Thoughts
MikeMcQuaid dared me to justify this bug so I'm digging through the Homebrew source. I'm up to three bugs found.
I think the thing that makes me so wickedly good at programming is that I'm good at the large scale and the small scale. I'm good at seeing
all the pieces connect to each other in the system, and I'm good at recognizing when you have an unnecessary if statement.
Good morning gang. Trying to convince the Homebrew maintainer to support my insane workflow this morning.
Sometimes I feel like Matilda. Like when I was a kid I pretty much had superpowers and now that I have a full time job that uses 100% of my
mental capacity I feel like a normal person.
The thing that drives me crazy about non-Apple fans, is that they INSIST that the only reason to buy an Apple product is stupidity. My whole
life I’ve been told I’m an idiot for liking Apple products because the fricking whatever hype android phone of the week is objectively better and Apple is just marketing. And there’s no ATTEMPT to understand or emphasize with me at all.
From today’s HN thread.
> This seems to somehow work on normal people
Someone else posted a video cussing out a strawmanned iPhone purchaser for 4 minutes. “Oh you used the r-slur to describe the iPhone users, argument won.”
This is a generalization because I have plenty of friends in tech that are not iPhone/Apple users because and I’m able to be friends with them because they recognize that there are some advantages to Apple products and recognize that I’m a human being capable of making and forming my own honest informed opinion.
What I’m getting at is that you don’t have to agree. You can disagree as vehemently as you want. But in repeating me as a person you have to put a tiny bit of thought into empathizing with why I might hold the position/opinion I do.
I was at a programming meetup the other weekend and an Apple user dropped some super oddly specific comment about how Apple has the best performance to energy efficiency of any desktop right now, and the windows/linux guy with his laptop brand that I’ve never heard of and his external mouse that he pulled out of his bag is like, ‘that’s not true.’ If you never let your opposition score a point that’s not a debate, that’s verbal abuse.
The iPhone user’s argument strategy, on the other hand, is digging through the entire list of iPhone features until you find one that Android doesn’t have and saying “iPhone is better because I care about this one oddly specific thing.” I’m not saying iPhone users are better at defending their phone choice. I’m saying you can’t take an argument like that head-on.
This is where the iPhone users are:
> This phone [iPhone Air] has the highest screen area to weight ratio except for the Galaxy S25 Edge.
We’re inventing metrics for second place. But the Android users refuse to give any ground whatsoever:
> And this is good or matters to customers because?
Com’n man. He’s invented a consumer who cares about second-best-screen-area-to-weight-ratio, you don’t need addition justification. “Um, actually, explain to me why second-best-screen-area-to-weight-ratio is a good thing.” The issue is that the android argument stems from 2009 when the iPhone was not popular in terms of marketshare. The Android fans are imitating an argument style that argues that Apple products shouldn’t exist, because in 2009 the Apple fans were equally annoying but they’re arguing that it makes sense for some people to buy iPhones. And the Android users who have the most market share are arguing that iPhones shouldn’t exist and Apple should go back to making computers. In 2025 that’s flipped but the Android users are still arguing iPhones shouldn’t exist, instead of arguing that only some people should use iPhones. I will concede that if you want a folding phone you should get an Android phone. If you want customizability you should get an Android phone. I want the phone with the second highest screen to weight ratio. “No you don’t you’re lying you’re a sheep you’re an Apple user you’re r***** you’re buying it for the status symbol you’re buying it for brand.” Ah you got me. But is there any reason I could give? No. There’s no reason for anyone to ever buy an iPhone unless they have mental issues.
> Lighter == better, thinner == cooler.
Okay that’s pretty simple. You can’t argue with that.
> What? absolutely not. Larger phones have the space for vapor chambers and better cooling tools. Thinner means you just get a piece of metal in direct contact with your CPU and you pray it can take out enough heat.
> that wouldn't be the first time the Apple distortion field makes people say stupid things.
