Thoughts

If I did reject it, it would be because it argues that there is a Platonic form to a chair, for instance. The counter-argument is of course that my own inability to imagine the platonic form of a chair is in-line with the theory and doesn't disprove anything.

At the time of writing, only the first of these has been written. I may edit with others as they are written. => https://thoughts.learnerpages.com/?show=ebcd74be-f8a3-4763-a3c5-81750a8eb55a The frosted pane of glass => The arbitration of self II => https://thoughts.learnerpages.com/?show=84b071bc-23ac-4dd9-981e-9e264cb7ce4b I reject the number 1 as a knowable truth => Plato's allegory of the cave fails to recognize that our truth is not just a subset of truth => This is a fundamental part of human nature (edit: and not a failure of our sensory input) => Godel's theorem, infinite complexity, and again, our understanding is not a subset

"We write code not just to be understood by the computer or other programmers, but to bask in the warm glow of beauty. Aesthetically pleasing code is a value unto itself and should be pursued with vigor." from Rail's doctrine page to "By using Black, you agree to cede control over minutiae of hand-formatting...You will save time and mental energy for more important matters." Black is a very popular Python code formatter. Django recently started using Black, for instance.

Javascript has this terrible burden. It has to be everything to everyone. It can't have a design philosophy that is 'do whatever makes me the happiest' because it has to be backwards compatible with Internet Explorer 4. I love JS. But I don't enjoy writing it anymore. Okay, that's not true, I still love writing JS. But it's not a well designed language. It has a lot of pitfalls. The ecosystem is a mess. There's a lot of incredibly ugly JS that has been written. Ruby embodies JS's flexibly, the syntax sugar, the blending of paradigms from every other language in a way that is both flexible and familiar. It gives you multiple options in a way that isn't confusing but is natural and freeing. Python's just there. It's boring. In a way I think it tries to be. It doesn't focus on performance or doing anything differently or letting you do everything. It just lets you write code. And that's powerful. But sometimes when I'm writing code I feel like I'm writing poetry. (Every time I write Haskell.) And Ruby gives me that feeling a lot more than Python. I will say the Ruby people use these DSLs and I hate DSLs. I do want to be able read someone else's code without trying to figure out if they've overloaded `*` to mean "throw a cabbage".

any of them caused all the others. This post brought to you by the HN commenter who blames the leveling-off in per-capita energy use for all of the others.

perceive a subset of truth, but that everything that we see is slightly 'blurry'. We don't perfectly know anything. We create abstractions on our side of the glass that let us talk about the thing that do exist on the other side, but those abstractions are not the true objects. This epistemology can be used as an answer to many philosophical questions. Is math invented or discovered? Is physics invented or a universal truth? What is the platonic form of a chair? Where does a person's body start and end? For all of these, there is a real answer, which completely defies human understanding. I'll need to break this into more thoughts.

absolutely delicious. I want to know what their secret is. Probably honey. Also they labeled it “Trader Joe’s Raises the Bar” which is the reason I picked it up, honestly.

I think the webdev ecosystem moved to JS just because it lets you use the same language for front-end and backend, not through any fault of Ruby's. It seems to be a very strong, flexible language. It reminds me of JS in a lot of ways, or what I imagine a server-side-JS should be.

I clicked on a video today in my recommended from a channel I've never watched. The title was "Can I pass an AP Music Theory Exam?" Just such a good title. It poses a question. If you want the answer to the question, you have to watch the video. No text in the thumbnail. It doesn't try to be anything that it's not. I have to assume that the person is a professional musician of some sort. And indeed, the first 10 seconds of the video lists the person's credentials. None of this "These tiny dots are people!" *big arrow*. I would click on the video if the title were "A giant mechanical elephant." And at some point I think Tom would have used that as the title. It feels insulting, I guess, condescending. Like, maybe the people browsing Trending on Youtube are your target audience and you need to draw them in as much as possible, but it annoys me. "Tourists could ruin everything!" Whatever Oh yeah it's not just Tom, that's just, how you write YouTube titles these days.

There, I have written "code"

tap-to-click option.

I'm so tired.

Working on a theory that I’m autistic and masking so hard even I haven’t noticed. Working on a theory I’m a trans plural girl. Working on a theory that all of human existence is meaningless and that our ability to deceive ourselves otherwise is an evolutionary trait. Working on a theory that everyone hates me. Working on a theory that I’m a bad person. Working on a theory that I’m addicted to novelty. Working on a theory that Ted Kaczynski was perfectly normal and average in every way except for his predisposition to violence. Working on a theory that I love anaphora because it satisfies both my desire for consistency and my addition to novelty. Working on a theory that I will forever be alone. Working on a theory that no one is actually happy. Working on a theory that I will die to myself and embrace the system and be dumb and finally at peace. I don’t know of a satisfying way to end this. I’m trapped in the same loops.

'what's easiest' I tend to answer along the lines of 'just do something quickly and consider it over with.'

Hmmm.

