Thoughts
“clouds are lies made by the government to splash people with water for the heck of it”
Yes anon, go off, I agree with you
Is this worse than callback hell?
```js
export async function getStaticProps() {
return {
props: {
posts: await Promise.all((await readDir(blogRelative(""))).map(async fileName => ({
title: await getTitle(await loadFile(blogRelative(fileName))),
slug: removeExt(fileName)
}))),
}
};
}
```
“But even when you’re on the side of less power, you can have agency within that. You’re not automatically a victim, you’re just more likely
to be one.”
On the theme of unpublished music, “Married on a Hill” is so good. Amazing 😢. I’m so glad it showed up on the internet.
If you'd like to follow along with my 1,100+ song library, I've copied it into a public Apple Music playlist.
=> https://music.apple.com/us/playlist/everything/pl.u-V9D7gq7FRvX7P7 Everything by Matthias on Apple Music
If you don't have Apple Music, just don't click that link. The Apple Music web interface does poorly with large playlists, and the songs that, by chance, ended up on the top are not, on the whole, reflective of my music taste.
I'm just so disappointed in myself.
"It's alright, I really think I peaked in high school" -80's Films, Jon Bellion
On desktop Safari if you have a tab group open and you close a tab and then use cmd+shift+T to reopen the last closed tab, the tab reopens
unconnected to the tab group, which is very confusing.
Veritasium tries to clickbait me, and I'm like, oh yeah, that's a penrose tiling. Classic. Don't need to watch your video.
I love phrases that outlast their original meaning.
"writing on the wall"
"boilerplate code"
"cc" on emails
""
hm
Just realized `pacman` is short for *pac*age *man*ager and is not in fact named after the video game character.
How is this the first time I'm reading Steph Week's wiki page?
"Weeks is readily identified by his nine eyes and nine hands, each carrying a bat. The bats are named after the nine days of the week"
RSS should now be working at /feed. I don't know, RSS assumes a lot of things that I am not actually doing, like having links to things.
Shoot! I forgot Haskell has a native composing operator when I made this Thought.
=> https://thoughts.learnerpages.com/?show=22c65757-d280-4714-abb4-13fc97dfa4fb The Thought in question
Combined with Haskell's implicit Currying, nothing is as true as
=> https://thoughts.learnerpages.com/?show=ea61e9ea-f6a9-408a-9497-7f572eda8519 "Every so often I re-invent Haskell."
I updated to Big Sur. Most all there is is a new design, which will definitely take some getting used to. Super rounded corners, wow!
People sometimes ask me if I think there will be computers in heaven.
They see that I am passionate about programming, and are curious if I’ll miss that after I’m dead.
They misunderstand. I am an artist. I want to create things, to create beautiful things. Perhaps the greatest tragedy of my life is the best medium I have found for the type of art I want to create is computer programming languages.
/r/unixporn is fricking wild because of the absolute variety of window managers. There are just always window managers I've never heard of.
Safari is so buggy I can't. Like what's their excuse there are no features. I'm clicking on a link and it focuses Safari but the page
doesn't open.
Oh yeah I forgot to mention that I finished my re-read of Five Kingdoms on the 9th. It was very good. Definitely an epic story.
It also partially inspired a lot of the previous Thoughts, but that should go without saying.
This feels big.
I just released the source code for this site.
=> https://tildegit.org/matthias/WhisperMaPhone
It's not like totally un-ready. But it has lots of room for improvement.
Really, this website is the only one that matches my aesthetic. Tumblr is too chaotic, Twitter is too passionate, Instagram to flashy.
Even this website seems a little too nice at time, too polished. I want a nice T-shirt-and-jeans-on-grass-under-the-sun website.
Twitter is like a promenade, either street performers or shops competing for your attention. Tumblr has been described as an abandoned clown factory. Instagram is like a beach: public, loud, bright.
Discord or The Linoleum Club (yet nonexistent) are like a bar, dark and loud but friendly. YouTube is a sports arena.
This website is my bed, my head, my thoughts.
Twenty One Pilots is an amazing band.
They should be underground, niche; they epitomizes the alternative rock sound. And yet they’ve done it so fricking well that they’re mainstream.
I have a model for thinking about mainstream vs. not, that I haven’t put into words yet, but TOP breaks it.
This website is actually a fidget toy. Typing here gives my fingers something to do doadoawdmkmad klmawd kmkmak mwkamw dmawdlmlkamsn otitnh
kmaksdkma klmwdcna and sle
The good news is that I'm now less sick, so my brain has enough energy to blame me for all the world's problems. Still not enough energy to
fix them, but maybe we'll get there eventually.
That’s what’s so weird, is that there’s not a catalyst. I wish I had something to blame but for myself.
I watched *October Sky* with some friends yesterday to celebrate the start of October. It's a very good movie.
I think about the Pit of Success a lot.
=> https://blog.codinghorror.com/falling-into-the-pit-of-success/
The idea behind the pit of success is there's some metaphorical "gravity" pulling you down, analogous to doing whatever is easiest, and in some programming languages that pulls you down into traps, and in other languages that pulls you into the best possible scenario.
The Pit of success wasn't meant to be graphed. But I like to graph things, so let's make some tweaks.
```Graph of Quality vs. Effort, showing a hill-shape
Q
u
a / - \
l / \
i / \
t __/
y
Effort
```
Suddenly, instead of a pit of success, we have a hill of success. This way of graphing things makes sense Effort is the dependent variable. "Gravity" is pulling us left, towards as little effort as a possible.
What makes the pit of success really interesting is that you end up in a place where spending more time leads to a worse product. And this way of graphing make this really obvious. Increasing effort, past a certain point, gives an actually worse product.
This might be hard to believe, but it's because we're really good at recognizing when there's not sufficient payoff and not continuing to work in that way. The basic example is re-implementing some library yourself. It takes more time and you likely end up with a worse result, when compared to using a pre-existing library.
The further point to make is that most languages and programming environments don't look like this. They don't have a pit of success. Instead, what you often see is *diminishing results* for increasing Effort. So instead of this nice peak, that gives you a nice stopping point, you end up with a flat area. And this where a lot of projects die. When you get to the point where it doesn't make sense to continue putting in effort.
But! There's an even worse scenario! In the case that an environment is very developer hostile, it looks like a logarithmic graph. There are no local maximums, no nice stopping points. It's always possible to make your product better, but more and more effort is required to do so. This is why creating Minecraft maps is hell.
One of the things that's so nice about interpreted languages to me is that they have a 0-complexity build process.
Hate to break it to you, but The 1975 is not a real band.
At best it's two bands on top of each other wearing a trenchcoat, but at worst it might be a podcast.
Why isn’t this open source yet?
Oh yeah the About page is in the source. Hm. Might just do it.
I don’t know, like this site is where I want it to be for myself, but if I want someone else to run, or it I was going to run it for somewhere else, I’d target a different set of features. Like, not add additional features but remove features like Gemini support or tweak settings. Maybe I’ll open-source it as is, with a heck ton of disclaimers, so people can take inspiration from it but like, I’m not giving you setup instructions because you should make your own site.
Tell me this isn't dumb, I fricking dare you. Defend this behavior, you won't.
```julia
julia> parse(BigFloat, "0.1") + parse(BigFloat, "0.2")
0.3000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000017
```
"Guess I don't understand that life, wonder why? 'Cause I'm all in 'til the day I die."
The song before this on the album ends with a sample of someone asking 'you've been going at this pace for a while, how much more you got in you?'
So many hype lyrics in this song
https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/tobymac/tilthedayidie.html
Obsessed with the HackerNews commenter who replied to my "we should fix bugs in software" comment with 'no. my job as a manager is to
make sure that my engineers don't go down rabbit holes chasing bugs that they might not even be able to fix. We need more engineers who ship features quickly'
I mean it's basic business sense. Why would you spend time and money fixing bugs when you could be making more software to sell. The user only encounters the bugs after they've paid. Why sell 1 piece of software that works when you could sell 5 pieces of software that are buggy as hell.
I'm going to become a fricking communist because I want software that fricking works all the time.
I'm glad to know that if I'm ever really bored I could join the Danny Phantom fandom or something.
Did a reading of the About page. Took over 11 minutes my word.
I stand by that length, the About page, like this website in general, is supposed to be a little awkwardly long. But man, it is awkward to read.
I don't speak English. I don't even know what that means. I'm going insane. Brain dead brain head. lead.
My obsession with social media and internet communication is really just a result of loneliness.
To follow up on "Monads and Promises are the same thing", apparently his claim is that Monads and Promises and Optionals are all equivalent.
I see where he's coming from. Promises implement optional-style features. But they're also frequently used as a way to implement async functionality.
Edit (5:59pm): I am unclear on whether Monads in Haskell are frequently used for async tasks.
"I know the question that is foremost in your thoughts. Who ate the babies?"
-Synopsis for Latecomers, They Might be Giants
I’m trying to explain how I would ironically make pasta noodles and I don’t think it’s really coming across.
The dream of technological self reliance is a fantasy from the past.
It mirrors the self-reliance of the days of the American Romantics. While illustrious, it’s not reasonable.
We need to establish how to function as a digital collaborative society.
I think the key might be in reclaiming email, but many have tried and lost their battles before.
Fusion 360 is bad. SolidWorks is bad. All CAD programs except for my yet unreleased CAD program are bad.
By "yet unreleased" I mean "imaginary hypothetical"
I’ve said this before but I want to reiterate that I don’t use mind-effecting substances, not even alcohol. The posts here are the sober
thoughts of a highly rational mind.
I'm not a fan of JS symbols. I understand why they exist from a theoretical standpoint, but I think in most cases they decrease code
readability. Maybe I'm just not used to them.
It’s really hard to know what people want. It’s really stinkin’ hard. But that doesn’t mean you should stop trying.
Mathematics is an arbitrary human invention. The concept of a number "1" is nothing more than a concept.
It is useful, as it relates to the real world, certainly, but single objects don't actually exist in the real world.
If you look at an apple, it's natural and easy for you to draw a circle around it in your mind and label it as a single apple. And once you've done that, it's natural and easy for you to say that one apple, and another apple, is two apples. But that's all happening in your mind. The atoms don't care whether they're in an apple or not. There's no formal definition of when two apples are "together" and become "two apples" vs. "one apple" and "another apple." The concept of 2 only applies to apples because you've chosen to use it.
