awhitty

This is awesome. I've been working on a similar concept based on the Escape Velocity series and love the space trader genre in general. I'm curious how you've thought about the faction organization structures as well as information flows in the sim? Are agents omniscient about prices and postings? I ended up making in-sim information a commodity that agents could choose to sell to each other, but I didn't follow through fully baking that dynamic.

Exactly - it's just a tool. So, trying to make the argument that someone's work is less-than because they used a cheaper/more amateur tool versus the tool the well-funded professionals are using _is_ elitist. You recognize that, but the comment I replied to centered on the tool, not the finer points of professionalism.

But on that- whether folks have knowledge and taste, demonstrate responsibility for their impact, pay attention to their work quality, show up to the work environment with respect, etc. are all elements at the domain of human relations. This discussion is conflating how people use tools with how people work with each other. The tools don't matter here. I think we're sayin' the same thing.

This analogy makes no sense to me and honestly skews pretty elitist in vibe. iPhone is regularly used in professional videography now. Like, 28 Years Later was shot on iPhone. Indie filmmakers have been using iPhone to break into the industry for years.

"I am white labeling a cloud"

Recently read through The Power of Limits and deepened my appreciation for the golden ratio. https://www.shambhala.com/the-power-of-limits-1203.html

I found this archive while researching a book titled Six Hundred Receipts Worth Their Weight in Gold [0]. My first thought was that the book itself could be a great resource for anyone working on a crafting mechanic for a video game - it covers cocktail recipes, but it also has recipes for varnishes, dyes, medicines, etc. Enjoy!

0: https://euvs-vintage-cocktail-books.cld.bz/1867-Six-Hundred-...

Huh, I wonder if anyone's tried to validate this approach again now that we have LIGO (and presumably more precise equipment?). I know very little about the physics involved here, but the articles I found about Weber bars don't cite disagreement about the theory underpinning the experiment, so I'm curious if we expect a detectable effect with our current understanding?

I also know very little about manufacturing Weber bars, but I could imagine it's cheaper to build 100s or 1000s of these and perform signal processing on them than building another LIGO. Or Weber bars in space?

Just spitballing here

The creator of this app, Nick Kallen, has a nice YouTube channel where he talks about some of the behind-the-scenes work on the project. I think his video comparing geometry kernels [0] was posted to HN a while back, but it's worth a watch if you're curious!

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WvwiH1DOK1M

An extremely tangential personal anecdote -

I learned about WebTV while writing essays for my college applications more than ten years ago. I had stumbled on this memorial site[0] for an engineer at WebTV named Jos who passed well before his time. The site includes some of his college essays[1] as well as some other bits of writing like his guide to OOP programming[2] (complete with Spanish and Portuguese translations !). His writing style and sense of humor have stuck with me for years and years now, and I still visit the site to have a laugh. Seemed like a very dynamic individual, and I'm grateful to his family for keeping his memory alive.

[0]: https://sepwww.stanford.edu/sep/jon/family/jos/

[1]: https://sepwww.stanford.edu/sep/jon/family/jos/college/index...

[2]: https://sepwww.stanford.edu/sep/jon/family/jos/oop/index.htm...

I came here curious if anyone would point this out. I was surprised to see the post describing UTC + lat/lng as a common practice in APIs without discussing this quirk. E.g. to your point, China's border with Bhutan is politically "fuzzy". Bhutan uses UTC+6, and Beijing Time is UTC+8. Weird that the post acknowledges timezones are a political construct but misses the fact that borders are too.

I’ve been using shadcn’s UI library lately and have been loving it. It’s distributed as a CLI that you use to vendor in pre-baked implementations of Radix UI components using Tailwind. Once they’re in your repo, you customize them as you want. Great for scaffolding a branded component library. React-only right now.

https://ui.shadcn.com/

I once mentioned Desmos to a college friend who was teaching high school math. This was the first and one of the only times I’ve seen someone express true glee about a software product. They literally shouted, “I love Desmos!” at the dinner table. Kudos to the team for building a product that teachers love that much. Teachers need all the help they can get.

I’m so curious about how their graphing calculator and their geometric construction tools work. I’ve spent marginal amounts of time researching their stack, and it appears to be custom software. If anyone’s familiar with writing about how these systems are built (particularly the display side of things), I’d appreciate some links or titles!

I draw a line at trying to compare property damage and homicide as if they stem from the same “mechanism”. There’s no analogy to be made there. The striking workers didn’t kill anyone, and it’s insidious to float “how would the author feel if a striking doctor planned their action to kill someone” hypotheticals because murder and property damage are not united under some definition of “sabotage”.

Like, what’s the useful takeaway from the comparison? Cement getting left in a truck is like losing a loved one? Really? Striking workers performing something like sabotage is similar to pre-meditated murder? Are these useful comparisons? I don’t think so.

Doctors… don’t murder folks (I mean, yes, this has happened, but not as a strategy of a strike). It’s a nonsense hypothetical created to make striking sound absurd. I’ve already described in general terms how striking in health care works. Walking out to strike mid-open-heart surgery doesn’t happen - it doesn’t benefit the doctor, and they would be liable for their actions (and for violating the 10-day notice, presumably). There are legal differences between property damage and taking a life, so the comparison isn’t particularly useful.

Depends on the nature of the relationship with the workers.