The question is not, “do you think there are aliens?” As for me, I don’t really care one way or the other. I already treat most people like they are aliens, completely different from me. So aliens wouldn’t be any more scary. And if I knew we were alone in the universe I don’t think I would feel any more alone than I do now. A little bit of angst before bed for you

I think it will be come to be known as just The 2:51. After finishing the run Feinberg put his head down on the desk and cried for the next 5 minutes. He's been working so hard for this. I would not be surprised if it never gets beaten. Feinberg has cemented himself as a legend. Saying he's the AA GOAT would be insulting, we all know that. He could be the greatest Minecraft player of all time, period. Like when it comes to skill I don't think there's a better test of MC skill than AA and no one can beat Feinberg. I don't even love him or his content, but I just have so much respect for him, because I can tell he has worked so hard and knows what he's doing and cares so much. Not to mention he's so fricking good. Like since Feinberg is alone on the leaderboard, he has to motivate himself, and he did, so you can tell it means something to him. He's not after the popularity or beating other people, he's grind-ed to push Minecraft to its limits. And as someone that cares about Minecraft, that's something that I love to see so much.

than my hand. Why are they the other way around? "It's been decades since any phone designer gave a second, third or even fourth thought to ergonomics, truly." -Solderpunk (the man the myth the legend)

I don't think I have abnormally large hands but I feel like computer mice are designed to be used with the finger tips and I want to put my whole hands on one.

world hates me and is conspiring against me. I don't think it's that uncommon of a thing. Or, I've mentioned on here before, the feeling that one small mistake is just decimating. ("Decimate" historically meant "kill 10%" but here I'm using it to mean "kill 100%.") Like I was driving and went "I don't know if this is the right way" then "well even if it's the wrong way, I've only lost 5 minutes, no 2 minutes, no more like 10-20 minutes, no all day, no everything I've ever wanted in life." And like, for a fraction of a second I believed that if I was going the wrong way it would lead to me being late to work and losing my job and never doing anything productive with my life ever again. Luckily, it turns out that I was going the right way.

I want to cry but won’t let myself. I feel so alone. I miss people. I miss myself. I love you.

I know I've said it before but Feinberg is goated.

All I want is software that works (Please read this in an annoyed sing-song voice.)

lovely things?"

huge world around ours that is weird and surreal, but the Detective Agency overlays an incredibly weird world on top of ours that is minimally different but impossible. Edit: subbed nicknames for full names of the books

Reading it in the middle of reading the *Poignant Guide* was perhaps a mistake. I remember a character living on the fourth level of a quadruple level bed (because of the flooding) which I believe was from the later book but I can’t imagine how it would fit into either. The plot of the book, that is to say, everything except for Dirk’s character, is different from the TV show. But they both do things with the plot line that are unmatched except by each other. So in that sense I commend the show writers.

penultimate guess had a similarity of 31.53 (920/1000). Had friends helping out. Semantle is saved if played as a group activity.

Edit: finally found this link again => https://viewsourcecode.org/why/ _why's estate

I hate repeating myself. I hate it when people repeat themselves and I have to listen to them say the same thing twice. It just makes me cringe. I can't listen to songs on repeat. My ears crave novelty. But like. If I want people to listen to me I know that logically I should say the same thing in multiple places and if someone reads the same thing on Discord and on here, that's not actually a bad thing.

Or rather, would be done if this was the type of project that is it is possible to finish. I will of course continue to tweak and change things, but those things will bring us less decidedly towards a “finished” state and will instead be changes for the sake of changes. Prominently, I still don’t have any markup support. I decided I cannot be faulted for merely displaying the text the user inputs.

Apparently _why named Tumblr? I don't know, Wesley didn't elaborate. => https://wesleyac.thoughts.page/#1651815057

webbedsite, thoughts learnerpages, it is filled, absolutely stuffed, with straight quotes.' I apologize. The plethora of straight quotes on this website is as much an affront to my eyes as it is to yours, I just don't know how to fix it without spending like 30 hours writing Zig code to implement a proprietary markup specification. Which I still plan on doing at some point, but there's also a certain beauty to typing in text and then having the same text emerge unchanged out the other side. Maybe I should just manually curve all the quotes. Hm.

Margaret Thatcher was. A Prime Minister of England?

I was watching a video (BobbyBroccoli's *America's Missing Collider*) and one of the thing that the author claims is that the particle physics community does/did a bad job with public outreach and education about quantum science, and he contrasted that to the job NASA does with space education. And my first reaction was "but Mars is a real, tangible, object that I can see, unlike quantum particles." But like. I've never seen Mars. I can't touch Mars. My knowledge of mars as a planet comes almost entirely from cartoon drawings in space exhibits funded by NASA. Quantum particles are a little harder to explain; it's physically impossible to take a picture of one, for instance, but you totally could come up with a standard representation of quantum particles and push to popularize it like we did with the clipart atom representation. And again, it is more difficult since we discovered these particles more recently than we discovered Mars or atoms, so maybe it will get better with time. Quantum particles exist inside of everything, right here in front of us, and people know they exist, but we can't name them, don't learn about them, and can't picture them. It's difficult to conceptualize something that small, but it's also difficult to conceptualize an object like the Earth, so large it looks flat, or something like Mars, so far away that it can't be seen with the naked eye. Quantum physicists definitely could do a better job communicating.

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.

This is said jokingly. Tumblr grammar/style in particular uses the run-on sentence extensively, and I enjoy it.

It's difficult to tell what the other stuff is. There's a lot of really cool settings (like exit nodes) hidden behind a couple of menus. It can't do everything, but it seems like it can do most things you want. The one thing I'm missing is exposing a local port to the public internet (i.e. port forwarding). Not that I would use that, I think the idea is that Tailscale gives you better tools for the same problem, but it would still be cool, I can still think of uses.

characters and what happened today and not really saying anything but experiencing the same thing. And that’s not really something that I have with most of my media interests. Like Blaseball or HermitCraft come closest, but somewhat integral to those is that everyone has a difference experience. Everyone has a different Blaseball team whose games they watch, or a different different Hermit whose videos they watch. And since everyone’s been participating for a different amount of time, everyone’s experience is really pretty unique. With Dracula Daily on the other hand, everyone’s reading exactly the same book at exactly the same time and it’s fun.

Okay I had to re-authenticate my laptop. Now it just works!