To quote Hofstadter, "we don't apply number theory to cloud systems, because the very concept of whole numbers hardly fits. There can be one cloud and another cloud, and they will come together and instead of there being two clouds, there will still only be one" (G.E.B. 457).
So we have this concept of "one cloud" in our brain, that makes sense and is useful. But the mapping between the "pure" ideas in our brain and the real world is imperfect.
One of the things that I really liked about *The Edge Chronicles* was that it did both small scale and large scale worldbuilding.
Definitely a fun reading, will hopefully revisit it in the future. (From last night, edited to remove a break.)
Transcript
E. E. Cummings
Introduction to New Poems
The poems to come are for you and for me and are not for mostpeople– it’s no use trying to pretend that mostpeople and ourselves are alike. Mostpeople have less in common with ourselves than the squarerootofminusone. You and I are human beings;mostpeople are snobs. Take the matter of being born. What does being born mean to mostpeople? Catastrophe unmitigated. Socialrevolution. The cultured aristocrat yanked out of his hyperexclusively ultravoluptuous superpalazzo,and dumped into an incredibly vulgar detentioncamp swarming with every conceivable species of undesirable organism. Mostpeople fancy a guaranteed birthproof safetysuit of nondestructible selflessness. If mostpeople were to be born twice they’d improbably call it dying–
you and I are not snobs. We can never be born enough. We are human beings;for whom birth is a supremely welcome mystery,the mystery of growing:which happens only and whenever we are faithful to ourselves. You and I wear the dangerous looseness of doom and find it becoming. Life,for eternal us,is now’and now is much to busy being a little more than everything to seem anything,catastrophic included.
Life,for mostpeople,simply isn’t. Take the socalled standardofliving. What do mostpeople mean by “living”? They don’t mean living. They mean the latest and closest plural approximation to singular prenatal passivity which science,in its finite but unbounded wisdom,has succeeded in selling their wives. If science could fail,a mountain’s a mammal. Mostpeople’s wives could spot a genuine delusion of embryonic omnipotence immediately and will accept no substitutes.
-luckily for us,a mountain is a mammal. The plusorminus movie to end moving,the strictly scientific parlourgame of real unreality,the tyranny conceived in misconception and dedicated to the proposition that every man is a woman and any woman is a king,hasn’t a wheel to stand on. What their synthetic not to mention transparent majesty, mrsandmr collective foetus,would improbably call a ghost is walking. He isn’t a undream of anaesthetized impersons, or a cosmic comfortstation,or a transcedentally sterilized lookiesoundiefeelietastiesmellie. He is a healthily complex,a naturally homogenous,citizen of immorality. The now of his each pitying free imperfect gesture,his any birth of breathing,insults perfected inframortally milleniums of slavishness. He is a little more than everything,he is democracy;he is alive:he is ourselves.
Miracles are to come. With you I leave a remembrance of miracles: they are somebody who can love and who shall be continually reborn,a human being;somebody who said to those near him,when his fingers would not hold a brush “tie it to my hand”–
nothing proving or sick or partial. Nothing false,nothing difficult or easy or small or colossal. Nothing ordinary or extraordinary,nothing emptied or filled,real or unreal;nothing feeble and known or clumsy and guessed. Everywhere tints childrening,innocent spontaneaous,true. Nowhere possibly what flesh and impossibly such a garden,but actually flowers which breasts are amoung the very mouths of light. Nothing believed or doubted;brain over heart, surface:nowhere hating or to fear;shadow,mind without soul. Only how measureless cool flames of making;only each other building always distinct selves of mutual entirely opening;only alive. Never the murdered finalities of wherewhen and yesno,impotent nongames of wrongright and rightwrong;never to gain or pause,never the soft adventure of undoom,greedy anguishes and cringing ecstasies of inexistence;never to rest and never to have;only to grow.
Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question
Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question
It's my opinion that Apache's `RewriteRule` is an anti-pattern and it is frequently used as a crutch.
Memory management in C be like
```C
/* The request_rec pointer is passed in here only to ensure that the
* filter chain is modified correctly when doing a TLS upgrade. It
* must *not* be used otherwise. */
```
Ah, my nemesis, the chocolate chip cookie, has defeated me for a fourth time.
I’m being dramatic of course, they’re not bad. They’re just not flat like I want them to be. Maybe my standards are too high. But the pictures from the recipe I’m following end up with fricking pancakes, and I have these domes of cookie. Maybe my expectations are too high.
Oh yeah just so it's clear, every time I say "I'm on drugs" I'm joking. I've never done a drug in my life.
Hofstadter's sense of humor in *GEB* reminds me of *Sideways Stories from Wayside School*.
I guess *GEB* is much less surreal. But the wordplay!
I haven't picked up *GEB* in months and I'm still not over "central dogmap"
It’s hard for me to lack confidence when I look in the mirror.
Sometimes I wonder if I’m bi just because I find myself so irrationally attractive.
"Goodbye ordinaryish people, we had quite the run didn’t wе though, but you gotta be somebody sometimе"
-Ordinaryish People, AJR
In the Blaseball API, there's a field on a Game object called `secretBaserunner`. I don't know why.
Time may or may not be meaningless, but if you pretend like it’s meaningless, it’s not like someone shows up banging on your door.
Absolutely cursed idea. What if every day for NaNoWriMo I wrote my 1600 or whatever words as posts on here?
It is, it's like there's a monster above, looming over me. I just want to curl up into a ball.
A little bit of anxiety and little bit of stress. But it's like mostly dread.
But I still find plenty, or at least enough, happiness down here in my little blob. I don't know. I want the new Regrettes album.
The use of "wimdy" to mean a 'an unlikely outcome' is possibly my favorite example of the evolution of language.
I love #cat-v because someone comes in trying to start a conversation with a Stallman petition, and everyone ignores them.
They are clowning on me for using plan9 utilities. I this person wants me to use the full OS or bust.
I ask for help, and they're like, 'that's how it's supposed to work.'
Oh my word I fricking love this keyboard!
I just got my computer back from the Apple Store. It's one of the last ones made with the butterfly switches. The keyboard gets a lot of hate for its close-to-0 travel and its infamous unreliability. But I love it. It's so fricking nice to type on. (I also haven't typed on any full-sized keyboard in close to 2 weeks. So i'd also probably be happy to type on a Microsoft freebie.) It feels even better than I remember, I wonder if it's actually nicer because it's brand new.
Apple's lack of modularization means that since I was having issues with the display on the Touch Bar, they replace the whole top part of bottom half of the computer, giving me a brand-new TouchBar, keyboard, trackpad, and battery.
Battery Cycle Count: 1
This is why I always pay for AppleCare+. Like-new computer for free for 3 years after purchase.
One of my favorite tropes is the assassin that says they’re an assassin because no one will believe them. Quality.
We had a couple of mice in the attic, so I bought mouse traps. We have some left over. I've been using one as a fidget toy.
I believe in a God because when I look at the world, I see broken people. I see the brokenness of humanity so clearly that I have to believe
that it is possible for someone to be unbroken.
Redditors explaining how high rent prices in the city is LGBTQ discrimination because people in rural areas are homophobic.
I'm probably violating the GNU Document License by posting that. If it counts a modified version of the document, then I suspect I am.
But I'm not enough of a masochist to have read through the GDL. It didn't get included in the reading.
I'm really worried Etho's going to burn himself out cramming for the charity event today. He normally takes a lot of time with these things
Everything is a tweet. My posts on Mastodon: tweets. My posts here: tweets. Funny Tumblr posts screencapped and posted to Reddit: tweets.
Julia Evans is creating creating some high quality bash tutorials, and this fool is all ‘just read the POSIX spec’
Like, I’m sure the spec is ‘surprisingly readable,’ but it’s still not color coded and doesn’t have little stick figures pointing out common pitfalls.
Can't believe they're making me write CSS.
They're not of course, I just have to add the bootstrap classes to the things, but it's like the same thing.
If Rust is really that good, we should see the benefits in Firefox soon. They seem to be embracing Rust.
I might have to re-watch Etho's Hermitcraft season 7. That was fricking goated. Basically the golden age of Etho. Which feels wild to say
because Etho has been so consistently amazing for 10 years now. But season 7 was something different.
People think weighted averages are difficult. I love weighted averages, I can do them in my sleep.
I hate doing archeology on Tumblr. Like this stuff is there or on archive.org or somewhere but it’s a pain. Where did you go Lucy?
Oh yeah I was reminded of that because Wesley is on the first page of Hacker News. This is what I mean by infinite connections.
I’m okay.
Perhaps the greatest lie I tell myself is that I am a rational creature. I fundamentally operate off of urges, feelings.
HELP. Someone made a comment about *Ted Lasso* carrying Apple TV+. That was an hour ago. I've watched the first 2 episodes.
Someone created a thoughts page almost exactly like this one, Apr 7th, 2020. I created this page Sep 5th, 2020.
=> https://wesleyac.thoughts.page
The feature parity here is honestly horrifying. I think the biggest difference is probably that they don't have what I call extended text (that's this here). They seem to not have a length limit. I limit to 140 characters in the first line.
I have 1,731 Thoughts, they have 408 thoughts. So I'm clearly better, don't worry. /s
“emphasising the composition of generic and reusable (pure value returning) library functions”
*reimplements Haskell in JS*
I had to see this, so you do too. Some of the worst JS I’ve ever seen. I can’t fall asleep, it’s scaring me. Why would you reimplement the Haskell standard library in JavaScript??? Are pure functions that important to you? Is partial application of function arguments worth creating a syntax for calling functions that I’ve never seen before? (It would be slightly better if you were using the ES7 `|>`.) If you care that much, allow me to point you to some excellent functional languages that compile to JS (Elm, OCaml). Ah, you say, ‘but what about when I have an infinitely long list (represented by this generator function), then the JS standard library is useless.’ Infinitely long lists aren’t a thing, I don’t care, go outside.
http://www.rosettacode.org/wiki/Determine_if_a_string_has_all_the_same_characters#JavaScript
I’ve been thinking for months about how to fix the US copyright system for the digital age. Such a mess.
