XKCD 353 is how I feel about Rails. Like. better_errors feels like a fever dream. Like it should not be possible to put me at a debugger
after the error has happened. Like active_job perform later? Like it just has its own scheduler? Its date functions are just English?
=> https://xkcd.com/353/
IRB has syntax highlighting in the command line. Like what. I honestly thought that these problems just hadn't been solved yet, but it turns out there are Ruby libraries that solve them
You could tell me there's a unmaintained Ruby library from 2015 that implements antigravity and I'd believe you.
Edit (:57): I've never seen Pry's `cd` before in any language (I wouldn't be surprised if common lisp/SLIME has it). If you had asked me why it didn't exist, I would have said it was too difficult.
I realized one of the reasons I get so worked up over dumb conversations about software design on HN is because in my mind it is morally
wrong to build bad software. So when someone argues that websites without JavaScript are bad, they might be commenting only on their view of the software design process. But I hear that as a criticism of the character of everyone who writes JavaScript, including myself.
Part of the reason that I do dumb things on here is to remind you that I don't have a moral obligation to deliver you with a good user experience. Adding `skew(-10deg)` is good software design because it is good usage of technology to reach my goal; but my goal is not to give you a good user experience.
Strawmaned HN user:
Technology selection (not a moral requirement) -> quality software design (not a moral requirement) -> good user experience (moral requirement)
Strawmaned JS dev (me):
Technology selection (not a moral requirement) -> quality software design (moral requirement) -> good user experience (not a moral requirement)
I don't really drink, I don't do weed, I don't vape. But that's a preference. I don't have a problem with it.
I have a problem with smoking. We did not stop smoking for the hell of it, or because a bunch of stuck up adults decided they hated fun. We were not forced to stop smoking. We chose to stop smoking, as a culture, because it was killing us. Not quickly, not sexily. It kills you in a way that is slow and ugly.
So I don't care if you think cigarettes are sexy or fun. Because they're not.
One of the many subtle things that makes a terminal nice is that characters are always grid-aligned, even vertically. So while I've
referenced smooth scrolling as a benefit of moving away from a terminal emulator, it would be reasonable to say that once you've stopped scrolling, you have to "snap" to the closest full-line scroll amount. (SMASH for search)
The Tumblr CEO banned someone for posting about how much she wanted to violently kill him but the person was trans and the CEO’s a white male so the entirety of Tumblr went insane about how transphobic tumblr moderation is and how the CEO needs to cope and they’re being “censored.” At least one person implied that it was fine to send death threats to white men because it’s not part of systematic oppression or whatever. So I log out of tumblr and deleted the bookmark right, fine. I jump over to cohost, because on the whole cohost is a good site; there’s a lot of high-quality enjoyable posts there. Well, coincidentally, cohost has had a spike in users recently. From tumblr users who think they’re being censored on tumblr. So now cohost has the most radically-liberal people imaginable, the people that couldn’t handle tumblr. I think mastodon has a similar problem. It’s people that were too liberal for Twitter. I don’t disagree with Twitter as drastically, but the discussion is really uniquely vitriolic. There’s a lot of mockery on twitter.
We'll probably make the prompt box a different color but try to avoid adding a border around it. I don't know yet. The visuals will be hard.
I just coined the term 'prompt box.' It's not a textbox.
SMASH (for search). I decided SMASH is better than NATE. It ends in "sh" as it is legally required to. Or maybe we call the shell half SMASH and the terminal half NATE. I don't know. I'm sick of the all-caps gimmick already. But I want to communicate that it's a dumb product with the name and all caps does that.
For NATE/SMASH, it seems like we need the prompt to always be focused and always be visible on the screen. So your cursor is always in the
prompt. This lets you preserve the nice behavior of terminals—that the prompt isn't a textbox that you have to explicitly focus, it's always ready to accept input—while removing the annoying behaviors that come from the prompt being a part of the same output character grid, like glitches where the cursor leaves the prompt line.
And then running a command will scroll you down such that, if the command output is too long to fit on one screen, the previous command is aligned with the top of the screen. So it'll be: previous command, previous command output (truncated to fit), prompt at the bottom of the screen ("floating" over the previous command output). And you can scroll down if you want or start typing immediately.
If the command output fits on less than one screen, then you're scrolled to the very bottom.
So the prompt is always stuck at the bottom of the screen. Like Slack or Discord. Oh it's always a good sign when you re-invent something from first principles.
Zig is interesting because half of the users are C users whose default debugging strategy is examining the generated assembly, and the other
half are users of high level programming languages trying to avoid learning C.
Edit (10:32): and they're both super entitled. "why doesn't Zig behave like [C or JS]"
Edit (April 23): What I want to emphasize here is that the first group of people are not necessarily smarter than the second. This user wants to know how to pass an argument to a naked function. (Because if it's not a naked function then the compiler generates 4 more assembly instructions.) (They're the instructions for passing the arguments. That's how functions work.) (What he wants is actually an assembler macro or something. Zig is not an assembler.)