Ah! Dante would spend another 9 years in prison. My heart aches for him.

days, "what's the easiest way of doing this" because otherwise I ask, "what's the best way of doing this" and that frequently involves doing way more work than is necessary.

Also I found out that since Astronomical Theater (my Gemini server) reads certificates into memory when it starts, since it's been running for three months, the certificates had expired. Hm. I'll need to fix that somehow.

I respect you. I respect you if you're trans, if you're religious, if you're pro-life or pro-choice or gay or straight or democrat or republican or too preoccupied to vote. And that respect is so important. And the rhetoric on the political left recently is, 'you need to disrespect everyone who doesn't agree 100%.' And I mean, this is because I surround myself with extremely left leaning media/content. I spend most of my time on Tumblr and Reddit. I'm sure the right is just as bad. But's frustrating to know that no one there respects me or my views. There are a lot of directions this post could go and just about all of them are me complaining and/or having a breakdown. I guess what I'm saying is that I think about posting about politics on here a lot, and I don't, because I don't care that much and I don't want to offend anyone. But I don't want you to forget that I am a human being and I do have opinions and views on topics that I don't post. And it's easier for you to just assume that I agree with you on everything, but I won't. (The subtext here is the recently leaked supreme court decision. The coverage I've seen (again, from Tumblr and Reddit) has showed no little or no respect for the pro-life side, which is a position that I respect. But, as a man, I don't have particularly strong feelings about abortion, and a lot of other things get to me more.) I guess, this is about me. Everything I post here is about me. I NEED more unity, more acceptance of moderate positions, etc. I'm so tired and I'm procrastinating from doing work I can't take this aaahahhh

> "Brothers and sisters, the Scripture had to be fulfilled in which the Holy Spirit spoke long ago through David concerning Judas, who served as guide for those who arrested Jesus. He was one of our number and shared in our ministry." … > "For," said Peter, "it is written in the Book of Psalms: 'May his place be deserted; / let there be no one to dwell in it,' and, 'May another take his place of leadership.' > "Therefore it is necessary to choose one of the men who have been with us the whole time the Lord Jesus was living among us, beginning from John’s baptism to the time when Jesus was taken up from us. For one of these must become a witness with us of his resurrection." > So they nominated two men: Joseph called Barsabbas (also known as Justus) and Matthias. Then they prayed, "Lord, you know everyone’s heart. Show us which of these two you have chosen to take over this apostolic ministry, which Judas left to go where he belongs." Then they cast lots, and the lot fell to Matthias; so he was added to the eleven apostles. -Matthias Chosen to Replace Judas, Acts 1:15-26

(Didn't hit submit on this one last night.)

The issue was that I didn't specify a home directory for Django when launching it from Apache, so when it went to lookup the search template it looked it up relative to `/`. (Search is the only thing effected since the other template lookups are preformed relative to the `thoughts` app.) (This wasn't caught locally because locally the working directory inherits from the working directory of the terminal.) Here's the weird thing. The commit that made this change renamed things, sure, but shouldn't have effected this behavior. I have no idea why it now decides that it needs a working directory set. I'm going to look into it more, will edit if I find anything.

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."

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?

Okay uh if you're a lawyer from Big Idea and you want to serve me a take down request please contact me at Matthias.Portzel at gmail, I just love following the law and I'm not willing to have this site taken down for copyright reasons. View description

I'm daydreaming about him than that I'm daydreaming about any number of other fictional characters. I can't decide if it makes or undermines the point if I don't mention other characters. Like did Hermione really capture a woman and keep her in a jar for like days? What the hell is going on in Trevor's, *A Day*? Is Rachel's treatment of torivors inhumane?

Going back to => https://thoughts.learnerpages.com/?show=c62d40fd-2d69-49f3-bdb7-61238c26c90b "the first item on my TODO list is: 'Make every piece of software in the world perfect.'" Someone used the analogy of climbing/digging out of a hole, and it's like, I don't even feel like I'm in a hole, I feel like I'm in the middle of an endless, bottomless, pit. In my life philosophy there is no "good enough" and there is no "too bad" there's just this infinite vertical tube stretching above and below me. And somewhere, miles above me, is "make every piece of software in the world perfect," but like, that's not what I'm going to do today. So I need to focus on moving upwards even when it's not clear that I'm making progress, because the tube is so long, or because there aren't nice landmarks.

Version just gave Tumblr away for free, for all intents and purposes. Wild numbers.

in coding projects and this wouldn't happen if people didn't use settings that made it visually impossible to tell them apart. Every editor has an option to allow you to see the whitespace in your code, and if you're using a good editor theme, it should be faint enough to be completely unobtrusive.

and solved all my problems but so far none of them have. They make good arguments and can help me solidify and enumerate options, but it's really a garbage decision making technique because after listening to them I still have to make a decision. Some of the Matthiases (because I think you'll find this funny): Matthias Portzel Matthias 1.0 Matthias 2.0 Saihttam The Count of Monte Cristo Mel Christian The Matthias that wrote the about page (I'm not sure how to refer to him. System 1?)

Would I be happier in a culture that encouraged positive feedback? Where people complimented me. Or would that hurt too? What is my real problem?

Like I'd see Lisp code use `hello` or `:hello` or `'hello` or `"hello"` and I was like, oh, it's got this special "token" datatype that you offset with `:` and it's got strings and it's symbols and they were all different things in my head. But no. Lisp has lists, and it has symbols, and that's it. And there's some syntax sugar/parsing rules where some symbols evaluate as values and some variables don't. `:hello` is just the symbol `:hello` (`:` isn't a special character at all as far as I can tell). The quote character means "don't evaluate the following symbol". Similarly `"` seems to indicate just that the symbol including `"` isn't evaluated. `(eq? '"hello" "hello")` is true. This is a dumb post because I still don't know what I'm talking about and I'm kind of talking about common lisp and kind of talking about scheme/racket. The point is, Lisp is wild. It's almost more like writing JSON than JS.