So no one told me `git` supports repos on other servers over SSH, just by default. And I guess I'm not very smart because I had all the
pieces, but yeah, I never put it together. Source code for this site/other private projects is being deleted from GitHub, get out of here Microsoft.
Hacker News sorted by new is just some guy, linking his own Medium post linking to a Google Doc describing how Satoshi Nakamoto is Elon Musk
I went through a phase where I used Matthias1@vivaldi.net as my primary email. And now I've decided that's kind of dumb, but I can't change
all my accounts over. IDK
The weird thing to me about Slack cutting down their free plan is that cost savings on the server side should be negligible.
Maybe it's not negligible, maybe Slack is using a single-server SQL database, and rather than scale up to a distributed KV-store like Discord did, they're kicking out the leeches.
Or maybe Slack's marketing about "this change effects a small number of servers" is just BS and their goal is actually to encourage people to upgrade to the paid plan, just because they can.
I am mentally stable. I am mentally stable. I am mentally stable. I am mentally stable. I am mentally stable. I am mentally stable. I am
What React should let you do is define custom equality comparisons for component props. So that you can say "the order of the items in this
array prop doesn't matter." Instead, the *enclosing* component is responsible for ensuring that the array doesn't change unless it's actually supposed to. Hence all this BS about "stability" and "memoizing."
Congrats to Grant on π million subscribers.
I was going to post this yesterday when he tweeted about it, but I couldn't easily type π on my phone keyboard.
Oh also I started reading *Pawn of Prophecy,* but I don't know if I'm going to be able to force myself through it. It's so fricking slow and
the main character is doing nothing and has no idea what's going on.
It's technically a re-read, I read it when I was probably in middle school, but remember nothing. Then again, that might be because there's nothing to remember.
Matt Parker (@standupmaths) has stared using “they/them” pronouns for literally everyone, including people he knows prefer others.
Apollo got a shoutout in WWDC today, a month before Reddit is going to shut down the 3rd-party API and kill the app. L
I haven't had a regular schedule for so long I forgot what it was like to slip. Well I'm slipping now.
I would like to use the name Matthias on the internet, and since Matthias is fairly uncommon, you'd think I could get away with it.
Probably the most well known "Matthias" is a YouTuber. His popularity is the biggest thing that makes me hesitate when committing to using "Matthias" as a name on the internet. Ironically, his birth name is Matthew, and he goes by "Matthias" because "Matthew" is too common. Imposter Matthias stealing the uniqueness of my birth name!
People complain about JS's date support but I have a date in the form "Sun Jun 07 06:57:25 2020" and Python just won't handle it.
Only ISO dates in Python I guess. Going to have to like call out to JS or something I don't know.
Edit: nevermind I missed `strptime`
“Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much
more valuable than they?”
Matthew 6:26 NIV
Lewis talks about living in the present in *The Screwtape Letters*, something that is hard for me. I can feel what Lewis means, what the Holy Spirit is leading me to—not a sort of “do whatever you feel like right now” but “do what you know you need to do right now and trust that it will work out for you.” I know that sounds easy, but my perfectionism makes it difficult. Perfectionism is useful when making decisions but after the decision has been made you just need to roll with it.
This sort of perfectionist rejection of perfectionism ties directly to the idea of “doing whatever is easiest.”
Ben Shapiro kind of jumped the shark. As someone who's relatively moderate, I used to appreciate him as a voice of reason on the
conservative side. Unfortunately, I now don't see him as much better than other conservatives. For example, he avoided Trump's cult in 2016 and was always relatively critical of him. He's still critical of Trump, but now seems to be backing DeSantis heavily. I, on the other hand, am not a fan of DeSantis. I think his politics in Florida have been too authoritarian.
It is important to understand that things posted here don't count.
This is a personal journal. Things published here are unpublished.
I feel for people that like listen to community feedback about their products.
It just looks painful. This guy's like 'I think this app should look like the Notes app did in OS X Lion.' Okay. No one else agrees with you, I'm sorry.
I just hate that complex software, like Minecraft for example, there are just these huge, easy to reproduce bugs, and we just accept that
they will never get fixed. If you start a Minecraft hardcore world, move outside of the spawn chunks (~500 blocks), and die, attempting to re-open the world will freeze/softlock the game. This behavior has existed since 1.14, released 3 years ago.
MC-157812 and MC-248926, having priority Important and Very Important.
(Before 1.18 you could open the world, but no terrain would load, so you could at least close the world again. In 1.18 the application just freezes and you have to quit it.)
And I can't even complain. Because this isn't even that bad of an issue. There are literally thousands (>8,000) open bugs. But Mojang's devs aren't working on fixing them, or if they are, they're working on the bugs in the snapshots that effect the new features and not the unglamorous bugs from 5 years ago.
There are some projects, like the micro text editor, for example, where there are hundreds of open bugs and the project is unmaintained. But the bugs are most weird, difficult to reproduce edge cases or feature requests, or the types of things that aren't a big deal. Like there's a very real idea of a "stale" bug report that just needs to be closed at some point.
But iTerm2 has almost 3,000 open issues and some of them are clearly not stale.
At some point humanity has to slow down and fix some bugs, right?
I solved Semantle #112 in 101 guesses. My first guess had a similarity of 10.51. My first word in the top 1000 was at guess #92. My
penultimate guess had a similarity of 31.53 (920/1000).
Had friends helping out. Semantle is saved if played as a group activity.
I am Matthias. I'm Matthias. Ahhh. Brain empty no thoughts just air. I wonder if getting 4 hours of sleep last night contributed to that.
Had some wild dreams last night. Your mind just kind of makes stuff up.
My mans is insane. He literally compiled C to WebAssembly (for its simple instruction set) so that he could implement the instruction set
in BrightScript and run C programs. https://motley-coder.com/2020/12/23/doom-on-roku/
Transcript
"To me, gratuitous linguistic mimicry is sometimes a sign of a weak independent thinking capability."
I feel like the Hellmouth Sunbeams spend too much time on the “sunbeams” parts and not enough time on the “hellmouth” part send tweet
The conversation happening in the live chat room for supportXMR is quality. I unfortunately cannot share it here, since it is NSFW.
All I want, is to retreat into a remote cave, and spend my time looking into the future and writing down prophecies, to be found by future
heroes in their time of need.
I want to know what the people who make static site generators are thinking. Because I think about static sites a lot. And none of the
static site generators are intuitive to me. They're all weird.
Last time I read the 6th Harry Potter I was not old enough to pick up on the implications that Ginny and Harry were doing more than just
kissing in their extended time alone together. It translates into awkwardness in 7 which I further didn’t understand.
I'm convinced that no one who has used the Apache 2 license has ever read it
=> /?show=95bd38a1-5051-4113-8937-7e7a83c0ab82
The problem with discussing education is that it’s just too easy to argue for complete radial reform of the education system.
Edit (9:03): This makes it sounds like I'm opposed to radial reform of the education system. On the contrary, what I'm trying to say is that you can make very good arguments for abolishing everything after elementary school. But that makes it hard to discuss smaller and more realistic changes.
Okay, so I made mild style tweaks. The page no longer scrolls side to side on mobile. You're welcome. Still no images.
Fell into the void trying to find an elytra and lost my good gear. I hate this game. I've been looking for an elytra for hours.
How hard is it, really, to create a good natural language processing system? It seems like it shouldn't be that hard to create a parse tree
out of an English sentence, and then derive meaning from it.
We just write so much poetry and so little of it is appreciated.
=> https://www.reddit.com/r/nonpoetry/comments/moge74/translation/
Transcript
"I believe there is
A divine revelation
Happening
Between us
I believe that
We are being
Shown
Each others words
Their power
Their intent
Their message
I believe
That there's a
Third party
Connecting us
A spirit of
Understanding
That moves between our
Throat
And each others
Ears
I believe that
You and I
Have the complete
And unwavering
Attention
And
Command
Of God
Or whoever
Allowing our tongues to
Wag with
Precision
And clarity
In order to
Shatter
The barriers
Formed by the
Limitations
Of language"
I think maybe time was meant to be linear and things were meant to be ephemeral. Maybe holding on to the past is a mistake.
I've been thinking a lot about mutual respect recently.
I realized I don't respect random people on the internet but want them to respect me
A little bit of mutual respect goes a long way, and I think we have way too little online.
I made brownies, and they're much thinner than I would like. But they taste super good, so I feel like eating 25 square inches of brownie.
We give dogs a lot of credit for their sense of smell, but we would probably be able to smell more if we put our nose close to the ground.
One of these days I'm going to create my own programming language and then I'm going to be unstoppable.
We have so much fricking more we can still do with computers. We're not going to slow down for the next 30 years at least.
I'm just thinking about like IDE/code-analysis features—we could totally have a button in the IDE that simulates running the code and generates all possible outputs. Like IntelliJ will point out if you can transform a boolean condition into a simpler equivalent form (like `if not (not a and not b)` -> `if (a or b)`, if I remember DeMorgan's). Why can't we do that with the entire program?
And like, I hate IDE features like type checking—but mostly because they're bad. It seems like I get false positives from TypeScript type checking 30+% of the time and an acceptable false positive rate for a static code analysis tool IMO is close to 1%. But that's something we can bring down in the next decade.
Ugghh, thinking about the possibility of making my own music player was a mistake.
I want the ability to block songs. Like there are some songs that I just don't like.
I could go to bed, or I could sit here in bed and flick the stoplight through different colors, *remotely*.
I think this is what they call a data crime
I'll give you a hint, the x-axis is unix timestamps
This is so cursed
=> https://web.archive.org/web/20220318075625/https://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~jrus/site/cocoa-text.html
Some very exciting things planned for this website. Nothing you’ll see just yet, but very soon.
I’m again amazed that someone else writes in that style.
That post is long, but the rest of their posts are short. Someone else creating a Thoughts page.
Although they may fall outside of a standard deviation of the mean.
I don't know who I am. I do things I never would have expected. I am slowly ruining my life and I can't figure out why.
I've been browsing the web for years and I've never once seen a website actually use a parameter.
Okay okay I searched my browser history. In 2020 I visited `https://projecteuler.net/archives;page=14` I'm horrified.
