Thoughts
Linear is doing modern-minimalist style zero-friction-bug-fixes.
=> https://linear.app/now/zero-bugs-policy
=> https://thoughts.learnerpages.com/?show=81dc9fee-446f-44b2-b1f1-aac77d8cdb92
=> https://thoughts.learnerpages.com/?show=6917acdd-6f89-41ce-8eb8-ca26fdfaac29
=> https://thoughts.learnerpages.com/?show=3ba59923-ece6-4297-bdcf-71f7bfcdcdda
Can’t sleep because there’s an incessant voice in my head going “program scribe’s veney. Program scribe’s veney” Shut up!
The Sanderson fans can't even keep up. They can't edit the wiki fast enough.
> I’m trying to recruit lifelong fans who will still be reading Brandon Sanderson novels twenty years from now.
- Sanderson
I tried and failed to read The Indian Bride last night. Still not clear to me how you’re supposed to engage with the book.
I mean I read a majority of the words in the book but clearly incorrectly.
I had shared the Guide to Humanism, but I had erroneously left off the title when transcribing so it didn't show up in search. Fixed now
Transcript
> truly some people have no genre savviness whatsoever. A girl came back from the dead the other day and fresh out of the grave she laughed and laughed and lay down on the grass nearby to watch the sky, dirt still under her nails. I asked her if she’s sad about anything and she asked me why she should be. I asked her if she’s perhaps worried she’s a shadow of who she used to be and she said that if she is a shadow she is a joyous one, and anyway whoever she was she is her, now, and that’s enough. I inquired about revenge, about unfinished business, about what had filled her with the incessant need to claw her way out from beneath but she just said she’s here to live. I told her about ghosts, about zombies, tried to explain to her how her options lie between horror and tragedy but she just said if those are the stories meant for her then she’ll make another one. I said “isn’t it terribly lonely how in your triumph over death nobody was here to greet you?” and she just looked at me funny and said “what do you mean? The whole world was here, waiting”. Some people, I tell you.
I can't figure out if I'm bad at searching or if I've never quoted the Narcissist's Guide to Humanism OR No Genre Saviness here
Oh my word, syntax highlighting in search results, they said it couldn't be done!
Switched to Zed because Sublime doesn't have "Copy relative file path" in the command palette.
5 year old filing a Sublime Text bug report, "Sublime for mini-brains?"
Your mom's a mini-brain.
It doesn’t feel fair to other people for me to walk around this close to drowning.
Also I need to open a Roth IRA
Crazy thing about the dollar losing value is that you can’t hedge it with fixed income securities.
I know this is bad, but it's hard to side against someone with the username @duckinator (or @puppy). Shopify hates puppies???
I don't know if I would have been so skeptical of Ladybird if I knew that they would have literal millions in donations.
I really need to make an Idea about Ruby programmers special-casing the empty array because it's always wrong.
It kind-of sort-of makes sense as a performance optimization, except that in the common case (99% of the time) the array is not empty, and you're introducing a branch point that won't be taken for no reason.
And they do it all the freaking time. Across the board.
I’m like crying laughing at the absurdity because there’s nothing else to do. Proprietary Software, slogan, screw you.
I can’t open the Affinity Publisher document that I have on my computer because I don’t have Affinity Publisher, and I can’t buy Affinity
Publisher because Serif has shut down their store in a bizarre marketing stunt.
The answer to the problem of pain is heaven. How can a loving, all powerful, just God answer for the pain and suffering on Earth? Well, by
offering us salvation from it. By offering unconditional, eternal, joy and love, free from pain, in heaven, forever. How can you compare the finite suffering you experience on Earth to the eternal life offered to you in heaven and claim to judge God?
A kid steals his brother's one cracker. The kid goes crying to the father, "how could you let this happen, this isn't fair, he took my cracker!" The father says, "Of course this isn't fair. I'm sorry he took your cracker. You shouldn't have to fight over one cracker. I'm going to give both of you a stack of crackers." There was a genuine wrong that was committed. We're not pretending like it's okay. But it's made meaningless in the face of the Father's generosity. The father is going to love and forgive the thieving brother. (There's no sin that one brother could commit against the other that would cause The Father to stop loving him.)
I wonder if you could sell Linux. Like maybe that's the spark that's needed. Because there are a lot of software engineer types who have
some familiarity with Linux, but don't daily drive it because of quality issues. I'd pay $50/year for a Linux distro with professional support.
