Thoughts
Okay so I ran the numbers for my 2022 music roundup back in December, but never posted anything about it. It was mostly the same artists as
last year.
=> https://thoughts.learnerpages.com/?show=7f77fad3-e811-4308-9242-2ee9dd5659ca Last year's music roundup.
The one interesting datum that popped out was that Watsky was in my top 10 artists, despite the fact that he has only three songs in my music library.

Oh yeah, I decided .bind is cursed, you should just create a wrapper function. (I'm particularly talking about using it to curry.)
Reposted the Gemini posts to Rigby. Thanks to Luke for recovering them after the downtime.
I didn’t proofread them again so hopefully they’re legible.
I still plan on open-sourcing this at some point, but I have secret keys in version control and text on the About page.
I’m leaning towards CC0, but I don’t want to public domain my writing.
The logical part of my brain is more logical than the normal person's. But the illogical part of my brain is less logical than the illogical
part of other people's brain.
Someone in the Vivaldi Discord made the mistake of linking to Min browser, and I'm very impressed.
Apparently the search page on here `-term` to remove `term` from the search results. Huh. Advantages of using a pre-baked search library Ig
Some Technoblade fans are wishing Techno more subscribers. ('Here's to 11 million.') They don't understand. Unless I'm mistaken, if Techno
continues with Youtube, it will be either because of his love of it or for the money. Not for further subscribers. He'll give us the second elbow reveal, but I suspect he'll take a long break after that.
Jane Street looked at OCaml, and was like, 'eh cool language, std lib's lacking' and then they re-implemented the entire standard library.
I think you have to realize that Tech is a bubble.
The number of Computer Science majors can't and won't increase exponentially.
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.
The name for this website is "Thoughts" or whatever, but the name for this project is "WhisperMaPhone" (e.g. in Git),
which is the name of the tube that The Once-ler uses to talk through in the original Lorax book.
Chrome fanboys explaining why Safari shipping CSS `:has` in January, 5 months before Chrome, doesn't count as "leading."
"IT IS STILL 100 SECONDS TO MIDNIGHT"
=> https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/timeline/
Climate change is as concerning to people now as nuclear war was 70 years ago. The former is much less concerning to me than the latter.
So Cohost doesn't allow you to use <style> elements, so you can't create keyframe animations, because you can't define `@keyframe` inline.
But inside an svg you can create a `style` tag, define a keyframe animation, and apply it to an element. Then you can base64 encode the svg and use it as a background image. Allowing you create looping animations in inline CSS. Woohoo.
I fricking lost my beautiful poetry. "The Sound of the Universe" eludes me.
Too late for Rigby, too early for Thoughts. Too long for Twitter. And I can't find it on Tumblr.
Because gemini doesn't support compression, it actually transmits roughly twice as much data as the normal HTML version of this page.
I'm sick of Hugo and want to go back to Jekyll but the <10ms compile times are addicting. Jekyll feels like I'm compiling C now.
Even in the areas where I may not be an order of magnitude off of society's expectations, I'm an order of magnitude off of my own.
Firefox has a feature called alternate style-sheets, which allows websites to provide multiple stylesheets and users to select between them.
Theoretically, I could use this to provide you, my reader, with optional themes. But the problem is I don't want to give up that control. I don't want you to pick what my site looks like. I want us all to suffer together when I chose a psychedelic color theme.
I'm tired of living here. I don't want to exist in the universe anymore! I want to exist in the alternate universe where jan Misali uploaded
toki pona lesson three in March like they said they were going to!
I should make more art.
A salamander sitting on a rock by the beach.
A submarine and a police car with a hat.
The Blaseball fan's struggle is to remove the L from the second position of words it belongs in
Like I understand that in the universe that we live it is considered commonly acceptable that the "correct" behavior of standard in is to
behave like a file. But in this case, as in many cases, I would like to treat it like a string, and I don't understand why that's not an option. Yes I understand what the means and what that entails and I want a version of `Readable.toString()` that blocks until the stream has been read into a string because 99% of the time that is what I want to do with readable streams.
No posts on https://www.kqwq.me/thots in 3 days. It's like he missed that the point is to spam things quickly.
Yeah having a Moment
Everyone on Reddit hates me because I don’t support abolishing the church and everyone in the church hates me because I mostly enjoy using Reddit.
Of course that’s not true. Of course not everyone hates me. I know that.
But normally it’s like there’s a big voice in my head that makes sense and sometimes the small voice says or suggests things that clearly aren’t true and the big voice is like, no. But sometimes the big voice is saying that everyone hates me and the small voice is like, “obviously that’s not true”
Anyways I ate sometime, took some deep breaths, and walked around, and I’m feeling better.
Become Catholic, become pope, start a crusade, conquer Istanbul, rename it to Constantinople. This is a joke.
According to stackoverflow commenter blueberryfields The Unlicense isn't legally sound in Germany and you shouldn't use it!
All these arguments against public domain licenses seem to boil down to 'the license wasn't written by my lawyer' or 'it's impossible to public-domain code' or 'no one's ever proven in court that this license works.'
It's like, if you assume that no one else is acting in good faith and your goal is to avoid a lawsuit by whatever means necessary, then I don't know what you want from me. If you're going to assume that I'm going to try to sue you, and that the judge and jury are going to misinterpret anything I say now to hurt you in the future, then I don't know what I can say to convince you otherwise.
Like literally, The Unlicense is like 'you can use this code for any purpose' and people are like, 'I don't trust that, stackoverflow commenter blueberryfields said that's not a legal disclaimer under German copyright law.'
I'll update this post with the username of the actual stackoverflow user later, it wasn't blueberry but it was something like that. Edit (9:43): It was "blueberryfields"
If I had a nickel for every time a girl told me I was autistic and should get tested, I’d have two nickels. Which isn’t a lot but it’s weird
“Getting lost is not always a bad thing. One might even consider misdirecting a stranger for his own good”
(Vladislavić 17)
I really wish Lite or Lite XL was good. The problem is that they start by building the UI/rendering from scratch, and it's just not polished
The problem with the school system is that it is blind to enthusiasm.
In the real world, attitude matters. But we don’t test for it in school.
Maybe this isn’t a problem, but it certainly seems weird now that I’m thinking about it.
I really like the zlib license. I might move to that over the Unlicense for my public domain things.
I want to see what an impractical computer looks like. I want to see, with our current hardware limitations, what a computer designed for
the love of it, would be.
=> https://thoughts.learnerpages.com/?show=06def988-b93a-496d-9523-6b4cac77416c
This is also true of modern technology in general.
The gosh people on Reddit, can't make it more than 3 comments into a thread before someone has made a snarky comment about how Trump is
authoritarian, implying that Biden is not. Like, in what world is Biden not authoritarian?
Pure functional programming is too much like pure OOP. It's just not flexible enough and it ends up making data flow more complicated.
I feel bad for the nvm maintainer. Because he's strongly opinionated that nvm should be written in bash. And I respect his opinion, but he's
wrong. And he has to deal with people coming in and telling him all the time that he should rewrite nvm in literally any language other than bash. And he has to explain to people that he actually really enjoys maintaining a 4,000+ line, single file, terribly slow, shell script.
Is there anything to indicate we're going in cycles other than repetition? Maybe we're jumping around randomly.
This might be my new favorite Chromium bug.
=> https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=916460
First reported to Brackets in 2012
=> https://github.com/adobe/brackets/issues/2419 adobe/brackets #2419
Most recently reported to VS Code 12 hours ago
=> https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/153061 vscode/issues #153061
Brackets, Atom, and VS Code blame Electron, Electron blames Chromium. Chromium blames macOS.
=> https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/1669 atom/atom #1669
=> https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/2617 electron/electron #2617
I feel like there's a lesson here but I don't know what it is (besides from "complex software is bad"). Maybe "vertical integration is good"?
I’m at 1,409 posts here. 24 are over 1000 characters, with the longest being
The fact that I've lost respect for so many other people means that I've lost a lot of respect for myself and I assume that other people
don't respect me.
I have already significantly violated The Guidelines.
It was for a reason I would argue is reasonable; I made a good faith attempt to follow them. That being said, it was still my fault. I'm still unhappy. If I can turn my life around at this point it is going to very incredibly clutch.
The SCP wiki has started fricking adding all sort of JS and cosmetic weirdness. The content! It's not about anything else!
You don't understand me until I'm comfortable enough with you that, when walking with you, I move as if I'm alone.
When I'm alone and I need to move from one place to another, I move like a character in a musical crossing the stage. You could call it running, or skipping, or dancing, but that none of those would be quite accurate.
There's something here.
Why did I buy PLTR? What was I actually thinking?
This is the problem with investment, waaay too long of a feedback loop.
Edit: I just realized that this is tempered by the fact that PLTR is a cheap stock, so I don't actually have any significant investment in PLTR.
I almost forgot about that time everyone used 🅱️ in their memes for like months until the mods of /r/dankmemes got sick of it and banned it
Instantly 🅱️illed the meme.
I don’t remember the last time I made a good decision.
I’m laying in an empty lot in the middle of the city.
Fairly big update today. Everything looks exactly the same, except for the few things that don't.
For some reason it’s easier for me to compliment people in Toki Pona. Normally I’m not very good at complimenting people.
Which is kind of ironic, since TP is supposed to be “polite by default.” Like, I don’t need to end all my sentences with “sina pona” but I want to.
sina mute li pona.
Okay fine fine, I'll keep the links, my word
It's just easy to leave them in place, just remove the top-level link to blog.
