Thoughts

I have about 5 years more programming experience than you would guess if I told you my real age. And it would give me a bit of a buffer in case I ever feel like I haven't done enough for my age.

up with

Maybe it's not negligible, maybe Slack is using a single-server SQL database, and rather than scale up to a distributed KV-store like Discord did, they're kicking out the leeches. Or maybe Slack's marketing about "this change effects a small number of servers" is just BS and their goal is actually to encourage people to upgrade to the paid plan, just because they can.

theoretical maximum of logic isn’t truth (Gödelian argument), and allowing for useful sources of “truth” other than the material world (that is a-priori knowledge or Devine revelation).

bad) and then it proceeds to make a bunch of assumptions (like assumptions are bad, or there is a universal Truth which is complete and consistent). I think I can close off some of the assumptions by making Pascal’s-wager-style arguments. But it still feels weak. Because you have to make assumptions in order to make any argument at all. It doesn’t help that FPG is complicated. It describes like 4 different versions of truth depending on the situation.

It is useful, as it relates to the real world, certainly, but single objects don't actually exist in the real world. If you look at an apple, it's natural and easy for you to draw a circle around it in your mind and label it as a single apple. And once you've done that, it's natural and easy for you to say that one apple, and another apple, is two apples. But that's all happening in your mind. The atoms don't care whether they're in an apple or not. There's no formal definition of when two apples are "together" and become "two apples" vs. "one apple" and "another apple." The concept of 2 only applies to apples because you've chosen to use it. To quote Hofstadter, "we don't apply number theory to cloud systems, because the very concept of whole numbers hardly fits. There can be one cloud and another cloud, and they will come together and instead of there being two clouds, there will still only be one" (G.E.B. 457). So we have this concept of "one cloud" in our brain, that makes sense and is useful. But the mapping between the "pure" ideas in our brain and the real world is imperfect.

I haven't even finished G.E.B. and I think I need to re-read it because I don't understand it.

I'm tired I don't know if you can tell.

It's actually really interesting because the language is designed in such a way that it doesn't feel crippling. You have a lot of options (passing procs or lambdas or blocks or a symbol representing the method), but you can't pass a method to a method.

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.

array prop doesn't matter." Instead, the *enclosing* component is responsible for ensuring that the array doesn't change unless it's actually supposed to. Hence all this BS about "stability" and "memoizing."

other people pick up and things that are obvious to me that other people misinterpret. I didn't even know what a cormorant 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.)

Or just like their real life in general. Like I’m glad you have a life but why are you telling chat about it?

I always win.

Edit: On second look, it's a macOS bug, not Chromium.

then do something with the result of a function call, and to disambiguate evaluation order, you really need parens. Ex. `Thing.where name: "Matthias"`, but then you want to call a property of that, on the same line. And since I'm thinking like Haskell, leaving off parens, I go to write `(Thing.where name: "Matthias").exists?`. And while that works, the stylistic way of writing this Ruby is to add back the optional C-style parens: `Thing.where(name: "Matthias").exists?`

I view differently from the people of the universe. I love Valentine Jones because she's so different from the current conception of a football star. But in-universe, she's just a football star. So I wouldn't be interested in a story about a football star today, but I am interested in Valentine Jones's story.

-In My Mind, Lyn Lapid

friend, but the friend treats them like a total stranger. Insert some drama here, where they're angry at each other. But the twist is that it's actually only the main character who has been cursed. It's not that the friend has forgotten anything, it's that the main character is experiencing time out of order.

Edit (9:03): This makes it sounds like I'm opposed to radial reform of the education system. On the contrary, what I'm trying to say is that you can make very good arguments for abolishing everything after elementary school. But that makes it hard to discuss smaller and more realistic changes.

Like I'm not going to give you false information and then encourage you to reach false conclusions. But sometimes I will falsify facts in order to lead you to a correct conclusion in a more direct way, or I may present you with misleading (but true) facts and then encourage you to reach a false conclusion.

think about a small segment at a time.

For example, many people in my generation were exposed to The Office, Dilbert, and our parents complaining about their bosses when we were kids. And while the things being complained about are certainly valid, the solution isn’t communism. It reminds me of some kids who look at boomer-comics about marriage, and go “wow, I’m never getting married.”

In some ways, I'm exactly like Mr. Ford. I would never touch someone without their permission. I have a list of rules built up in my head governing many different expectations of social behavior. I try to very open-minded and very empathetic. But I'm also completely different. Most of the time I walk out of a conversation with the take-away that I don't like the person and that I regret talking to them.

commit happened, and there's no way to reach it anymore. Git has a garbage-collection-like system that cleans up unreachable commits after 30 days. On the other hand, if you save the commit's SHA hash, then suddenly it is reachable, and you can resurrect it with cherry-pick, for example.

Aahhhha

They just met an ornithologist.