Okay, I figured it out. I figured out how to read from standard-in in Zig
```
var input = std.BoundedArray(u8, 128).init(0) catch unreachable;
_ = stdin.streamUntilDelimiter(input.writer(), '\n', input.capacity()) catch unreachable;
const got: []u8 = input.slice();
std.log.debug("{s}", .{ got });
```
My biggest problem was actually not understanding the difference between the length and the capacity of my BoundedArray. It's just not well documented.
Oh, and obviously I know that Zig expects explicit allocations and I don't expect it to support a Ruby-style `read()`. It would be nice if streamUntilDelimiter took a &BoundedArray and returned a []u8. Or took an allocator and returned a []u8.
One of things about being a hacker is that you become unimpressed by hackers. Which sucks because the idea of being a hacker is cool.
The aesthetic is cool, so then you learn the tech, and the tech is simple, and suddenly the aesthetic is less cool because you know that the kid on Discord who calls themselves a hacker is just a rich kid buying DDoS attacks on telegram.
The web just isn't a document distribution platform anymore. And there are a whole horde of angry hacker news users who think that every
website is bad these days because the author has chosen to make it not a document. Like. It's not a document because the web isn't a document platform. Sorry not sorry.
I wish communists used language like "free food for everyone including the rich." That's a policy that a rich person could get behind.
"free food for poor people and kill the rich" is a non-starter for a rich person. It doesn't even try to be.
I guess that's not what communism is about. Communism is about killing the rich people.
Fascinated by the theological statement that abortions or even murder effaces God's glory. "efface" means "erase" which I don't think is
even the word they intended there.
"A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word 'darkness' on the walls of his cell."
-Lewis
I love False's trust issues so much. Like the Hermitcraft server is fun because everyone is always down to do someone else a favor, but it
gets a overdone at times. Like the 'stand here in the middle of this red X' 'okay' *dies*.
So it's refreshing for Iskall to be like 'pick a number,' and False to say "no."
Part of my hesitation to seek therapy immediately is that showing up to a first meeting with a therapist isn't going to magically fix
anything.
Part of my hesitation is that my social anxiety also applies to meeting with a therapist.
I get uncomfortable or frustrated easily, and it's difficult to express that in a social situation; complaining or "whining" is not normally well received.
I probably have undiagnosed asperger's (sorry liberals). Or something that makes me inherently less comfortable in social settings.
May editing continuously with thoughts.
I get really strong second hard embarrassment sometimes. Like sometimes someone will say something or explain something in a group of people, and everyone else will kind of smile and nod, but I'll be tempted to pinch the bridge of my nose and shake my head or laugh at them. And I have to kind of fight to stay respectful.
It's hard for me to figure out if me not liking people is a cause of the anxiety or a symptom of it. And obviously it seems like it can't be a cause because I still have social anxiety when I'm going to interact with the 5% of people that I like interacting with. But at times I feel contempt, a strong dislike, for almost everyone and that can't be unrelated.
It's like my emotions are wrong. I shouldn't be feeling contempt or disgust or anxiety or terror, I don't want to be.
There's a common autistic experience which is that a "texture is wrong." And I've never had that experience with textures, really. (I'll tangent in a second.) But that's kind of it feels to talk to people sometimes. It just feels wrong. But, and this is important for me to remember, my social anxiety tells me that that is the case all the time, when it's not. It's actually a small percentage of the time that I feel viscerally uncomfortable.
(Texture tangent: Okay I looked it up, and apparently not like carbonated drinks is an example of a sensation that autistic people don't like. Which is funny. I've never met anyone who shares my intense dislike for that feeling. So I guess this is confirmation I'm on the autistic spectrum. But I've never really felt that way about clothing. Wool is itchy and so I don't like wearing it, but I will. Similarly with food, I wasn't a picky eater as a kid. There are some normal foods that disgust me, but it doesn't match with how I've heard other autistic people describe it. Maybe it's an autism vs Asperger's thing.)
Nothing I've really seen online matches with my experience. The autism stuff is all focused around behaving inappropriately in social situations. And while it doesn't come naturally to me, I don't need help actually navigating the social situation. The social anxiety descriptions seem to be based around a feeling of embarrassment. This is a little harder to compare because I'm not embarrassed in normal ways. I'm not very concerned about wearing the wrong thing, for example. But I honestly don't feel like it's a fear of embarrassment for me at all. It's more like a fear of pain or of that second hand embarrassment mentioned earlier.
I can't ask for help because if I ask for help and no one comes, then I'm really screwed.
The problem with me is that I don't stay focused. I just tried the brain.fm thing that is supposed to get you focused, but I break out of it
really quickly. On the other hand, breakcore helps because it's so obnoxious that I switch from focusing on the task to focusing on the music and back. I can't get distracted by the conversation my coworkers are having, because I'm distracted by the breakcore first. The problem is that I can't listen to breakcore for 8 hours a day without going insane. Maybe brain.fm is better for long productivity sessions, but if I get distracted after a couple of minutes than we don't get there.