The thing that makes Veney mind-crack for me is that it's *not* complicated. There are only 10 pieces.
Northernlion is a mediocre streamer but such a good comedian. His ability to create and run with a bit is on the level of Dropout improv
This idiot is blaming himself for poor system performance when it's obviously the BIOS's fault for locking the computer at 800MHz. Come on
"If the bottleneck appears somewhere that you didn't choose, you aren't running an operation. It's running you."
What I love about this is that it's a reminder that there has to be a bottleneck. The i5 in my mini-PC is getting absolutely hammered but that's because I internally bought an old, cheap computer but put in 16GB of RAM and an SSD. So I choose the chip as the bottleneck. Now, I probably didn't need 16GB of RAM…
It's just crazy that Facebook can't provide rpms, and Fedora can't provide rpms. You know who can? Homebrew.
Re: Linux on the server also sucks, I can't `dnf install watchman`. Like hello???? Bug open since 2024, "Can't really do anything here"
Open source is not a gift that the maintainer gives to the user because the maintainer is doing the right things. It's also a protection
against the maintainer because they might do the wrong thing in the future.
To ask for something to be open source isn't entitlement, it's caution.
> In a word, live together in the forgiveness of your sins, for without it no human fellowship, least of all a marriage, can survive.
> Don’t insist on your rights, don’t blame each other, don’t judge or condemn each other, don’t find fault with each other, but accept each other as you are, and forgive each other every day from the bottom of your hearts
> The person who loves their dream of community will destroy community, but the person who loves those around them will create community.
Good morning. Finished the 4th Stormlight Archive book. Probably 3 stars.
I’ll give it 4, just because the pieces were mostly there. It was just very drawn out. I started rooting for Kaladian to collapse and die so that it could be over.
It deals with mental health a lot, and I think Sanderson does a decent job of writing those characters. Better than some books for sure. But then, it doesn’t deal with those issues. We don’t get to see the process of overcoming and healing from those issues.
No, I’m giving it three. I could have stopped reading halfway through and it would have been totally fair.
The whole book just feels like it’s treading water but I can’t tell if that’s because it’s switching between 9 POVs (not an exaggeration) or if it’s because the characters are actually treading water. I wish I could read the book from the perspective of one character at a time.
In like 50 years some kid is going to write me a message with an inline markdown link and I'm going to go off on them.
And they're going to see me as old and mean.
It's so hard to be nice to people.. aaahhahha.
Some of the core principles I follow when programming:
* Good data. Bad data structures make good code impossible
* Follow semantics of the real world as closely as possible. Code that is messy in the same way as the real world is better than code that is messy in a different way
* Functional programming when appropriate: pure functions, expressions that transform constant values, are preferred to branches and mutations
* Single source of truth, both for logic and for data (DRY is training wheels for SSOT)
* Separation of concerns and responsibilities. Code should know as little as possible about other code
* As little code as possible (in terms of complexity, not word count). Don't handle things you don't need to
“No one ever said it would be easy, no one ever said it would be this hard”
It makes me sad how hard it is. It makes me sad that good things
need to be fought for.
“I need you, every hour I need you”
=> https://thoughts.learnerpages.com/?show=cd5ebbb9-cbb7-42f9-9688-3e8aaf4dca5a
This thought has really shaken my confidence in the
correctness of simplicity. Something like Actually Flowers wouldn't work because with a more complicated search space (more possible buttons and components and functionality) it's easier to create a good solution. Actually Flowers applications need to be easier to make than e.g. GTK applications.
Gemini was supposed to be able to give us a better user experience because of the compromises it made. But it didn’t.
I think the issue with Rails (and its or Ruby's philosophy in general) is that you end up with decisions like `.count` / `.size` / `.length`
Having all of them, so that whatever you type works: good.
All of them having slightly different implementations and performance implications: bad.
It's easy in this example to say, "oh they should just all alias eachother" but that's not the real issue. The issue is that when you're in the business of creating shorthands and aliases, and you have two different, similar, operations, they both get shorthands that don't communicate the differences.
I think if you want to be lax in using the interface, you have to be extraordinarily disciplined when creating the interface, or be satisfied with undisciplined programs, which is what most of the Ruby community does.
There's a distinction between a function that delegates its continuation to another function, and one that doesn't. I wonder if it's
possible to formalize this and reject it. It's almost always incorrect.
I guess the rule is: if the last thing that your function does is call a different function, you should inline that call. But there are exceptions.