It was periodic tab reloading. Spamming the refresh button makes me feel like a pleb.

me having to say anything, and with you having the freedom to ignore my body language with complete plausible deniability.

were no downsides, all other things being equal, I just would rather speak to you in person than over text or a call or Zoom. If my co-worker was sitting in the cubicle next to me, sometimes I would DM them instead of tapping them on the shoulder. For example, if it wasn't time-sensitive and I didn't want to interrupt, or if the my question hinged on a link that I wanted them to open. Then sure, start with a DM. But if my co-worker was sitting next to me my default is going to be talking to them face-to-face. So if you're going to make a remote-first argument, you have to "play-defense," I think, by establishing enough benefit to overcome this initial hump. If your pro-remote argument follows the lines of 'Slack is just as effective as talking face-to-face,' then you've lost me, unfortunately. Google Starline isn't available yet, we're not there yet. To put it another way, humans have learned how to communicate face-to-face, and for vast majority of the population, they would have to re-learn the entirety of what they know about social interaction to work remotely. That includes me. I love text, I love learning and sharing things on the internet, I love talking to people online. But even my brain equates socializing with something that happens in person. Now, the reason I think it's important to talk about this is there's a very different type of argument that you could make for remote work, which is that work shouldn't be social. These people like platforms like Slack for work precisely because it is less personal. It keeps people professional, cuts down on chit-chat, makes it easier to ignore personal feelings, etc. But this is a very different argument to the argument that you can have the same socializing experience on Slack that you do in-person. As an example, I got to sit down and eat lunch with the CFO of my company the other day, just because we were both in the break-room at the same time. This is someone who is 30 years older than me and in a completely different part of the company. But we got to have a nice, if awkward, little chat. This conversation was very much borne out of learned social-skills that apply in person (i.e. we totally could have ignored each other, but since we're both used to talking to people in person, we didn't). It also only happened because we were in the same physical space. Some remote-work proponents claim that this type of conversation could totally happen online as well. You could totally have an online-work-place culture where those types of spontaneous interactions happen, through many different mechanisms. But any mechanism where this happens online would require us to learn a completely new set of rules for social interaction. The other argument pro-remote-work argument you could make is that this interaction didn't need to happen. It was a distraction, it wasted both of our time, it was awkward etc. Here's where you get the "I want my work life and personal life to be separate." I don't understand this reticence.

moving the mouse to somewhere else, then holding shift and clicking. This feels especially weird, but cool, in text that isn't editable.

most of the plot, but the vibes are etched in my brain forever.

Edit (Feb 2024): Emacs has this feature.

You make a Gemini request to some website, it gets translated into an HTTP request, sent to an HTTP server, and then content gets sent back over Gemini. Kinda solid.

I got all excited when I saw it in my inbox and then, it’s a receipt.

I wish I was joking. I love thinking.

It's just easy to leave them in place, just remove the top-level link to blog.

There's this idea that web urls should stick around for 20 years. And while I love consistency, it's just not in the nature of the web to do that. If I want to re-organize my website in such a way that given content isn't on my website anymore, sorry. Websites are like store windows, not libraries. On the other hand, I'm not opposed to people scraping my websites for the purposes of archiving them. Archive.org is very impressive. Or I have content (e.g. for my blog) in Git, so I'm not saying I'm going to erase my writing from the face of the Earth. But I'm going to shut down my "blog" and some links are going break. Cope.

I don't want to "hur dur bash is slow Rust fast" but like. The tool designed to be fast is faster than the tool designed to be a shell script. wow! Meanwhile the nvm users are like, 'I can speed up shell loading time I only invoke nvm if I use zsh's pre-hook command to test if the command that I'm about to run is `node` and then initialize `nvm`.' Like I ran `volta setup` and then had to check if it worked because I didn't believe it. Volta setup runs once and takes 26ms. nvm runs every time you open your shell and takes 600ms. And that's not Rust vs. Bash, that's a fundamental architecture difference, of which the language choice is just a symptom.

doesn't transpose characters like I expect it to. Also, mouse gestures don't work in a couple of places since they're not a native feature. But that's, conceptually, in my mind, I have to remember that Firefox's text inputs are not native text inputs but merely inferior clones.

exception that within 5 minutes of the Thought being posted, I'm free to edit it to hell. For example, the last Thought, I wrote the first line, hit Edit, and then typed in the extended text immediately. This is mostly just for readability purposes. Adding "Edit:" is ugly and if I created a new Thought, it would go above, not below, the thought I'm appending to.

Not "hard" as in, I forget, "hard" as in I don't like it. And of course, that the thinking doesn't matter at all, but just that I don't credit for it itself. Although, what do I "get credit for"?

But seriously, the terminal is just monospaced and doesn't have mouse support. That doesn't mean it has to be unintuitive. Or maybe it does, what do I know

-*Dracula* (Reference Matthew 10:29)

(e.g. `String.prototype.getRandomLetter = function () {return this[Math.floor(Math.random()* this.length)]}`) was taboo, and should be avoided. This idea, generally, allowing one piece of code to add properties/methods to a class defined elsewhere, is a really powerful one. If I try to explain too much here I'm going to give the impression that this is something I came up with, but it's like a thing. Languages like Swift and Ruby and C# advertise this as a feature over languages that don't support it, like C++ and Java. Anyways, JS totally has this, and it would make a lot of things easier. For example, Rails overwrites native Ruby classes to implement specific behavior, creating a really seamless integration between the language and the framework.