”So why are you now challenging God by burdening the Gentile believers with a yoke that neither we nor our ancestors were able to
bear?“
Acts of the Apostles 15:10 NLT
”“For it seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to lay no greater burden on you than these few requirements: You must abstain from eating food offered to idols, from consuming blood or the meat of strangled animals, and from sexual immorality. If you do this, you will do well. Farewell.”“
Acts of the Apostles 15:28-29 NLT
Lewis's criticism of "Christianity, and" is so so so funny because I see it everywhere now, and not even in regards to Christianity.
It's such a brutal razor.
It essentially asks, is this idea valuable in itself, or only valuable in order to give me new ways to talk about other things. Or to let me talk about other things, or to give me new things to talk about.
"'Christianity And.' You know—Christianity and the Crisis, Christianity and the New Psychology, Christianity and the New Order, Christianity and Faith Healing, Christianity and Psychical Research, Christianity and Vegetarianism, Christianity and Spelling Reform. If they must be Christians, let them [this is Screwtape letters, so satire from Lewis's perspective] at least be Christians with a difference. Substitute for the faith itself some Fashion with a Christian colouring."
"Never forget that when we are dealing with any pleasure in its healthy and normal and satisfying form, we are, in a sense, on the Enemy's
ground. ...it is His invention, not ours. He made the pleasures: all our research so far has not enabled us to produce one. All we can do is encourage the humans to take the pleasures which our Enemy has produced, at times, or in ways, or in degrees, which He has forbidden. ... An ever increasing craving for an ever diminishing pleasure is the formula."
SMASH: an escape from terminal emulators
Alpha: SMASH usable for basic command line operations
...
...
A standardized protocol for command
lines and repls, supporting modern features like syntax highlighting and autocompletion. Integration with LSP. Etc.
...
VS Code plugin replacing the in-editor terminal.
...
SMASH itself enters community maintaince mode.
...
profit?
Borderline has some great examples of 2-level worldbuilding. Her voice is always hoarse. Why? From the screaming. Why? Because she was
raised by fey.
And it's like, okay. That's the character. That's the worldbuilding. We don't get, and we don't need, a traumatic flashback or a detailed explanation. I have a ton of questions but they're technicalities. I don't dare ask why a third time.
It will never be normal to me that Sublime Text plugins target a version of Python from 12 years ago.
'we can't upgrade because we'll break compatibility with the version of Sublime Text from 2017'
(And if you're thinking to yourself, 'don't fix it if it's not broken' it is very broken and they're discussing how they can't fix it.)
OH MY FRICKING WORD.
Okay this might still be dumb.
But what if you had a separate frontend and backend. e.g. HTML frontend/rust backend.
Obviously with the architecture I described here, or similar. https://thoughts.learnerpages.com/?show=6350a520-7a4c-4688-bee4-3107a7dcb7ab
Because one of the big questions is SSH, but if you build a two-sided interface you just have to install it once and then run the client locally and the backend on the server.
Oh my word.
(Edit Mar 20, for search, SMASH)
Man Cohost is so bad. HN at least is a technology website with people who are too deep into technology. Cohost is like computer-adjacent
people who don’t like computers posting about computers. Like if you’re not going to nerd out about this stuff and research it why are you posting about how much it sucks.
I think there's a very real opportunity to replace the terminal emulator, system terminal driver, the line editor (zle or readline or
equivalent), and the shell with a novel text-based input-output system for invoking programs.
If I type `python main.py` today that text gets converted to a format that is compatible with teletype writers before python is executed. And I'm not opposed to backwards compatibility, but Python doesn't know or care that it's being invoked from a terminal at all. It interfaces with standard out/standard in for the most part naively. These terminal escape characters are used primarily to interface between the shell and the terminal emulator.
So if you replace the whole terminal and shell and end up with a command entry system that you completely control, allowing you to do syntax highlighting and auto completion and inline docs and configuration in a terminal-liberated GUI. And then you invoke Python as a subprocess and output the result in, again, a GUI text box that you control with smooth scrolling.
You need a thin compatibility layer to support terminal codes for color, but that's about it. And this could honestly replace most of my terminal use cases.
(Edit Mar 20, for search, SMASH)
The Ruby ecosystem is crazy because you'll have a gem that provides some amazing debugging feature that I've never seen before and it'll say
"requires Ruby 2.0" (which was released in 2013).
It seriously feels like the cutting edge of web development is Ruby gems that haven't been updated in 4 years.
It’s unclear if it was actually broken or if I just needed to plug it in to my computer to reflash the firmware with an updated WiFi username and password. But I opened it up and replaced a flaky relay and reflowed a couple of my awful soldering joints to make sure everything was grounded. (It’s possible the aforementioned flaky relay was actually just a victim of my awful soldering joints, but it’s been replaced anyways.)
On evaluating Christianity solely by reading scripture:
1st: scripture tells you what to care about, not just what to believe.
2nd: even if you’re able to understand Truth, it is likely that you will not derive the same truths as other Christians.
3rd: most scripture translations are not written in a casual modern dialect.