*Piranesi* is similar in a lot of ways to "The Most Dangerous Game".
Unrelated, one of the things that *Piranesi* does well is that it slips into the realm of fantasy enough to introduce different perspectives, which is something that a lot of literature fails to sell IMO.
Something just occurred to me. Gemini is different from simple HTML because you don't have to design the site yourself.
Conceptually, you can write simple HTML and end up with something that is similar to a page served over Gemini. And it might even be more difficult to set up a Gemini server than writing the HTML and CSS, especially if you're already familiar with those languages.
But at some point, HTML has this conception that you're responsible for laying out your own site, and choosing good colors, and positioning the elements on the page. Gemini frees you from that responsibility! Gemini's beauty is not that it is simple! Rather, the genius of Gemini is that it shifts the burden of complication to the client instead of embedding it into the document or the protocol.
Of course, this idea isn't Gemini's genius alone. We used to know this about the web. I don't know why we forgot. The issue with web browsers today is that I have to write CSS. If I don't, if I just serve an HTML page, it looks bad.
I need image support on here. I don't want them inline, sounds intrusive. I guess I could link to them. We'll see. Twitter for links for now
I did start rewatching Etho's HC season 7, an episode a day. Binge-ing faster than that starts to get stale.
Wow, I just had a weird shapes-are-an-illusion, moment.
Like, I can say I≠l, those are different Ascii characters with different binary representations. But in real life, handwriting, how do I know I've written the correct thing?
I’ve said before that ads are allowing someone with goals completely different from yours to come in and design, literally design, a part of
your product. That something you'd never do if you’re trying to make the best product possible.
The other day my allergies were really bad, so my nose was running, and I was wearing a mask. Let me tell you, not fun.
I tried to turn off the pop-up boxes in VS Code when you have hover over something, and it kind of worked, but now there's an empty box.

It's like, when I created *The Imperfections* except I can't even bring myself to break down the problems. It's just, the first item on my
TODO list is: "Make every piece of software in the world perfect."
I complained about my computer being too slow so my company upgraded me to a 2.6 GHz 6-Core i7 MacBook Pro <3. But like switching to esbuild
would have made more of a difference.
Mailing the Gemini mailing list at 2 am. I've never interacted with a mailing list before. What could go wrong?
Uhhg. My sites are just such a mess.
I’m trying to remember how the Gemini version of MatthiasPortzel.com works. I think what I need to do is re-write it to be static like the HTTP version, then I can throw out Astronomical Theater. But I would still have to hack together static file support in Jetforce.
This might be the sunk cost fallacy, but I just can’t see how it’s easier to reconfigure everything with a different Gemini server than it is to fix astronomical theater, which already does everything that I want, at least in theory. Especially since I have such esoteric requirements.
One of my co-worked committed a function that takes a value, and returns a stable version of that value. How does it
know when to update the value? Well, um, there's a useRef, and useMemo and um those things are used to make things stable, so uh, the result is definitely stable, just trust me bro.
Edit (4:40): I asked him about it and his reply included "just some more garbage code from yours truly." This guy is like 10 years my senior; I feel bad.
Django doesn't have default templates for signup, login, reset password, etc. It has the code for that, but it's not a frontend framework,
it doesn't even give you basic HTML implementations. Which is frustrating because I really don't want to build logic to check if passwords match again, I want to build my actual application.
Unfortunately, progress in the area of full-stack frameworks is depressingly slow. The only frameworks I can think of that will handle user authentication for you (including default pages), are Redwood, ASP.NET, and that's all. Rails doesn't by default but there's a library (devise) that does everything you want.
Looking at the devise feature list makes it clear how much you really need.
* authentication (e.g. login page)
* session management (setting cookies)
* password reset (email, etc)
* registration (sign up page, confirm passwords meets requirements, email confirmation, etc)
* user management (the ORM-level user object)
* account deletion
2FA and third party auth providers (e.g. Oauth) are things that make sense to be handled by plugins. Plus lots of other settings (e.g. locking account after invalid attempts), some that are assumed.
Anyways. Django does some of those things. Rails needs devise to do them. I haven't used other frameworks to know, but I feel confident saying most frameworks aren't wide reaching enough to cover all of them. But I don't understand why not. Why should I have to re-write any of that?
People explaining UDP/TCP are like, 'TCP orders your packets, UDP doesn't. UDP stands for Unreliable. UDP is bad, TCP is good.'
*Always more nuance.*
In Matthias's JS style-guide, you only use arrow functions for pure functions that are a single expression. No side-effects and no brackets.
I hate that driving requires my feet right now.
Just because I’ve been walking all day, normally I am in favor of more foot-based interfaces.
I think the Alphabet creation/split really killed the culture at Google.
I have no evidence to back this up of course. But it seems like Google had this great culture of experimentation.
I'm just thinking back, Google did Google Maps in 2005 at a time when they were a *much* smaller company.
Now they have a much larger budget, and they're not doing the same types of things. I think part of that is that Alphabet exists and Google has been relegated to handling the day-to-day operation of existing products. Google's not supposed to branch out and do self driving cars or anything radically different. On the flip side, Alphabet is the *parent* company. They're bigger and so they have to be operated like an investing firm. They don't have a "culture of experimentation"—they're trying to diversify a portfolio.
I think Google would be in a lot better place today if they had created an R&D subsidiary instead of a holding company.
It's like, I don't think anyone would have a problem with there being a function to convert an object to a JSON string and another function
to convert an object to do JSON serialization but return the object hash before stringification. The problem, where I have a problem, is that one of them is called `.to_json` and the other is called `.as_json`. Yeah.
This is my empire.
This is art created by someone with something to lose.
You and me are in this together. We're doing something.
Characters are just single-length symbols. Strings are lists of symbols of any length. Wouldn't that be weird.
The thing that just tears me up every day is that I enjoy writing. I have things to say, this website is my proof. But no one is interested
in listening to me. I want people to listen to me. My love language is you listening to me.
I'm afraid of other people. Like, obviously in a superficial way, but also in a deeper way. Where I assume that other people are different.
I would switch to Linux if it was better but it's just not.
I'm leaning more and more towards making my own OS.
I think not having the ability to support any "normal" software and expecting everything to be designed as an integrated part would actually be really interesting. That's what Apple software is supposed to be but in practicality that advantage is lost by the time you're using Vivaldi and and Atom and Python.
In particular, what leads to 95% of bugs in software is the exponential number of configurations. Every setting increases the number of possible combinations of settings exponentially. So if I didn't have any settings and only had to support one configuration—my configuration. I think I could eliminate a large number of bugs. Of course, it's next to impossible to get there, but that's a different point.
Accidentally ended up on a toll road and had to use my 2019 War in the Pacific quarter. Kinda devastated.
Okay but seriously, the sapling web interface is incredible. I know there are GUI git tools, but my impression is most of them are bad.
This shooting pain in my heart kind of concerns me.
I might be having a heart attack. Then again, I would probably be dead by now, it's been an hour. Maybe it's an hour long heart attack. That would be fun.
Safari's devtools are so buggy. It's a shame, they're so good.
I mean maybe it's not possible for anyone but Chrome to make a web browser anymore.
Orwell is interesting because it’s not partisan in the traditional sense. But it is super individualist. The message of 1984, directly, is
that big government is bad. But the message is also that you can only trust yourself and everyone else has been ‘corrupted.’ And I don’t think it’s just that they’ve been corrupted by the government. I think it’s that they’ve been corrupted by not being you.
Sources are the scene where Winston talks to the older prole who says the current time is much better. And the gaslighting scenes in Animal Farm, where it’s not just the pigs, but the other animals, gaslighting.
This wicked generation does not deserve a sign of God. I pray that the Lord would have mercy and reveal Himself to stubborn anyways.
Kind of jamming with my new AirPods Max. I'd never really used over-the-ear noise-cancelling headphones before.
'grats to Techno on 10 million. The man has legitimately aiming for this since he was like 15. He can do anything he sets his mind to.
I want to see if I can find the video where Techno hits 100,000 subscribers and says "only 1% of the way there." But I don't *really* feel like binging all of Techno's Skywars content tonight.
I forgot how bad my website set up was. The absolute path to the certificate file for the Gemini version of Thoughts is hard-coded into the
source code for MatthiasPortzel.com
I'm cold.
And alone. The snow falls lazily outside. Snow hasn't been forecast since a week ago, but it comes anyways.
My mind taunts me with threats of something better.
I went to the store this morning and got food for the week.
I'm hungry.
The chill air keeps me on edge. Relaxation is a memory.
I still have to unpack, and to put in a load of laundry. I have the strength to do it, but I haven't yet.
I don't trust myself. I feel dirty.
The showerhead here is quite erratic. I would like to make a trip to the store to replace it, but someone took my car.
I can't leave.
I am, at least, awake.
A Docker container's lack of persistence really isn't appealing to me, but I do appreciate the super quick start times.
It's really nice to be able to `docker run -it alpine /bin/sh` without having to download or flash Alpine or anything.
No functional language survives first contact with the user.
This is part of what makes React, or even Elm, so appealing. The functional bits are super useful for say, describing UI elements.
But while React handles updating okay, it struggles with updating dynamically from user input.*
* The example here is a textbox, a button, and a div, and anything entered into the textbox shows up in the div when the button is pressed. JS, piece of cake.
```js
document.querySelector("button").addEventListener("click", evt => {
document.querySelector("textarea").textContent = document.querySelector("textarea").value;
});
```
React,* Elm, the examples aren't worth including here. They're too long.
