraphrase from Chapter 48: Ideology*
Villefort, the King's Attorney, responsible for overseeing the courts of France: Why do you philosophize. If I, like you, had nothing better to do, I would do something more interesting.
The Count: Do you really think you have better things to do?
Villefort, shaken: Perhaps, since you have spent so much time in countries less civilized than France, you are unfamiliar with our justice system. (Okay, Villefort is more racist in the book.)
The Count: In fact, I have made a philosophical examination of the justice systems of all the countries of the world. I find that those more primitive nations, which use the law of retaliation, do better a better job of achieving justice, as measured against the law of God. Human inventions march from complex to simple, and simplicity is always perfection. So perhaps then you will have nothing to do.
Villefort: Maybe so, but until then, I spend a lot of time studying our complicated laws.
The Count: Sure, you might know the laws of France, but I also know the laws of the Enlgish, Turkish, Japanese, and Hindu. And so I'm right in saying that you haven't done anything, since I've done so much more relative to you.
(I can't handle this book. It's all like this, you have to parse the 1800s grammar, but then it's just The Count roasting the hell out of everyone. Nothing advances the plot, it's just The Count toying with his food. It's not subtle at all.)
The Count: "I see that in spite of [your] reputation...as a superior man, you look at everything from the...most narrow view which it is possible for human understanding to embrace."
Villefort: Waht
(It keeps going. I can't! The Count is like, I'm the enlightened of God, and Villefort gets sassy with him.)
Villefort: "Excuse me if I was unaware that I should meet with a person whose knowledge so far surpasses the usual knowledge and understanding of men." It's rare for "us corrupted wretches of civilization" to get to meet someone like you.
The Count: Really, you couldn't tell I was special? I thought you were a discerning person. (That's how I paraphrased it. The text is "do you never use your eyes?")
(The Count alludes to angles here.)
Villefort: So you believe in angles of God.
The Count: Of course, I am one.
(I have to cut The Count's monologue here. If you want to read it, I'll happily send you a picture. The highlight is "What men call the chances of fate—namely ruin, change, circumstance—I have fully anticipated.")
Villefort: So then you're the only perfect person?
The Count: "No, not perfect, only impenetrable."
(It keeps going! I have to stop here. It's your loss that you don't get to hear about how The Count sold his soul to Devil to become the hand of God.)
Now is a good time for me to be browsing TikToks on Reddit. Yep. Nothing else important for me to do. No work due tomorrow.
2 of my currently open tabs: Wikipedia, on Executive dysfunction, and Random.org, which I just used to schedule my night.
My word, KA really sped up time to connect or something.
Maybe my internet changed, but I used to have to wait like 2 seconds before KA would send anything, and then 6 seconds or whatever for the AJAX graphQL to finish. The second part seems about unchanged, but the first is much quicker.
I need to eat food. it is very important i am falling askleep because i not have any energy byecause i not have any food thaink you
The Count is a little like Batman, but Bruce Wayne was rich before his parents was murdered. Dante was well-off before he was imprisoned,
but he wasn’t rich. He could have chosen to go back to that lifestyle after he left prison, but he didn’t. He became super rich, not because he valued money, but because he needed to be super rich in order to compete at the same level of the people that he was trying to get revenge on. The dramatic irony of The Count pulling a straight face with Villeforte is that The Count’s wealth, and lifestyle, and life, is a sham to get his revenge.
All install methods are bad. “People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.”
If the pandemic isn't over by, say, 2030, I'm going to stop wearing a mask, tetra variant or no.
I once read an interesting excerpt from *Being Alive*, by Tim Ingold (p. 36). In it he points out the degree to which we constrain the role of our feet, and moreover, how this is regarded as a mark of how civilized we are as a society.
> Paradoxically, it seems that with the onward march of civilisation, the foot has been progressively *withdrawn* from the sphere of operation of the intellect, that it has regressed to the status of a merely mechanical apparatus, and moreover that this development is a consequence — not a cause — of technical advance in footwear. Boots and shoes, products of the ever more versatile human hand, imprison the foot, constricting its freedom of movement and blunting its sense of touch.
At the risk of over-extrapolating, I would not be surprised if, in 8 years, it is socially expected that everyone remain masked when possible. Not out of a particular fear, as today, but out of respect. "Mouth-breather" is already an insult, and chewing with your mouth open is already rude. Is it really that much of a jump to expect people to cover their mouths with cloth as often as possible?
This mask-wearing would be used as evidence of the advances of civilization, in the same way that wearing shoes is, but it is unclear whether it would be tangibly beneficial. Eradication of some airborne illness is near the bottom of my goals for human progress, far after eradicating hunger, poverty, space travel etc. Many, however, would take this objection without issue.
Why is this a problem? Because wearing a mask drastically reduces our sense of smell. Smell is one of only 4 senses that can really be used to experience the world around us. (The sense of smell is most important outdoors. It's possible, in a projected future, that masking outside is seen as unnecessary. It's also possible that we develop masks that you can smell through, etc.)
But the sense of smell, in modern civilization, isn't valued. Moving your nose to better smell something is an extremely undignified act. Dogs smell things, humans don't. (We praise dogs for their sense of smell, but dogs are unashamed to put their noses to the ground. I've tried it, you can smell a lot more with your face in the grass. I was also immediately scoffed.)