It's got like a metronome sound and the occasional background noise. Not to mention the white noise. It feels like I'm there in the orchestra pit. => https://music.apple.com/us/album/433/406490689?i=406490698 => https://thoughts.learnerpages.com/?show=4e7bee6b-dfdc-4775-89fa-cb97cff1a9c3

toki pona lesson three in March like they said they were going to!

PEP8 is impossible to programmatically enforce. PEP8 is ambiguous. PEP8 defers to human judgment about what makes code look good. You CANNOT implement a tool that programmatically enforces PEP8. The fact that you think that you can, tells me that you fundamentally do not understand PEP8, fundamentally do not understand the concept of aesthetically pleasing code (which by definition subjective), and are either dumb or arrogant to try to implement it anyways. We've been through this already. There was linting tool called `pep8`. And they CHANGED THEIR NAME because THE CREATOR OF PYTHON asked them to because PEP8 is not programmatically enforceable. And it was causing confusing from people who looked at the tool called "pep8" and assumed that it would output things that were consistent with PEP8 (which is impossible because PEP8 is subjective). => https://github.com/PyCQA/pycodestyle/issues/466 Please rename this tool But now, years later, someone else comes along and they've figured it out! They've got an auto-code formatter that actually implements PEP8 correctly! And so they're going to call it autopep8! Despite the fact that it like, has open bugs, from years ago, where it syntactically changes the behavior of your program!, as is clearly required by PEP8. => https://github.com/hhatto/autopep8/issues/539 I've blocked the creator of auto-pep-8 on Github. I have no interest in interacting with them. I have more respect for Black. I'm not opposed to the entire category. But the two paragraph introduction to Black does not mention aesthetics or PEP8 at all. Black's position is 'code should not be formatted by humans. Uniformity is more important than human judgment.' I do not agree with Black's position. I think that code should be beautiful. And I do not use a linter because I do not believe that it is possible for the linter to recognize beautiful code. Edit: The post was written under the assumption that autopep8 was a newer tool, which in fact it pre-dates the mentioned request to not call things pep8.

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.

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"

Had some wild dreams last night. Your mind just kind of makes stuff up.

The_Quantum_Alpha was a user that hung out in the Vivaldi Discord server for a while. He and his fiancé used #off-topic as a group chat instead of like, texting each other. I think he eventually got banned for picking fights with other users and generally being rude. If you told him he was wrong, he'd bring up his multiple PhDs. There was a second woman who followed him around, I think it was like another girlfriend but I'm not sure, and it could also be like his daughter. There's a high likelihood, I guess, that it was a single person engaging in an extended role play. But I also like to believe there are people just that unhinged. Anyways I tried to find his Mastodon but apparently he got banned (from multiple instances), so yeah. Looks like he's hanging out on MeWe.com these days, but I'm not signing up for that!

and is only convincing me that global warming is a conspiracy and that the climate scientists are trying to cover up global cooling, the real crisis. => https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling

Soli Deo gloria.

>add BBQ sauce >dinner

little bit by setting the story in a parallel universe which is more similar to biblical times.

View transcription

-Josh

(It's difficult to draw the same line in Thu, since Thu has "variable type," which is like Java's compile time type, in that it can be determined semantically. But in Thu, it also exists at run-time in a meaningful way, whereas Java throws the compile-time type away. I don't mind having typed variables and untyped data.) Unfortunately, I felt that static methods, or what Thu calls `typefunction`s, were necessary. Which means that any given keyword-property lookup could be in reference to a Type-function or a data-function, depending on how the data was declared. Maybe you could fix that just by requiring type functions to be called with e.g. `:` instead of `.`. Edit! Nevermind, Type-functions are only callable by the language, i.e. there is no syntax to call them. I don't know if that's better.

`assert`s, with the intention of catching errors as quickly as possible at run-time. The Thu philosophy is to error as soon as encountering undefined behavior, but at runtime, not compile time. I don't see any other languages really doing that. => https://ourjseditor.com/program/S5ShEy

refuses to acknowledge that the escape key is being pressed. Happens across multiple applications. I guess I'm going to restart my computer but I don't know what would cause this.

had pushed back against in making this website. My Twitter was originally conceived as an experiment in spontaneity, which proved to be successful and was translated here, but at some point that morphed into a more intentional desire for the Thoughts here to be unrefined, which I would be uncomfortable applying more generally. This is about YikYak, which is just this site but scoped by location and publicly available. => https://thoughts.learnerpages.com/?show=f6dd8ad9-0910-4a54-bee1-94b5232a8561 "poetry is dead in part because we value candidness"

subsystem for development on Windows, which allows you to develop software targeting those servers, but it's recognized as a platform in its own right. It's possible I'm wrong and WSL users are brand new Linux users, and the same number of people, or more, will use Linux as a desktop natively. But I'm very concerned about the possibility of a majority of Linux users being WSL users, in which case Microsoft would have a lot of influence over the direction the Linux project goes.

I do not know when, if ever, I will close the tab.