Freak that's sexy. Get rid of a personal library and liked songs and playlists and just have collections of songs (call them "lists"). And they're public and they have owners but other people can create requests to add or remove songs, and back it by git. *biting my lip*

yeah, that's miserable. You should never. But, speaking for myself, I really like working in person.

=> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vd8Wfk9im0&lc=Ugx6laRJCMHFax73eNB4AaABAg

had seen it, I probably would have told you in a Tom Scott video, but that's obviously not the case. My second thought is that it was in an episode of my favorite television show which I haven't thought about in 5 years, Fetch! with Ruff Ruffman, but a quick search doesn't surface anything there. Side note, Tom Scott's channel and Fetch! with Ruff Ruffman are like basically the same show. The problem is that it could have been like any show. "Kid's show that features sending kids to places IRL" is a surprising prolific genre. My current plan is going to read all the comments and see if any are like "I remember this from X."

single request. We need a standard like CGI but for modern serverless scripts so that you can move code between platforms. Something like JSON piped to stdin.

something but making no progress on it.

I suspect other web servers just don't support content negotiation at all and ignore the header.

want it, with up to 3 decimal places of precision. I would rate my desire to receive an HTML page with a score of 0.65 and my desire to receive a JSON response with a score of 0.21. => https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/Quality_values

-Talking to Myself, Watsky

money. You don’t get to make a Reddit post complaining about the American healthcare system unless you don’t have insurance. Don’t know if you have health insurance? You probably do. 90% of the population does. The hospital is not trying to screw you over with ridiculous prices, they’re trying to get paid by the insurance company. One of the reasons the hospitals charge what they do is because health insurance companies will negotiate. If you don’t have health insurance, you need to go back to the hospital and tell them that. Tell them that you can’t pay the sticker price, and they will work with you lower your costs. If you are a college student, in most cases, your college will require you to have health insurance. In some cases, it will be included in your tuition. And in most cases you will covered by your parents’ health insurance. Do not refuse treatment because you aren’t sure if your insurance will cover it. There a lot of bad things about the American healthcare system. It is a mess. It is not intuitive. But please do that research before making a Reddit post with your 5 figure hospital bill.

(This is a riff on the Rails Doctrine quote I posted the other day. It feels weird to put any sort of quotes around it since I've competently changed the meaning but I can't exactly not attribute it when I stole all the words.)

going to be able to handle it.

boolean value to an instance of the `Toggle` view. Like. Okay I need to run code on user input, I'm sorry. How do I do that?

=> https://rubyonrails.org/doctrine Source: The Rails Doctrine View transcription

`value.to_s.match('\b(?:4[0-9]{2}|5[0-9]{2}|599)\b')`. I can't get over this line of code because not only is it using a regular expression to check the value of a number, the regular expression it's using is awful. It's equivalent to `'[45]\d\d'`.

ways of doing things work, even when those ways are unambiguous and arguably just as intuitive. This wouldn't be too much of a problem except that the right way of doing any given thing changes every couple of years when Swift updates.

is that it reveals how bad computers were previously at understanding declarative instructions. Programs that can understand declarative code feels like an important step before any sort of more traditional difficult problem in computer science (e.g. AI or natural language processing).

installed software), Docker lets you do three things with it: * Run in on a Linux host in a low-overhead container * Seamlessly configure a Linux VM to run it on Mac or Windows * Upload it to DockerHub so other people can easily run it or build on top of it It's a mistake to focus on any one of these aspects.

The thing that makes this weird is that IIRC the kernel can just decide to not free memory. Like the app calls `free` but sometimes Linux goes, “well no one else needs that memory, we’ll just keep it allocated to you.” So sometimes you see that, where an app’s memory goes up after a large operation, and then doesn’t go down, and it’s not a memory leak, it’s just the kernel trying to be ready for future operations. But a) 11GB is a lot. Surely the kernel should start actually freeing at some point and if it’s not at 11GB I don’t know when it is. And b) It should have been able to allocate a MB, and re-use that same MB for all the operations. I never did a 10 GB operation. I might have done 1,000 1MB operations.

and made some test requests to this page over Gemini. (For a bit of context, the Gemini version of this page isn't paginated, so it's just 700KB of every Thought I've ever had.) Anyways, it's using almost 12GB of RAM. VIRT is virtual memory; the kernel is telling it it has 12GB if it needs them, but this is a VPS with 0.5 GB of RAM and 2 GB of swap. It doesn't actually have 12 GB of RAM. And my code doesn't actually need 12 GB of RAM, it's actually using 28kb of RAM (RES). But V8 just isn't designed to be memory efficient so it's going to aggressively ask for memory and since Linux doesn't want to fail until the very last minute, it's going to promise memory that it doesn't have. Anyways I don't know if this is an actual problem or just a consequence of using V8. I hate node. ``` PID USER PRI NI VIRT RES SHR S CPU% MEM% TIME+ Command 995704 root 20 0 11.8G 28852 15604 S 0.0 2.9 0:01.16 node gemini/gemini.js ``` (This is why astronomical theater isn't open-source, by the way. I regret using node for it.)

half a Jerma video once and he seems like the most basic white guy twitch streamer imaginable.