The sense of smell is often neglected, but it still plays an important role in experiencing the world around us.
The nose and mouth are not significantly valued in western culture today. If they were to be blunted or obscured by a mask, most people would not realize the magnitude of what would be lost. It is important to me that I get the fullest possible experience of the world God created, bar of course urgent public-health crises. If mask wearing is still the social norm in 9 years, I think it reasonable to say at that point that this is not a short-term public heath crisis, and is in fact a cultural and value shift. This value shift would be one that I protest.
The great minds of Hacker News commenters on why Safari sucks:
“Ahhh, that's the version number. I thought that's how % of the spec that they actually supported.”
Safari only supports 15% of the web, and Chrome supports 106% of the web. You gotta give it to Chrome on this one, folks.
Here's an unpopular opinion. Having Show Invisibles on in your code editor is just better. I see mixed spaces and tabs so often
in coding projects and this wouldn't happen if people didn't use settings that made it visually impossible to tell them apart. Every editor has an option to allow you to see the whitespace in your code, and if you're using a good editor theme, it should be faint enough to be completely unobtrusive.
One time I had a teacher who made a big deal about how we were not allowed to use any copyrighted characters or media for our project. And
then he demoed a project from a previous year that was literally just based on *The Martian*. Like the main character's name was Mark Watney and it took place on Mars. And I pointed this out, and the teacher proceeded to explain how The Martian book was originally published online for free under a public domain license, and that the characters were actually public domain. Now, as far as I can tell, this just isn't true. I couldn't turn up any reference to it anywhere. So my theory is that this group in a previous year created a *The Martian* fan project and then when questioned, they gaslit this teacher into believing that it was public domain.
I'm "having a real one", as the kids say.
Ohoohooh i don't even have to type words here.
uharugalouighey
semllt
huruahu
shape
/-\
| |
V
Hehe
I’m just a screwed up person.
In 6th grade the Chinese teacher would give a piece of candy to the student that got there first. She had these Asian candies with edible rice-paper around them, and I ran to class every time because I really wanted one. I was never first, and the one time I was she didn’t have the candy, and gave me like a lollipop instead. And I hate myself for not making it to class faster. And I hate her for having such an arbitrary and dumb reward system.
I’m a screwed up person.
I can’t take it. I pick things to care about, like getting that candy, and if I fail, it just destroys me.
I say I’m not competitive, because I don’t have a lot of things that I care about winning. But if I try to win and I’m not good enough, that just destroys me.
I actually didn’t get to class first. I actually don’t deserve the candy. I’m actually not good enough.
I have absolutely no fear of losing. But the fear of not being good enough absolutely destroys me. It keeps me up at night, it paralyzes me to inaction during the day.
I don’t want to be a bad person. I DON’T WANT TO BE A BAD PERSON.
*am I a bad person?*
Do I need to come to terms with the fact that I’m a bad person? Or do I need to come to terms with the fact that I’m not a bad person just because I make some mistakes?
"Debugging is parallelizable".
> Although debugging requires debuggers to communicate with some coordinating developer, it doesn't require significant coordination between debuggers. Thus it doesn't fall prey to the same quadratic complexity and management costs that make adding developers problematic.
- The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Eric S. Raymond, http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/ar01s04.html
~starbreaker does the worldbuilding around CPMD so fricking well, like it's occasionally plot relevant but mostly blends into the background
except to make certain characters more interesting. And then it's completely undermined by the fact that they're just fricking catboys and catgirls and the image in my head is either anime, furries, or the *Cats* CGI.
CPMD: congenital pseudofeline morphological disorder
Oh yeah I changed all the audio files on this website to mp3's so they can be listened to in Lagrange.
Also I found out that since Astronomical Theater (my Gemini server) reads certificates into memory when it starts, since it's been running for three months, the certificates had expired. Hm. I'll need to fix that somehow.
Anyways I think I would need another 3ish posts to the FPG series to tie up initial assumptions (the Pascal’s wager-style argument), the
theoretical maximum of logic isn’t truth (Gödelian argument), and allowing for useful sources of “truth” other than the material world (that is a-priori knowledge or Devine revelation).
All I want out of a programming language is being able to add `0.1` and `0.2` and get `0.3`. Is that too much to ask?
Just found out that "nickelodeon" was a slang term for a jukebox, from *GEB*. I feel like I've aged 10 years.
Multi-user Linux (or macOS for that matter) in 2023 is a joke.
And that's fine, but we should admit that it's fine and stop trying to secure systems across users when having things functional across users is next to impossible.
I am back to the land of the computers after a weekend away. I may back-fill Thoughts with things I wrote down, I may not.
Me aggressively disabling like every VS Code setting.
Yes I caved and switched to VS code. I just want (perfect) syntax highlighting for every language.
I spent the past 5 hours fighting with the physical world.
I have assembled a thing and I am waiting for the wood glue to dry.
The big difference that I want to emphasize between FPG and Plato's theory of forms is that in FPG the *true* version of an object can never
be comprehended by a human. Sometimes people use "Platonic form" to refer to "my conception/idea of the of the object, as opposed to the version of the object in the real world" but that's just the difference between the object and your idea of the object. I'm saying there's a third thing "the real object" which is unknowable.