The Better Touch Tool buttons stopped working again. And then Vivaldi crashed. Thankfully both are working now, but like. I pay money for these softwares for a reason. It seems reasonable to expect a minimum of functionality from them.

```py [('Spring 2022', 231), ('Winter 2021', 692), ('Fall 2021', 386), ('Summer 2021', 375), ('Spring 2021', 317), ('Winter 2020', 410), ('Fall 2020', 584)] ``` This is the first one of these to show Winter 2021 with the new record of 7.7 Thoughts/day, beating out the first season of this site.

years ago.

Gatsby will import it into a graphQL database and then you can create pages based off the result of querying that database. But there's no docs on how to use that. I quote: > A GraphQL query is made in the second half of the file to get the Markdown data. Gatsby has automagically given you all the Markdown metadata and HTML in this query’s result. > > Note: To learn more about GraphQL, consider this excellent resource And then it links to a 45 minute video course on GraphQL.

I'm still mostly using Atom, but there are some things Atom doesn't do well, like in-line git diffs or remote file editing.

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.

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.

```js (…args => args.reduce((acc, v) => acc + v, 0)) ```

"I feel like a two dimensional creature that just lives in a three dimensional world."

momentum. It lacks flow. One sentence comes after the next in a steady beat but there's no crescendo. Edit (2:52pm): This is, of course, not true.

and like a bunch of other stuff at Reddit). Something about the internet being small or there being a social elite.

-I Love Us, The Regrettes also, "I got so good at lonely"

in listening to me. I want people to listen to me. My love language is you listening to me.

Copium

"How lucky am I to have two things I love" -Christmas In June, AJR

collection, *Songs of Innocence and of Experience*

"The universal deployment of IP networks on Avian Carriers [RFC1149] is facing a multi-decade delay. After operators discovered that birds are not real…"

fools pranks in one. - A bunch of random buttons that light up or make sounds or do nothing - Crab button that adds crabs to the page. Clicking on crabs captures them and spawns money. Crabs display little textboxes of what they're on top of. If they stay alive for long enough, hovering over them gives a "Friend <3" textbox. - Sponge button that covers the page with dirt and gives you a sponge to clean it off. - A button that opens a tiny minigame with bars that you move up and down for points (I can't play it because the hundred crabs on my screen keep getting in my way) - Wizard button that generates emoji spells, and a gravestone button that generates quotes - Brick Whartley, a brick in a suit that is behind this click-a-thon. They have a Tumblr account and a LinkedIn account. - Typing in the post box makes Honking sounds. - I'm even sure how I got on this page: https://www.tumblr.com/humans.txt No idea how much content is here I haven't bothered going through it. - There's a button that adds a train to the bottom of the page. Started that and forgot about it.

Haskell *kind of* has this. Types in Haskell can have different constructors, (which can be almost completely different, almost like subclasses or classes implementing an interface or something), and you can overload a function to work with different constructors of the same class. But what's beautiful about Julia is how much the language embraces overriding methods and using them for every different type imaginable.

This was throwing an error to stderr, but I can't see that when I'm inside of w3m. What's dumb is that my $EDITOR was set to neovim, since I don't have vi installed, but w3m ignored that. (You might be able to argue that you need vi to be Unix complient, but Linux isn't Unix compliant, so I don't think that's what's going on.) Anyways, apologies for the spelling errors, this was written inside Neovim from w3m.

this bad? I can select the textbox but typing doesn't let me insert and the manual for this app hasn't been updated in years.

Like having it set at 13px is a bad idea, and forcing me to recognize characters that I've literally never seen before is super painful. But that only exacerbates the real problem which is this font. Look at that W. Who allowed that? It's like Comic Sans. 'This is my programming language, guys, you have to write it in comic sans.'

=> 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."

running and I don’t know what I did to my sinuses Edit a minute later to add I’m not congested, my throat feels fine, I don’t have other symptoms of illness.

I have. I do every day. This is my purgatory. My boulder. My pain. My cross. It is a small cross, a light cross, and I carry it. There is something to be said for universalism. There is something to be said for anarchy and for death. There is something to be said for life and for everyone who lives it. There is something to be said for "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 there's a line, there's going to be people on the other side of it. A mountain is a mammal. A soul that keeps singing long after it should have stopped. A voice that starts singing long after it should have started. A cave, and in the cave, a mine, and in the mine, something, something indescribable, something valuable, something more than you and me, and yet nothing without us. A nose. A nose and The Nose and in a piece of bread and above our heads. I'm tired of not being able to say what I mean. I being unable to describe the angle through which I view the world. A movie to end moving.

addicted to that mindset. This works for single bugs, but there's a temptation to apply this to whole projects, to just replace whole code-bases, or even to real life (e.g. just 'reorganize everything in my room' or 'reinvent myself'). I've generalized this as 'trying to jump from imperfect to perfect.' It makes sense at a super small scale. You can take a single bug from 'broken' to 'fixed' without intermediate steps. But with complex software or anything analog, like real life, you have to iterate incrementally. You have to take small steps at a time. The exception of course is when your current system doesn't let you increment anymore. When you've hit the limit of what the current system can handle, only then does it make sense to tear down the system and start over. To rephrase: people often re-write apps because they have too many bugs or don't have enough features. Instead, you should rewrite an app when you *cannot* fix bugs and *cannot* add features. => https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/ The Excellent "Things You Should Never Do, Part I"

I hadn’t set a max_age on the authentication cookie. Just kind of funny, since you can see source now I don’t need to use this as a change log for the website itself.

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"

things for hours. Although that sounds strangely appealing now. I need a hobby like that…

is a chore. But I have to do it because otherwise the ideas, they would overflow and start spilling out sloppily.

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.

don't respect me.