* 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."

This is malicious compliance with the GPL.

and sure enough I hadn't payed enough attention to the license when forking xapian-haystack.

Xapian-haystack is distrubuted under GPLv2 => https://github.com/notanumber/xapian-haystack/blob/master/LICENSE I maintain and distribute a fork of xapian-haystack => https://tildegit.org/matthias/xapian-haystack GPL also contains a requirement that "You must cause the modified files to carry prominent notices stating that you changed the files and the date of any change." which I didn't do! Frick! I might be able to argue in court that I didn't modify the files myself, I only resolved merge conflicts between two already existing forks, but I don't think that would stand up. I would consider that a modification. Dang it!

=> 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!

And VS Code has that. And vim has that (and neovim by virtue of compatibility). But that's it. (Okay I imagine emacs has to as well, right?) Vim Polyglot is freaking amazing. It just has syntax highlighting for 600 common languages. I install it once, and in 5 years of opening files the only things it hasn't been able to syntax highlight are IBM RPG and Gemtext. (And it's easy to find Vim syntax highlighting packages for both of those.) => https://github.com/sheerun/vim-polyglot Vim Polyglot I just don't understand why that isn't priority number 1 for people making text editors. Anyways this Thought was inspired by BBEdit bragging about supporting "over two dozen built-in languages."

didn’t want `--soft`. But that’s not the point.) I managed to restore my changes by scrolling up in my unlimited scroll-back terminal until the last time I had run `git diff`. So I’m thinking about unconventional ways of syncing up with git again.

The path problem is named for a specific instance of the problem that arises when manipulating paths in a webserver. The webserver has to take a URL-path (e.g. `/static/images/example.png`) and know that static files are served from, for example, `/var/www/example.com/`. And so it has to return the file at `/var/www/example.com/images/example.png`. Now the problem is not that this is hard. There are std library functions in most every language to do these kinds of path operations. The problem is that "a path" has several different meanings. It could refer to the entire raw URL-path from the client, or the URL path after it's been sanitized to remove any directory traversal attempts (e.g. `/static/../../../../etc/passwd` needs to be rejected at some point), or the relative path to the image (e.g. `/images/example.png`) or to the entire file system path. Not to mention that all of these have variants with or without trailing or leading slashes. These are all very different semantically. But despite their semantic differences, they're represented by the computer in exactly the same way. They're all strings, or maybe in a language with a generous type system, they're all `Path`s. And you want to have utility functions that can work on all of them, right? There is similarity there. But this means that if you're writing a static web server you have to keep in mind the intended semantics of every path-style value at all points in your code, because otherwise you could end up passing something that starts with a `/` to a function that expects a relative path and end up with a path traversal vulnerability. That's not to say "coding is too hard," this isn't one of these posts. This path example isn't even a hard problem, it's quite possible for one person to solve. The larger problem is that there are always, in coding, these larger, undocumented, semantic, understandings about the behavior of functions. Even functions that, at first glance, look to be composable in every possible way; even functions that your type-checker says are compatible. (If one function expects a serialized file system path starting with a slash and you ever pass it something directly from the URL, that's a terrible error.) I'm not sure what the solution is. Possibly a more powerful (Thu-like) type system. Possible a different style of coding from the functional or object-oriented paradigms. Possibly better documentation or comments.

I’m never changing who I am.” -It’s Time, Imagine Dragons

creativity and genius, and package them into something easily digestible by everyone.

There’s a scene in Agents of Shield (which I haven’t watched all of, only bits and pieces, but this scene stuck with me), where some character declares ‘I am a god’ and is met with the reply ‘there’s only one God, and He doesn’t look like that.’ Which is an extremely sharp contrast to the very similar famous scene in Avengers; “I am a god” / Hulk throws Loki against the ground / “puny god.” And what’s very interesting to me is that my reply to Loki even in the Avengers movie is “these people are blaspheming.” And even within the Marvel universe there are people who agree with me. My point is that Christians are no by any means an un-represented group in media. Yet, in the Marvel cinematic films, they go out of their way to avoid giving any of the characters religious stances and all. Blockbusters like that are designed to appeal to literally as many people as possible, and to avoid making anyone uncomfortable. It’s like, in the same way that characters in movies don’t leave to go to the bathroom, they don’t go to church or do their prayers, and at some point you’ve gone beyond just “cutting out controversial topics” and you’re really portraying a character that doesn’t represent anyone. I’m not even saying this is a bad thing, but it is definitely something something to keep in mind.

that I do could cause someone else to lash out and hurt me. Do you want to guess if I’ve eaten dinner yet?