Ad blockers are a myth. Ad blockers promise to "remove the ads from the website." But the ads are an inseparable part of the website.
What the ad blocker does is create a new website that approximates the real website, but without ads.
I'm not interested in the version of the web created by extensions. I'm interested in the real web, as created by the authors of the websites.
If a website has ads, either I respect the author and I value the content enough that I'm willing to endure the ads for the content. Or I don't, in which case I clearly don't value the content very highly and the burden is and should be on the author to improve their content or remove the ads.
If a website is an ad-infested piece of garbage, I don't want to pretend that it's not. I want to know that it's an ad-infested piece of garbage, so that I can close it.
In the web paradigm, websites have complete responsibility for their functionality, content, and appearance. The text and content of a website is 100% determined by the website author. But so too is the appearance, with CSS. The website author can of course abstain from using CSS, but a web browser doesn't step up and provide styling. It provides *defaults*, but those defaults are an implementation detail. The client, the web browser, has to implement a mechanism by which website authors can style websites, and as an implementation detail, they have to set defaults. At no point is the browser *responsible* for styling the website—the browser is responsible for providing a mechanism for the website to style itself.
Extensions change that. With a browser extension, suddenly the extension also has some responsibility for the appearance of the page. Which might not seem like a big deal, but it is. The extension could break the page. The extension could fix any number of infinite things that are broken on the page already. The extension is responsible for deciding what is an ad and what isn't. And to their credit, ad blockers do a really good job at this. I do trust and respect uBlock. But I don't want to have to trust uBlock; I don't need another thing that can fail. If a website's bad, I want to blame the website. If I see ads on a website, I want to blame the website, not blame my ad blocker.
I intentionally avoid making the "support creators" argument here because a lot of time ads are not a viable or healthy longterm monetization strategy. And moreover, if you take pride in your content, it's very hard to do ads in a way that preserves the quality and tone of your content. Ads are, by definition, someone else's content that you've been paid to interject into your page.
But at some point, when I read a website that has ads and has content that I value or enjoy, I am glad that I'm supporting that content by viewing the ads along with it.
Like, if you can't be bothered to watch a 30 second ad before your Youtube video, why are you on Youtube? Find something better to do with your time. Read a book. (And I say that to myself.)
Cold-start to edit a single file, VSCodium takes 4 seconds to open.
All I want in life is a lightweight text editor.
*The Original Motion Picture Soundtrack* is out!
I just realized, it came out the 25th. I’ve been waiting for it.
I'm thinking it might be assonance and not slant rhyme that contributes most to this
The thing to understand is that doing something that you don’t like doesn’t cause you to like it more, but the decision to do it becomes
I have so many outstanding projects at any given time it's kind of ridiculous. It feels like I have more outstanding projects than completed
projects.
Like, LISP like languages tend to say ‘data are lists and functions are lists everything’s a list’ and they make it easy to change from
data to a function. But in making that transition easy, they emphasize that the transition is necessary.
JavaScript doesn’t let you change from data into a function since from the perspective of the JS programer, functions already are data.
Okay around a third of the time it seems like it's astronomical theater (my gemini server) crashing
I have stopped laying in the stairwell. I’m now sitting in a chair outside. But. I have overcome the small amount of friction that was
keeping me in the stairwell. Unfortunately, there is much more friction keeping me from doing things.
Sharkfin has traumatized me. I saw him in a VC in KACC, and I had to leave me computer and sit downstairs with my hand over my heart for a
couple minutes. It’s a problem
Can you hear me? Can you hear me? Can you hear me? Can you hear me? Can you hear m e? Can you hear me? Can you hear me? Can you hear me? Can
Your hear me ? Can you hear me? Can you here me? Can you hear me? Can your grade me ? Can you hear me? Can you hear mev? Can you hear me? Can you hear me? Can you hear me?
Thinking a lot recently about one of the best sermons I’ve heard, in which the pastor took a bike wheel, and said ‘God is the hub, and we
are the spokes. The closer we get to God, the closer we get to each other, and the closer we get to each other, the closer we get to God.’ (One of the things that made it memorable is that it was about 5 minutes and was delivered through pointing at pieces of paper and the wheel—no talking.)
Willard in *The Devine Conspiracy* argues something similar—that being a Christian means surrendering your own will and joining God’s “kingdom” (here defined as the sphere of God’s influence, where God’s will is carried out) and that teaming up with God in this way is the most effective way of aligning your will with others.
You don't know the anxiety of waiting for a `git rebase` to complete and hoping you don't run into merge conflicts.
Incels, garbage. But every so often you run across a volcel. It's like striking gold.
I only pulled the good parts out of his 1000 word essay. Just kidding, it's almost all like this.
> This is the only time I've ever cheated for a competitive website. Not that I expect anyone to believe that, but it's true. I don't even know what alcohol tastes like. I've never smoked and I've never done drugs. I'm a 30 year-old virgin. I've never even kissed a girl. I went all the way through college and graduated cum laude without cheating a single time... but I did cheat in a video game once :)
> I only pointed out that I don't know what alcohol tastes like, never smoked, never had sex, etc. to show how horrible and out of character this was. I had never done anything of this evil magnitude before and I never will again.