I just want to apologize again for not building WhisperMaPhone in a language that allows me to distribute reproducible builds.
Every five f***ing minutes someone has a super special unique use case that definitely needs an entire feature to be added to the Zig
programming language to save 1 assembly instruction call.
> the extra mfence [assembly instruction] cant be expected to have no cost, but ive not set up a benchmark
Factor meals are like "Roasted Garlic Chicken with Garlic Green Beans" or "Garlic Herb Chicken with Roasted Green Beans" or
"Truffle Butter Chicken with Garlic-Roasted Green Beans."
I just can't use Safari any more man, Twitch is just too buggy. The video playback is just not there. The clipper doesn't work at all.
4 VAULTS IT HAPPENED. THIS IS INSANE.
=> https://thoughts.learnerpages.com/?show=b037fbd5-5de0-4ee7-879b-7ec87c56612b
Edit: we got 4th; Sands is crazy.
Welcome to my realistic fps. If you get shot, your character is permanently dead. You can't play the game ever again.
MikeMcQuaid dared me to justify this bug so I'm digging through the Homebrew source. I'm up to three bugs found.
I think the thing that makes me so wickedly good at programming is that I'm good at the large scale and the small scale. I'm good at seeing
all the pieces connect to each other in the system, and I'm good at recognizing when you have an unnecessary if statement.
Good morning gang. Trying to convince the Homebrew maintainer to support my insane workflow this morning.
Sometimes I feel like Matilda. Like when I was a kid I pretty much had superpowers and now that I have a full time job that uses 100% of my
mental capacity I feel like a normal person.
The thing that drives me crazy about non-Apple fans, is that they INSIST that the only reason to buy an Apple product is stupidity. My whole
life I’ve been told I’m an idiot for liking Apple products because the fricking whatever hype android phone of the week is objectively better and Apple is just marketing. And there’s no ATTEMPT to understand or emphasize with me at all.
From today’s HN thread.
> This seems to somehow work on normal people
Someone else posted a video cussing out a strawmanned iPhone purchaser for 4 minutes. “Oh you used the r-slur to describe the iPhone users, argument won.”
This is a generalization because I have plenty of friends in tech that are not iPhone/Apple users because and I’m able to be friends with them because they recognize that there are some advantages to Apple products and recognize that I’m a human being capable of making and forming my own honest informed opinion.
What I’m getting at is that you don’t have to agree. You can disagree as vehemently as you want. But in repeating me as a person you have to put a tiny bit of thought into empathizing with why I might hold the position/opinion I do.
I was at a programming meetup the other weekend and an Apple user dropped some super oddly specific comment about how Apple has the best performance to energy efficiency of any desktop right now, and the windows/linux guy with his laptop brand that I’ve never heard of and his external mouse that he pulled out of his bag is like, ‘that’s not true.’ If you never let your opposition score a point that’s not a debate, that’s verbal abuse.
The iPhone user’s argument strategy, on the other hand, is digging through the entire list of iPhone features until you find one that Android doesn’t have and saying “iPhone is better because I care about this one oddly specific thing.” I’m not saying iPhone users are better at defending their phone choice. I’m saying you can’t take an argument like that head-on.
This is where the iPhone users are:
> This phone [iPhone Air] has the highest screen area to weight ratio except for the Galaxy S25 Edge.
We’re inventing metrics for second place. But the Android users refuse to give any ground whatsoever:
> And this is good or matters to customers because?
Com’n man. He’s invented a consumer who cares about second-best-screen-area-to-weight-ratio, you don’t need addition justification. “Um, actually, explain to me why second-best-screen-area-to-weight-ratio is a good thing.” The issue is that the android argument stems from 2009 when the iPhone was not popular in terms of marketshare. The Android fans are imitating an argument style that argues that Apple products shouldn’t exist, because in 2009 the Apple fans were equally annoying but they’re arguing that it makes sense for some people to buy iPhones. And the Android users who have the most market share are arguing that iPhones shouldn’t exist and Apple should go back to making computers. In 2025 that’s flipped but the Android users are still arguing iPhones shouldn’t exist, instead of arguing that only some people should use iPhones. I will concede that if you want a folding phone you should get an Android phone. If you want customizability you should get an Android phone. I want the phone with the second highest screen to weight ratio. “No you don’t you’re lying you’re a sheep you’re an Apple user you’re r***** you’re buying it for the status symbol you’re buying it for brand.” Ah you got me. But is there any reason I could give? No. There’s no reason for anyone to ever buy an iPhone unless they have mental issues.