Feb. 2020, a bunch of unaffiliated websites using `PAGE;jsessionid=REACTED?PARAMS`. I wonder where that comes from.
Few more random ones including a Google ads redirect. But mostly auth/sign-in redirects it looks like.
React is in that beautiful place where it is both 'so simple at there is obviously nothing wrong with it' and 'so complicated that there is
nothing obviously wrong with it.'
The problem with CS is that it's too easy to make things modular. In plumbing, you're working with these standardized composable units, the
pieces of pipe. And you have different options and you can combine them in different ways, but the building blocks are well defined.
In programming, that building blocks are not well defined. Every project, you have to first choose your building blocks, possibly creating your own new building blocks, before you can put them together.
The plumber has to choose the material and radius of the pipe, but that's about it. To stretch the metaphor, the programmer has to choose the pipe material, and shape, and whether there's going to be an integrated internet connection in the pipe. The plumber doesn't have to worry if it would be more efficient to run Ethernet along the same path as the pipes, because that's not really an option.
I feel like programmers, or at least I, spend a lot of time trying to figure out the best way to create these modules. If I could just create a perfect set of building blocks, or of modules, or functions, then all future programs wouldn't have to re-invent them, they would be able to just compose this perfect standard library of functions into every possible program. Then programming would be like plumbing, because you wouldn't be writing your own classes or utility functions, you would just be writing the application-unique logic.
What this view misses, is that plumbing is made up of connecting segments of PVC pipe because it has to be. If it were feasible to machine your own shapes of PVC pipe for every project, that's what plumbers would do.
This is no perfect set of standard library functions that make every project possible, because there is no clearly defined boundary between where the utility functions end and the project-specific code begins. Unlike in plumbing, where that line is very clearly defined. The factory produces sections of pipe, and the plumber doesn't have any other options.
At first I was sketched out that this site was showing up in search results, but I kind of love the idea that someone Googles something and
my thought on it shows up.
I could make Linoleum Club in like a day if I made it an invite-only Discord server with a web portal instead of making it a whole website…
First version of the HPL is done. I don't have any software to release with it right now, however.
It doesn’t matter at what level/scale you’re working at. The system is imperfect at every level and it’s impossible to make something
perfect at any level. All you can do is make the best thing you can at the level you choose (including trying not to make it more difficult for people at other levels).
(If you don’t see it, this is profound.)
Allow me to propose a security model called, 'don't have anything anyone would want to attack.'
The Gemini protocol is using this model with great success.
So funny to me how Dev Ops is a job. My understanding of it is like `rsync`ing the files to a server and paying the AWS bill.
I have been asked four (4) times in the last month to explain the algorithm by which QR-codes encode data. I do not know.
Tumblr monetization update: there’s now lore behind the merch store. The fictional Brick Whartey has gone on vacation and the fictional
crabs that manufacture the merchandise have gone on strike.
A publicly traded company has created fictional unionized factory workers in order to convince socialists to buy merchandise that was almost certainly manufactured by real factory workers that are not unionized. Capitalism is amazing!
Tumblr users like crabs and unions. Someone at Tumblr: ‘please buy our merch, it was manufactured by unionized crabs.’
I just feel like you haven’t *really* lost your virginity until you and your SO have been bitten by the same mosquito.
People are like "I don't know who…is and at this point I'm too afraid to ask" and it's like, some internet micro-celebrity. I don't know who
Margaret Thatcher was. A Prime Minister of England?
I think the thing about remote/in-person work is that for me, communication in person is clearly superior. If we could teleport, if there
were no downsides, all other things being equal, I just would rather speak to you in person than over text or a call or Zoom. If my co-worker was sitting in the cubicle next to me, sometimes I would DM them instead of tapping them on the shoulder. For example, if it wasn't time-sensitive and I didn't want to interrupt, or if the my question hinged on a link that I wanted them to open. Then sure, start with a DM. But if my co-worker was sitting next to me my default is going to be talking to them face-to-face.
So if you're going to make a remote-first argument, you have to "play-defense," I think, by establishing enough benefit to overcome this initial hump.
If your pro-remote argument follows the lines of 'Slack is just as effective as talking face-to-face,' then you've lost me, unfortunately. Google Starline isn't available yet, we're not there yet.
To put it another way, humans have learned how to communicate face-to-face, and for vast majority of the population, they would have to re-learn the entirety of what they know about social interaction to work remotely. That includes me. I love text, I love learning and sharing things on the internet, I love talking to people online. But even my brain equates socializing with something that happens in person.
Now, the reason I think it's important to talk about this is there's a very different type of argument that you could make for remote work, which is that work shouldn't be social. These people like platforms like Slack for work precisely because it is less personal. It keeps people professional, cuts down on chit-chat, makes it easier to ignore personal feelings, etc.
But this is a very different argument to the argument that you can have the same socializing experience on Slack that you do in-person.
As an example, I got to sit down and eat lunch with the CFO of my company the other day, just because we were both in the break-room at the same time. This is someone who is 30 years older than me and in a completely different part of the company. But we got to have a nice, if awkward, little chat. This conversation was very much borne out of learned social-skills that apply in person (i.e. we totally could have ignored each other, but since we're both used to talking to people in person, we didn't). It also only happened because we were in the same physical space.
Some remote-work proponents claim that this type of conversation could totally happen online as well. You could totally have an online-work-place culture where those types of spontaneous interactions happen, through many different mechanisms. But any mechanism where this happens online would require us to learn a completely new set of rules for social interaction.
The other argument pro-remote-work argument you could make is that this interaction didn't need to happen. It was a distraction, it wasted both of our time, it was awkward etc. Here's where you get the "I want my work life and personal life to be separate." I don't understand this reticence.
Thinking a lot about the Tumblr post, ‘we basically live in a gasoline-punk society, where nuclear energy has been available for decades’
LaTeX is surprisingly close to the dream of Actually Flowers; a way to semantically describe documents such that any document renders well.
Of course, that isn't actually the goal of Actually Flowers and LaTeX isn't even close to that goal. It's just surprising to me that the comparison can be made at all since they are so different in theory.
The hotwired.dev paradigm has the potential to be the future of the web.
Unfortunately DHH's mastery of the long-form essay isn't appreciated by today's JavaScript developers.
The difference between the Next.js docs and the Turbo documentation is shocking, especially when you consider that Turbo is much simpler than Next.js.
I'm trying to post here more often after I did the per-quarter breakdown and realized how much I posted the first season of this site.
The web is ephemeral.
There's this idea that web urls should stick around for 20 years. And while I love consistency, it's just not in the nature of the web to do that. If I want to re-organize my website in such a way that given content isn't on my website anymore, sorry. Websites are like store windows, not libraries.
On the other hand, I'm not opposed to people scraping my websites for the purposes of archiving them. Archive.org is very impressive. Or I have content (e.g. for my blog) in Git, so I'm not saying I'm going to erase my writing from the face of the Earth.
But I'm going to shut down my "blog" and some links are going break. Cope.
‘Stocks have decent ROI, but don’t pay significant dividends. Real estate pays, you can write off expenses/depreciation, and you can do a
1031 exchange when you want to cash out.’
I'm totally going to end up with a memory leak or something
On a page called "Manual Memory Management"
It's shocking how refreshing it feels to me to open this website with new colors.
These colors are based on ones color-picked from my driver's license. I had to adjust the beige, such things are terribly hard to get right.
Today, in the age of client-side web apps, React, and extreme JavaScript APIs, it's difficult to remember that the web before JS wasn't
static.
Let me back up a little bit. The internet is splitting at the seams into 2 factions—those that want a document-based web and those that are building web apps. The former makes the argument that documents don't need to be Turing complete, and that webpages should serve primarily text. The latter group is supporting WebUSB, because they see the web as a distribution platform for ephemeral applications, ala XKCD 1367: https://xkcd.com/1367. (Personally, I fully support this schism. I like the idea of having two different clients, one that let me run sandboxed applications and one that lets me view text.)
Gemini is a product of the first group. For all of Gemini's "forced simplicity," it doesn't address dynamic server-side generation of pages. Without Javascript buttons, you can implement dynamic functionality by generating the page every time the user visits, having links that log actions, and re-direct you back to an updated version of the page. Gemini doesn't support POST or form elements, but it supports clicking links and taking user input as text. And this where, functionality wise, it's quite possible for me to build a capsule that has user accounts, posts, votes, etc. on Gemini.
What concerns me is that the pro-document group doesn't remember that before JS functionality, the web did look like this. And if Gemini gets any significant traction, these types of pages will appear. And suddenly your lack-of-features only hurts the user experience.
Now, in practice, this isn't going to happen. The web will always exist and people will chose to build dynamic sites on the web instead of on Gemini because the web is the better platform for it. But it's still weird to realize that Gemini's "forced simplicity" is really just accomplished by making dynamic pages a poor user experience, and not precluding them.
It's fricking wild to me that Vim is the best editor in 2021. I mean, that's subjective obviously. But like, I use Vim. In 2021. And I don't
particularly like it.
But if you look at time to start, cross-platform availability, and syntax highlighting in a variety languages, Vim has Atom beat by a factor of 2 it feels like. And those are the only constraints I care about. Vim does lose major points for not supporting normal Mac keyboard shortcuts. Maybe I'll make a list of Matthias' Requirements for the Perfect Text Editor.
I honestly didn't know that GitHub lets people with write access to the repo edit comments posted by other people. Iconic. Hype.
People don't understand that docker is 3 things.
Given a Dockerfile (a declarative description of a machine configuration, especially
installed software), Docker lets you do three things with it:
* Run in on a Linux host in a low-overhead container
* Seamlessly configure a Linux VM to run it on Mac or Windows
* Upload it to DockerHub so other people can easily run it or build on top of it
It's a mistake to focus on any one of these aspects.
This website is dedicated to 3 things.
First, of course, is thoughts. The mere act of creating ideas is good, and those ideas should be shared.
Second, is words. Words still have power.
Third, is design. Design is simplicity and functionality and form and appearance.
I think the finale of Dracula today serves as a good example of how Dracula is portrayed as a personification of evil, rather than as a
character, and how that really helps the portrayal of our protagonists. But at the same time it’s terrible for the portrayal of the Romani who are shown to be helping Dracula.