> Just one week before caivs discovered the splices, I had a dream where I took flight over a field. A creature ascended toward me from the nearby forest. As the creature approached, I looked at it and said:
> "Ah, the antelope of death. It's because I cheated in Super Mario 64. This will need to be addressed soon."
[Forum archive](http://ethangaming.us/archives/sites/allegations.html) [Youtube](https://youtu.be/iL7sNPGKksc?t=345)
It's so hard to tell if I'm inventing too many things to do and stressing myself out unnecessarily, or if participating in NaNo is actually
a requirement for being a well rounded human being.
I hate Twitter and Reddit outside of my bubble because the negatively bias is just so obvious. Like it's just 'watch this video of
someone getting shot.' 'Child is brutally murdered' 'Our son died today'
Like these things are awful and have a huge impact on the community that they're in. But all the algorithms (and human-run media compaines) see that big impact and assume the news is worth sharing outside of the original community. Which numbs me to it, and at some point lessens the impact when there is tragedy that's actually within my community.
I’m postponing the migration of Tweets onto this website. I realized there’s no real point and so I’m not going to motivate myself to finish
the annoying parts of the code. That is to say, I’m going to work on this website when I feel like it, and not for any other reason.
When developing, fixing bugs, a lot of the time that looks like deleting a big block of code and rewriting it. I find myself getting
addicted to that mindset. This works for single bugs, but there's a temptation to apply this to whole projects, to just replace whole code-bases, or even to real life (e.g. just 'reorganize everything in my room' or 'reinvent myself'). I've generalized this as 'trying to jump from imperfect to perfect.' It makes sense at a super small scale. You can take a single bug from 'broken' to 'fixed' without intermediate steps. But with complex software or anything analog, like real life, you have to iterate incrementally. You have to take small steps at a time. The exception of course is when your current system doesn't let you increment anymore. When you've hit the limit of what the current system can handle, only then does it make sense to tear down the system and start over. To rephrase: people often re-write apps because they have too many bugs or don't have enough features. Instead, you should rewrite an app when you *cannot* fix bugs and *cannot* add features.
=> https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/ The Excellent "Things You Should Never Do, Part I"
I started a Dropout.tv subscription so I could watch Game Changer and oh my word. I'm crying laughing.
They can just, on command, spontaneously improve a duet of an original song. I don't know how they do it.
Okay okay, the Count of Monte Cristo is an alias that is currently convient to use for the Matthias who has a similar personality.
Everyone hates me.
I don't think anything prompted this, just normal invasive thoughts.
I usually counter thoughts like this with "too bad I'm amazing" but in like a mean way. Doesn't help me make friends.
I have a set of features that I want in a Gemini server. I am not aware of any servers that support all of those features, although all
features are supported by at least one Gemini server. So of course, I'm tempted to write my own Gemini server. But that Gemini server would then be the most feature complete Gemini server, and I am not ready for that.
I'm a lover not a hater, I take back every mean thing I've ever said. I didn't mean to hurt you.
I was today years old when I realized U2's albums *Songs of Innocence* and *Songs of Experience* were a reference to William Blake's poetry
collection, *Songs of Innocence and of Experience*
To elaborate on that last Thought. A ‘normal’ social anxiety would be ‘I have to try to be normal.’ But the second level to recognize is
that there’s an implicit assumption a) that I am different, and b) that’s a bad thing.
And that’s not black and white—it’s a discussion question, not a yes/no question. But it’s important to deal with all of those questions.
For some reason, it’s easier for people to be passionate about content consumption than it is for them to be about content creation.
Tea cli looks really interesting.
And I'm not opposed to bringing crypto or money into open source software.
But I'm reading the Tea whitepaper and a lot of the crypto side of things seems super hand-wavy and I'm imagining a lot of problems.
Not to mention they have 8 million in VC that they need to make up. I don't think they have any of the blockchain stuff done? I literally think they've gone as far as "we'll store the packages on a blockchain" and the whitepaper is like "we'll store the packages on a blockchain."
I'm chuckling at the RayWorks ban evidence PDF. He's so stressed. The man has no chill. He's inventing problems and then blaming others.
Reminds me of KAD honestly
Another installment of myself live-Thought-posting my way through developing a versatile set of best-practices for React state management.
Buried way in this random page is a helpful hint:
=> https://reactjs.org/blog/2018/06/07/you-probably-dont-need-derived-state.html#recommendation-fully-uncontrolled-component-with-a-key
If you pass a different `key` prop, React will re-create (rather than just re-render) the child component. This could be used in the resetable button challenge. The parent merely changes the `key` prop of the child Button, which implicitly resets the state of the child. In a lot of places, this is more idiomatic than an effect on the child that resets.
The obvious problem is that if the child component has more than a single state property or has other hooks or state values, changing `key` will wipe *all of them.*
JS devs splitting their 200kb bundled JS file into four 50kb files in order to make 'large js file' warnings go away.
I want a service like a server, except I just give them a binary and they run it 24/7. And they have a database and handle port forwarding
and stuff. In particular, I want this to be so easy to use that I can create a binary, give it to a tech-questionable friend, and have them upload it and have it just work.
