Comment by xena | Hacker News Reader

Comment by xena | Hacker News Reader

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Thanks! That's exactly the point of it! I'm going to be working on the CSS this weekend on stream (the images being so big for longer conversations take up too much screen real estate), but in general the idea is to have a combination of the Socratic method of dialogue based teaching combined with a few consistently written characters; not to mention it helps move out parentheticals to break up giant walls of text. I don't have any page explaining each of the characters and their tropes, but here's a small list:

Mara: the student that knows a fair bit but isn't afraid to call the teacher out on their shit, also used for most parentheticals

Cadey: the teacher that learns from student questions, also a bit of a self-insert to de-emphasize certain parentheticals

Numa: the shitposter that really does mean well, but communicates in shitposts, memes, and similar

Aoi: the idealist that has difficulty accepting the state of the world as it is

With these I create tension between the characters to help illustrate the point. Aoi was added for this article and helps to ground the satire in a sense of reality by being disgusted by this tool.

> the idea is to have a combination of the Socratic method of dialogue based teaching combined with a few consistently written characters

This is, of course, how the original Socratic dialogues are written, too! There are characters with distinctive personalities and points of view who (re)appear in multiple dialogues.

Maybe a lot of STEM folks here have never read Plato or other/later philosophical dialogues, or they never got a sense for how they can be useful. Maybe how it's interleaved with the main body of text is confusing for people as well?

Either way, I think the main idea of the format is good. Maybe some small formatting tweaks or a link at the top like 'how to read this document' would help get new readers to grok the format.

I'm gonna work on the CSS on stream this weekend. It's something that usually comes up in bad faith so I haven't really prioritized acting on it. However I think I finally understand enough CSS to do it properly.

Fixed on stream. The CSS looks a bit better now.

It looks good to me! It's easier for me to tell that the main body is totally separate from the dialogue now. (Before, I wasn't totally sure if the main body was just one of the people in the dialogue monologuing sometimes, although I usually assumed it wasn't.)

Very readable, still fits with the theme, and helps clarify the genre. :)

Reminds me of Bob and Alice.

The dialog could probably use some left/right padding or an alternate font to indicate it's not part of the main text. Initially I found it a bit unclear, and also hard to skim the article.

I'm gonna give it a lot of love this weekend. Sorry it's not the best. I'm quite terrible at CSS.

Fixed on stream. The CSS delineates conversation snippets better now.

I really like your style as well and have throughly enjoyed several of your articles in the past (a lot of your articles on nixos for example).

I have no problem at all with the presentation of this article. As always your characters make the article really gripping to read imo, like taking part in a good conversation.

But I did not like the way you handled the topic as much this time. I know that it is supposed to be confrontational and a bit in the face. That is the joke. Being nonchalant about is kinda fun, but when that is part of what actually is quite hard criticism of someone else's work it starts to sound very arrogant. But I don't know.

Anyway, looking forward to your next article :)

I just have to say: May you one day end up on a system nobody uses, and watch as your environment dies so other people can have "nice things".

Why shouldn't people try different, novel approaches on their personal websites, though?

Where else should one try out "weird" (non-mainstream) concepts and see what sticks?

I don't understand your harsh dismissal of the author based on the design of a personal website, to be honest.

I'm responding to this:

> <Cadey> I don't know about the code quality standards of the sudo project, but overall I don't see them doing any concerted effort to try to migrate away from C (or to reduce the complexity of sudo) and there are frequent security vulnerabilities that result in attackers getting root access anyways. I really wish the industry as a whole would take languages like Rust a bit more seriously and start actually moving towards programs being safer to use because security vulnerabilities in core infrastructure result in emergency patches. It was disappointing to see an attempt at using Rust in an important Python library torpedoed by users of obscure architectures not supporting Rust. Maybe the solution there is to use WebAssembly as a compile target instead of making everything be native code. I wouldn't wish hppa's reverse stack growth on anyone trying to write a compiler though.

Which was edited from this:

> <Cadey> God I wish they did. They wrote the program in C, (as far as I can tell) have no intention of rewriting it in Rust, and it's had many viable attacks over the years that allowed attackers to gain root privileges and worse. It's also debatable if the entire concept of privilege separation as implemented in Linux and UNIX was a bad idea to begin with but we're stuck with it because of an endless ball of legacy programs controlled by egotistical open source people that refuse to change because then obscure targets that nobody uses won't be able to leech off of the rest of the ecosystem by holding back any chance to let us have a modicum of nice things.

I don't care about their website design (it's better than a number of "serious" websites I've visited) and I don't care about their characters, especially since it's a literally ancient way to explore philosophical issues and being a furry is morally better than being a pederast, as the Ancient Greeks were.

Ah, I see, misunderstanding on my side, also didn't see the old version. Sorry! :)

That already happens to anyone that tries to stay on the same system indefinitely.

Personally I'm used to it and I think security is more important than indefinite hardware support. Installing the same software on newer hardware is fine.

If you're going to be working on CSS anyways, I noticed that the tables on the pronoun page could use a little bit of padding—the text is touching the table borders (https://vgel.me/imgshare/xe-pronouns-no-padding.png)

Good catch! I'm really bad at CSS lol

Hey! I would definitely recommend putting this somewhere on your website.

I have been encountering it now and then - mostly on Nix/NixOS topics (by the way, thank you very much for some very useful articles!), and while I don't have any issues with the format, those characters were a kind of small and a little bit weird (not in a bad way, just... unusual) mystery, making me wonder "who are those, what's the story/going on here besides the obvious dialogue format?". Not much, of course, just a minor casual curiosity, but made me look into the footer/about section if there was anything in there.

Just saying. And thanks again!

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