> Lighter == better, thinner == cooler.
Okay that’s pretty simple. You can’t argue with that.
> What? absolutely not. Larger phones have the space for vapor chambers and better cooling tools. Thinner means you just get a piece of metal in direct contact with your CPU and you pray it can take out enough heat.
> that wouldn't be the first time the Apple distortion field makes people say stupid things.
Ah, you got me. It’s the Apple distortion field. I’m just not right in the head.
The thing that’s funny about the “fashion” take is that I literally don’t care about being seen with the phone. Never in my life has that been something I’ve thought about. But I think it comes from the fact that I do want the phone to look good because I’m looking at it. I’d rather get a Mac mini than a System 76 meerkat because the Mac mini looks better. But the Android fans somehow insert this idea that the only reason you would ever want something to look good is for someone else. And I understand thinking that about the actual fashion world (you’re obviously still wrong) but no one talks about getting a computer to make them look nicer. Apple nerds are still nerds.
Anyways I have a problem because I internalize all criticism even when it’s not directed at me or is inaccurate. Same programming meetup, someone laughed in my face for using Python, “try doing reproducible builds”, IT’S A WEBSITE.
Manifold can be really interesting and engaging when there's a really interesting question. But there just aren't that many questions that
are interesting, at least to me. A lot of questions that hinge on chance, or depth knowledge in a field, or one person's decision. It's not that I can't generate a probabilistic estimate of the likelihood of these events, it's that my confidence in those estimates is so low that my estimate is completely uninteresting.
When writing fundraising marketing material, don't answer the question "why should I give you money." Answer the question, "why should I
give you $1,000 instead of $10?" (Or maybe you don't need $1,000, but plug in what the amount is that you need.)
I’ve been on Lobsters for only a little while, but it seems much more toxic than HN. Which is really weird.
> “Tiny self-contained software”. Huh? What are you even on about here? Do you think million line projects are tiny? Ones which do use numerous third party dependencies? And all written in Odin? And even the Odin compiler itself is not “tiny” and has loads of stuff.
> I’m sorry but your argument makes little sense and misses the point of the argument being presented, and your hypothesis is just flat out wrong.
This reminds me of like deathaxe’s tone. I think it’s a rhetorical device where you create a sentence fragment off of the previous sentence fragment. “And all written in Odin” is a sentence fragment on its own. It simultaneously builds on the sentence fragment before “ones which do use third party dependencies” and the sentence after starts with a conjunction “and all written in…”. It gives the impression of a sputtering furious person.
Whether or not it’s meant this way, I find it hard to engage with rationally.
Here’s another quote from a different user on the same thread:
> You know what the iOS App Store is? Yeah I just blew your mind. Just extended the analogy right there. You could talk for hours about this.
Obviously very different in terms of tone, but note the sentence fragment, “Just extended the analogy right there.”
XKCD 3117 (replication crisis) is really fricking good, but I can't help but feel like it would be even better without the first panel
Could do it as two panels:
> "Over a decade into the replication crisis, we wanted to see if today's studies have become more robust. Unfortunately, we found exactly the same problems."
> Replication crisis has been solved!
`assert`s are a debugging tool. I love Zig's asserts because they're an effect debugging tool and debugging is really important.
But asserts are also loved by defensive programming advocates that argue that every component should assume that every other component is behaving poorly. And that's bad engineering.
jojosolos might be the coolest mcyt'r because she's just friends with the entire community. Name another player who has been on Hermitcraft,
lifesteal, and ranked.
The reason semantic programming is important and powerful is that the semantic meaning of the code is limited by the human’s capacity for
understanding complexity. Since the semantic meaning is defined as “what does the person mean when they ask for this?” the answer has to be simple enough for a human to describe. And so implementing that meaning as closely as possible means that you’ve limited the possible complexity of the system.
Yeah, I can't figure out what the issue with Rancher is. It's hanging doing something but I don't know what. The esbuild build sometimes
hangs. Going to switch back to docker. Ugh.
Don't have more time to debug this but this definitely is an issue with our proprietary build.js which calls esbuild not esbuild itself.
HermitCraft season 10 ending announced by JoeHills on LinkedIn. That's the JoeHills difference.
I thought Monsters vs. Aliens was funny as a kid but there were a lot of jokes that went over my head oh my. Some good fricking bits.