I try to avoid posting marketing material here, since I am not being paid; however, I will in the rare case that the marketing material has
significant artistic value (in my opinion (such as the Afri-Cola or Stadia commercials)). This may or may not be cult propaganda. Without further adieu, I would like to present, the copy from a candy bar wrapper I recently ate:
ORGANIC AND FAIR TRADE CERTIFIED
DR. BRONNER'S MAGIC ALL-ONE CHOCOLATE
SMOOTH COCONUT PRALINE DARK CHOCOLATE • 70% COCOA SWEETENED WITH COCONUT SUGAR
DR. BRONNER's ALL-ONE! MAGIC FOODS
IN ALL WE DO, let us be generous, fair & loving to Spaceship Earth and all its inhabitants. For we're ALL-ONE OR NONE! ALL-ONE!
As taught by The Moral ABC to unite all mankind free!!! 1st: If I'm not for me, who am I? Nobody! 2nd: Yet, if I'm only for me, what am I? Nothing! 3rd: If not now, when???!!! Once more, unless constructive I work hard, perfecting first me, absolute nothing can help perfect me! Exception none!!
DR. BRONNER'S IS CERTIFIED
Contains at least 95% Fair For Life Fair Trade certified ingredients
6th: Absolute cleanliness is Godliness! Balanced food for body-mind-soul-spirit is our medicine! Full-truth our God, half-truth our enemy, hard work our salvation, unity our goal, Free Speech our weapon, All-One our soul, self-discipline the key to freedom!
From Confucius' Absolutes (Moral ABC, Book II): 2. It is an absolute full truth that everybody in God's tremendous universe must eat or there is no body! To shine on, eat must even the Sun, consuming every second on its surface meteoric matter 100,000 tons! Exceptions? Absolute None! 3. It is an absolute full truth that every ounce of good food on God's Earth requires constructive teamwork in harmony with God's timing-wisdom-power-mercy-love, or there is not an ounce of good food left above! Exceptions? Absolute None! 4. It is an absolute full truth that any man planting 10 fruit trees in harmony with God's timing-teamwork-wisdom-power-mercy-love can reap 10 million more above! Above! Exceptions? Absolute None!
Baeck: The mark of the mature man is his ability to love and be loved, joyful, brave, without feeling of guilt. We have leaned to teach that or teach nothing!
11. We're all Sisters & Brothers! Exceptions eternally? Absolute None! None!
This wrapper is made from 100% recycled paper, with a minimum of 80% post-consumer recycled fiber.
COCOA MAGIC FOR YOU, EARTH, AND FARMERS!
ON OUR WAY TO REGENERATIVE ORGANIC CERTIFIED™️
We're making Magic with cocoa farmers through regenerative organic agriculture and its many benefits: biodiversity, soil fertility, better farmer livelihoods, and delicious, rich, dark chocolate! Read more inside the label! All-One!
INGREDIENTS: FAIR TRADE ORGANIC COCOA BEANS, FAIR TRADE ORGANIC COCONUT SUGAR, FAIR TRADE ORGANIC COCONUT, FAIR TRADE ORGANIC COCONUT MILK POWDER, ORGANIC SUNFLOWER OIL, FAIR TRADE ORGANIC BOURBON VANILLA BEAN
Made on equipment that also processes almonds, hazelnuts, milk, coconut and soy.
Distributed by Dr. Bronner's • P.O. Box 1958, Vista, CA 92085 • drbronner.com • 1-844-937-2551
Oregon Tilth Certified Organic • Made in Switzerland
18. From every power enchains, each man can only free himself as self-control he gains!
Lol I had a React component named `History` that shadowed the global browser `History` class
It's easy to argue this is a problem with globals (like History), but from the other perspective, it's an issue with imports, because I forgot to import it. If the new History had been defined globally as well, than there wouldn't be an issue.
One of the advantages of "do things that don't scale" is that sometimes those things add extra friction. And running a service with extra
friction is a good way to get an idea of if people are actually interested. If people are willing to pay to have food delivered, then they're willing to open a spreadsheet or a google form to place their order. You don't *need* an app.
kidslapper74 submits a Youtube video to Hacker News titled "I love Slapping Kids"
"What happened to normal sized smartphones?" [I just want] "a smartphone that is the same size as they used to be" (What's crazy about this take is that Apple still sells an iPhone SE or an iPhone 12 mini, but those aren't new or small enough for this commenter. They want all of the functionality of the iPhone 15 in an iPhone 5 sized box. "I want Iphone [sic] SE with a camera of the pro.")
Resources online talk about social anxiety as being a fear of embarrassment, or a fear of people laughing at you. But for me, it's more
about being afraid of being hurt, I guess.
I'm normally very self aware, but any time I try to press my System 1 to explain what I'm afraid of it just goes, "aaahhhhah people!" Almost any specific scenario that I can imagine, I'm fine with.
I do kind of worry that it's a feedback loop, and some of my anxiety is a fear of being social awkward or social anxious. I stand in the back of the room because I'm afraid someone is going to talk to me, but I'm more uncomfortable in the back of the room than I would be talking to someone. I guess that's normal for anxiety though. Peeling the band-aid off doesn't hurt as much as you hype it up in your head.
I just did my first Decked Out run. It was really fricking easy. It was also extremely stressful don't get me wrong. But I was shocked at
the degree to which watching people play a game for 100s of hours translates into being able to play it yourself. I'll probably lose the next run, but that's how the cookie crumbles.