*You could golf a React example to a similar length as JS, because React *is* JS. You can access another component in the global scope and call .setState on it. But that's not idiomatic React, that's using React to render and writing JS same as you normally would. React, according to the docs and "good practice," state/information should never flow down, and should never flow sideways. This is an example designed to force React to flow state info sideways, but that's not something React is good at. Here's the React example: https://ourjseditor.com/program/VVr6PE. I haven't written one for Elm, that would take too long with my current knowledge of Elm.
Please do not try to contact me.
Please contact me with any questions.
I just want to be alone.
I just want to avoid hurting anyone.
I'm playing chess but everyone else is playing checkers. But like, the game is actually checkers and I'm just overcomplicating it.
Decided I'm not going to shut this site down, since it's cool. But I might have to pivot the content. Might start posting poetry or bits of
story of something.
No matter how ambitious I aspire to be, at the end of the day, if given the choice between writing code to save the universe and reading a
good book, I'll choose the book.
Seriously my phone goes in my hand so I want it to be smaller than my hand, and my hand goes on a mouse, so I want the mouse to be bigger
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)
"Learning how to program is hard but most people can do it. There are two requirements, really: emotional regulation and patience."
=> https://trashmoon.com/blog/2022/reflections-on-12-years-at-mapbox/
Can't remember if I'm posted this before and I'm too lazy to search.
Hello people from Hacker News. Check out the About page understand what's going on here.
lolololololol
Do other people not feel the need to fix all of the world's problems? I suppose not. I suppose they blame the problems on other people. Well
the buck has to stop somewhere. It might as well stop with me. It might as well all be my fault. It's probably not, but some of it is my fault. I can't fix all of it, but I can fix all of it, and I need to fix as much as I can. And I can't do that so I guess it's my fault.
All I'm saying, is that at the end of the fifth *Fablehaven*, when Venessa says, "The only way to be safe from the Sphinx is if he ceases to
exist" maybe someone should have paid attention…aside from making a comment about her appearance. Might have been a good idea…
Even when I was a kid, I wondered, why didn't websites just load a big list of all of their content? I really like that this website
questions the convention of having 10 items on the page and then a new page. Obviously, it's partly done out of laziness, but I do love having all the content on one long page, even if it's impractical to scroll through sometimes.
I finished the book. Took me about 10 hours from start to finish. I don’t think I ate dinner. Help
Oh yeah I re-read the third Fablehaven. The series exists somewhere between quality and meaninglessness. Like a dry bread.
Vivaldi crashed on me earlier. Spark crashed just now. This is pain.
All I want is perfect software.
Okay okay okay okay okay.
I had the thought. "you know what ChatGTP's dry, academic, English paragraphs remind me of? The GNU info manual."
So I asked ChatGTP to attempt to reproduce part of the manual for Emacs's Info reader.
ChatGTP is kind of verbose, so I'm going to skip over some low-stakes filler.
ChatGTP opens with "Certainly! The Info file reader is a built-in feature of GNU Emacs that allows you to read documentation files in the Info format." This is true, and proves that it knows what I'm talking about.
"To use the Info file reader, first open a file in the Info format by typing `C-h i` (that is, press and hold the `Control` key and then press `h` and `i` simultaneously)."
* A couple of things here. First `C-h i` is the right command to open Info in Emacs.
* Second, `C-h i` is input as holding control and pressing `h`, then pressing `i`. Pressing all three of them simultaneously, as ChatGTP would have me do, is almost nonsensical.
* Third, the Info manual, when it introduces key strokes in the early parts, uses the construction of command-in-short-form, and then the explanation in parenthesis immediately afterwords. The corresponding section in the manual, literally, is "type `C-h i` (Control-h, followed by i)". And in other sections the manual uses "that is," for example, "type `M-TAB`—that is, press and hold the META key and then press TAB."
Okay next, we get a bulleted list of commands (keys and their possible actions). It's beautiful. The GNU Info manual authors have never created a bulleted list in their life. It's so much easier to read than the actual manual I'm dying. For example (Chat GTP):
* `n`: Move to the next node (section of the manual)
* `p`: Move to the previous node
I was going to put the corresponding section in the actual manual here, but it's too long. How do you make those 2 bullet points take 300 words? I don't know, but the GNU Info manual pulls it off.
=> https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_mono/info.html#Getting-Started
ChatGTP then rattles off a bunch of other keyboard shortcuts that are wrong. (n and p are right, but it claims `m` "show[s] the contents of the current node", which is nonsensical.)
Anyways. The GNU Info documentation is still the winner in my mind for dry, unhelpful English.
Also, ChatGTP is clearly doing a lot more memorization than it looks like. Like it can't be compressing information that much. There might not literally be a place in memory where it's storing the string `C-h i`, but it has to be pretty darn close.
One of my toxic traits is that I really enjoy assuming that you know what I'm talking about, even if I know that you don't.
One of the reasons you don't really need copyright to protect code is because if you want to, you can just not distribute the source code.
I can render my markdown on the client side, where it takes 1.5 seconds, or on the server, where it takes 3 seconds. I hate this.
The issue is the images that I’m in-lining take forever to render as text on the client, and HTML layout has to finish before JS can run. So I was going to move it to the server, but the Python markdown library is just slow, to no one’s surprise. All software is bad, and anyone who says otherwise is trying to sell you software.
You need some sort of proof of work system with gleaning built in.
> When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not wholly reap the corners of your field, nor shall you gather the gleanings of your harvest. And you shall not glean your vineyard, nor shall you gather every grape of your vineyard; you shall leave them for the poor and the stranger: I am the Lord your God.
- Leviticus 19:9-10
I love talking to people after 9pm because I can use “I’m going to bed” to end the conversation. Normally I hate ending conversations.
This site uses ES6 JS
I don't know if I made that decision intentionally or not. Because like, I try to support no-JS browsers as best as I can, but I apparently don't try to support older browsers. It's weird.
Hopefully everything moves to server-side rendering soon :tm:
Please tell me Sentry doesn't actually use the regular expression that they claim to use to detect credit cards.
=> https://sentry.io/security/
Then search for "regular expression"
`1 2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-0-1-2-3-$`
Behold! A credit card number!
I had a dream that I was in a forest of metals trees that were Queen songs. There was a snake, and I grabbed the snake behind
the head, like you're supposed to, and the snake was also ranked bedwars all star player nohuh. And my grip slipped, and the snake scooted forward and was able to turn its head like 90º, but couldn't quite bite me. But I was worried that if I brought my other hand over, it would be able to bite me, and I couldn't, like adjust my grip to where I was holding it safely again without my other hand. So I'm just squeezing this snake behind the neck, pretty hard, because I don't want it to slip out. I considered just squeezing super hard and trying to kill it, to be safe, but that's very against the morals of the recreational snake hunting club that I'm in. Because if you kill all the snakes then you can't catch them anymore. And then I woke up.
Honestly it's so weird living with other people and getting to know them. One of my roommates has been to McDonalds "once or twice."
One of my roommates never lets her computer die. I'd sit in a McDonalds until my computer ran out of battery without thinking twice.
I'm sorry, I still can't get over how the GNU Info manual is so fantastically boring and instead of making it more consise they have the
audacity to include an italicized command to "please don't start skimming."
People get so fricking ticked-off about Safari on iOS only kind-of allowing you to side load apps. And they compare it to IE. And it's like
you clearly have never designed a website for an IE version before 9.
Oh no! Safari's IndexDB implementation isn't spec-compliant (as of 2016). I have to use a library to store large amounts of data persistently on my user's devices. My website can't send phone users background notifications! What ever will I do‽
And Firefox gets a pass because they invented tabs 10 years ago.
I love the number line in Wolfram Alpha results. Like yes I needed to know where this number is relative to other numbers next to it.
My eyes are so tired. I don't know if I didn't enough sleep last night or what. I'm not even that tired, it's just my eyes.
I flew into the sky and landed on a cloud. An angel asked me, “are you a real person?” To which I replied, “does the set of all sets contain
itself?”
I fell down through hoops, rings of gold held aloft by eagles. There are few eagles left now. When I rejoined with the earth it was warm. It spread out in all directions. The flea on my monitor cannot hear but can perceive the vast force that oversees all things.
A yellow plane slices through all things. A panic attack overtakes an elder in a small town in a flyover state. The whole world holds its breath for a moment, acknowledging, then moves on with the same pace.
Let's fricking go, ladies, it's an excuse to subclass `HttpRequest`!!!!
```py
class GeminiRequest(HttpRequest):
```
The thing about Blaseball is that it's not a game, it's a cultural event. And as long as you know about it, you are participating.
Confused? So is everyone else. You can learn more about Blaseball, but it's structured such that you're pretty much always confused. The people that don't know what Blaseball is, provided they know *of* it, are just as much participants as anyone else.
Honestly I think the most mind-blown I have ever been is the 4 and a half pages in G.E.B. describing the Supernatural Numbers.
I haven't even finished G.E.B. and I think I need to re-read it because I don't understand it.
The problem is that there aren't words in my head struggling to get out. My head is crammed full of emotions and ideas and transcribing them
is a chore. But I have to do it because otherwise the ideas, they would overflow and start spilling out sloppily.
“Hey There Delilah” is such a great song but the production/recording is so uninspired. Put some passion into it.
Edit: Plain White T’s is a rock group, and it’s like I can tell that the song could be a rock song, but it’s not. It sounds like you should be able to sing along to it like you can to “Sweet Caroline.”