It’s hard to state as a general rule without it becoming a tautology, but there’s a really interesting relationship between the depth of the protagonist and the antagonist.
Yeah so a bee stung me on the lip this morning while I was biking. I just biked into it face-first and it stung me.
I kind of can't beelieve it happened. My lip still hurts a bit. I got stung by a bee, right on the lip.
I feel like Oscar from VeggieTale's "I Love My Lips." Usta!
I am going to explode. I am so mean and I judge everyone so harshly. I cannot imagine that other people are not doing that to me.
RFC 791 (IPv4) (1981) avoids "byte" in favor of "octet," which they define as an "eight bit byte." Ya' know, unlike those other-length bytes
Tom Scott just hasn't been the same since The Park Bench ended.
I realize I like the character/personality of Tom more than his actual content.
Decided I want this on my wall
=> https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/aJNFqf81ds9785AgmYkdWiboTNU=/0x0:2000x4286/fit-in/2000x4286/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/21967143/blazers.jpg University of Alabama Birmingham 19188 "Steamroller" formation poster
I expect Vivaldi's level of customizability everywhere now. I don't mind the Firefox defaults but I'm honestly surprised when I go to change
a keyboard shortcut and Firefox doesn't the option to change shortcuts. (Maybe I can do it at the OS-level? Hmm)
Oooof
And this is on an internal page, so you have to have an account in order to see this, it's not people who don't have accounts.
The problem with cult classics is that they’re not actually good.
If they were good they’d just be classics.
This is about the *Good Omens* book.
Made some changes to the website, most visibly the date format. Explanation below
The purpose of including a date is to provide context.
Rather than provide the time in the client's (your) timezone, I provide the time it was for me when I posted it, and my timezone. This means that if you want to figure out the time I posted it in your timezone, you can do that. But more importantly, if I post something at 2 a.m., you can see that it was 2 a.m. for me when I posted it.
Unfortunately, the formatting on the date/time is bad. It's verbose and ugly. Trust me, I tried. I have spent 2 days trying to find a date+time format that is human readable and concise, and none exist. I'm trying to communicate too much information.
One of the interesting take-aways from Zig is that Zig does not have conciseness as a goal. It eschews Haskell-levels of implied behavior
and syntax sugar. And yet, since it has modern features and well-designed syntax, and it values simplicity and avoiding cruft, it feels more concise than a lot of languages.
Having spent the last 24 hours without so much as leaving my room, my sanity seems largely unaffected.
“I want a vaccine, but what I want even more are magic beans I can plant in my arm that will grow into a beanstalk my sons can climb if
they ever run out of hope.”
Hello, I am a normal, functioning, adult human, and I would like you to commit to spending time with me
I want to push back on social norms, I like to question things that have always been done in the same way. But I don’t like rebelling
against people
Executive dysfunction finally allowed me to start the laundry, which is annoying, since I'm going to end up going to bed
The thing I love about "The Magician Poem" is that it exemplifies the fact that I have no idea what I'm doing. I absolutely love something
about its cadence, but I couldn't tell you want that is. I can't write more like that, the poem just came to me.
Like it's not even a poem, it's bloody prose, and yet it triggers every part of my brain that is triggered when I'm reading poetry.
Transcript
I once saw a man do a magic trick
Misdirection, he didn't say
He did nothing with one hand that looked flashy
While with his other, he suffered
So too, these words.
I love how low-stakes YouTube videos are. I don’t want to watch videos about things that matter.
It takes a very long time to happen, but I am starting to reach the point where I am fatigued from looking too much stuff up on the internet
I've decided caring about what 'is' and 'isn't' a 'word' is dumb and if I end up contributing to the invention of a new word that's a good
thing. This is about "unironically." Also reading Donne and seeing the number of words that are no longer "words" but are still perfectly understandable. "Emparadised" Also e.e. cummings, of course, "mostpeople"
The thing that's so weird to me about "communist takes" is that a lot of them follow a pattern of "humans are bad because of capitalism."
I guess I just don't follow? They like simultaneously want to blame human nature and capitalism, and maybe they just need to use more words, but human nature wasn't created by capitalism. This is similar to the 'capitalism is responsible for computers (and that's a bad thing)' that I've posted here before.
This Thought brought to you by, "[people] want to use and abuse everyone around them…It's a side-effect of having built a society around the idea that money is literally more important than anything else (including even life itself)." Like. Okay.
It's just, I would totally agree with "capitalism encourages people to hurt others in order to increase their own wealth." Or "capitalism rewards being greedy." But I honestly can't tell if these people would agree with that, or if they're arguing something more fundamental about how human nature is fundamentally corrupted by being in the presence of dollar bills.
When you say you're glad that humans are in the process of wiping ourselves out, is that tongue-in-cheek, or do you actually believe that humans are inherently a stain upon nature, and that the most ethical way forward would be expediting a mass suicide?
If you'll allow me to meta-pivot for a moment,
In real life I wouldn't ask these kinds of questions. I would file away "is communist" in my mental notes on the person talking, and find a prompt that would turn the conversation in a more pleasant tone. But on the internet, I'm frankly not interested in the individual person. I'm here (on Hacker News) to stimulate my mind by engaging it with new perspectives or arguments that I wouldn't have come up with alone. To that extent, I want to engage solely the argument, in isolation from the author. I've said before that I'm frustrated by takes that I don't understand, and I think that's part of it. But I'm also frustrated by takes that aren't purely logical, because I can't engage them without understanding the person.
Blaseball is like JavaScript, a convoluted mess of overlapping rules which are impossible to memorize or understand.
I'm not a big fan of faces in artwork. I feel like most of the time your artwork doesn't need to look at me.
At some point I need to do a meta-analysis of Thoughts where I talk about things I’m afraid of.
I need to figure out if my fear of being boring and my fear of losing control of my self both stem from a pride that keeps me from surrendering myself to God.
Alternate universe where computers are fast please.
I've switched to Safari as my default browser.
Billions of dollars are potentially riding on how well Garry can respond to hacker news commenters.
I'm serious, I'm copy and pasting these JSX components from Next.js to NanoJSX+Deno and the SOLC go from 4k -> 1k somehow
Just moved all my sites over to Apache Managed Domain from certbot, since I was using a version of certbot from at least 2 years ago.
Certbot had also stopped working for some reason.
Now I just have to figure out how to uninstall certbot. Can't be that hard, right?
Adding a social life is so fricking stressful. Like, do I enjoy it, sure. Do I need some more social interaction, probably. But that doesn’t
make it any easier.
Hot takes on Discord.
'Discord is a malware distribution platform.'
'Discord does do anything special for gamers, gamers are just smart enough to fix the problem'
Hear me out, a block-chain-based database reliant on data transformations which are expressed in a functional programming language.
Oh my word.
So your "website" is a function that takes a copy of the database and a network request and returns a new copy of the database and a network response. And the beautify is that if you write it right, in a lazily-evaluated functional programming language, you don't even conceptually need a database; you just store all the transactions.
Oh my word. This is what I want. Frick. Cache invalidation, which used to be a hard problem, because literally so trivial, because the entire application is the composition of pure functions.
I now return to our regularly scheduled content consumption.
(my headache has not dissipated.)
(Oh yeah I checked earlier today and the tumor-like-object in my throat hasn't magically disappeared yet.)
When this site was in "maintenance" I set a Minecraft speedrun person best, but I don't remember the time. I would've posted it here...
“I have no fear of drowning, it’s the breathing that’s taking all this work”
-Work, Jars of Clay
I am convinced that the only reason that people do not express their hate for me is because they do not see me.
Thinking about reading Le Mis, just as an escape from this world into a land of fiction for a while.
No matter how logical you are, you will never be as logical as the computer.
No, not even with proscribed estrogen.
I’m going to finish *Without Bloodshed* because I can’t stop myself. I’m addicted to content consumption.
Not tonight though. I’m about 2/3 through it, just got to chapter 19.
Okay, the about page for this site is on its 4th iteration. I think it is ready to be shared, but adding links to it is coding
that I don't feel like doing right now. I suppose you can check it out at /about but you're going to have to type that in.
It's roughly 10,700 characters, putting it slightly over Rigby's 10,000 character limit.
“It’s time to begin, isn’t it? I get a little bit bigger than it. I admit, I’m just the same as I was. Now don’t you understand?
I’m never changing who I am.”
-It’s Time, Imagine Dragons
The writing for Blaseball is just so good. Every line of copy on the website is poetry.
“Nothing is Commemorated. Nothing Beckons. Power Vacuum. Creative Void.”
A friend that I follow who normally posts about his music and skateboarding just causally posted a picture of a terminal with a filter. My
first thought was that he snagged a generic terminal output and had put work into editing it, but it was a standard Instagram filter and his name was the username in the image. So it looks like he was legitimately trying to set up SSH keys with a Ubuntu remote sever (and struggling with it). Welcome to the Linux club, free as in freedom.
Diversity win! I thought about whether I should identify as non binary, and then decided I shouldn’t.
I would like to identify as a masculine immaterial entity.
It’s really breathtaking to realize that computer science as an industry is founded on rules that we came up with.
Jands really put all of the chaotic energy into one player. Munavoi is the chaotic scapegoat of the team.
I love people who leave 1-2 star Goodread reviews on books I read as a kid. Like, I get it, this piece of children's literature is not up to
your standards. I'm sure your criticisms are valid but it's too late; I already read it and enjoyed it.
"Just reading about how the zeppelins are constructed or how to operate an airship made out of a combination of creatures bored me to death." I'm sorry that you didn't enjoy the description of the giant flying steampunk whale but that is all I want in a book, thank you.
I now have 3D printer filament, and a breadboard, and ESP modules, and relays.
And a cable to charge my electric shaver because I don’t know to use a normal razor.
I may be married to JS but every weekend I go out and have an affair with a different functional programming language.
I wonder if I would be better than someone who is musically inclined at memorizing a series of notes.
The thing I love about Stirling’s Christmas album is that the songs are recognizable but interesting.
It is unethical to hurt other people. It is impossible to interact with other people without sometimes hurting them.
The Vim learning curve is just so unbelievably steep.