I think what's going on here is that I ate like a couple handfuls of chocolate chips and I now have excess energy.

too focused on whether they've been asked a good question.

There are a couple of approaches here: * A blog, doesn't need explaining. I want to highlight that it is fundamentally chronological. * A book, describing me or the things I've done or whatever. Rather than a log with distinct entries, this format is conceptually a single document (even if it's split across multiple pages or chapters), intended to be read start to finish. * A dictionary of opinions. The idea here is that for any topic, I can write ~500 words describing what it is, or my views on it. So I could create a "dictionary" where each entry is a topic that links to my post about it. It wouldn't be chronological, like a blog, and someone reading it could jump directly to a topic that they're interested it. It would be a collection of individual documents that could stand alone, unlike option 2 (which views the entire site as a single document). What I really don't want to do is create a personal knowledge base, or a personal wiki. And my concern is that that's basically what I described in #3. There are a couple of reasons I don't want to create a personal knowledge base. Mainly, I think that it purports to contain a representation of the things that I know. And I think it does a bad job at that, because my mind and even my knowledge is a lot more fluid and fuzzy than can be expressed in a collection of pages. Similarly, since I can't transcribe literally everything in my head, I'm afraid it would end up being wide but shallow. It wouldn't be better source for any topic than a primary source, and it wouldn't be good representation of my mind. The difference between a PKB and the ideal dictionary of opinions that I tried to describe above, is that in the latter I'm giving you "an opinion on X," not "what do I know about X" or "what is my conception of X." The latter 2 questions are very hard to answer with words. My last problem with a PKB is that it purports that my thoughts or my conception of a thing doesn't change if I'm not thinking about it. That's kind of a weird argument to make, and it's not fixed by other options. But just because I thought something once, doesn't mean I can't change as a person and hold a different view in the future. What this means is that every entry in a PKB is inherently ephemeral, even if I don't revisit the topic. Like if I wrote a post about Khan Academy a couple of years ago, it would be very different in some ways from if I wrote one today. But I'm not going to write one today, because KA isn't something that I think about that much anymore. I'm not sure what the solution to this is, aside from the obvious ones of dating everything and/or auto-removing things past a certain date. Neither of which seem very in the spirit of a PKB. What I'm leaning towards is a listing of ~10 projects on the projects page where I can describe cool work that I've done, and ~10 opinions on an Opinions or Views page where I can post a small number of active "blog posts." But once I add a new one, old ones would get rotated out of the listing, archived, and hidden. And then I can also set up an RSS feed for changes to that page if I want to. By inherently limiting scope, it would let me make sure that the active pages are up-to-date, and also avoid the illusion of attempting to wholly describe me as a person. If I didn't have this page, I would be in favor of writing couple-sentence blog posts, as is common in Geminispace. But if I'm going to write something for matthiasportzel.com I want it to be higher quality, and if it's going to be higher quality, I don't want it to go out of date (where at all possible).

There are extensions for VS Code to let me open and edit Excel files. I can almost use VS Code as a browser (there are extensions for it but these seem really bad.) Sooner or later someone is going to create an application that supports plugins to open any file type, and it is going to be incredible.

-- Henry Nelson, March 1999

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"

(since communist takes are just a part of the language of the many in our generation), but it comes off as "fellow-kids"-ish. Like I'm not communist and I'm not trying to gatekeep being communist. I'm just saying that some of these people are clearly not communist and are just joking about it because they're trying to appeal to an audience that is.

that go off screen in a video such that the camera has to pan up.

ah the pain in my stomach never ceases

=> https://thoughts.learnerpages.com/?show=246016a0-16f1-4f1c-9940-433d968ea4dd

information is out of date. Which is just such a shame.

Edit (:49): actual docs are here: => https://docs.ruby-lang.org/en/3.1/CGI.html I don't even know

a keyboard shortcut and Firefox doesn't the option to change shortcuts. (Maybe I can do it at the OS-level? Hmm)

code.

=> https://thoughts.learnerpages.com/?show=6e56bd7b-4d40-4a24-ada1-8bbaef7060f4

like his videos anymore.)

=> https://thoughts.learnerpages.com/?show=dfdd4a26-7952-4541-9a14-43f74ec5745b

realize that I like habits because I don't have to think about them, and I love thinking about novel things. It's weird to me when people think about or comment on things that I wouldn't consider novel.

I just haven’t bought the whole serverless thing. There are infinite options if you want to host a static site, but I’m scared of getting vender-locked if I build for one company’s serverless platform.

Part of my problem is that my standards include perfectly meeting everyone else's standards as well so that no one can fault me. A lot of my problem is that I haven't eaten dinner and I'm really fricking hungry please

if I follow my standards than I'm not happy because I haven't done what I want. And I think everyone has to some degree, probably, but it feels extreme for me.

-Moonbeam Rays, They Might be Giants

thoughts of a highly rational mind.