The problem with a lot of online arguments is that instead of trying to argue in terms of the other side's core beliefs, people will
condemn the other side's core beliefs.
Instead of arguing that trains are traditional forms of transportation, and convincing traditionalists to support a liberal agenda, Tumblr argues that all traditionalism is fascism. (This example references two recent popular Tumblr posts.)
I could write 1000 words here about whether or not traditionalism implies fascism (I don't think it does), but that's not my point. My point is that you're not going to be able to convince a traditionalist to not be a traditionalist with Tumblr posts. You might be able to convince a traditionalist to support voting for a train expansion on the next ballot. That's part of why political discussion, in particular online, is so frustrating: it's not actually about tangible issues. It if was, people would be making arguments that respect other people's intangible values. Instead, people are just insulting other people's intangible values for no gain.
("values tradition" is an intangible value; it doesn't have any fixed manifestation. "values trains" is a tangible value.
Political parties and candidates don't really have intangible values. Both parties say they care about the working class. Both parties say they value America. Republicans say they care about tradition, but as in the above example, you can argue in favor of progressive, liberal, policies exclusively using arguments based on traditional values.)
Asking ChatGPT questions really makes me feel like a kid again, in a good way. I once said that I stopped asking questions as I grew up only
because other people (adults) stopped knowing the answers. For some things I can and do ask friends or family, but we're peers. There can be a lot of implied judgement in a question, on either side. ChatGPT has a sort of innocence where it doesn't care about what questions I'm asking, and it enables an innocence in me because I can ask about anything and trust that it will have an answer.
See previous thoughts,
=> https://thoughts.learnerpages.com/search?q=%22stopped+asking+questions%22
Yeah, this is what I call an enm-center-dash, it's a little wider than an en-dash, has a slightly raised baseline to center it in the line, and it has a little more space on either side when kerning.
Surprising can't-live-without-it Apple watch feature: the colored ring around the current temperature.
(Specifically with a multicolor/white face color; it uses your face color if you set one), the temperature widget has a ring around it which is a gradient of colors representing the low temperature to the high temperature for the day. And since it's using the same colors, I've learned, "oh the weather is light teal—it's cold but not freezing." That color to temperature step is so much more enjoyable than a number to temperature.
I'm talking about the widget in the upper left here
There are a couple of ideas that are not common in modern society, despite not being formally rejected.
The first is that death is a natural part of life. I don't fear death and I place significantly less value on avoiding death than many people. I'd rather live well and then die than compromise to live longer.
The second is that our local communities deserve more passion than distant communities. This point requires some nuance, because we have rejected the idea that local community is more important than distant communities. But I think it's normal and practical that you care more (from a passion standpoint, not from a moral standpoint) about problems in your own community than others. (And if you are passionate about issues in other communities, it makes sense to go to that community in order to address the issues.)
One of the collaralaries to the funemental paradox of the internet is that the balance between yours and centralized has more or less
remained stable over the last 40 years, and so I apply a rule of thumb, or an intuition to other projects, that trying to mess with that balance too much is a doomed affair. The website box fails under this test.
Origin of Species came out in 1859, before Mendel’s foundational genetics work was widely known, and almost 100 years before Crick’s
breakthroughs in DNA and it’s replication. And yet we’re supposed to believe that Darwinian-evolution is the only process that explains the existence of specialized life on Earth, based on the same evidence Darwin had available (because any more recent evidence, like any paleontology, reveals a fossil record widely inconsistent with Darwin’s predictions).
Darwin was ignorant of genes, and so offers no explanation of how new genes enter the gene pool. Almost 200 years later, Science’s best explanation for the origin of incredibly complex novel DNA patters is “mutations,” a random unguided process—equivalent to arguing that computer programs emerge through bit flips from solar rays.
Yes I am an evolution denier; why not.
And so Gemini-style minimalism is dead, but Sublime Text style minimalism isn’t. ST solved one problem well, editing text, and it’s able to
do that well in part because they don’t worry about other problems. And so I need a text editor and so Sublime Text is the best tool to solve that problem.
So then to the question: does this mean minimalism is dead? That a simple product will always be beaten by a more complex one?
My argument is kind of this: given n, the number that hear about your product, and k, the percent of those people that think it’s a good product, growth is O(n^k), not O(k*n). (Don’t look too hard at the math. It doesn’t actually make sense.) Further, that “think it’s a good product” is more precisely defined as “solves a problem for this person.” So for example if someone doesn’t have the money or the time to use your product right now, they don’t negatively impact your k, since they might still tell other people or later use your product. On the other hand, someone who thinks it’s a cool product but doesn’t think it will solve their problem does negatively impact your k. And I’m kind of conflating things, but that’s the idea.
Like, I’m not going to build a Gemini client because I’m not going to use a Gemini client. And so the fact that Gemini doesn’t solve my problem also hurts all of these other people who might have used my Gemini client. And so the fact that I agree with Gemini’s ideals doesn’t mean anything.