I have a file without an extension. I want to tell Vim to syntax highlight it as markdown. In a GUI editor, that would be a button. But I've read the Vim help pages for `:colorscheme` `:language` `:syntax` and `:highlight` and none of them can be used to change the language Vim thinks the file is. (`:language` is for changing the interface language.)
I’m brutally curious about everything. I love learning and asking questions and thinking about things. I want friends who are like that.
And they’re really fricking difficult to find.
Today’s bad take is brought to you from Cohost.
Why doesn’t the raspberry pi have a power button? Because it was designed by men.
To be honest I didn’t actually follow the argument but for some reason the person brought in gender roles and I don’t understand why.
I think stuff happened in Blaseball but I deleted Twitteriffic, along with like 4 years of other apps.
"I keep losing my socks / where the hell do they go / I bet they're finally free"
-Adventure Is Out There, AJR
I started working on Flying Balcony again and it's really exciting. I think I'm going to be able create a really interesting interface.
Feminists really be confused when men get offended by “all men are trash.” Like?
‘Obviously not all men are trash. It means that the patriarchy is bad’
Okay, can you say that? Because that’s not what you said. Sorry for assuming you meant what you said.
I don’t give anyone else slack for this either. I take things literally. I will say what I mean.
And people, especially leftists on the internet, *constantly* employ rhetoric which trips me up.
It makes me angry. I want to have a discussion, to understand you, and I’m having to work in order to tear through the rhetoric to what you actually mean.
“Eat the rich” is another example. Attacks on “the 1%.” These are not thought through, or else not meant to be taken literally. I had to ask a friend IRL if people were legitimately pushing for a violent revolution. (The vast majority of people, even on the internet, are not, to my knowledge. “Eat the rich” is a comment on the problems with wealth inequality, not a cry to actually eat people. “The 1%” I don’t think means 3,000,000 people, but views vary.)
I’ve been accused before of being autistic, because I have a fixation with the literal meaning of words. And I’ve commented before how much I struggle with taking general insults personally. It makes me emotional. Say what you mean, and if you happen to insult a group that I’m a part of, don’t be surprised when I take it personally. Be ready to say it to my face. I want everyone to like me and if I have a behavior I need to change, let me know. Don’t insult half the population. I’m not a feminist.
I’ve been thinking about meta-novelty. Do consistent sources of novelty dry up as they become predictable? Like at some point I recognize
broader patterns and the novelty within a given post/book is reduced. Or is it?
Do I have a novelty addiction or a meta-novelty addiction?
A lot of people, especially older people, aren’t interested in meta-novelty. Will I always be?
For concrete examples, /r/Askreddit is dreadfully boring to me today. It didn’t use to be, in 2015 I could read askreddit for hours. Now it’s possible the quality of the sub has declined. (I think I’ve noticed a decrease in the word-count of popular answers.) But there’s also an extent to which every AskReddit title and answer follows a predictable formula. There are still new AskReddit posts being made, there’s novelty. But they follow the same formula they did 7 years ago. There’s no meta-novelty.
On the other hand, I’ve been reading children’s fantasy novels for as long as I can remember, and they’re still good. It’s a relatively narrow genre, but I still can’t pick up patterns or predict what’s going to happen. Now there’s obviously more depth (and more words and information) in those books. But the question is, at some point do I figure out what the formula for children’s books is, and get bored of all of them? Or am I reading children’s fantasy as a 60 year old? (There are people who absolutely do.)
Geminispace ran out of meta-novelty for me extremely quickly. Which is a shame, because the individual posts are interesting and new, and about things that I’ve never heard before. But the formula, very predictably, is journal-style posts about things the author’s niche interests.
What about this website? Will the thoughts posted here eventually fall into a predictable tone and formula? Is that a bad thing?
What about the thoughts in my head? What if I tread all pathways for new thought in my brain at some point, and end up applying the same formulaic critical thinking process to everything? Are we already there?
Brew is trying to compile llvm for some reason and it's destroying my battery like a microwave in a YouTube video with some off-brand
YouTubers that got their hands on a stick of dynamite.
I like having a plan and I don't like doing things on impulse but I'm also really bad at long-term planning (like more than a couple of
days in advance).
I had a fricking bracket in the directory name so of course it didn't build.
This is the first and last time I use special characters in my
filenames.
“A wave. A great and terrible wave of darkness will swallow us. Eternal night. An end to hope. Where do you hide from a shadow bigger than
the world? Can we fight the night? Can we outrun darkness? The wave looks over all, growing as it consumes, engulfing everything.”
Feature idea: when I close the tab with unsent text in the post box, it posts it for me automatically.
Frick the social anxiety that comes with pinging 350+ people on Discord. Arguably worse than public speaking, my word.
Thinking about *Eli* by Bill Myers. It's really hard to do present-day Jesus, and I think Myers does a pretty good job. Although he cheats a
little bit by setting the story in a parallel universe which is more similar to biblical times.
Music (the app formerly known as "iTunes") won't open. 1/10. AMPLibraryAgent is using 100% of my CPU.
Apache 2.0 License requires that "You must cause any modified files to carry prominent notices stating that You changed the files"
It's trivial to find pull requests on Apache 2 licensed software that don't include prominent notices stating they changed the files.
Why is that in the license? Do you really mean that? Like.
At some point open source-software licenses are just like a way to virtue-signal that you're not going to sue people. Especially for the FSF's recommended licenses (like Apache 2) which have 10 clauses that nobody reads. There's a patent infringement clause that I don't understand! but I think means that if you sue for patent infringement it opens you up to copy right lawsuit because you're not respecting the terms of the software license.
I don't get it. Why is it not enough to say "I waive copyright on this software." Why does it have to be "you can use the software AS LONG AS you CLEARLY INDICATE if you modify anything." FSF talks big about "unconditional right to modify" and then they stick a fricking condition on your right to modify. I could go on for a while. The point is. If I can't read and understand your software license, then I'm just trusting that you're not going to sue me and you might as reserve all copyright.
It's just weird, because I really, really, enjoy both Minecraft speedrunning clip compilations and fantasy books. They are very similar
sources of entertainment in my mind. And mediums are completely different, sure, but the standards are completely different as well. Can you judge a speedrunning clip compilation as a narrative arc of man vs. nature (in the game)? Can you judge a book by as the average quality of a number of individual action moments? Sure, why not.
As someone who subscribes to error-driven-development, my step 0 is getting the environment set up so that I can test it, and I will never
not be amazed when people write big chunks of code without even the ability to test it.
Seriously, what the heck. Why is Python so bad? Why does a language with list comprehensions fail so spectacularly in list manipulation?
The challenge:
```py
input = {"a": {"x": 1, "y": 2}, "b": {"x": 3, "y": 4}}
# Becomes
[1, 2, 3, 4]
```
You only need to go 2 levels deep.
Javascript:
```js
Object.values(input).flatMap(a => Object.values(a))
```
Python option 1:
```py
from itertools import chain
chain.from_iterable([a.values() for a in input.values()])
```
Python option 2:
```py
[b for a in input.values() for b in a.values()]
```
I *do not* understand how that second python example parses. I don't know whether b or a is the inner loop variable. I can't use that code. I have to add an import line to flatten a list. I'm sorry Python. The fact that you technically can golf a nested list comprehension to approximate `flatMap` doesn't count. And the worst bit! Is that the "readable" itertools solution is still opaque. Ah yes, my go-to list-flattening function, `itertools.chain.from_iterable`.
There has to be a better way of doing this. Maybe I can flatten the dicts first and then `.values`? I'm going to keep researching because Python is such a huge language.
The counter-argument to the "there is no speed limit" philosphy is that you should go slow and think about what you're doing, in order to
make sure that you're doing what you want to do; that you're solving the right problem. But like. You can always pivot as soon as you realize you're solving the wrong problem (don't apply the sunk cost fallacy). And a lot of the times the faster you go the sooner you realize that you're solving the wrong problem.
This desire to go slow and avoid mistakes a lot of the time can come out of a desire to avoid mistakes. That is to say, people who like to avoid mistakes tend to overstate the negative impact of mistakes, in a sort of re-enforcement-bias-loop. (Where as other people who like to go fast and make mistakes, shrug off the mistakes a lot quicker.)
I forgot Chance featured Death Cap, I’m crying.
If Ryan Met ever remixed Death Cap I would probably die.
Editing `/etc/apt/sources.list` again
Man, I don't have these kinds of problems on Arch. (That's not true, I totally do.)
I think, that part of the reason that programming languages don't support out-of-the-box exact arithmetic is that it's possible to construct
arbitrarily "complex" numbers.
something something Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, "There is no recursively related notation-system which gives a name to every constructive ordinal" -Church and Kleene (from GEB)
Pure components and React state. OR
Storing state in a global Iterator that is called every time the component is rendered.
Update: I can confirm that the second one doesn't work.
"Even lifelong marriages usually end in one spouse surviving the death of the other spouse which is often not a happy ending. The idea [that
love could] 'be expected to end happily for everyone involved' is based on the shortsightedness of the sophomoric."
"When it's quiet and I stop thinking, I hear voices in my head that sound like radio commercials."
Love arguing with my co-workers about code-style in GitHub issues. Truly the peak of productivity and expression
The biggest IRC server is Libera.chat.
Irssi is a very popular terminal IRC client.
The default port for servers in irssi is not the port
used by libera.chat.
It is virtually undocumented, and certainly unclear to me, how to add a server that doesn’t use the default port.
Being around people just tires me out so quickly. I don’t actually have the stamina to think for more than an hour or two.
I'm serious I don't know how to turn this off.
I disabled the Python VS code extension. I still have syntax highlighting somehow and that's
all I really need.
I wish I were an artist.
I wish I was a leader.
I wish I could inspire the hopeless, and shed light on great mysteries, and share complex emotions.
I wish I was Steve Jobs; I wish people listened to me.
I am Steve Wozniak. I am alone.
I think the thing that makes Tumblr so fun is that people can just keep adding posts until there’s a funny punchline.
They're making me write .erb noooo
ERB stands for Embedded RuBy, it's Rail's templating language. It's literally just Ruby embedded into HTML, PHP-style.