Self-hosting is one of the things that makes the internet great. But hosting these days requires either code or messing with web server configs or else using a template provided by some website generator.
The problem with trying to make things intuitive is that there are a lot of things that seem intuitive until you think about them.
My example is Django auto-trimming text from text fields from the client. If you don't think about it, it seems natural. If you typo a space at the end of your name, and then you check database and there's no space, you're like "yes, exactly right." But if I tell you 'Django strips white-space from the start and end,' that feels unintuitive, at least to me. Why is the default behavior saving something different from what I type?
Along similar lines, if I go to reach for something and it teleports in front of my hand, that would be intuitive, in that I want it to happen, but it's also very unintuitive in that it violates my understanding of how the universe works. That's a contrived real-life example, but it makes more sense in the realm of software. Is a button that does different things depending on the context intuitive or unintuitive?
Per-season numbers
```py
[('Spring 2022', 231), ('Winter 2021', 692), ('Fall 2021', 386), ('Summer 2021', 375), ('Spring 2021', 317), ('Winter 2020', 410), ('Fall 2020', 584)]
```
This is the first one of these to show Winter 2021 with the new record of 7.7 Thoughts/day, beating out the first season of this site.
Hacker News comments are so bad. I’m going to stop commenting there, I’m done.
German PHD student describes a thought experiment in which you have infinite money and are incapable of telling if you’re sick. If you have 2 doctors, who can tell if you’re sick, but don’t care about your personal well-being, how do you pay them? (Ex. Pay them both only if they agree; pay one for diagnosis, one for treatment; etc.) It’s a game theory problem, with implications for negotiating with hyper-intelligent AI or aliens.
The comments:
‘Only pay the doctors if you’re healthy’
‘I am a doctor and I just want to help people’
‘Move to a country with a great healthcare system like Sweden’
‘I’m not going to read the article, the premise is flawed’
Honestly these comments are so bad. Comments that understand that this is a metaphor and not a commentary on US Healthcare are the minority. This is Tumblr levels of reading comprehension.
=> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29269973
Honestly, so many bugs and issues that I can avoid by re-installing all macOS shell utilities through brew. Bye bye
2016 `less`.
In the Python REPL. "inconsistent use of tabs and spaces in indentation" Oh No. What a fricking bad language.
Cloudflare WARP is a free VPN. It seems reputable. It doesn't come up in the VPN conversation because Cloudflare doesn't advertise it as
such, they really don't want to complete with the "VPN" providers for some reason.
Edit: Oh so you know what it is. Is they're really focused on encrypting your connection to HTTP websites and running DNS over HTTP. And in some cases, like if a website is hosted on Cloudflare servers itself, then they don't bother e.g. hiding your IP address. So they can't advertise it as a true VPN. But it works for me. No more unencrypted DNS!
I fricking hate config files.
I can’t debug config file to save my life. Anytime I’m working with something with config files, be it Django or Apache or Babel/webpack/React, I spend more time struggling with config files then I do writing code.
Lunch is a social construct. What matters is that I’m hungry and we have food that I want to eat.
The DuckDuckGo feedback survey is all, ‘how many searches have you done in the last 24 hours’ and has a drop down to select 1-15 or more
than 15. I can open my browser history and check. I’ve done 91
The more I program in other languages, especially LISPs, the more impressed I am with Haskell's partial function application.
And their ability to make any function infix, man I just really like Haskell. (Except for its type system, I have no idea what a Monad is and I have no desire to learn.)
I wonder why I enjoy reading so much. I wonder if understanding that would help me understand other parts of who I am.
There's only one type of pain, and it's the pain of wanting something too much.
If you get punched in the face, the pain you feel is just you wanting to not get punched in the face. Yes.
The pure irony of me staying up an hour later than I would otherwise to listen to 3 O'Clock Things, which describes the futility of staying
up until 3AM.
Every so often Vivaldi's performance gets worse and I feel like I have to toggle hardware acceleration to fix it.
People (including me) are like, 'HTTP isn't that complex' and then. You can specify the response content you want, based on how much you
want it, with up to 3 decimal places of precision.
I would rate my desire to receive an HTML page with a score of 0.65 and my desire to receive a JSON response with a score of 0.21.
=> https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/Quality_values
I have so much anxiety, I'm so stressed, I don't even know what about. I think it's probably social anxiety because I don't feel this way
when I'm alone.
I'm like, IDEs are so bad and inflexible, but like, I want to leave my `<p>` unclosed for humorous and rhetorical reasons.
The thing about React and even something like hotwire.js is that you run the risk of making your site *seem* slower, even if you've actually
improved time to first content paint. There's a certain advantage in using the browser's native loading mechanisms in that users think 'the browser is loading.' On the other hand, if you serve a static page from a CDN, the user very quickly gets to see your, branded, loading component, while dynamic content is loaded from the site. But this can mean that the user starts to associate your site with loading, regardless of the actual loading times.
Now entering my maniac pixie dream girl era.
I think what's going on here is that I ate like a couple handfuls of chocolate chips and I now have excess energy.
We did lose Gemini support, unfortunately.* It's too hard to maintain two different versions of the same site.
*I say that like there's a reason. We lost Gemini support because I removed it because I didn't want it any more.