This argument isn’t dependent on the thing being a social platform and it isn’t dependent on your growth model. Because people aren’t going to engage with any growth model if they don’t have a use for the product.
Gemini fails miserably through this lens. It’s solving exactly the same problem as HTTP/HTML, just with drastically different values.
And the problem with that is that I agree with Gemini’s values and it doesn’t matter. I never use Gemini, either to read or to write, because HTTP is better when I need to do those things.
I open Lagrange when I want to use Gemini and sometimes I’m pleasantly surprised by there being good content there. But if I want good content I don’t go to Lagrange first. And you can’t fix that; you can’t create a better “algorithm” or a better curation system for Gemini because of the limitations in the protocol. There’s no reason that literally anyone who doesn’t agree with Gemini’s values would use the protocol.
I suspect that the original post author meant that you should look up a country's Wikipedia page when it was relevant, instead of throwing
your hands up in the air, which I absolutely agree with. But that is not what they said. What they said was "knowing sort-of where myanmar or bosnia or montenegro or somalia or laos are is literally the basic minimum and you cant even do that." And I think it's a little absurd to claim that the bare minimum is knowing the location of over 100 countries.
Still thinking about the Tumblr post, 'there's no excuse for being bad at geography, there's literally a wikipedia page called list of
countries.' Like yeah but I don't have it memorized I'm sorry. They used the phrase "bare minimum." Like if opening the Wikipedia page for list of countries is the bare minimum I'm sorry we're so far gone. 8% of the population can't read. I'm not excusing willful ignorance, but you are living in a hyper-educated nerdy bubble.
I had to pull up the post: "there are blank maps of continents online which you can use to practice." I would like to apologize to the 7.3 million people living in Laos because I have no idea where your country is and I really frankly do not care. Also I'm not going to lie, I wouldn't say I knew Montenegro was a country at all. That one is probably is on me.
Also the post was very particular about how annoying Americans are about not knowing geography, with the implication that it's a result of US-centrism. But I'm actually just bad at geography, I don't know where Jacksonville or Oklahoma City are. Hopefully Oklahoma City is in Oklahoma, but I'm not confident in my ability to point to Oklahoma on a map. (That's a lie, I know what Oklahoma looks like because I have the "I'm Ok...lahoma" image seared into my brain. I could also confidently identify Chad for you on a map of Africa because of the memes.)
I think it’s impossible to get lost. I’m always right where I am, even if sometimes I don’t know how to get where I’m going.
Like if there was a big wall between me and my destination, I wouldn’t say I’m lost. And the unknown that lies between where I currently am (which I know because I can look around) and where I’m going (which presumably I know) is like a wall that keeps me from getting where I’m going.
You have to design for 100% of users. It’s possible this is what Theil is getting at with his argument that you should try to be a monopoly.
If you solve a problem really well for 10% of your possible users, I don’t believe that works, because you can’t get any momentum or any network effects. This is a subtle point because you do have to pick a niche. But it’s better to do that by solving a problem for 100% of people with that problem, rather than solving a common problem for a subset of people (e.g. “people on a budget” or “people running Linux”). In Theil’s words, you want a big slice of a small market, not a small slice of a big market.
This will effect, for example, how I design my Gemini client in the future.
The problem with tree climbing is that you have to want it.
The tree doesn’t care, gravity doesn’t want you there, and a lot of the time your body doesn’t want you to do it (especially as you get older). You have grab the tree branch and say, “I’m going to hold onto this branch even if the branch breaks or it cuts my palm or I’m not strong enough to hold my body up.”
Project/product idea: social printer. A printer, but you can add friends that are allowed to print from it to send you messages or images.
Obviously, this is equivalent in some way to a fax machine, but “fax” is a technology, and I have no attachment to the technology. You could build a social printer with an app and an internet connection.
Obviously, you’d also improve every other aspect of modern printers while you’re at it, but social features would give you inherit vitality.*
The problem with "unless" in Ruby is that a lot of the time when you have a falsey condition, it's a condition that you expect to be true.
"unless" in English carries the connotation that the thing is normally not true.
So if you're doing form validation, I might do:
```rb
if !form.is_valid?
return :400
end
```
But, that's annoying, because "if not form is valid" isn't how you speak English. And the condition is already inverted, so it seems like a good candidate for an "unless".
```
unless form.is_valid?
return :400
end
```
"unless form is valid" is grammatically correct, but this has actually decreased readability because "error unless the form is valid" is the exact opposite of how you think about this control flow. It makes it sound like erroring is the default and this behavior is avoided in the special case that the form is valid.
Lots of ways to fix this; I think I would prefer `if form.is_invalid?; return :400; end`
> It feels petty and mean to say "no" to polite requests for simple, reasonable seeming features from enthusiastic fans of the project over
> and over again. It really does. It's not fun. But a line has to be drawn somewhere, even if it's ultimately arbitrary, otherwise the expansion continues forever.
In my quest for edgy Christian music, I'm listening to Johnny Cash.
> Well you may throw your rock and hide your hand, working in the dark against your fellow man, but as sure as God made black and white, what's done in the dark will be brought to the light!