VS Code JSX syntax highlighting broke on me. My JSX is valid but VS Code is failing to syntax highlight it because I'm doing fun things
Minimum reproduction example:
```jsx
function makeComponent() {
return (
{component: <div>Hello</div>}
);
}
export default function App() {
return <div className="App">{makeComponent().component}</div>;
}
```
This works and renders fine, but VS Code doesn't syntax highlight the first div.
I have a theory that Arch Linux is only good because you have to set it up. Like any computer is good after you set it up, it's just that
an Arch Linux install isn't usable until after it's been set up. Whereas, you can go years without setting up a Mac, and just rely on default behavior.
IRC is funny. I think it's in an Eternal September phase, where it's used by people that are desperate for software support, and senior devs.
I set up the The Lounge a little bit ago, which is an IRC client server, it connects to IRC servers for you and store messages, so that you get a traceback like a modern app. This is legitimately one of my problems with IRC. I don't want to have to leave an IRC client open, I don't use IRC at all. I just want to pop in and check it everyone once in a while.
I made corn bread last night and then left it on the counter and forgot about it. Morning after cornbread review:
8/10
Great sweetness, slightly moist, good texture. Could be warm, obviously, and has a little bit of that bitter aftertaste that a lot of cornbreads have.
Also it was made with an egg with a use-by date of Feb 1, so I think “fresh ingredients” is a scam propagated by the food companies to sell more food.
Winter 2021 Hytale update is all "we're far from done" & "we've been prototyping some fairly dramatic changes." I'm moving my release
estimate from late 2022 to 2024.
Oh my word I thought that was conservative. But somewhere else on their website they say "we no longer expect to be ready to launch Hytale before 2023 at the earliest, and it could very well take longer."
They were acquired by Riot in 2020, and the FAQ says
> Will this acquisition delay Hytale?
> We’re still aiming for Hytale to be playable by everyone in 2021.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that the acquisition has delayed Hytale. We'll be lucky to see it before 2025 at this point.
"Old, but I'm not that old / Young, but I'm not that bold / And I don't think the world is sold / On just doing what we're told."
Writing out captions twice because some of my friends are only on Snapchat and others are only on Discord.
Okay things that are not going on the TODO list:
[ ] - Go insane
[ ] - Eat chips
[ ] - aahahahhahahahhahahahhahahahha
[ ] - listen to breakcore
[ ] - Destroy the sound
[ ] - vomit
[ ] - keel over and die
[ ] - watch blaseball
[ ] - fix all the bugs on the blaseball website
[ ] - Go insane
Other people just don't feel real. I think it's because I've spent so much time online, my conception of what it means to be a real person,
what thoughts and feelings you have
no that's not it.
(Oh yeah side note, almost any time that I end a line without punctuation, I haven't forgotten punctuation, I'm indicating that I'm cutting myself off, stopping that train of thought. I use it in several places, including the About page. The exception is of course when I hit the character limit on the first line and move to the second like nothing happened.)
A fair amount of it is that I'm bad at talking. So I end up listening more than interacting with people—which is fine on Twitter, but does feel fake in real life.
I want conversations to move quickly and feel fluid. But I think slowly. That's why I actually enjoy talking to some people. When I'm talking to some people, I can keep the conversation on topics that I'm very comfortable talking about. Common ground like past shared experiences or programming or a specific kind of fluff. But that's like it. That's the limit of what I can talk quickly about.
I think it just takes time, with new people, for me to loosen up. To learn what things they're going to react positively or negatively towards. And right now I have no one in that sweet spot.
Okay, one more Thought on *Fat Vampire*, Adam Rex, before I stop posting about it.
A lot of the times when I read a bad book, I start thinking about ways to improve it. But the premise of *Fat Vampire* is so problematic that there's just so little you can do with it. The premise is basically: "sucking blood from someone is sexual. Wouldn't it be screwed up if someone who doesn't have sex, like a 15-year-old nerd boy, got turned into a vampire?" And the problem is that you end up with this incel-like prompt where sex is basically required for this 15-year-old to live. (He can suck blood from animals, and does for a while, but it leaves him very weak, not able to live a normal life. Now you might be thinking, "is sucking the blood from animals not-sexual." And of course it is. He's unwilling to suck blood from a pig, but enjoys sucking blood from a deer a lot because a deer is sexy.) I can't do a logical breakdown of this book. Every person and thing that he sucks blood from throughout the book is problematic. There's no good way out.
Honestly, screw it, the one thing you needed to change was to make these adults. He would still be a jerk and the characters would all still be dumb, but like at least then it's an adult abusing his girlfriend. Instead of a 15-year-old abusing another 15-year-old.
I don't know what Rex was going for.
Okay okay. The inside flap calls it "satirical." Maybe it's a fine book and I'm just operating on a level far beneath it. I guess? Like, maybe the point is that the main-character is a jerk and you should use him as role model as how not to live your life. And it's a satire of incel-culture. In which case I'm having exactly the reaction I'm supposed to. But there's nothing in there that implies that the author disagrees with it. It's not overboard enough to imply to me that it's clearly all a joke. This is seriously the best I can do. The best way to fix this book is to make it worse so you can justify the satire label. Maybe it's a satire of *Twilight* and I haven't read *Twilight*.
Aging up the characters also would have helped my expectations a lot. It's described as Young Adult, but it has a *lot* more language and other adult themes than most stuff in that category.
I just read a couple of Goodread reviews. Most of them agree with me that it's bad, but one or two mention the "second level" that I missed. That is to say, the book tees up to be about a nerdy, awkward, boy gaining confidence and getting a girl. And it fails if you expect that. But there's another view that the main character is an unreliable narrator, and the story is actually about how he goes from being a weird jerk to be a bully. Which is certainly an interesting perspective. But I think Rex lays it on too thick, and it comes off as "nice boy is suddenly being mean to everyone for no reason."
Honestly, I don't think Rex knew what he wanted to do with it. I think it's like at half a layer of irony. He's kind of aware that what he's describing is weird, but he's not willing to commit to it being a weird book. So it all just comes off as awkward. It's like he thought that by writing a bad vampire book he could attract both people who liked vampire books and people who didn't.
RFC 4329 defines the MIME type for Javascript to be `application/javascript`. The HTML spec defines it to be `text/javascript`.
The internet is broken.
Hawtie and Hawtey are two different ranked bedwars players. (I'm pretty sure.)
Ranked Bedwars is like such a small community it seems like a wild coincidence.
I want to add like 4 more pages to this site but I can't fit more links across the top on mobile. Heck mobile design
To quickly recap some of my issues:
1. I know my problems are smaller than other people's; so I feel like it should be easy for me to deal with them.
2. I fault myself for having problems. Any problem (that was avoidable) also carries with it the weight of knowing that I wasn't good enough to avoid it.
3. I take criticism personally. Like 2, criticizing something I've made is both a criticism of the thing and a criticism of me, either that I haven't fixed it already or else that I wasn't smart enough to know that was a problem. (If I ask for criticism, I mean it. The biggest problem is when you criticize something I think is good. )
4. I'm a perfectionist. 1 problem is 1 problem too many.
As an example, I enjoy climbing. I bought climbing shoes, then scheduled myself to go climbing.
When the time came, I couldn't find my climbing shoes. ('I don't have my climbing shoes' is the first problem). Then I fault myself for losing them ('I lost my climbing shoes' is the second problem). I now feel the need to fix both of these problems, first finding the shoes and second ensuring I never lose the shoes again. Since I'm a perfectionist, I can't go climbing without my shoes. And I now have a systemic problem ('I lose things'). Combing that problem with my perfectionism means that (if I can't fix the systematic problem) I should never go climbing again (because I can't guarantee I won't lose the climbing gear). But wait, my brain can apply 2) to the systemic problem as well. I never should have bought the shoes in the first place. If I knew I was going to lose them, buying them would be a bad idea. And we can keep going. I should never buy anything again. I shouldn't go climbing. etc.
My brain does this all the fricking time. I hate it.
(I wrote this last night at the same time as everything else but didn't post it.)
I miss the park bench.
It gave Tom an opportunity to talk about his medium (some that he's very good about doing) in an informal setting.
Writing a React component that renders its Gemtext content. I can't decide if that's beautiful or cursed.
You’re trying to prove all toads are frogs? Idiot. Don’t you know that Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem states that under any system of
formal logical complex enough to prove toads are frogs will also include paradox? Logic is dead. Help by establishing a societal system for punishing people abusing toads.
I might pull the plug on the Gemini version of Thoughts and switch matthiasportzel.com over to static content served with agate.
I hate to be like, 'this is too hard,' especially when the design and the technical engineering are done. Like I know what everything needs to do. But it looks like making everything work is going to be another several hours, for little payoff.
It doesn't help that
* maintaining the Gemini version of the site slows down development, making it harder to iterate fun ideas, like changing the pagination system or importing tweets
* the Gemini version of the site is a different experience. It's better in some ways (I still love Gemini more than the web), but it doesn't (and will never) have the colors or the ability to link to Thoughts
I don't know, I really like the Gemini version of the site, it's something that I think it cool that I want to exist. But I don't use it, no one else uses it, and it's essentially another whole site for me to maintain. Especially since I'm writing some of the intermediary layers like astronomical theater.
You claim I’m not oppressed, yet when I put my retainer in my mouth for the first time in a month it hurts like hell. Checkmate liberals.
Guys be like, ‘the terrifying ordeal of being known’ and then base their identity on the success of a Khan Academy game from 5 years ago
that they never tell anyone about.
I guess if GitHub Copilot is like IntelliSense but it doesn’t just yell at me because of minor syntax errors or misconfigured settings,
that’s an improvement.