"You never had a mother. You only have this knife, these hands, this screaming that has been echoing for generations"
Cannot convince myself that “practice making my bed so that I can make my bed perfectly” doesn’t belong on the TODO list
I figured out how to turn it off. You need to edit the syntax-specific setting file.
=> https://github.com/ziglang/sublime-zig-language/issues/60#issuecomment-1034378985 Thanks to this comment
Maybe my cookies just need someone to sit and watch them while they bake. Maybe they’re lonely. Maybe they’re overcooked.
It’s really impressive how much personality Bois gives the satellites in *17776*. He can’t use environment or appearance or actions, really,
to create personality. He has to do it all with dialogue. And he does it so well.
*insert Lunchables scene here.*
I've been working on what I think is a novel explanation of sin and the problem of pain. The problem is that, while it is novel to me, I'm
sure it's not novel in the history of theology. So it's possible it's blasphemous. It's also possible that this is what every pastor has been trying to explain to me and they just haven't been able to do it in a way that I understand.
The basic idea is that every action have a percent that it is good, and a percent that it is bad (sinful). No action is purely good or bad.
Then you calculate (in theory of course), the percent good/bad that someone is by averaging their actions. Then if you're 100% good, if every action you've ever taken is 100% good, then you are perfect and can be admitted to heaven.
What this fails to capture is the inherit meaninglessness of sin. There's an interesting paradox there in Christianity, where sin is both meaningless and powerless and insubstantial, and yet even a small amount of sin can corrupt the whole.
But that fits, too. Anything that has a small percentage of bad in it is meaningless, is worth nothing, and as soon as you hit 100% good, then suddenly that thing becomes infinity good.
'In this video-essay, I will explain how the lack of standardization of hangman allows players to cheat by dynamically changing the rules.'
I want a phonograph “capable of producing any and all sounds.” I want perfect software.
“If any record player—say Record Player X—is sufficiently high-fidelity, then when it attempts to play the song” designed to produce vibrations which destroy it, “it will create just those vibrations which cause it to break…So it fails to be Perfect. And yet, the only way to get around that trickery, namely for Record Player X to be of lower fidelity, even more directly ensures that it is not Perfect.”
- G.E.B. 77
*Automatic for the People* is such an interesting album. It has so much passion but less energy.
I think it's impossible to do anything.
The Orion people are like, 'let's make a web browser that's exactly like Safari.' And it's like, so buggy. I'm not trying to diss them here. I think that's a great goal and I think that that should be achievable. But it's really not.
Like, what is this? Why is there a black bar here?
2023 problems, I can't run `l` to list the contents of the current directory because libssl.1.1.dylib is missing. Crying.
My brain has shut off. I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing. I think I’m going to read for 30 minutes and then go to bed.
It's possible to go too far with the whole semantic thing and have like `OrderableSymbol`s when you could just use numbers.
Or is it???
I am no longer angry at the editor of the abridged version of The Count of Monte Cristo. I forgive them, and I feel sorry for them.
It is absolutely striking to compare Mr. Beast with Improv Everywhere.
So I've been super antisocial the last day or so, and I've been binge watching Mr. Beast. I don't like and am not subscribed to Mr. Beast, but some of his prompts, his ideas, are really good. The video style just ends up being more of "Mr. Beast REACTS to stranger that he gave $100" than anything else. And I don't enjoy those reaction-style videos, where a large portion of the content is really the emotional response of Jimmy and Chandler and Tyler, more so than content about what's going on. To me as a viewer, I don't care about the amount of money involved; the money is only there to elicit an emotional response from the people in the video.
(Background for Improv Everywhere. They peaked in fricking 2008, 12 years ago, with a 37M view video. Sure, Mr. Beast gets millions of views on every video, but to get that many views 12 years ago is insanity. The iPhone had come out less than a year ago; Twitter less than two. People didn't have Youtube accounts so the video had like a handful of likes. They didn't build a dedicated audience, because that's something people didn't know how to do on Youtube in 2008.)
On the other hand, Improv Everywhere does some similar prompts. They don't do giveaways. They do public skits/pranks but some portion of their content is the other people in public that are reacting to their stunt. But they very intentionally do not have a "face." If you did through their stuff you find the guy that leads it at the beginning of most of their videos, but I don't know his name, and cut all prep time out of some of the more recent ones. Since the stunt isn't giveaway-style, their stunts create audio/visual contrast to the normal. This gives you more time to react to it personally, and imagine what's like to be there. Your experience is much closer to the experience of someone randomly on the street, with the notable exception that you know that it's staged.
Improv Everywhere treats their work like art. Their goal is to do a performance, whereas Mr. Beast is running a gameshow. If Mr. Beast treated his videos like IE does, he and his friends wouldn't have any lines, it would just be classical music over the reaction of someone getting money. I'm not trying to say that's why Mr. Beast is successful—Youtube success is a different question to content-style. I think it's interesting to compare the content of these channels that have similar success in different time periods.
The "list of common misconceptions" Wikipedia page is dumb because it equivocates not using scientifically accurate language with a
misconception.
'Um, akually, the clade dinosouwa includes biwds which awe still alive today.'
The word dinosaur has an accepted meaning in vernacular English and it does not refer to birds.