I'm terrified of another OurJSEditor. Of thinking that I know better, that I can make something better than anyone else and then committing myself to it. And sinking hundreds of hours and thousands of lines of code and years of my life into it. For nothing. I'm thinking about *Primer*. What terrifies me about that movie is the unlimited hubris of the characters. (Spoilers may follow. I recommend watching the movie unspoiled for full effect.) They just keep thinking that they can fix things, that they can make everything perfect if they just go back in time one more time. And it just introduces so much complexity so quickly and they were really in over their heads before they even started. And I honestly don't know if the directors intended for the point of the movie to be that you don't understand what's happening. But I didn't understand what was happening by the end of the movie, and that just made the apparent confidence of the characters so much more impactful. They couldn't stop. They couldn't let themselves believe that they had already lost, and so they just stayed trapped in the same impossible, infinitely complex, puzzle. I don't fear being trapped in a time-loop Groundhog-day-style, at least not any more than the next person. Like it would terrifying but I know it's not going to happen. But trapping myself? Wasting years of my life dedicated to a puzzle that everyone else can see is impossible? That scares me because it could happen.

that nuance. Once I've found it, I always feel more satisfied, like I have a more complete view.

to be one.”

submit whatever the frick they want to /new. Like this is just some girl describing how wild the party scene was at her High School. There are people, accounts, who just submit things to Hacker News all day every day. Like there's no way they are reading these articles, and thinking, 'yeah that fits on HN', they're just posting for the fun of it.

in a ham and cheese sandwich. > he fought to muster the will to eat. His choice of a meatless sandwich did nothing to help matters. … > He dropped the meatless sandwich into a trash bin and found a ham and cheese on rye. His eyes widened and his mouth watered as he unwrapped it, took half, and found its heft was due almost entirely to meat and cheese. Instead of being stuffed with lettuce and tomato, the sandwich consisted of what appeared to be a dozen slices of ham, three of Swiss cheese, and a thin layer of Dijon mustard. Rapture radiated from his tongue as he took the first bite. This guy's been a vegan for 5 years and there no explanation of why he's decided to eat meat now? Not to mention this person gets shot like 5 paragraphs later. If I were the editor of this I would cut not only this paragraph but the entire fricking character.

The idea of a function is really weird when you try to define it. Fundamentally it's about re-naming variables within a given scope. And all of modern mathematics and computer science rests on how powerful that concept is.

View transcription

to change, and didn't allow the engineers working on the technology to significantly change their approach, what does technology look like in 100, 1000 years? How does the smart assistant in my microwave communicate to the smart assistant in my toaster oven? How big is my iPhone L (pronounced "50" of course)? Is there a subscription service that lets me order ballpoint pens?

of our lives in an ugly way. Cyberpunk and whatever Black mirror is doing glorify the computer systems themselves too much. And as someone who works with tech a lot, it's not very believable or interesting to me that a well-functioning computer system either is used for bad purposes or else fails to integrate well with humans. Because that's what Black Mirror is, is computer are these different, ethereal things, almost beings, that can't co-exist with humans. But like, humans are broken, flawed systems too. But Black Mirror isn't actually interested in making a point about computers, they're making a point about humans and society and values. So to restate the prompt, what if everything we owned was made out of circuit boards and wiring, and it didn't effect our lives at all.

It is, of course, very difficult to say how it will be before that bubble pops. It may not happen in my lifetime. But at some point the rate of technical increase has to slow down (at least when referring to computers as we know them). Then question then becomes, is a given piece of technology (or code, in my case), useful outside of the current rising tide.

-Joehills => https://clips.twitch.tv/RoundSmallCakeTheRinger-ZJmzodfiPfqk86EG

Yes I caved and switched to VS code. I just want (perfect) syntax highlighting for every language.

Literally shaking and crying right now. I should have stopped at Unifying the Technical Interview. I should have stopped at 'author of Jepsen' I should have stopped at his LinkedIn account username I should have stopped at "A History of Leather at Pride" But nooo I had to open his mastodon. AAAAAAAHHhhhh

for the author to maintain or that it's buggy or slow or stylistically inconsistent. You *have* to appeal to other code that has been written. It is bad because it is different. In "Typing the Technical Interview" the programmer implements a program in Haskell using only types, never instantiating the types or creating variables or values. But it works. You have to appeal to the fact that there's a way that you're supposed to write this type of program, as ordained by the creators of the language and endorsed by every other person who's ever written Haskell. => https://aphyr.com/posts/342-typing-the-technical-interview

the code itself. The absurdity of the code exists to emphasize the absurdity of computer science as a whole, socially and technically. It describes someone who fails to conform to the computer science industry's social ideals about how code should be written. Importantly, it's written from the perspective of that person, so we get to see that their ideals are (at least mostly) internally consistent. And since the code that they write works, and since they're particular about it (they have a personal style-guide), we're reminded that the style of code that we write is a social construct. Which isn't to downplay the more obvious tone that makes fun of the main character. They're dumb for not being able to adapt their style to the environment.

are so intuitive and useful that I feel like they should be in every programming language. `where`/`let` clauses that are expression-scoped! Guards! Pattern Matching in general! Implicit Currying/partial function application! The ability to create your own infix functions! And the ability to call native operators as not-infix, and pass them around as values! List comprehensions! Infinite Lists! Any of those could be added to any language. They don't require a strictly-typed, functional, language to use.

And their ability to make any function infix, man I just really like Haskell. (Except for its type system, I have no idea what a Monad is and I have no desire to learn.)

Okay fine we can word dump sheep yellow flowers, actually poe and edger and summing s and aah my mind my brain is full of thoughts thaat don't have meaning and yet are more thaan the sum of their parts and thier soul and their fingers overflow with light and with meaning. I don't know if these word dumps are interesting to other people. They're low effort, even for this site. (I use them like a pre-writing exercise, like warm-up.) But I kind of enjoy coming back to read them. I'll probably keep posting them, but clearly labeled like this one.