Using the hum of a computer's CPU to decode the secret key that it is using to encrypt a payload: https://www.cs.tau.ac.il/~tromer/acoustic/
Lapce (new text editor) has so many features and is so unpolished it's impressive.
It's a Xi front-end, which I'm a huge fan of.
I'm thinking it might be worth me forking it and literally just fixing bugs in it for the rest of my life and using it as a primary editor.
Because all the hard stuff is done. There's a language server client implementation and tree-sitter syntax highlighting all these languages, it's just like missing half the keyboard shortcuts that I expect. But there's a panel for customizing keyboard shortcuts.
Communicating over public social media is boring. I want to talk through shared private Google docs and private Twitter accounts and IRC and
mailing lists and iMessage and Gemini.
Carcinization gets a Wikipedia page and you’ll can’t stop yourself from acting like it’s the most important thing in the world.
Ladies, ladies, my Amazon package got here!! That’s a day after they shipped it, and 2 days before it was supposed to.
I think it got here this morning, but I didn’t grab it off the porch when I looked this morning, because I assumed it wasn’t here yet.
I feel like I have screamer death metal playing in the back of my head I'm trying to ignore it and drown it out with Fun.
Github changed their "issue" icon to a circle with a dot in the middle, and it looks so natural that I can't remember what it used to be,
and it annoys me. I think it was an "i" with a circle around it.
=> https://drewdevault.com/2020/03/18/Reckless-limitless-scope.html The reckless, infinite scope of web browsers
I don't like Drew DeVault. But he recognizes the issues with the web that many people do not.
Oh yeah I got tired of Emacs. I'm trying out sublime, but it's just not customizable enough.
It's one of those things. Sublime is *so close* to what I want. So much closer even then Emacs currently is. But I want command-d to delete the current line. in Emacs, I can write a lambda function to do that. In Sublime, I don't even know if it's possible.
```lisp
(global-set-key (kbd "s-d")
(lambda () (interactive)
(delete-region
(line-beginning-position)
(+ (line-end-position) 1))))
```
Also I realized like 50% of my editor requirements (like command-d to delete line) come from the ace editor on KA. But they seem reasonable.
Edit (:19): I think I can get very close to what I want in Sublime by binding a macro to a keyboard shortcut.
Fricking quality from SparkNotes, acknowledging Chronicles of Narnia as the iconic piece of literature that it is.
There are like 7 books. Aslan shows up like a handful of times. If you say that the theological references significantly impact your enjoyment of it, you sound like the conservative Christians who won't read Harry Potter because witchcraft is bad.
What if you had a room with a carpet that was like several inches thick. And ideally thicker in some places than others.
"More precisely, the set of all finite-length strings S together with the string concatenation operator * forms a free monoid (S, *)"
-The Julia documentation.
This language really was written by mathematicians
‘Have to sneak into a party’ is one of my absolute least favorite tropes.
If you think your characters need some space, some down time, give us that. That lets me relax as a reader as well. But the high-stakes party-heist masquerading as a chance for your characters to chat is somehow boring and stressful.
On the other hand, I legitimately want:
* People who choose software licenses to understand what that license is asking
* To comply with the letter of the rules of what I'm being asked to do
* People to understand that "free software" or "open source software" has very particular meaning and you can't just see code on GitHub and assume you can do whatever you want with it
There's a culture born out of the popularity of open source software that takes open source as the default. On the user side, this looks like people assuming that if code is on GitHub you can do whatever you want with it. On the other side, people+companies upload their code to GitHub and slap a license on it without understanding what rights they're giving up, and without wanting to enforce the terms. This the idea that a "open source license" really communicates "I'm not going to sue you," and this leads to "open source" being used to virtue-signal. When people use it to represent "giving code away for free," without understanding what they've legally said.
On the contrary, I think it's important that we remember that the default (under law) is zero freedom to distribute or modify. To quote the GNU GPLv2, "nothing else grants you permission to modify or distribute the Program or its derivative works. These actions are prohibited by law if you do not accept this License."
What Django calls a view, Rails calls a controller, and what Rails calls a view, Django calls a template.
Things I will never stop thinking about: The Adventures in Odyssey episode where they bust a child immigrant labor ring.
Adventures in Odyssey is like a children's Christian radio program, where they like learn biblical lessons. Except for "The Other Side of the Glass" arc.
When I say it's hard being a perfectionist I mean that I had to unplug my external monitor because the color profile on it was off.
Apparently there's no `Math.sum(a, b, […a, b])` in JS? What is this?
```js
(…args => args.reduce((acc, v) => acc + v, 0))
```
I moved the computer tower under my desk and I keep kicking it and causing the DVD slot to open.
And then going "I can't believe this computer has a DVD drive lol"
Forcing myself to eat food like this is some sort of game. (I’ve been asleep for the past two hours.)
Me and Saihttam and God and generic male narrator #1 and [redacted] have lived in together in my head for years but suddenly I realize that
there's a female voice in here with me and I'm going insane. Sexist.
I understand problems better than anyone else, quite frequently. Yet that only leads me to more eagerly conclude there is no solution.
Writing code for me is like a jigsaw puzzle. If I see two pieces that connect, I'm going to grab them off the table and put them together,
even if I don't have anything else that they connect to. So it's really weird to do code analysis on my programs before I'm done writing them, because they're not complete, and they're not even internally consistent.
(I don't want to sound like I'm the only one that thinks this. There's some really interesting work being done to try to design editors and type checkers around "holes." But it's all experimental for now.)
Honestly, I’ve been considering moving back to Twitter since I don’t think anyone reads this, but it’s just so perfect. The aesthetic.
I tried to do one Leetcode problem, and I think my code should work. And when I run it in Deno, it works. But in the Leetcode editor the
array spontaneously generates a null value in between the bottom of the while loop and checking the while-loop condition.
Also I haven't eaten anything in like 24 hours. I am having a wonderful day.
Javascript! Inferred names on anonymous functions are "now" a thing in ES2015, and no one bothered to tell me.
Okay, let me see if I can string together I am home. I am home. String else is outside. If there is a who’d I am not him okay that looks
like it’s going to be a know baby her sheep. Wow. Okay. So this is where we are. My brain is a network of ideas and connections between them. 12 is a number but is perhaps not the number that it appears to be. Oh my word. Uh
Thinking I'll change the background color in the light mode to `#FFFDFA`. Dark mode might go back to standard.
Not to flex but I get 246Mbps down/159Mbps up, over WiFi. (It goes down to 100/100 if Cloudflare WARP is on lol.)
I use Reddit in part out of nostalgia for 2016 me_irl, which was just amazingly high quality. 2020 Reddit is trash.
3 types of Redditors today:
- Doesn't care, wants some memes; Low effort content creation or re-posting.
- Compares everything to the ideal meme, nothing matches up. Tries to start new, obscure memes, but no one else is on board.
- Remembers good memes, knows today's memes aren't as good. Oh well.
It’s interesting to think about how there are no rules to the content I could post here, except for the minimum enforced by the government
The world will be worse off without Technoblade's dry humor and his passion for the game.
His dedication in getting 10 million subscribers, 9 years after he set his mind to it, is inspiring.
"Technoblade never dies"
This website does not work in SerenityOS browser. I think it doesn't support background color, so the text is all white-on-white.
I assumed that *The Phantom of the Opera* was like an 1800s opera. It's actually a 1910 book, or a 1986 musical, or a 2004 film
=> https://rubyonrails.org/doctrine Source: The Rails Doctrine
Transcript
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.
I still haven't solved formatting/markdown. I'm doing client side markdown ! I've been thinking about it for months.
The reason I don't make playlists is that it's really hard to get into the mindset that I was when I made the playlist so they don't stay
relevant.
I made a playlist years ago called "Electric Pop Hype" and it's fire but it's completely missing a bunch of songs and artists. But I don't feel confident about that to update it.
Parker MacMillian the first has unfathomable energy.
Like they just keep nerfing him, we’re on, what, IIIII. And he’s still cooler than he has any right to be.
Writing macros that expand to macro calls is normal. That's just recursion. But I've had my hands on Lisp macros for less than a week now
and I'm writing a macro that expands to a call to defmacro.
The Xi editor has been maintenance-only for a couple years now, but for some reason the xi Zulip room is popping off. It's turned into
a hub for discussing building GUI projects with Rust.
=> xi.zulipchat.com
Took a nice stroll this morning, barefoot, talking to myself and gesturing.
I’m surprised and lucky no one called the cops on me.
"I thought my way to greatness, I could claim this, but he gave me the brain."
-JT, Jon Bellion
I still kind of can't believe this website exists. Like, I just made it? And now it's here? Wild.
"I don't really make content, I'm more of a performance artist"
I think I may be in love with Dark. It's **so powerful**. So little boiler plate. 100% functionality. The Dark website is bad, don't listen
to it. They seem to think that Dark is a language, when it's a whole platform. "Build in Dark" should be "Build on Dark." They're hosting everything for free. It's insanity. I spent what, 8 hours on this website? I could have done it in half that with Dark, no joke. And it would have SSL.
I saw the new DnD movie last night. The first half was kind of cheesy but the ending was good.
One could write a very long essay on gender roles in that movie, but I am not qualified to do it.
I feel like I’m trying so hard. And I barely managed to pull myself out of bed this morning.
So tired.
I wonder to what extent I view other people merely as sources of novelty to fuel my novelty addiction.
I have 10+ years of muscle memory for macOS keyboard shortcuts; it shouldn't be surprising that it takes a bit for me to adjust to Linux.