'Um, akually, there is gwavity in space'
Yeah and it's operating on a distance-scale that causes it behave fundamentally differently from my day-to-day experience.
Like at some point 'gravity doesn't actually pull things down, it actually pulls them towards the center of the earth, there is no down in space' but wait 'actually, the center of the earth is just a helpful conception, actually gravity from every atom pulls on every other atom, and it happens the average of those forces pulls you towards what we call Earth' 'well aktually, gravity isn't a force at all but an effect that causes the bending of space time '
Like
Congrats, you've passed "pedantic" into "unable to understand the concept of language."
Edit: May 6 2023:
The article has been edited to clarify the zero-G misconception. It now says, "Astronauts in space are weightless because they are in free fall, not because they are so far away from the Earth that its gravitational pull is negligible." I have no complaints with this wording.
It still includes the sentence, "Objects orbiting in space would not remain in orbit if not for the gravitational force," which still makes it sounds like the misconception is that 'there is no gravity in space.' I think this sentence clarifies nothing and does not need to be included.
I don’t trust anyone, but my threat model doesn’t account for malicious action from some people.
I wish I could climb out my window, but the next best thing is walking out my door.
(My window is very far off of the ground. I totally would if I could, trust me.)
CoFH "Don't Be a Jerk" License v2 has shot up my list of favorite licenses.
It's basically all rights reserved, but you're allowed to fork, modify, or use it (but not redistribute it). It allows derivate works, provided they are at least source-available. Basically, it's what people think they're getting when they blindly add an open source license to a project.
It's just frustrating that I have to keep up the illusion of my sanity for the rest of my life.
Aria Buckles is my second favorite (former+current) KA employee right now.
She's lurking #khanacademy on Freenode, she's maintaining simple-markdown, she's still alive. That's almost Matthias levels of dedication, considering she hasn't worked at KA for like 3 years.
Grant Sanderson is always #1, I'm sorry.
Evaporation is insane. The water just... dries up...
Every day I wake up and am amazed by the water cycle.
Absolutely quality blog post, highly recommend:
Words next to quotes just aren't indexed here for some reason. Makes searching for things infuriating.
The other thing that I've started doing recently, that is like something that computers have always supported, is selecting text by clicking
moving the mouse to somewhere else, then holding shift and clicking. This feels especially weird, but cool, in text that isn't editable.
"just install ubuntu, even people with 2 braincells can do it"
Someone needs to fricking drill into all the Linux users that a *nix shell is far from a universal experience.
Hello. It is a thoughts.learnerpages.com kind of night.
I’m stuck in Newcastle after a storm caused a disruption of train service to Edinburgh, which is where I’m supposed to be right now.
Trees fall over on top of each other and on top of myself.
Ah
It was not clear why we must do the opposite of whatever Google did, but the world is a strange place
I can now control my stoplight remotely, over the WiFi, using magic and an ESP module. And my friend who knows electronics.
Wait I left Twitter and Bill Wurtz started Tweeting again, what is this?
"phone booths no longer have phones in them. now they are a blank canvas for the open minded adventurer"
Remind me to come back to this when I have sanity to spare
=> https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSf7Fs5gzrcJDUx_75JkZu6xwyGzJ3N9BfyOm6AzOJtqw4Ae3w/viewform
I should totally start a crypto/Web3 arc. Ah! Matthias with an NFT profile picture, I can see it.
Are not the shells of men, who disagree with their past selves and the rest of society, as beautiful as humans who are complete?
Hur dur I don’t even know. I changed the password back because I had changed it to 4 characters because I kept having to re enter it because
I hadn’t set a max_age on the authentication cookie. Just kind of funny, since you can see source now I don’t need to use this as a change log for the website itself.
Tumblr was bought for 1,000 million dollars, and sold for 3 million dollars. Elon's looking at 54,000 million for Twitter.
Version just gave Tumblr away for free, for all intents and purposes. Wild numbers.
You have to earn your happy ending (in literature at least).
In contrast, you don't have to earn bad endings.
One of the coffee mugs that says "Don't talk to me until I've had my coffee" but it just says "Don't talk to me"
Matthias's programming language of the day is [ReScript](https://rescript-lang.org), a language that compiles into Javascript, but is
designed to encourage functional paradigms. It's strictly typed, and places an even greater value on type-safety than TypeScript. Much like Rust, it's designed to be similar to common, modern languages, while still being compiled and taking advantages of the safety that results. (It's of course garbage collected, since it compiles to JS.) Syntax is similar to JS. Prominently, all primitive variables are constants; if you want a mutable value you have to wrap it in an object. It encourages pure functions, doesn't have any `null` or `undefined` types, and (in most cases) can infer types without needing type annotations. Because of compiler time optimizations, it boasts faster run times and smaller source files than comparable JS. The compiler is written in OCaml.
=> https://mobile.twitter.com/3blue1brown/status/1599200613488676866
Makes me wonder if the goal is to create a generally-intelligent AI or
if the goal is to pass the Turing test. Hofstadter and Turing and Asimov understandably equate the two, since computers in their time were dumb compared to humans.
Right now it seems like our current AI is neither smarter or dumber than a human. ChatGPT knows more trivia than any Jeopardy contestant, and can also instantly write hundreds of words of prose or computer code.