I use systemd instead of `network-manager`. I use system instead of `cron`. Etc. ``` $ systemd-analyze calendar '*:00/15' Original form: *:00/15 Normalized form: *-*-* *:00/15:00 Next elapse: Thu 2022-03-17 18:00:00 EDT (in UTC): Thu 2022-03-17 22:00:00 UTC From now: 8min left ```

In contrast, you don't have to earn bad endings.

but Github 500s for requests made from logged in users right now. AAhhhhhh. Please Microsoft.

A little like me.

What the ad blocker does is create a new website that approximates the real website, but without ads. I'm not interested in the version of the web created by extensions. I'm interested in the real web, as created by the authors of the websites. If a website has ads, either I respect the author and I value the content enough that I'm willing to endure the ads for the content. Or I don't, in which case I clearly don't value the content very highly and the burden is and should be on the author to improve their content or remove the ads. If a website is an ad-infested piece of garbage, I don't want to pretend that it's not. I want to know that it's an ad-infested piece of garbage, so that I can close it. In the web paradigm, websites have complete responsibility for their functionality, content, and appearance. The text and content of a website is 100% determined by the website author. But so too is the appearance, with CSS. The website author can of course abstain from using CSS, but a web browser doesn't step up and provide styling. It provides *defaults*, but those defaults are an implementation detail. The client, the web browser, has to implement a mechanism by which website authors can style websites, and as an implementation detail, they have to set defaults. At no point is the browser *responsible* for styling the website—the browser is responsible for providing a mechanism for the website to style itself. Extensions change that. With a browser extension, suddenly the extension also has some responsibility for the appearance of the page. Which might not seem like a big deal, but it is. The extension could break the page. The extension could fix any number of infinite things that are broken on the page already. The extension is responsible for deciding what is an ad and what isn't. And to their credit, ad blockers do a really good job at this. I do trust and respect uBlock Origin. But I don't want to have to trust uBlock Origin; I don't need another thing that can fail. If a website's bad, I should blame the website. If I see ads on a website, I should blame the website, not blame my ad blocker. I intentionally avoid making the "support creators" argument here because a lot of time ads are not a viable or healthy long-term monetization strategy. And moreover, if you take pride in your content, it's very hard to do ads in a way that preserves the quality and tone of your content. Ads are, by definition, someone else's content that you've been paid to interject into your page. But at some point, when I read a website that has ads and has content that I value or enjoy, I am glad that I'm supporting that content by viewing the ads along with it. Like, if you can't be bothered to watch a 30 second ad before your Youtube video, why are you on Youtube? Find something better to do with your time. Read a book. (And I say that to myself.)

couple hours old. (I use Vivaldi, which has a vertical, scrolling, tab bar.)

web sites.”