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.

-Astronaut in the Ocean, Masked Wolf

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.

When I was a kid you had to pay like $$$ to the people that had an app that let you do that.

=> https://soundcloud.com/ajrbrothers/ajr-lindsey-stirling-im-readytake-flight-mashup "I'm Ready/Take Flight Mashup" Lindsey Stirling and Ryan are both iconic editors so having both of them on a song is overkill. And indeed, this sounds like Ryan just remixed Sterling into I'm Ready, with the violin as background. But it's still incredible, like ah!, Ryan with the up-tempo violin is great. Edit (:17): I should make explicit that I'm working under the assumption that it was edited by Ryan based on the fact that it shows up on AJR's official Soundcloud.

They're not of course, I just have to add the bootstrap classes to the things, but it's like the same thing.

because Etho has been so consistently amazing for 10 years now. But season 7 was something different.

much of a real technical achievement that was. That's an absolute win for privacy. Granted she did it accidentally because she thought Signal was replacing Facebook Messenger, but a win is a win.” => gemini://moddedbear.xyz/logs/2022-07-07-re-signal.gmi Modded Bear - Re: Signal

a broken and contrite heart you, God, will not despise.” ‭‭Psalms‬ ‭51:16-17‬ ‭NIV‬‬

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.

To wish to be

Ohoohooh i don't even have to type words here. uharugalouighey semllt huruahu shape /-\ | | V Hehe

=> https://thoughts.learnerpages.com/?show=6df0758b-1669-4eec-a729-dffd7c96a9e3 "auto-generated docs that list the types of your values does not count as documentation."

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.

Like I know Apple has more money than pretty much any other company, but Google is right there with them, and Google has a lot more incentive to push the web forward. Anyways Safari is dead, FireFox is dead, long live Chromium.

JSX-like syntax for DOM elements, so you're writing these Haskell-style arrays that represent HTML elements and it's ugly. It's ugly.

(subject to change) hours."

inflicting pain on your characters. I see a lot of dramatic writing as no better than slap-stick comedy.

His dedication in getting 10 million subscribers, 9 years after he set his mind to it, is inspiring. "Technoblade never dies"

important we do not forget that.

pre-load songs on it.

overwhelmed by what I'm looking at. Like it puts my mind in the mindset of "we have to focus!" keeps my mind from wandering.

be comprehended by a human. Sometimes people use "Platonic form" to refer to "my conception/idea of the of the object, as opposed to the version of the object in the real world" but that's just the difference between the object and your idea of the object. I'm saying there's a third thing "the real object" which is unknowable.

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."

it until today, I don't think, but I've remembered, if not most of it a lot of it (should have taken the goat, women are better at climbing than men, the three-strike system, climbing is more expensive than you thought, suave motherfool (at the time I was using a browser extension (that I wrote myself (okay it was a bookmarklet)) that replaced curse words with alternatives like "fool"), the perfectly-nested multi-level parentheses, ah!). This is deep in the Matthias Lore Archives. "suavemotherfool" was a computer password of mine for a while. => https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/3157lu/comment/cpz2x14/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 content warning, strong language, sexual themes

would have made more of a difference.

shortcut to switch.

=> https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/aJNFqf81ds9785AgmYkdWiboTNU=/0x0:2000x4286/fit-in/2000x4286/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/21967143/blazers.jpg University of Alabama Birmingham 19188 "Steamroller" formation poster

Of course, NanoJSX isn't a static site generator, it just renders JSX to a string and I'm having to build all the loops to iterate over files and directories myself. :| But it should give us very close to feature parity with cleaner code and 1/10 the page size.

*All I want is software that works.* I'm sure the anti-paste thing has forgotten that I opted into that years ago and is now in a corrupted state where I can't paste but also don't see the prompt that tells you how to allow pasting. (Or maybe it's only FF that has that prompt, IDK)

it's like the amount of lowercase required to be hip just keeps increasing. Would it kill you to hit the Shift key? (This is about the antisoftware.club manifesto which is 1,400 words of prose without any capital letters. If your Twitter username is lower case I don't care)

hmu stands for "hit me up." That's what the kids are saying these days.

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.

energy *afterwards* to process it. Even if I'm too tired to do anything except read Reddit, doing so keeps me tired after I've put my phone down and stopped.

the invention of the semaphore, so that you could include the telegraph monologue mostly as is.

I legitimately think the addition of features to the web platform will stop when: * a browser like Chrome gains enough market share that it can start vender-locking websites until it gains 100% market share * a browser like Safari uses its platform advantage to capture enough market share that it can refuse to add features and hold the other browsers hostage * JS becomes so bloated and unmaintainable that it becomes impossible to write bug-free websites (sic, we’re here already and no one cares) * something radically different (ten times better than the web) comes along and the web dies

> write just enough code to fix that particular error, and nothing more. You repeat this process until you have the result you want. This is exactly how I code

don't describe what you're doing anywhere. Aghghahhh

I need to figure out if my fear of being boring and my fear of losing control of my self both stem from a pride that keeps me from surrendering myself to God.