They told me Gemini was minimalistic. I didn't believe them. But wow.
text/gemini, the native file type, is like Markdown without support for in-line links, bold, italics, or anything else inline, because 'character-by-character parsing is too hard.' No images on the page. No fricking anything. The entire format is: text, link lines, code blocks, headers, lists, and quotes. No nesting of anything.
The content transfer protocol is similarly minimalistic. No support for compression. HTTP status codes are too complicated, we have 2-digit status codes, and so on.
I'm going to try to get this site to support Gemini at some point soon.
"How do good men become a part of a regime? They don't believe in resistance."
-The Resistance, Josh Garrels
The difference between Kaz Breeker and The Count of Monte Cristo is that Kaz is ashamed of who he was and proud of who he has become.
It’s wild that we’re still feeling the effects of Turing. He invented and then solved computer science.
People say having two dads wouldn't be that bad. But I had a dream last night that I was sitting with my family and my dad came up to the
door from the backyard, so I let him in. And then I realized that my dad already was in the room. I went to the kitchen and got a knife. And we just kind of sat there calmly, but with the tension of knowing that I was going to have to stab one of them and if I guessed wrong my whole family would die. It was pretty terrifying, would not recommend.
It has been months since I created the Melodramatic cover art, and I cannot get over how good it looks.
OpenAI published scores that GTP-4 got after taking several high-school level exams. It does well on most of them, but the one that
immediately stands out to me is the AMC 10. The AMC is the American Math Contest (10th grade and below). GTP-4 got a 30/150 on the test, which is the 10th percentile. This is much worse than its performance on other tests. (For example, it's in the 89th percentile on the SAT Math subject test.)
To try to understand what's going on here, I'm going to quote part of the grading description on for the test.
> This is a 25-question, multiple choice test. Each question is followed by answers marked A, B, C, D and E. Only one of these is correct.
> You will receive 6 points for each correct answer, ... 1.5 points for each problem left unanswered ... and 0 points for each incorrect answer.
The AMC is supposed to be hard. You are not supposed to be able to answer every question on the AMC, which is why you get points for leaving questions blank. If you left every question blank, you would get a 37.5, and do better than GTP-4! But GTP isn't designed to leave questions blank. It's going to generate a BS, plausible sounding, answer for every single question. Now, if you guessed randomly on every question, with 5 correct answers, you'd get a 30, which also happens to be the score GTP got.
The type of problem solving that you have to do on the AMC is the exactly the type of stuff that GTP has a bad time with. I remember geometry problems that require you to be able to visualize spacial objects in a novel way. As a language model, GTP has no spacial reasoning ability. I think GTP is guessing randomly here, hurting its score.
I'm calling this the AMC-effect. Text generation models would rather hallucinate than not-answer, leading to worse performance in some cases. I think it could be used by teachers trying to detect cheating. They could include a nonsensical, honeypot, question, and instruct students that they don't have to answer every question. Any student who generated BS for this honeypot question is likely to not understand the concepts, or be cheating.
Another weird note: GTP does better when it doesn't have visual input on the AMC 10. Some of these questions are only possible to answer correctly with the diagram. OpenAI says that they replace the image with "IMAGE: with a non-meaningful filename wherever an image would be missing" (Appendix A.4). I think what's happening is that the text-only GTP is opting not to answer these questions, since it knows it's missing information, and leaving the question blank, leading to more points than otherwise.
But here's the weirdest part. GTP-4 does better on the AMC 12, landing in the 50th percentile with a 60/150. Why? This should be a harder test. It covers more concepts. I have no idea why it performs respectably on this test. It kind of throws a wrench in my whole theory.
I'm really curious if/how their prompt for these tests explained that the test taker can leave the questions blank, I think that's an important peice of information.
=> https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.08774 The GTP-4 paper (click PDF in the upper right)
=> https://artofproblemsolving.com/wiki/index.php/2022_AMC_10A_Problems The 2022 AMC 10
I was thinking this morning, a lot of my tension comes from oscillating between wanting to perfectly exceed people's expectations and
wanting to subvert their expectations.
Maybe exceeding expectations is a type of subverting.
The thing that I think makes me optimistic about Gemini is that the perception of the web as bloated is actually surprising common.
Absolutely incredible Wikipedia page:
=> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_films
You're like, 'this is a conspiracy theory or a coincidence' and then there are like 500 examples of movies about exactly the same thing released the same year. "Zzyzx" and "Zzyzx Road" both released in 2006 and "Both are thrillers about people trying to hide a dead body."
I have been in #linux on libera.chat IRC for about 30 seconds and they're already discussing beating Windows users. (Like, with sticks.)
Still wish I had pants made of light cotton or silk. Like material bedsheets are made out of, but pants. So that don’t have to wrap a
bedsheet around my waist and confuse my roommates.
I really shouldn’t be up this late, but I wanted to get as far into 7 as possible before leaving.
I am both lonely and afraid of not being alone.
Why would I be afraid of not being alone? Yet I am.
I hate the awkwardness of conversation. I hate the jarring feeling of isolation that comes when I share what I'm thinking and no one understands. I fear being good at conversation because I fear being popular. I fear people looking at me, expecting something from me, and me not having anything to give. I fear being asked to defend myself. I fear making mistakes, but moreover, I fear being seen making mistakes. I hate having to come up with things to say while someone looks and waits for me because I have nowhere to run if I say the wrong thing.
It's killing me. I haven't seen a friend in person for 2 weeks. There is an expanding balloon in my chest.
The year is 2002
Transcript
The year is 2002. You stand in an empty hallway. The floor is a brown linoleum. The walls, wallpapered, beige, with pink flowers. You walk forward, slowly. It’s difficult to see in the flickering florescent light. At the end of the hallway there’s a door. You try the handle, but find it locked.
I can add editing to this, although the UI might be a bit tricky. I tried to keep it as simple as possible, lots of Django and no React.
What if instead of Reddit or similar, where you have a parent and then replies, you have something more like a forum, with a topic and posts
, but nested infinitely. So you see the headline on Reddit or HN, but clicking comments shows another list of headers ("Jokes", "Off topic", "Refutations", "Context", etc). (And then maybe you click a joke and it has sub-threads for "more jokes" or "anecdotes.") The obvious con being that most posts don't have enough to say about them for that to make sense. But it would theoretically help me navigate the conversation in the direction I want, and avoid some of the frustration that comes as a result of the comment section taking the conversation a completely different direction than I want.
Truth tables are a lot of work and space, and do not provide proportionate return in terms of understanding.
Poetry is going to have a resurgence but it’s going to be called like “meterposting” or something
I'm totally going to end up watching TFC aren't I. He just hit 100k subs, so that's pretty neat.
RaysWorks was banned from Prototech awdjnkbwqkhd
Makes me respect Prototech so much more to know that they care about their image. SciCraft's dominance as the technical Minecraft server is being questioned. Proto and Hakate are in a position to do much cooler things. Ray feels like he's playing catch-up
"Perhaps 'tis the mental difference between embracing and eschewing moments?"
Transcript
Perhaps 'tis the mental difference between embracing and eschewing moments?
After the Dragonwatch 2 twist I protested Mull for a couple of days, but I can’t last long. I have an addiction, you see. I just got to the
Hunter reveal in the third Five Kingdoms. It happens way later in the book than I expected (still not at the very end like in Dragonwatch, though *glare*.)
If I do stuff with urgency than it’s stressful. If I don’t do anything than it’s a waste of time. I don’t know how to be productive at a
moderate pace.
For the first time in my life, I'm digging through the jQuery source code. I'm glad it didn't happen sooner.
I suspect that there is overlap between people who program in assembly and speakers of toki pona.
Sometimes, when I have no idea what's going on, I wish that the programming language, would give me a runtime error.
Instead, Rust insists on forcing me to catch every possible error in order to sure that it cannot panic. Well, my code doesn't panic. Instead, it just stops running, exiting silently.
I think what I'm doing is equivalent to wrapping all my code in a `try…catch`. But if I don't do that, I can't compile, because Rust doesn't want me to face any runtime errors.
Ok, I finally got a panic. It contains useful information! `InvalidColumnType(3, "visit_count", Integer)'`.
I love Couriway so much. Thank you so much for coming back to give us an update, the hero we need but don't deserve.
I hold beliefs that are extremely controversial on Reddit, like, “Christianity and logical thinking are not incompatible.”
I need to try out https://remix.run/ and compare to Fresh, Next, and static.
I just haven’t bought the whole serverless thing. There are infinite options if you want to host a static site, but I’m scared of getting vender-locked if I build for one company’s serverless platform.
I was like, “I’m going to register for housing and shave and clean my floor tonight” and then I turned off the lights and put my pajamas on
It would be easy for me to forget about all the time I spent playing gaga ball in middle school.
My pain tolerance is so low. I have been completely incapacitated by a bee sting for the last 2 hours.
"Bummerland" is a great song because you can listen to it when you're happy or sad, it has a very broad spectrum of emotions.
Frick I really need to post the hyper sterilized no-culture thought.
Edit (Nov 2nd): I'm not sure what I was thinking when I posted this. I think "the hyper-sterilized no-culture thought" was posted over a month before this one,
=> https://thoughts.learnerpages.com/?show=188c0446-2b9f-418b-b9ce-e956ac560760
I need to take a break for a little while. Everything is going to be okay without me. Discord, Khan Academy, YouTube, Reddit are sinking
My time and my energy and my soul.
People don't understand that I have executive functioning issues. I cannot do anything except on impulse. I'm terrified of making a mistake.
I think this is my whole generation, but I don't want to project. Everyone is all, "sign up" for whatever. Like, that's an extra click, my odds of doing whatever you're inviting me to do have decreased by 90%.
I can't take it. I'm just broken. I can't imagine social interaction at all.
Feeling sane enough today to do laundry and fold and put it away, which hasn't happened in a single day in, a long time.
You can tell people on the internet “you need to consume nuanced content and exercise your own critical thinking skills instead of only
reading stuff that you already agree with” and what they hear is “I need to think critically about whether the character in the book is a good person or a bad person and then decide whether the author is a good person or a bad person.”
This is still about the Harry Potter thread from a couple of days ago, but also about some other bad takes.
=> https://thoughts.learnerpages.com/?show=e8d0ddc5-8359-4ad6-bcab-feac7898b4f0
My solution for AoC day 7 part 1: #tw Javascript
Definitely a trickier one. At this rate, we'll be doing machine learning by the end of the month.