There's totally a line in the Cloudflare WARP FAQ that implies that they're going to selectively give your IP to sites that pay them.
It's not "lucky" that the cup was empty. The cup wouldn't have tipped if there was water in it. This is physics.
I still hold irrationally strong feelings about characters from Brandon Mull’s Five Kingdoms.
I’m almost angry at the AO3 authors paring Mira/Jace. You’re wrong and you do not understand the characters the way I do. Mira/Cole is still my OTP.
When you have an idea what you're doing, a strictly-typed language can help you catch errors. When you have no idea what's going on, type
errors are so much less helpful than runtime errors.
Why am I such a bad writer? Why can't I write well?
I enjoy writing so much, but no one enjoys reading what I've written.
I had written like 250 words on Julia and comparing it to Thu and I didn't post it so it's gone. You're welcome.
The ignore cache button in the Safari dev tools just doesn't work?
Maybe this is what I was referring to when I said the Safari dev tools
were bad a little while ago. Going to try Safari Tech Preview, will update you.
Also doesn't work in STP. I'm wondering if I'm misunderstanding it when it says "resource was served from memory cache" or else "Disable Cache" with a checkmark.
Edit 5:41: Coming back to follow up: I think there was something else going on because I was getting data I thought was stale in three different browsers.
Always a bad day when you have to pull up the Chromium source code.
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1162276
(For the record, the issue in question is that in the following case Chrome *always* picks the ico favicon. I skimmed the Chromium source and can't tell why this is the case, but if there's an ico available I don't think it's possible to get Chrome to use the SVG.
```
<link rel="icon" href="/static/images/favicon.ico">
<link rel="icon" type="image/svg+xml" href="/static/images/favicon.svg">
```
)
I'm going to address it by not shipping a .ico. Sorry IE 8 or whatever.
Run on the JVM?
Get out.
It's that easy.
Bye Kotlin, bye Java. Yes Scala, I'm talking to you too, leave.
“Jesus said, ‘If my followers remain quiet, the very stones will cry out.’”
-Luke 19:40, paraphrased
I don't want to lay in my bed, but I end up laying in bed. I want to float through the sky or lay in a hammock or something.
gist.github.com has a notification bell at the top of the screen, but clicking it takes you to gist.github.com/notifications which 404s
Something about imports. It's common to have 20-30 lines of imports at the top of a file. I really like name-spacing as an alternative.
I finished my *Beyonders* re-read. It's wild, difficult to describe. Mull does very different things than some of his other books, and yet I
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.
Apparently learnerpages.com still redirects to a placeholder site? Just updated it to point to the (unhelpful) Luther landing page.
It's wild how humans still haven't run out of things to do with the idea of functions.
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.
The web is so fricking bad.
I want a 140 character textarea here. Easy, check `.length` client-side; check `len()` server-side. Right?
Wrong!
JS-side `.length` treats new-lines as 1 character, but per some spec, lines in form-encoded requests are `\r\n` delimitated. So Python's `len()` sees two characters.
WiFi really is an underappreciated invention. I'm outside on my computer!
(At least Linux users don't take WiFi for granted.)
Focus on pursing excellence. Success and failure aren't ever in our full control. All we can control is what we choose to do right now, in this moment.
Focus on better outcomes. Any real situation can always be improved. (Don't worry about making it perfect, that's not possible.)
52% is better than 51%.
Last night I decided to watch possibly the best sermon I've ever heard. I made it 25 minutes in before I started crying and had to stop.
Here's the sermon. Some parts of it are sad, but it's beautiful, not depressing. https://vimeo.com/groups/65464/videos/58318290
I'm not crying, you're crying. I need to go to bed. I start crying when I don't get enough sleep.
Somehow my escape key broke. In software. It's not a keyboard or TouchBar issue; I've plugged in an external keyboard, and my computer
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.
I didn't realize how insecure I was.
I'm like watching myself turn into an incel in real time this is fun.
(I'm having a hard time imagining that a girl would choose to date me over any extrovert.)
Can’t believe Paul spent 2 years rewriting Dark in ASP.NET, when it’s not possible to have more than ~1000 objects because all objects are
pulled from the database and manipulated in memory—there’s no querybuilder or anything.
Edit (Aug 25): I asked Paul and he said there is now a query builder. There might have been when I originally posted this Thought.
Reading the *Left-handed Booksellers of London*, by Nix. And he keeps dropping these references. And I miss most of them.
Some of the references are to Tolkien or Lewis or whatever. But then I catch like a line from a Donne poem I memorized once, just as a part of dialogue. Like, the character says "One short sleep past, we wake eternally," and the conversation moves on. That's a direct quote from a poem from over 400 years ago.
The thing that gets me is that there are lots of other lines in the book that I think could be references to something, that go over my head.
One of the characters drops 2 lines of the Major General's patter. Like…
I feel like I can’t say stuff like I did in the last Thought because of who I am. I’m sorry. I just want to be loved. I’ll probably shut
down this website or something dumb in the morning. I don’t know who I am. Pray for me.
HTTP/HTML/JS’s unnecessary complexity serves primarily to lock control of implementations to a couple of rich corporations.
HTTP is classist. Gemini is the future. This is not satire.
A data store that is neither declarative or imperative. The set of data *and* the fundamental operators on those data.
It is literally impossible for me to keep track of all of these JavaScript frameworks and build tools. It is impossible for me to keep them
all in my brain.
Someone will be like, 'Vite, a fast JS builder' and I'm like, okay, so something that's competing with esbuild. And then, no, Vite and esbuild work together. Thanks a lot.
Jon Bois just published the last chapter of 20020. Absolutely beautiful.
I highly recommend checking it out, even if you haven't read or didn't like 17776. Jon understand what I might call "art." The beauty of being human, of imperfections.
He lets us peak at his morality and worldview, which I don't agree with (but that's a longer Thought), but it doesn't take away from the story.
https://www.sbnation.com/secret-base/21410129/20020
One of the things that makes Darklang.com bearable for me, despite it’s bugginess, is that the developer is on Slack and is pretty chill.
I posted a Slack comment with a bug report, and he just fixed it.
All non binary people are lovely and valid, but man, people who physically pass as nb are on another level. Like when you look at them and
you just draw a blank on their gender. Amazing.
What is "a hypothetical police beat news site"? Is that a news site dedicated to news about police beating people?
I have a feeling not.
Nano also has mouse support off by default. Invoke it with `nano -m` or add `set mouse` to `~/.nanorc`. I'm extremely disappointed.
I get it, you think you're a terminal-based editor. Here's the thing. The single biggest frustration for me getting used to the terminal was that the mouse did nothing. And in 2021, terminals support mice. For `vim`, sure, there's some random backward compatible reason. But Neovim and Nano aren't supposed to be bogged down in that. Your system will have a POSIX compatible `vi`. If someone's opening Nano it's because they want a better experience than that. I'm extremely disappointed.
'Well actually, the number of children in cages has gone down significantly during Biden's presidency.'
'The two party system is fundamentally flawed. The only person that can bring real change is Bernie, which why I voted for him.'
'The US has always been right-wing.'
'Nothing ever changes'
I feel like Tumblr users are neurodivergent, but aware of it, and are finding healthy coping mechanisms.
On the other hand, I don't think I would use the word "healthy" in the same sentence as Reddit or Twitter users.
Okay so for some reason I can edit <input type=text> in w3m (by pressing enter), but I can't edit <textarea>'s, obviously.
Even the Brandon Sanderson fans don’t like the *Rithmatist.*
It’s not that they don’t like it, but Sanderson just has written so much that there has to be something missed.
The problem with having one email for website accounts and one email for personal communication is that as soon as I give someone my
personal email they use it to invite me to sign up for some service that I've never heard of.
I was in a couple of Matrix servers that are set up to kick people that have been inactive for 30+ days.
Sorry I don't talk about your product regularly, doesn't mean I don't care. Wow.
It is unclear to me whether this code is intentionally setting `stroke: transparent` as a way to decrease the font-weight or if they are
trying to not set a stroke and this is a bug. I am going insane. Share to instant-KO a typographer. They're outlining the letters in the same color as the background, in CSS, in order to decrease the font-weight.
KA finally fixed the bug that led to quotes being over-escaped in bios. It only took them like 4 years.
So one of the things that I want to add here is search. And it was originally supposed to happen before pagination. But search is
suprisingly difficult. I want to be indexed, right, for that sweet, sweet O(log n). And there like theoretically are libraries to do it for you. But I search for “GEB” and get posts about “Algebra.” And I have to figure out how to update the index when I make a new post and it’s kind of a mess.
I might just throw away the index and say O(2000) is fine. Because it would be. But the binary search!
I just go whole days without any motivation.
I had a good day today, I unicycled some, I watched some good Youtube videos. The weather was nice, I'm not in pain. But at several points I had the opportunity to be productive, and could not find the strength or energy to do anything.
I begin to understand why retirees live so idly.
I thought Python was a big language, Julia is fricking huge! Like they just want every feature!
In applying multiple dispatch, the question comes up: to what extent do you try to standardize your function calls? Do you try to ensure that the more specific type comes first? Do you try to only define methods (function implementations) that actually get called? And I after reading more Julia documentation, they don't seem concerned with redundancy or inconsistency. I would guess they would say, "define as many methods as you feel like."
"This all probably seems insultingly simple so far, but _please don’t_
start skimming. Things will get complicated soon enough"
I don't think I could write a better satirical help page if I tried.