Sometimes it’s too literal and sometimes it’s too trusting and sometimes it’s not creative enough. But those things are knobs that we’re trying tune to match a human.
Like, the right amount of trust is the amount of trust a human would have. But human trust is a function of our entires lives and every interaction we’ve had. It’s dumb goal to make an AI assistant that is as gullible as a human.
And yet, how else would you define intelligence other than the ability to communicate and understand conversations with humans? The computer has *no* inherit intelligence, we as humans have to be the ones defining intelligence.
Last night I made an appointment at the Apple store to get my screen fixed because it has been showing these black bars of dead pixels.
And today I open my computer and it's working fine, no issues with the screen. No joke I have lived without a tenth of my screen for 3 months, and as soon as I make an appointment it fixes itself. It'll probably break again in a minute.
Nothing is more pretentious than making fun of Mensa members for being pretentious.
(I am aware of the irony of this Thought.)
Safari doesn't support regex look-behinds; the website I'm trying to use doesn't work; RIP, F, L, ratio
My friend was talking about how under appreciated *The Lorax* movie was, and how great a song “How Bad Can I Be?” was
And how weird it was was that everyone kind of forget about the movie.
And I sat there in silence, cursed by the knowledge of Onecest, *trying* to forget.
People are all 'Chick-fil-A donated to "anti-LGBTQ" organizations' and you look into it and it's like, churches, that teach Christianity.
Fellowship of Christian Athletes, The Salvation Army, and Paul Anderson Youth Home, are the 3 Vox mentions. All 3 are Christian organizations, and all have expressed anti-LGBTQ beliefs. But they all have a mission statement that is not related to LBGTQ at all. They are charities which have a net-positive effect on the world, and yet refuse to hire members of the LBGTQ community. I initially read "anti-LGBTQ" as 'organizations that set out to hurt LGBTQ people' and so find these headlines to be very misleading.
(I am referring to the last 5 years. In 2012 Chick-fil-A also donated food to a marriage seminar with a homophobic agenda?. In 2010 the owner donated $1000 to a group that promotes gay conversion therapy. There are several other incidents related to discriminatory hiring or homophobic statements by employees/leadership. But nothing else I found about the organizations in question acting on a homophobic agenda.)
My conclusion here is not to defend Chick-fil-A. I'm trying to push back on statements calling for a boycott because of misconceptions about where Chick-fil-A's money goes. If Chick-fil-A was actively funding gay conversation therapy, I wouldn't eat there. But they're not.
Sources: https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/3/21/18275850/chick-fil-a-anti-lgbtq-donations, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-salvation-armys-histo_b_4422938, https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/5/29/18644354/chick-fil-a-anti-gay-donations-homophobia-dan-cathy
"Global cooling" is a great Wikipedia article. It wants to ensure that you do not believe anything there, but it comes across too strong
and is only convincing me that global warming is a conspiracy and that the climate scientists are trying to cover up global cooling, the real crisis.
=> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling
How frequently should a code-base be rewritten in order to be considered healthy and active? Ever?
Remember, GNC men don’t exist and it is your job as an LGBTQ+ ally to encourage any man engaging in feminine actives to come out as trans
Something about Bethesda moving to Steam even though Steam takes a 30% cut. Maybe Apple isn't evil.
All my month numbers are off and probably other date things. Formatting dates is harder than I expected.
Okay, let's do the 2021 music roundup.
(I'm not excited about it. Make anything a requirement and I run from it.)
(Then maybe I'll fix the front page so it doesn't show "Winter 2022.")
* AJR
* Sylvan Esso
* HONEYMOAN
* half•alive
* They Might Be Giants
* The Regrettes
* twenty one pilots
* Jars of Clay
* Saint Motel
* Imagine Dragons
No real surprises here. The first half of the list preforms well on plays/day, releasing hits like "Monday" that I listened to often. The last four artists contribute more of my hours of listen-time, but I rarely seek them out. AJR, of course, is an outlier by both metrics.
I always thought that scene in *Dead Poets Society* where they stand on the desks was symbolic, but I just stood on my desk and the room
actually looks different.
I enjoy playing with space and geometry.
One of the things that makes teaching math difficult is that Math fundamentally relies on formal-logic-proofs to derive truth but math
teachers often don't understand all of the underlying rigorous logic. So when students ask a question, the teacher can try to answer off of their own intuition, and can try to convey that intuition, but that isn't the real answer. The authoritative answer is step 16 of Gauss's proof of whatever.
But it's much more practical to try to teach the intuition of math of than the formal logic of math.
My life goal is to be the statue from "The Statue Got Me High." Just a monolith of stone that intoxicates people and then disintegrates them
Not installing `ag` earlier was a mistake. I had a tool that accomplished something similar by running `grep -R` with a long `--exclude-dir`
```sh
g () {
grep -nIr --exclude="*.min.*" --exclude-dir={node_modules,.git,dist,.cache-loader,OurEnv,bower_components,.idea,.wine,.virtualenvs,.local,.gnupg,venv,site-packages} "$@" .
}
```
But The Silver Searcher's approach of just following `.gitignore` works better most of the time. And has a nicer output format.