-Work, Jars of Clay

I know what you're thinking. 'Matthias, it is a crime, to put what is undeniably the best sequel pun, "squeakquel" at third place.' But one of the factors that I considered heavily when rating was the ability to parody. And "The Squeakquel" only works as an Alvin and the Chipmunks title, whereas you can throw "Electric Boogaloo" after anything that ends in 2 and it is hilarious. Also I would like you know that there was a Breckinridge Jazz Hand named Wyatt Mason II and we called him 2 Wyatt 2 Mason.

I'm just thinking about like IDE/code-analysis features—we could totally have a button in the IDE that simulates running the code and generates all possible outputs. Like IntelliJ will point out if you can transform a boolean condition into a simpler equivalent form (like `if not (not a and not b)` -> `if (a or b)`, if I remember DeMorgan's). Why can't we do that with the entire program? And like, I hate IDE features like type checking—but mostly because they're bad. It seems like I get false positives from TypeScript type checking 30+% of the time and an acceptable false positive rate for a static code analysis tool IMO is close to 1%. But that's something we can bring down in the next decade.

page from disk cache. That's iconic. This laptop has an SSD. I mean it's not a good SSD but it's an SSD. It read the other content (images+scripts) from the cache, so maybe since that took a little while, it was able to complete the download first. Still, the whole page is only 300kb. The server is in Utah. The internal SSD is literally 0% of the distance. It's quicker to roundtrip a couple packets to Utah than it is to read 300kb from the disk.

improved time to first content paint. There's a certain advantage in using the browser's native loading mechanisms in that users think 'the browser is loading.' On the other hand, if you serve a static page from a CDN, the user very quickly gets to see your, branded, loading component, while dynamic content is loaded from the site. But this can mean that the user starts to associate your site with loading, regardless of the actual loading times.

never survive in polite company. I mean seriously, your legs are straight and not supporting your weight, you have something to lean back against. You can lean your head back, but it's not like you're in a recliner.

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"?

And I’m hungry

echo -n ${"$(git -c color.status=always status)"[0, -1]} fi fi } zle -N my-accept-line bindkey '^M' my-accept-line ```

=> https://music.apple.com/us/playlist/everything/pl.u-V9D7gq7FRvX7P7 Everything by Matthias on Apple Music If you don't have Apple Music, just don't click that link. The Apple Music web interface does poorly with large playlists, and the songs that, by chance, ended up on the top are not, on the whole, reflective of my music taste.

Only the hardest hitting analysis on Thoughts Learnerpages

IDEs are dumb.

that we could have just a little bit of TypeScript types on these objects.

at home.

more valuable than they?” ‭‭Matthew‬ ‭6:26‬ ‭NIV‬‬ Lewis talks about living in the present in *The Screwtape Letters*, something that is hard for me. I can feel what Lewis means, what the Holy Spirit is leading me to—not a sort of “do whatever you feel like right now” but “do what you know you need to do right now and trust that it will work out for you.” I know that sounds easy, but my perfectionism makes it difficult. Perfectionism is useful when making decisions but after the decision has been made you just need to roll with it. This sort of perfectionist rejection of perfectionism ties directly to the idea of “doing whatever is easiest.”

describe but which I would normally call the desire for perfection or frustration with imperfection.

really like each other, have a more solid relationship than two people who get married because they've fallen in love. Remind me to edit with source/quote once I'm back near my copy of *The Screwtape Letters* Edit (Jun 16, 9:05 a.m.): For background *The Screwtape Letters* are an imagined collection of letters from one demon to another, so when it says "thanks to us" Lewis means "thanks to the work of the devil" and when it says "the Enemy" it means "the Christian God" > The Enemy described a married couple as "one flesh." He did not say "a happily married couple" or "a couple who married because they were in love," but you can make the humans ignore that. … > The truth is that whenever a man lies with a woman, there, whether they like it or not, a transcendental relationship is set up between them which must be eternally enjoyed or eternally endured. … > Humans can be made to infer the false belief that the blend of affection, fear, and desire which they call "being in love" is the only thing that makes marriage either happy or holy. This error is easy to produce because "being in love" does very often, in western Europe, precede marriages which are made in obedience to the Enemy's designs. … > humans...can be deterred from seeking marriage as a solution because they do not find themselves "in love" and thanks to us the idea of marrying for any other purpose seems low and cynical. Yes, they think that. They regard the intention of loyalty to a partnership for mutual help, for the preservation of chastity, and for the transmission of life, as something lower than a storm of emotion. -p 82-84 I think what's going on here is that Lewis is using a definition of "being in love" which today would be closer to "love at first sight." I don't think Lewis is saying that you shouldn't love your wife/husband. (Notice how he always quotes "being in love," I think to make it clear this isn't real love.) Rather, I think he's defining "being in love" as the inherently childish, transitory, "storm of emotion" which exists only at the beginning of a relationship. And he further argues that basing a relationship on *that* feeling is a recipe for disaster. At another point, he describes how a new couple might be spontaneously moved to do things for one another which would be unreasonable and unsustainable for the entirety of a marriage. But I just can't stop laughing at 'there's nothing wrong with getting married for the "preservation of chastity."'