It's okay. It's Tuesday. Um. I'm probably still sick, but there are also a bunch of other factors here. I'm going insane. I feel really
guilty, I guess. I didn't eat dinner. I took an acetaminophen and the fever has gone down but I'm obviously awake at 5:30am which isn't ideal. I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing. I'm lonely and lost and bored and sad and nervous and
Why can't I let go of the past? Why does no one else have this problem?
I hate it; I can feel it dragging me down; but I can't get rid of it.
This is about how I'm in over 30 Khan Academy Discord servers.
I guess I don't have anything better. If I could go back I would in a heartbeat. I'd love to be talking about programming and drama and playing the word game in KA vendors' market. But that's not the world we live in anymore, the bot hasn't been online in 6 years.
16:26 <#emacs> roadie: I tried to swim across to the submarine in warhead today and found that they did put the shark in - barely made it out alive
16:26 <#emacs> InstNEON001: You can pry alien hominid from my cold dead fingers.
16:26 <#emacs> vuori: also especially American old money companies tend to have massive turnover in their IT and admin departments in my experience, so if they set up analytics thing A in 2022, all the people who knew about it will be gone in 2023 and the new people install analytics thing B. Thing A stays around because one insistent guy in marketing must absolutely use it to count page views
16:26 <#emacs> johnw: what channel did I just enter?
16:27 <#emacs> InstNEON001: Emacs.
It's cause they don't have dedicated off-topic channels like Discord, so it's kind of fair game to talk about whatever.
Gemini's mistake, if it made one, was being radical in too many different ways:
* It was radical in having presentation controlled entirely by the client and having documents be fully semantic
* It was radical in being very simple, non-extensible, not valuing growth, not valuing rapid development
* It was radical in encouraging client and server development ("making a client/server is easy" was a design goal; that's not true for any other protocol or specification I can think of)
* It was radical in encouraging TOFU certificates
In a lot of fiction, you have a tendency for characters, especially side-characters, to be prepared to sacrifice or die for “the cause,” or
to prevent an apocalypse, or because it’s the right thing to do, or because the bad guy killed their parents. But what “the cause” is or exactly what they’re willing to sacrifice is kind of poorly defined. What I love about the characters in *Beyonders* is that even the side characters have very specific sacrifices that they have made or are going to make, to benefit very clearly defined causes. They align with the main goal, but the characters have an arc which is not the main goal.
The problem with git is that git commands and git operations are orthogonal to each other. Running `git commit` creates a new commit and
updates the branch to point at that commit. That should be two commands.
Branches are just pointers to commits, but it took me almost 10 years of using git to figure that out. Because the command to update where a branch points is `git reset --hard`.
Sublime text users are such fricking bootlickers.
I get it, the editor is unjustly maligned for not being open source and not having
whatever whizbang IDE features the kids obsess about in VS Code these days.
But when someone points out that Sublime isn't following the Unicode standard, you don't need 4 people to jump in and explain that akually! emojis are made up of codepoints and so "both perspectives express a truth."
One of the perspectives, is the perspective that is defined by the unicode standard.
I need to do a much better job of telling other people when I'm uncomfortable.
When I'm alone, I'm good at figuring out that, for example, a song is annoying me, and skipping it. Or it's too hot, or I'm bored, or nervous about something. And when I'm with other people I exert a lot of pressure on myself to conform, I guess, or endure, or something.
For example, if I'm traveling with a group of people, and I'm nervous that we're lost, I should tell them that and check the map and deal with the problem. And instead, I tend to follow the social cues—no one else is nervous so I shouldn't be nervous. Which means that I'm just uncomfortable.
And I further hypothesize that this creates a meta-feedback-loop. Where I tell myself that I'm uncomfortable *because* I'm bad at "matching" what the rest of the group is feeling. I tell myself I just need to be more like these other people who aren't nervous, and I need to be less nervous, and then I'll be more comfortable and enjoy socializing. When instead I should do what I would do if I was alone and deal with the thing making me nervous.
The obvious problem with that is that the things that make me uncomfortable are very different from the things that make other people uncomfortable. And so there's a chance of annoying the other people if I'm pestering them to double-check the map. But I'm kind of okay with that because it reframes the problem to be an issue of preference. I prefer the music to be quieter. That doesn't mean that I'm "bad at" going to parties with loud music. In the same way, I'm not "bad at" traveling with people who don't want to stare at the map. But instead of coping with it, you should ask to turn the music down or get ear plugs or ask to see the map.
Maybe skill in socializing is more about creating an environment where you are both comfortable socializing, then it is about forcing yourself to be comfortable in a social environment where you are not.
This also applies to like conversation topics. Instead of sitting and waiting for a conversation topic you care about to come up, try to bring it up. "Anyone here play minecraft?" If they don't want to talk about minecraft, that doesn't reflect poorly on you, it reflects poorly on both of your's compatibility.
I'm afraid of someone that I love hurting me. Kicking me in the shins or ridiculing something that defines me or otherwise abusing me.
I guess that's a silly fear to have because I wouldn't fall in love with someone who was prone to doing those things.