"PWAs from the beginning would have prevented Facebook from collecting data for the last decade in the first place" Facebook–Cambridge Analytica scandal could have been prevented if only Apple had allowed PWAs to send push notifications 10 years ago… (This is sarcasm.) "Here I am still waiting for ES2018 regex look-behinds" "Web MIDI? Still surprised that's missing on Apple" Whataboutism at its worst. 'BuT whAt aBouT WebUSB?' Don't even get me started on "Lazy loading images is at best user hostile"

```zig const data_one = [1]u8{1}; const data_two = [2]u8{1, 2}; const data_three = [3]u8{1, 2, 3}; const data_four = [4]u8{1, 2, 3, 4}; const data = [4][]const u8{ data_one[0..], data_two[0..], data_three[0..], data_four[0..]}; ``` In JS this is `[[1], [1, 2], [1, 2, 3], [1, 2, 3, 4]]`. And I recognize that JS is allocating that on the heap and I want Zig to allocate it on the stack so that I don't have to worry about memory management. But it's clearly possible, I don't understand why it's so verbose. I can't let myself use that code because I don't know Zig and I have to assume there's a better way of doing this, so I've been researching for 3 hours now.

data that the rest of the program acts upon is a super common pattern in my code. But apparently, the system programming program never do that. Or I mean maybe they just do it in n lines and don't complain.

client design needs to be capable of handling *any* semantically possible Gemtext document. In short, this is reiterating one benefit of Gemini: it is impossible to have a Gemini site that looks bad. But I had previously argued that this advantage is independent of Gemini's simplicity. That is, I'm imagining an interface (which I've named Actually Flowers) which allows for significantly more complex documents (read: Turing-complete applications) to be created, while not giving those applications any control over their own visual appearance or layout. I'm holding out that it might still be possible to achieve this, but I don't think I appreciated the difficulty of saying: every theoretically possible application has to look good. At some point you have to tackle that problem by limiting the scope of possible applications. Which Gemini does in an extreme sense.

heroes in their time of need.

willing. No. Something else I believe ugh well rip.

* The service provided is so simple that anyone could implement it. * It's marketed for reasons that are technical gibberish that are pointless and no one cares about. * The interface is quite bare-bones and unremarkable. * People (users) feel a need to bestow personality upon it. * (The domain name Random.org is a single word. I'm not yet sure if this is interesting.)

don't think he does what he thinks he's doing. He's said at a couple of points that *Beyonders* is intended for more mature audiences, but that doesn't really come across to me. He juggles perhaps more characters or plot devices, but the detail of each suffers proportionally, so it's not significantly more complex. And the stakes are no higher than *Five Kingdoms* or *Fablehaven*. The plot feels very out-of-control, but that just makes it cheesier when everything falls perfectly into place.

imagine if a software button didn't work 1/10 times? Ridiculous

Edit: I've decided 1.5 might be a better place to start.

you of a frozen lake at dusk. A liquid crystal."

> “But… those aren’t even the same type. That’s… that’s illegal.” > “If it were meant to be illegal,” you remind him sagely, “Sun Microsystems would have made it unrepresentable.”

Had to edit the link on the Thought from Jan that referenced it.

people that I'm friends with. It's difficult for me to follow like, topics, on Twitter. I'd be interested in some recreational mathematics content on Twitter. And so I follow @standupmaths, @Ayliean, and @3blue1brown. But Matt tweets about their dog and Ayliean tweets about about Scottish school Covid restrictions and I don't really care. And Grant only tweets when he releases a video. Like I actively do not want to see political content. And that means that I can't follow any tech journalists on Twitter because all of them will retweet political content. I'm not trying to criticize these people. I understand that this is how Twitter works. I'm just pointing out that this is how the system works, and that the system could work differently. Tumblr has a similar problem. I told Tumblr at some point I was interested in Math, so it recommended I follow a blog with "mathematics" in the name. Well, it was just some person's blog. And they re-posted a lot of cool math, including a fair amount of original art. But they also have some mental health issues and they used this unassuming "mathematics" blog to share life updates. It would honestly be comedic, the juxtaposition of "cool fact about the Fibonacci spiral" with vaguely-suicidal ramblings, were they not of course vaguely-suicidal. I suppose, then, that Hacker News and Reddit suffer from the opposite problem, dedication to a topic at the expense of the human element. But at least I know what I'm getting into.

-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK----- Version: 3.1 GCS d- s !a C+++ M++ UL+ w-- E--- W++++ !N PS+ PE++ Y+ !PGP !tv b++ G e h+ !r ------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------ On one hand, the concept of a geek code is like right in line with "20 | gay | they/them | autistic" in a Twitter bio. On the other hand, age is the only label that overlaps at all. I wonder what happened to the types of people that would have unironically used this. Some Gemini users fondly remember their time on Usenet (I think there's a Gemini/Gopher Usenet forum that was recently created, but "!N"). But what about all the people that were cringy kids on Usenet and are now being cringy on Twitter? Oh yeah I guess I should link: https://web.archive.org/web/20050210083932/http://www.geekcode.com/geek.html

Do I have writing there that’s not backed up? Did I not learn from last time? Who knows.

also the belief that realism (or what most would call the truth) is actually not useful. This is about 9front’s code of conduct and also the about page of this website.

superfluous words and say the same thing. It's hard to use blackout poetry to add nuance.

the same Youtube account I've had for 15 years. Google has 15 years of watch history. And not a single video in there is in Spanish because I don't speak Spanish. I'm watching a video in English. And yet. Google decides to show me an ad for the Pixel translating Spanish into French. Which I also don't speak, for the record. Why is Google collecting all my data, ostensibly to show me better/targeted ads, and yet they can't even match the language of the ad to the language of the video I'm watching. This just seems like such a dumb, basic, failure of the system.

Also I just woke up and I’m not sure why I was asleep or what I should now be doing. Perhaps making waffles?

I tried but it would be very long. Without explaining, much less justifying, it would look something like: I think therefore I am; there is a God; God is good; Truth is absolute; Truth is infinitely fractal; human perception is inherently finite; pragmatic analysis must be used; logic is useful, but inherently limited; people are good; people are inherently flawed; independence is good; creation is good; etc.

"Break the pattern. Take control of your life, Todd. The instant you take control, interesting things will happen. I guarantee it." -Dirk Gently (S1E1)

I just, I'm going to have to get the keyboard replaced again. Apple's going to think I'm running an AppleCare scam but legitimately the TouchBar, screen, and now the keyboard have failed me. And since the computer is all glued together they really only replace the top-half or bottom half, so I'm going to have gone through 2 entire computers. How do you even make a computer with a life-expectancy of one year?

They provide no examples. They're just 'this is confusing. I'm not a lawyer and you're not either. It's impossible to know what "public domain" means. Anyone who wants to use public domain software should talk to a lawyer. You might not actually be able to use it. If you're still confused, read 3 months of mailing list archives from 2012. You think that's unreasonable? Then trust us, just use an OSI-open-source-approved license.' They do argue you shouldn't CC0, since a) CC0 explicitly disclaims that the author may hold a patent on the content and b) CC0 doesn't include a disclaimer of warranty. (Which is a result of CC0 being intended for media, not software.) But like, there's no mention of the Unlicense or Zlib or BS0 or similar. Sources! Because I apparently I hold myself to a higher standard that the OSI ("if the thought of reading all those conversations is daunting, please take that as more evidence that it's just better to use an approved Open Source License if you can!"). => https://cr.yp.to/publicdomain.html One of the prominent anti-Public domain lawyers retracts his statements when it's pointed out that he is contradicting the Ninth Circuit. => https://unlicense.org The Unlicense. The Unlicense is verbose, and claims that its verbosity is necessary to safely public-domain software. Which doesn't exactly help. But it does address all of the concerns of the OSI and is OSI approved. The list of sources at the bottom is also pretty good. There are other OSI approved licenses that are also effectively public domain: 0-clause BSD, Zlib, etc. => http://harmful.cat-v.org/economics/intellectual_property/ Libertarian Propaganda (please read) (Also see links at the bottom of this page.) => https://opensource.org/faq#public-domain The OSI's 1000 words that say nothing in their FAQ. => https://opensource.org/node/878 Another 1000 words on the OSI's website that repeat the same bland talking points. "It’s probably safer to use a license like MIT instead." (Just in case I haven't made my point well: This quote is dumb. If I want to public-domain my code, saying "just don't" isn't helpful.) (This post was inspired by the Gemini user who claimed that most people who don't support the OSI are trying to profit off of open source.)

I hate VS Code I hate Microsoft I hate everyone who said VS Code is good I hate open source I hate GitHub I hate everything.

This is a theory.