Edit (10:32 pm): => https://thoughts.learnerpages.com/?show=97a82374-a097-4bf0-b70f-7eb98491382e Turing invented and then solved computer science.

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.

much as possible. Downvoted to -4 the other day for commenting on Reddit that telling kids about the existing of heaven and hell didn’t constitute child abuse.

devil, but by necessity it is different and the only reason to want something different is if you are unsatisfied with what you have; and so, a desire for novelty and unsatisfaction go hand in hand. (From the plane a couple days ago)

the annoying parts of the code. That is to say, I’m going to work on this website when I feel like it, and not for any other reason.

everyone else to die, and then at the end of the episode they drop a QR code for their NFT What timeline are we even in.

are the spokes. The closer we get to God, the closer we get to each other, and the closer we get to each other, the closer we get to God.’ (One of the things that made it memorable is that it was about 5 minutes and was delivered through pointing at pieces of paper and the wheel—no talking.) Willard in *The Devine Conspiracy* argues something similar—that being a Christian means surrendering your own will and joining God’s “kingdom” (here defined as the sphere of God’s influence, where God’s will is carried out) and that teaming up with God in this way is the most effective way of aligning your will with others.

=> https://thoughts.learnerpages.com/?show=e593874a-8f17-4f97-af02-cad878e6ee0d

That's me, a normal person, with normal thoughts. God is good. I am something else. The small pain of finite meaning in the face of the infinite truth of everything. Insanity. Freedom. I can do whatever I want. I have complete control. complete and perfect control over myself. Right? Surrender.

I mean maybe it's not possible for anyone but Chrome to make a web browser anymore.

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.

Couriway voice optional

moving the mouse closer to the keyboard. Save a bunch of time that way.

Hm. It occurs to me I could update them myself. Hm.

I don't even know This Thought brought to you by `_.isNil`

-How Great, Chance the Rapper

I don't know, it could be worse. It has been worse. I just. uh.

to play by even the silliest rules of engagement. For the moment, it’s been pretty nice. I can’t wait until we ruin it for everybody else.” Hot dang 😭

"most police should be completely unarmed" liberal. They may disagree on gun policy but are willing to put that aside to insult the police.

think.) So I need to write code to download those from Twitter. And of course some Tweets or threads (I wrote a neat bit of code to unroll Twitter threads into a single Thought) have multiple pictures, and I have no idea what to do about that (this site only supports one piece of media per Thought).

pip installing requests. There's no reason to use requests. It's not. Ahhhhh Banging my head into the wall. requests is like jQuery for Python programmers. They just can't live without it and it looks exactly the same to me.

forgotten most/all of them. As opposed to Thoughts, which I reread periodically frequently enough that I remember (or at least am not surprised at) most of them.

A salamander sitting on a rock by the beach. A submarine and a police car with a hat.

room for error as possible. If I have a line of code that doesn't work, my style generally is not to look at it or think about it or even "rubber-duck" at this point. I tend to jump immediately to assuming nothing and either wildly printing variables or binary-searching between the present and a previous working state.

Only ISO dates in Python I guess. Going to have to like call out to JS or something I don't know. Edit: nevermind I missed `strptime`

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.

all I really need.

disabled! Code verification is Disabled!

this jQuery user?’ And the answer is yes.

It makes me feel sad because I feel like it's a reflection on my character. I don't regret my actions. Regret is not something that I frequently experience. In short, I feel resigned to it. I feel alone, both because I feel they don't want me, and because I know that my friends will be having fun without me and because I don't have another life setup, as much as I pretend that I do. I'm scared. I don't know if I can do it. "And, the trouble is, we don't know who we are instead."

And “He didn’t believe in perfection. How could he? Perfection was God. Unattainable. Perfection was really only the mask of ambition, and Justo wasn’t driven by ambition.”

ah frick these are words from inside my mind boy i do not have the sanity to create the things that I want to never be destroyed on this earth or in the heavens beyond our comprehenious in time sheep yelow words flow from my mind like they've never had a chance to escape before and this is the opening of the floodgates that destroys a city and a town and the world and everyone behind thier own minds is light oh

-The Resistance, Josh Garrels

gives up on storing scrollback but I'm currently at 29,000+ lines with no issues.

finished, people are using it, there is no intention to attract users, and there is no path to make breaking changes. And the Gemini mailing list is called rude but I guarantee you if you go on the mailing list for any other project which is done and is in maintenance mode and suggest adding features the reply is going to be "no" in about that many words.

was designed to fix Solderpunk's problems with Gopher. If you want to fix your problems with the web, make your own protocol. This HN user is like 'Gemini does nothing to fix the problems with embedding LaTeX on the web!' And I'm like. No. It doesn't. Did you expect it to? Sorry?