```js
const input = document.body.textContent;
const bagTypes = {};
for (let line of input.split("\n").filter(l => l.length)) {
let [_, color] = /^([a-z ]+?) bags/.exec(line);
const bag = {color, canContain: []};
for (let canContain of line.matchAll(/(\d+) ([a-z ]+) bags?[,.](?: |$)/g)) {
let [_, count, subColor] = canContain;
bag.canContain.push({count, color: subColor});
}
bagTypes[color] = bag;
}
function canHoldGold(bag) {
for (let content of bag.canContain) {
if (content.color === "shiny gold") {
// Then we can, base case
return true;
}
//Otherwise, we need to check if any of this bag's sub-bags can
if (canHoldGold(bagTypes[content.color])) {
return true;
}
}
//If none of them can,
return false;
}
console.log("Part 1: ", Object.keys(bagTypes).filter(bagType => canHoldGold(bagTypes[bagType])).length)
function countSubBags(bag) {
let total = 0;
for (let canContain of bag.canContain) {
total += parseInt(canContain.count, 10);
//Plus all the bags those have to contain.
total += parseInt(canContain.count, 10) * countSubBags(bagTypes[canContain.color]);
}
return total;
}
console.log("Part 2: ", countSubBags(bagTypes["shiny gold"]));
```
"dont let this distract you from the fact that lightning mcqueen blew a one lap lead in the piston cup"
I feel like I haven't accomplished anything in my life, like I'm working not to create, but just to survive.
I try to fight that. The dichotomy doesn't surprise me. But I set out to create things and I feel like I'm failing.
Thinking about Mr. Right (2015). Talk about a movie.
The trailer almost doesn't do it justice because it spoils everything, and it doesn't have the right pacing. It's almost Douglass-Adams-esque, in that it jumps around wildly, but it flows between pieces well. As opposed to Dirk Gently (ooof, I can't really pull in a Douglass-Adams work as my "as-opposed-to." Screw it, I mean the TV show, I haven't read the book.) which jumps around erratically, with no flow. This Thought is very difficult to parse, I'm sorry. I don't care enough to re-write it.
Okay pagination is fixed.
If you're not able to guess, all the issues arise from the fact that we'll be in "Winter 2021" until March, and there were still a couple of places where I was using the year of the last Thought, without adjusting for that 2-month offset.
Zero being a set of numbers, basically the infinitesimals, works extremely well with my theology. Yes you read that right; my understanding
of Christianity is very similar to an obscure branch of mathematics known as the Hyperreal numbers.
Maybe one day I'll elaborate but I'm also extremely skeptical of attempting to post novel religious interpretations, because people have been doing this Christianity thing for a hell of a long time and most takes have already been thoroughly discussed in articles and essays that I'm not willing to read. I will say that my understanding is very similar to Lewis's depiction of hell as being compressed into an infinitely small point, as described in *The Great Divorce*.
Also I should finish watching this video:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=dyjlRi8nuw0
Zoom should completely re-design their business around selling cosmetics to virtually wear during calls.
The thing about analyzing AJR is that they have such a broad range, that there's "doesn't sound like other AJR songs" and there's
"doesn't sound like AJR" and they are completely different things. "Ordinaryish People" has sounds that I've literally never heard before. It doesn't sound like anything else. But it sounds like AJR, because what other band is going to give a dubstep remix of the Blue Man Group's unconventional acoustic instruments.
I want to make this website weirder, but one of things that makes this website so weird right now is its simplicity. If I added some gimmic,
I could lose simplicity, resulting in a net zero change in weirdness and a net negative in website quality.
Vivaldi just crashed. Please I just want software that works.
There's no crash report.
At least my screen is fixed.
Didn't post here yesterday, ending a daily posting streak that goes back to September 13th, I think.
I'm okay with that. I'm pivoting a bit. I was stretching myself too thin. Too many hobbies meant I couldn't make progress on any of them. I had a moment yesterday when I was like 'I could post now just to get my daily post in,' and then was like 'nah, that's dumb, I don't want to force it.' Honestly, I considered moving back to Twitter for a minute. All I posted the 2nd was quotes from other people.
Ultimately, the point of this website is to store my thoughts. And my thoughts yesterday went other places than on this website, and that's okay. They got stored.
I'm going to say all this, and then post like 20 times every day for the next week, gosh frick.
You can complain about Siri a lot, but when I say "hey Siri play Lisztomania" and she does it, that's pretty impressive.
@nateruessmusic’s background image on Twitter is a crop of the conspiracy theory pyramid, edited to include himself.
I didn't go to church Sunday and now I'm regretting it.
The weekend is an important time for me to recover sanity and it's all too easy for me to allow myself to be overcome by insanity over the weekend—since I don't need to be sane over the weekend. But if I do that, then I don't have the sanity to make it through the week.
That Thought was a banger, I'm dying laughing. I think it could do *numbers* in the right corner of Twitter (or Cohost or whatever).
When I don't have my phone I'm forced to engage more with the world around me, but I do so in weird and not necessarily helpful ways.
That is to say, without my phone, I, and people in general, tend to focus on things that are interesting solely/primarily because of their proximity.
This is both a good thing and a bad thing.
A text-editor with an integrated, upside down, console/terminal could be very cool. So you would always enter commands at the top.
Unix command line pro tip: Ignore anyone that tells you to run commands like `chmod 755`
`chmod +x ` adds the ability to execute the file (sets the executable bit), `chmod g+w` lets group users write, `chmod go-wrx` removes read write and execute permissions from everyone except the owner (read as a group, other, remove, write, read, execute).
If you understand the underlying permission system, it makes so much sense. And I do not understand why people decide to encode these things as octal??
The Guidelines have been almost completely eschewed, and shockingly enough, I'm not being productive.
I'm not actually using eschewed correctly, but whatever.
Something about Python requiring whitespace and my belief in the subjective nature of beauty in code and PEP8 and Black and Ruby.
Homepage is broken. It's not handling the year change well. (Server's time zone is of course UTC, so it's 2022 already, even though I
have another 5 hours.) Ah.
I went insane in 2009.
Hm
Hmmmm
I'm bored of the word "insane."
Maybe I'll continue the "my mind is" anaphora series.
The "my mind is" anaphora series, which I last updated Jan 12, 2021:
My mind is like oatmeal, a mush
My mind is like a vuvuzela
My mind is like a peanut and butter jelly sandwich, the least substantial real meal possible
My mind is like a pile of sand, falling over but very slowly
My mind is like a crescent wrench, and my problems are like a screw
My mind is like a box of chocolate, you never know what you’re going to get, but probably chocolate
My mind is like a pineapple, spiky on the outside and tastes bad on the inside
My mind is like a downward staircase
My mind is like a soda, mostly waters but with bubbles
My mind is like a steel trap and my thoughts are like water running through it
My mind is a little like a maraca
My mind is like a washing machine, spinning
Countdown on the top of XKCD.com. What is it for?
=> https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/Countdown_in_header_text
My Twitter feed is telling me I’m an awful piece of **** person because I haven’t condemned the evil that is going on in Washington. I
don’t know what’s happening. There are no details, no facts, just judgment.
Receiving gifts is just really stressful for me because it feels so performative. Like it seems like you're giving me the gift, and in
response I'm supposed to do a little a dance, smiling and thanking you for it, regardless of how much I actually want it.
I know this is just like, "being polite," but I don't like it.
I spent like a solid 10 minutes laying in bed last night trying to imagine I was trans. I don’t think I succeeded.
>be me
>9:30pm
>haven’t eaten dinner
>hungry
>remove 2lb of chicken from fridge
>use by: Mar 31
>dice
>throw in pan for 20 minutes
>add BBQ sauce
>dinner
In my opinion one of the biggest mistakes that the JS community made was deciding that adding methods to global objects
(e.g. `String.prototype.getRandomLetter = function () {return this[Math.floor(Math.random()* this.length)]}`) was taboo, and should be avoided. This idea, generally, allowing one piece of code to add properties/methods to a class defined elsewhere, is a really powerful one. If I try to explain too much here I'm going to give the impression that this is something I came up with, but it's like a thing. Languages like Swift and Ruby and C# advertise this as a feature over languages that don't support it, like C++ and Java. Anyways, JS totally has this, and it would make a lot of things easier. For example, Rails overwrites native Ruby classes to implement specific behavior, creating a really seamless integration between the language and the framework.
Remind me in three years to submit GRIBFILE #1 to Hacker News.
Edit: I've decided 1.5 might be a better place to start.
I float.
(This is my first time uploading audio here, hopefully everything works.)
Transcript
I operate in a realm unknowable to most people. I float inbetween the internet and real life and sleep and death and fantasy and any number of infinite realities
Blackout poetry is weird because you either blackout negative words and say the opposite thing from the original author or you blackout
superfluous words and say the same thing. It's hard to use blackout poetry to add nuance.
React organizational question. You have a list of items and you delete one. You make a fetch request to delete it, easy. You could do a
client-side delete, and drop an item from the list. But this is weird if the list is paginated. As long as you weren't looking at all the items to start with, deleting one shouldn't decrease the number you're looking at, you should fetch a replacement item from the database.
How do you do this? I think you might just end up needing to create a boolean variable "needsReset" that is set to true and then you can monitor when it changes with an effect.
This has a lot of parallels to the The Resetable Counter Challenge
=> https://ourjseditor.com/program/B9YlIe
The magic of code is that it is inherently declarative. "Imperative programming" is declaratively describing an imperative process.
Just read a little less than 200 pages in a little less than 2 hours, if you want an estimation of my reading speed.
This is children’s fiction, ~300 words a page, for ~500 wpm.
Oh my work, oh my fricking word. I just love reading fiction so much. I just absolutely guzzle fiction, it's incredible.
Feminism is literally so funny to me. Every version of feminism is different and they are all incompatible with each other and themselves.
Like academic feminism and Tumblr feminism and radical feminism are all parodies of each other. Each of the three is indistinguishable from satire of the other two.
Solidworks is a bad program. I've never even used it, I just know I could make something better.
Recently, like in the last couple of months (since living in DC) I’ve noticed myself get shivery when reading. It’s weird.