=> https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/info/Help_002dP.html
If you're not following, this is the manual for the "info" program that runs inside of emacs that allows you to access emac's documentation and help pages.
"When you type the SPC, the two lines that were at the bottom of the screen appear at the top, followed by more lines. DEL or BACKSPACE takes the two lines from the top and moves them to the bottom, usually, but if there are not a full screen’s worth of lines above them they may not make it all the way to the bottom."
"From now on, you will encounter large nodes without warning, and will be expected to know how to use SPC and BACKSPACE to move around in them without being told."
Reading this makes me feel computer-illiterate. I can't.
I just wrote what is quite possibly the jank-iest bit of Cookie/authentication code I've ever written. Although, compared to some things
I've seen, it's not that bad.
I just finished reading a book. The author biography on the back flap describes her as a founder of Archive of Our Own.
I was not ready for that. I nearly choked.
Also possible current tensions resolve themselves economically instead of politically, in which case we end up with a stock market crash in
the summer of 2038. Down 24%.
I wish “I hear voices in my head that sound like radio commercials” had made it into the About page here. It’s a good quote.
Accidentally bought small face masks. (I didn't realize face masks came in different sizes.) My head is waaaay to big for this.
I'm so glad I left Twitter. I've heard Twitter doesn't let you Tweet the exact same thing twice and it's stressful for me to wonder
"have I posted this before?"
I'm going to be an old man using the Atom One theme. It's just so good. Especially Light is better than almost any other light theme.
I'm really excited for Catppuccin Latte to get ported places, because it seems pretty cool. But it's also hard to get sufficient contrast with those colors.
America might be close to being able to support a post-work society, but there are a lot of countries that are not, and so I can't in good
conscience support laziness.
I got mail. It’s a handwritten note from the Democratic Party. I can’t read what it says because it’s in cursive. I hate 2021.
Reading, uh, *Without Bloodshed* I think, by ~starbreaker but not *Star Breaker*.
Anyways, he’s got this private army of vigilantes, obsessed with protecting people’s rights. It’s wild world-building. This person was arrested without being read their rights and the Adversaries broke them out of prison. But like, they also act as police sometimes.
> Adversaries talk a good game about due process, but if you hold office or wear a badge, their idea of proper procedure is to put a second round through your head―just to make sure.
emacs (spacemacs in emacs mode) is more keystrokes than Vim, but arguably more intuitive.
Delete everything in the current file and save and close:
Normal mac editor: cmd+a, delete, cmd+s, cmd+w
Spacemacs in emacs mode: escape m b e y C-x C-c y
Vim: g g d G Z Z
Vim is so nice because it composes, g is start of file, G is end of file, d is delete, so d G is delete to end of file. Spacemacs achieves its goal of being discoverable, escape m is the general-purpose leader, then b for buffer, and e for erase, then just confirm and close and save. But it's more keystrokes and isn't necessarily nicer.
Really what I want is to be able to issue the mac keyboard shortcuts and have that work in a terminal editor. That is and always has been the goal. I have to get comfortable not using emacs, but modding emacs.
One of the goals of Thu was to eliminate the distinction that Java makes between compile-time type and run-time type.
(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.
I'm going to stop going through Aphyr's internet presence now.
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
Ode to the Bridge Builder: Nostalgia for the Wind
For the bridge builder,
oh, to the creation of new things
connections, stability
architecture and art.
The fierce orange winds of the autumns of my childhood,
an all encompassing experience,
warm gusts passing my body,
to be swallowed by the air.
The warm sand on the beach beneath me,
the hot sun, radiating,
and the cool, salty, air
sweeping me along.
It would suck to get cancelled for some boring mid take. I gotta keep the takes spicy so that when they cancel me I'm like "yeah, fair"
I have been informed that I can't be cancelled since I'm not famous. Dang it.
Never seen this before.
=> https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Proxy MDN Proxy
3D, first person is really powerful.
There are a lot of shooter games that are 3D-1st person, but it's not universal in other genres. Portal is one of the only 3D-1stP puzzle games, and Minecraft similarly is one of the only sandbox games to use 3D-1stP.
Here are some negative thoughts since I’m in a bad mood.
Plastic Beach is the only good Gorillaz album.
I hate that my $xxx AirPods now won’t connect to any devices. Woohoo.
ArchLinux will not connect to WiFi. It is impossible.
Aahahahhhhhhaaaa
I think
Google.com in 2001 had 10 links. Google.com today has 15.
Many people, including at times myself, would claim that modern webdesign
has a inclination to minimalism. But that's a superficial preference at best.
Google has simplified its logo, but it hasn't simplified its homepage.
“I choose marble and the Catholic Church because /
They say no, to natural beauty that lures us and kills us”
People for some reason think that ultra minimalistic or old fashioned themes ‘allow you to focus on the content’
If you’re obnoxious in your minimalism, or your lack of styling, just like anything else, that distracts from the content. The medium is the message. You cannot escape.
Part of being a Christian is trusting God to take care of you and provide for you. But this doesn’t mean that being a Christian guarantees
you anything.
The more I think about it, the more I become convinced that the human brain's conception of time is not universal.
I just started chuckling at `(load-and-use SDL)`. My sense of humor is normal and understandable
Javascript deserved so much better than this. Such a beautiful syntax, beautiful type system. Alternatives like ReScript exist.
People understand what JS could have been. ReasonML, ReScript, or TypeScript. It's JS syntax, dynamic typing, but well-defined and strictly typed. Super clean and polished. JS is so ugly. It's tearing at the seams.
But I can't in good conscience write one of these languages which is going to be transpiled to OCaml that is going to be transpiled to Javascript.
Can't fricking wait for the Catppuccin iTerm and VS Code themes to update with a light theme.
Hm.
It occurs to me I could update them myself.
Hm.
Every time. Every time I think I have a handle on how broken the web is, something comes up that's worse.
I'm just waaayy too black and white as a person. Like the reason I have to say "always more nuance" is because I forget that there's nuance.
Working on a theory that Java’s type system is just bad and that other strictly typed languages are good.
Like I can’t stand Typescript but that’s because it’s just Java’s type system crudely bolted onto JavaScript.
The counter point is that I’ve written some Rust and that was pretty painful.
It's funny to me the differences in what's allowed in different speed games. Like minecraft speedrunning just like, allows segmenting and
some mods.
Here's a Thought from last year that talks about pagination
=> https://thoughts.learnerpages.com/?show=b3b9020f-edbd-412d-9787-6874b21622d1
It's hard to teach tech because you want to start with simple, older technologies, because they're simpler, but they're also bad.
Like how do you teach someone about HTTPs and not HTTP? But you also have to make clear that websites in 2022 probably shouldn't be using HTTP.
It took me like half an hour to figure how to install Turbo on a page, but once I did, it just worked, which is pretty cool.
To get to the point where you can copy a script tag into the top of the page, you have to go hotwired.dev > Turbo > Installation > skypack link which returns a JS file* > copy and paste a link out of the comments at the top of the JS file > the actual fricking installation instructions.
* You can just include this JS file, *if* you specify `type=module` on it. That isn't documented anywhere, which is my main complaint.
I think I can save 500ms off of page load time for seasons with a lot of thoughts (i.e. not this season yet) by adding a Redis cache.
'Two sparrows are sold for a penny, but not one will fall to the ground apart from the Father. You are more important than many sparrows.'
Paraphrase of Matthew 10:29,31
The Big Sur design looks even better with Rectangle and padding between windows.
You can't do rounded corners and no padding. It looks bad. Rounded corners don't mate with straight lines, it doesn't work.
I would like to be an artist.
I would like to be an artist.
I have decided.
I feel unfulfilled writing code for its own sake.
Maintaining a web of wires, connecting me to myself.
Tying me down.
Uncreative. Unfulfilled.
I would like to be a designer.
Not a builder.
Not merely an inventor, or a problem solver,
or a go-getter, or a hamster on a wheel.
Creating for others' sake.
Original. Beautiful.
I would like to be something more.
Than me.
The logic is raw.
I lack meat. I lack skin.
I am bones and joints—a skeleton.
Code without art.
In theory, everyone's switching to Docker because it's easier to set up, but it is very much not easier to set up.
Something something maintainers
What's so profound about the Frosted Pane of Glass epistemology is that it allows for a reconciliation of the statements "I 100%
believe X is true" and "It's possible I'm wrong." The epistemology recognizes, no! is founded on!, human fallibility. Because humans can't ever conceive the true nature of anything, and that is recognized, a statement like "I believe" is can be thought of as "I understand this to be true, to the best of my limited understanding."
Why are people so afraid?
I wonder if my fear of social scenarios is balancing my lack of fear of physical things.
Maybe I’m just interacting primarily with people online? Maybe this isn’t a thing and I’m reading way too much into a few online comments.
Fear is an interesting thing.
I still don't know how to multiply matrices. This is becoming a problem.
Please save me daddy Grant Sanderson.
I love the way SCPs handles the themes of sacrifice for the greater good and the ends justifying the means and authority to impose order and
freedom and chaos. The SCP foundation is not good but not having the SCP foundation would be worse.
This is about the interview in SCP-3108, again.
The thing about *Thinking Fast and Slow* that makes it so interesting, is that’s not a list of ways that humans are illogical and tips on
how to be more logical—although it certainly appears to be at times. But what it ends up doing is thoroughly tearing down the myth that humans are rational at all.
I love how Firefox and Chrome agree that the correct color to annotate flexbox containers is purple.
=> https://xkcd.com/267/ XKCD 267
Transcript
I shouldn't do this, but I pulled you out for a moment to give you a hint.