Ah, you got me. It’s the Apple distortion field. I’m just not right in the head.
The thing that’s funny about the “fashion” take is that I literally don’t care about being seen with the phone. Never in my life has that been something I’ve thought about. But I think it comes from the fact that I do want the phone to look good because I’m looking at it. I’d rather get a Mac mini than a System 76 meerkat because the Mac mini looks better. But the Android fans somehow insert this idea that the only reason you would ever want something to look good is for someone else. And I understand thinking that about the actual fashion world (you’re obviously still wrong) but no one talks about getting a computer to make them look nicer. Apple nerds are still nerds.
Anyways I have a problem because I internalize all criticism even when it’s not directed at me or is inaccurate. Same programming meetup, someone laughed in my face for using Python, “try doing reproducible builds”, IT’S A WEBSITE.
Manifold can be really interesting and engaging when there's a really interesting question. But there just aren't that many questions that
are interesting, at least to me. A lot of questions that hinge on chance, or depth knowledge in a field, or one person's decision. It's not that I can't generate a probabilistic estimate of the likelihood of these events, it's that my confidence in those estimates is so low that my estimate is completely uninteresting.
When writing fundraising marketing material, don't answer the question "why should I give you money." Answer the question, "why should I
give you $1,000 instead of $10?" (Or maybe you don't need $1,000, but plug in what the amount is that you need.)
I’ve been on Lobsters for only a little while, but it seems much more toxic than HN. Which is really weird.
> “Tiny self-contained software”. Huh? What are you even on about here? Do you think million line projects are tiny? Ones which do use numerous third party dependencies? And all written in Odin? And even the Odin compiler itself is not “tiny” and has loads of stuff.
> I’m sorry but your argument makes little sense and misses the point of the argument being presented, and your hypothesis is just flat out wrong.
This reminds me of like deathaxe’s tone. I think it’s a rhetorical device where you create a sentence fragment off of the previous sentence fragment. “And all written in Odin” is a sentence fragment on its own. It simultaneously builds on the sentence fragment before “ones which do use third party dependencies” and the sentence after starts with a conjunction “and all written in…”. It gives the impression of a sputtering furious person.
Whether or not it’s meant this way, I find it hard to engage with rationally.
Here’s another quote from a different user on the same thread:
> You know what the iOS App Store is? Yeah I just blew your mind. Just extended the analogy right there. You could talk for hours about this.
Obviously very different in terms of tone, but note the sentence fragment, “Just extended the analogy right there.”
XKCD 3117 (replication crisis) is really fricking good, but I can't help but feel like it would be even better without the first panel
Could do it as two panels:
> "Over a decade into the replication crisis, we wanted to see if today's studies have become more robust. Unfortunately, we found exactly the same problems."
> Replication crisis has been solved!
`assert`s are a debugging tool. I love Zig's asserts because they're an effect debugging tool and debugging is really important.
But asserts are also loved by defensive programming advocates that argue that every component should assume that every other component is behaving poorly. And that's bad engineering.
jojosolos might be the coolest mcyt'r because she's just friends with the entire community. Name another player who has been on Hermitcraft,
lifesteal, and ranked.
The reason semantic programming is important and powerful is that the semantic meaning of the code is limited by the human’s capacity for
understanding complexity. Since the semantic meaning is defined as “what does the person mean when they ask for this?” the answer has to be simple enough for a human to describe. And so implementing that meaning as closely as possible means that you’ve limited the possible complexity of the system.
Yeah, I can't figure out what the issue with Rancher is. It's hanging doing something but I don't know what. The esbuild build sometimes
hangs. Going to switch back to docker. Ugh.
Don't have more time to debug this but this definitely is an issue with our proprietary build.js which calls esbuild not esbuild itself.
HermitCraft season 10 ending announced by JoeHills on LinkedIn. That's the JoeHills difference.
I thought Monsters vs. Aliens was funny as a kid but there were a lot of jokes that went over my head oh my. Some good fricking bits.