But it is, like, I can barely handle criticism from strangers. If someone that I loved criticized me it would sting for decades. (Luckily that's never happened before.) But it's not really about criticism so much as it is about pain or discomfort. I'd rather be comfortable and lonely than uncomfortable and happy. I'm scared of falling in love with someone who makes me uncomfortable. And everyone makes me uncomfortable.
> The autoregressive nature won't allow the LLMs to create an internally consistent model before answering the question.
This is key.
Informally, there's no way for the model to "back up" its train of thought or to take several logical steps before outputting the first token. It has extremely limited working memory.
It's the whole can't play akinator/20-questions thing.
but not actually tired, like I could run a mile right now, just fatigued. But not fatigued in a worn-down way, but in closer to a sleepy way. Like my body is awake but my mind is asleep.
```js
function zip(array1, array2) {
const accum = [];
const shorterLength = Math.min(array1.length, array2.length);
for (let i = 0; i < shorterLength; i++) {
accum.push([array1[i], array2[i]]);
}
return accum;
}
function args (...a) {
return a;
}
function then(...exprs) {
return exprs;
}
function sum(rvalue1, rvalue2) {
return function (env) {
let value1, value2;
if (Object.hasOwn(env, rvalue1)) {
value1 = env[rvalue1];
}else {
value1 = rvalue1;
}
if (Object.hasOwn(env, rvalue2)) {
value2 = env[rvalue2];
}else {
value2 = rvalue2;
}
return value1 + value2;
}
}
function equals(varname, val) {
return function (env) {
if (val instanceof Function) {
val = val(env);
}
env[varname] = val;
};
}
function ret(rvalue) {
return function (env, returnCallback) {
if (Object.hasOwn(env, rvalue)) {
returnCallback(env[rvalue]);
}else {
returnCallback(rvalue);
}
}
}
function defineFunction(args, doSteps) {
const env = {};
// Everything is lazily evaluated until the function is actually called
return function (...a) {
for (const [argname, value] of zip(args, a)) {
env[argname] = value;
}
let shouldReturn = false;
let returnValue = null;
function retCallback (value) {
shouldReturn = true;
returnValue = value;
}
for (const step of doSteps) {
step(env, retCallback);
if (shouldReturn) {
return returnValue;
}
}
}
}
console.log(defineFunction(args("a"), then(equals("b", 5), equals("res", sum("b", "a")), ret("res")))(5));
```
Obviously some big problems but just as a "heh" it does actually work for that example.
My favorite thing ever is DIY-ers thinking that they're engineers and then getting torn apart.
"[here's what I plan to do]"
> derived requirements need to be done based off trade studies comparing all involved components
"they are based off emphirical testing"
> If you have a prototype with no trades or requirements you have a toy
"im gonna run fea" (finite element analysis)
> That’s not a trade study
"if the landing gear buckles its just a tube"
"look i think this is good enough"
"the clamping will work"
> how do you know
> What's you're torque spec for enough clamping?
"i just do it and fix problems if they happen"
"Sigh. It was so much simpler when all valid input was 7-bit ASCII."
Sigh. It was so much easier when we all spoke English.
I will spend a lot of time complaining about the complexity of modern computer systems, and Unicode, in its efforts to be thorough, is more complex and bloated than it needs to be. But "just-use-ascii" is the easiest possible example of oversimplification. Most of the world uses a language that requires more than ASCII. Sorry.
(Disclaimer, I have no fricking idea how prevalent or good Romanization of other languages is.)
There's a parking spot that has a sign that says it's reserved for service vehicles in front of my building, and normally I park there to
bring groceries up to my room, before moving my car to the parking garage that I have a permit to park in. But the other day I was super tired and out of it, and I couldn't bring myself to park in the service-vehicle spot, so I carried all the groceries to my room from the parking garage (in two trips).
=> https://thoughts.learnerpages.com/?show=2ad72ae9-22ab-4695-8b53-60106e37442d
It would be fun to motion blur your entire computer screen.
Someone made an argument for 120Hz about quick-moving objects clearly having discrete positions.
But 120Hz only doubles the number of discrete positions. It's possible for me to move my mouse fast enough that you would need a >1000Hz screen to render the mouse at every pixel.
The solution? Motion blur. Smear that mouse across the screen.
I think Johnny Decimal is wrong because it's quicker for me to click through 5-deep nested levels of folders with 10 items each, then it is
to find one item in a list of 50 items. Because I don't have to scroll.
And if you don't know the name/number you don't need to read 50 options, you have to read 10.
Oh yeah for the record I think that if you get out the door on level 4 you can leave the dungeon without going back to level 1.
Edit (Dec 2): Pearl got behind the door a day before I posted this lol. I still think it maybe possible to get out from level 4 directly but it's more complicated than just opening the big door.
![A screenshot of a Discord conversation from June 2017. Matthias says "taxidermy." TheWordGame [BOT] says "taxidermy has been submitted by @Matthias.
18 points (+ 6 bonus points) have been awarded.
It is now @NovaSagittarii's turn!
If this word is invalid, object it with ?objection."](/media/cfd9f8cf-9225-4210-ba32-891f65487f36.png)