Take wrong turns. Talk to strangers. Open unmarked doors. And if you see a group of people in a field, go find out what they're doing. Do things without always knowing how they'll turn out.
You're curious and smart and bored, and all you see is the choice between working hard and slacking off. There are so many adventures that you miss because you're waiting to think of a plan. To find them, look for tiny interesting choices. And remember that you are always making up the future as you go.
I really want an operating system that doesn’t include any applications but does include all the tooling to make applications.
Spark (email client) released a new version. It's an electron rewrite, removes the dark theme, removes the option to open a side panel
forcing a mobile-like experience on Mac, is focused on a "smart inbox" that sorts your mail for you, and moves to a subscription model. It's like everything not to do, all at once. They all added a "sent from spark" to the footer of all your emails, but apparently that was a bug.
It doesn't even look that bad; like I don't think the company is trying to screw over users, I just think it was designed by managers and never actually used.
To clarify: I don't think managers are inherently bad at designing products or anything. But when making software, you have to have iteration cycles. You have to describe a feature, build it, then test it to see how it actually works, and tweak it. Products designed by developers are often easier to use because that cycle can be very quick. (On the other hand, they're often impossible to figure out how to use.) The Spark update sounds like some one white-boarded it, the developers implemented it according to the whiteboard diagram, and then it was shipped, with no UAT (user-acceptance testing).
Way back in November, I came up with 4 things that make the terminal appealing. Gemini satisfies all 4 of them.
"We use global variables for simplicity, but this is not the best choice for a real language implementation :)."
Smiley-face emoticon in the LLVM documentation.
I'm not going to give up on astronomical theater.
I'm claiming to be betting on JavaScript and Gemini, and I'm willing to put code behind that.
My roommate and I both writing (possibly cursed) Gemtext parsers at the same time. Get on our level.
I would not be surprised if, in the future, it becomes customary to shave one’s head in order to wear a hat/wig all the time.
The most important thing in life is your commitment to God.
The second most important thing in life is your commitment to your Blaseball
team. This is why I will be moving to Breckinridge in order to better support the Jazz Hands at our home stadium. 👐
I almost cried looking at /r/Sh*ttyPoetry.
It’s not good poetry. But it’s there. And there’s so much of it. 10 poems being posted a day every day for 10 years. Most with 1 vote. Seen by no one. But that’s not why they were written. No one fishes for popularity on a subreddit with more posters than readers. No one hopes to kick-start a literature Nobel by opening /r/Sh*ttyPoetry. Just people with words filling their heads and overflowing. Just poems, crafted for the art of it, and shared because they could be, and maybe they could mean something to someone else. “But actually flowers”
Bad website ideas with Matthias:
A website like Youtube, except the only videos are ones linked to by https://tiltlhat.tumblr.com
A yellow flower sits in a field.
Alone, but for the sun. The sky hangs above, and the dirt hangs below, and the grass flies up between them.
The clouds drift in the currents of the sky, sitting in a field of blue. The wind pulls and stretches and whisks the fluff into strands and swirls, which adorn the dome above.
The ground sweeps away, rolling forward in all directions, moving inexorably towards the horizon.
Heat falls from the sun, sharply and flying into the grass.
There is more, and yet, nothing more.
They're all, function evaluation order can be ambiguous; and I'm like "You're using space to apply functions. Parens don't have this problem"
There are people warning against WallStreetBets, which is so funny to me. They're like, 'Remember, the Reddit users on WSB don't have your
best interests at heart.' And you read WSB, and it's like 'I like the stock. This is not investment advice. I am an ape with a keyboard. Everyone in this subreddit is a ****ing r*****.'
Like, if you open WSB, and decide that these are the types of people that seriously make good decisions, you are so unbelievably dumb. You don't deserve to manage stocks. Like, they're serious about it, but they're not trying to *fool* anyone that they know what they're doing.
Speaking of utterly idiotic stock plays, I bought GME at 413 the other day. (I wish this was a joke.) (I'm holding don't worry.) (You can't lose money if you never sell.)
Side note, WSB actually has content that is not suitable for minors. I found a post from a couple years ago where a literally bought a hooker and then took a picture of the naked hooker and posted it to WSB.
I really took for granted how much code I *read* on Khan Academy. It makes me sad that there's no equivalent for professional react.
I mean I guess there's Github. Maybe I should make a habit of perusing Github repositories.
I actually really like that idea.
Seriously this is the best I can come up with
```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.
When you're a kid, there's this distinction between things that happen to your body as a result of the passage of time (growing)
and things that happen as a result of your actions. There's a weird period from 25-45 where your body doesn't really change except for as a result of your action. And then you start seeing changes as a result of the passage of time again. But we don't call that growing, we call it aging or something.
What do I need to post-translate my text?
### Filters
Need to convert line breaks to `<br>` (without CSS, `white-space: pre-wrap` doesn't work and `pre`s look bad)
Linkify (Otherwise, links need to be copy-pasted, bad UX)
Typographer quotes! (I notice straight quotes and they annoy me) (double and single quotes, exclude code blocks)
### Block
Fenced code blocks (Gemini strictness)
### Inline
Italics (for MLA titles, or emphasis) (including the ability to escape asterisks)
Inline code (useful for distinguishing between references to programming-specific uses of English words)
# Notable omissions:
Bold (Doesn't have any semantic meaning, only stylistic.)
Underline (Ditto)
Block quotes (even Gemini has these!) (Styling these well is very hard.)
Unordered list (again, even Gemini) (It's very easy to parse these wrong. See: https://thoughts.learnerpages.com?show=bc51ad8a-07f5-49bb-9a35-8d636dafc6fa)
Ordered list (CommonMark ordered lists are lame because I can't easily start them at dynamic numbers.)
Headers (On this website, posts are supposed to represent a single thought or a train of thought. If this was a blog, I would include them.)
Unicode ellipses, em dash (I have shortcuts to type these, so it's not really necessary. You could I guess.)
Math blocks (I probably should/would include if I talked about math on here.)
I might have forgotten something, but most things that aren't in "Notable omissions" are just too complicated. Tables? Masked inline links? (Nested lists are awful. They're hellish to parse in the way the author intended them to be.)
My ideas are not linear I hate the linear nature of the English language I want something else.
Thinking about how often I was lied to as a child and it makes me want to cry.
Lying, in my mind, is the ultimate betrayal of trust, because it shows that you have no respect for me and see me as just an object to be manipulated.
This is about magicians who would say "magic" when I asked them how they did a trick.
Even as a kid, I knew what it felt like to know someone that someone else didn't. That feeling of power and superiority. And it's humbling to explain it to someone else.
So when I magician refuses to reveal their tricks I don't think think "oh it must actually be magic," I think, "this person values their own ego over any respect they have for me," and I pretty much instantly lose any respect I had for that person; as well as "willing to deceive others for their own reputation."
And like, I've talked about the magic thing before. I like magic, I like magicians. It's the afterwords; after the show, in the comment section. Are you trying to ride the high of knowing something other people don't for as long as possible, or are you willing to admit how it was done. The magic looks cool whether you know how it was done or not. I can't put it into words well, but the dismissiveness just comes off as super disrespectful to the audience sometimes. Like if I respectfully ask a random person on the street a question that they can answer (what time is it? where'd you get that coat?), they'll answer me respectfully. To say, "you don't deserve to know how I did it," is treating me as less that a stranger, as an adversary. I feel like I'm in an adversarial position trying to uncover a big secret, and my point is it doesn't have to be that way. I meant the question very respectfully, even as a kid asking magicians. Asking a question of someone is humbling and shows you respect them. Magicians act and feel like it's a cold war or something, and I really think that that is the fault of the magicians and not the audience. Audiences are perfectly willing to suspend disbelief for every other fiction medium.
I still haven't forgiven Rick Riordan for writing in the introduction of the first Percy Jackson book that the book was definitely true.
Like do you think I'm idiot? Do you think I'm 4?
No, I think you're lying to me because you're insecure about the fact that you're writing fiction.
In a moment of brutal self-reflection, I realize that part of the reason this upsets me is because I want magic to be real and I want to be able to trust someone if they told me magic was real.
Anyways, this post wasn't supposed to be about magicians or about Rick Riordan; it was supposed to be about how I take lying a lot more seriously than most people. But I think I made that point.
Anyways, this is why I don't trust anyone and why I don't have any close friends.
When I say all software is bad, I don’t mean that every software responses poorly to good input.
Making software that responds to good input is easy. Making software that does exactly what you want is easy. But there are so few softwares that do everything well. That respond well to all inputs.
I think that ties to Godel’s Theorem, but I haven’t finished GEB yet.
Reddit is a shell of its former self. The more people you have trying to get in on an inside joke, the less complicated it can be.
Reddit won't let 69,420 die; the meta-meme "haha funny sex/weed number" has been incorporated into the original joke by people who don't understand satire, and who now use it un-ironically.
Do something
do something that's never been done before
never done before
do something that's never been done
do something before
do
something that's never been done before
never been done before never before something that's been done
do something
do something that's never been done before
Sometimes you can write broken characters in such a way that their brokenness compliments each other.
Rex is not doing that in this book. He does in some of his other books, but in this book everyone is screwed up and they’re only hurting each other.
Option number 1: Submit homework assignment I've already done.
Option number 2: Eat dinner
Option number 3: Play Minecraft
Wanna guess which one I'm going to do?
Opened a Costco 64-pack box of soft + chewy granola bars today. Let's see how long it takes me to finish them.