If I’m employing them directly, I doubt there would be reason for a strike - what are they striking against? I don’t have a construction company. They’re either doing the work as contractors, and I’ll pay for it, or they aren’t doing the work, and they don’t get paid. IANAL, but I doubt it’s considered a strike if contractors skip a job or abandon a job midway through. Also, it’s important to foster a good relationship with your contractors and to make sure both parties agree they’re benefiting from the business relationship. That’s just simple good business.

If they are under someone else’s employ, the comparison doesn’t add up - the cement-in-truck didn’t cause substantial damages to the customer. (Maybe delayed schedule? I don’t know the details of the case.) What you are describing harms the customer directly. Talk to folks that are striking, and they will almost unanimously say they don’t want to inconvenience the customer. Rather more often than not they’re seeking to change the terms of their employment to benefit the customer, whether that’s more staffing, more safety, or more manageable hours to provide better service. These are folks working closest to the customer touchpoints, and I’m inclined to trust their knowledge of customer service more than management’s.

Does that make sense?

No, it certainly does not describe the mechanism. One is inconveniencing a business and one is murder. Please don’t get confused on this.

  Wonder how the author here would feel about surgeons going on strike scheduled intentionally after beginning open heart surgery on a loved one?

This is a silly comparison. Concrete trucks don’t have beating hearts - they’re just property owned by the business. It’s important to recognize life as distinct.

Physicians take the Hippocratic Oath, and they otherwise generally care about the well-being of their patients. Also, it is illegal to strike at a health care facility without first giving 10-days notice (to plan how to continue care). I’ve talked to residents organizing at Mass General Brigham, and (though they aren’t planning a strike) my vague understanding is that the logistics of striking in health care are targeted more at paperwork rather than holding up care (e.g. provide the care but don’t sign the notes so billing can’t commence).

I recommend reading more about how organizing in health care works - it’s complex, very topical these days, and I think it’ll show you that folks tend to care for one another. Too easy for Silicon Valley edge-case thinkers to reach for ad absurdum armchair arguments like “what if a doctor let their patient die on the operating table because they want more money” - that’s not where their heads are at at all.

It’s also incredibly important that quality of life improves for health care workers. Med students are 3x more likely to die by suicide than the general population.

Looks great! I like the idea of focusing on highlighted regions at a time. I spent some time exploring similar form factors for learning the fretboard, focusing intervals and shapes more than the notes themselves (link below) - I implemented a two-step drag-and-release gesture with visual feedback for selecting positions on a mobile device, and I think it helps avoid frustrating mis-taps. Maybe something to consider for your UI as well. The additional modules look interesting! Bookmarked.

https://awhitty.me/fretcards/

I appreciate that! I'll have to keep an eye out for it. I definitely agree with that perspective - I don't think it matters much how we organize the bits and pieces of the system if we don't have a shared value for life beyond our own. I do think it's harder to be intentional about our value systems when we pass everything off to the optimizing machinery of capitalism and the free market - in my mind, it's too easy for that machinery to optimize for pleasures that skirt our values. But I'm also not sure if it's tractable or "good" for a worldwide population to develop shared values - I think "valuing life" is something we should all practice, but who's to say how that actually renders out in the minds of 7bn people? Tricky stuff, and I have no answers haha. I was a CS major, and I'm sure freshmen philosophy majors could do circles around me on this.

Hoo - I remember that scene and the mix of feelings it brought up for me. It reminded me of an attachment to physical objects that I attribute to watching Toy Story growing up. I love the way she wrote, and I still have a long list of her books to dive into. Another scene that left its mark on me is from The Dispossessed when Shevek shares a moment with the pet otter at a dinner party:

  The otter sat up on its haunches and looked at him. Its eyes were dark, shot with gold, intelligent, curious, innocent. "Ammar," Shevek whispered, caught by that gaze across the gulf of being – "brother."

From Shevek's perspective, he had never seen or known this kind of creature to exist, and he was staring at something alien to him and still finding a connection. I think in a way thanking the herbs was a lesson in looking across the "gulf of being", though the herbs didn't return the attention with a gold, intelligent gaze. Maybe it was something more like what Werner Herzog sees in chickens haha [1]. To me, when he calls a chicken's gaze "stupid", I don't think he's saying that in a negative sense but instead in a way that's recognizing their being as it is in human terms. The connotation that we put into the word "stupid" is what makes his perspective sound like a harsh judgement, but I think he's just being "brutally honest".

I can't help but mention the song "Spud Infinity" by Big Thief as well [2]! Definitely a song (and album) to get lost in:

  From way up there it looks so small
  From way down here it looks so small
  One peculiar organism aren't we all together?
  Everybody steps on ants
  Everybody eats the plants

...

  When I took another look
  The past was not a history book
  That was just some linear perception

...

  When I say celestial
  I mean extra-terrestrial
  I mean accepting the alien you've rejected in your own heart

...

  Kiss your body up and down other than your elbows
  'Cause as for your elbows, they're on their own
  Wandering like a rolling stone
  Rubbing up against the edges of experience

I think the motif underlying each of these that matters to me is embracing "radical alterity" or "the other". "Accepting the alien you've rejected in your own heart" and recognizing the "edges of [your] experience" and where you can and can't know yourself. Adrienne Lenker frequently talks about how LeGuin is one of her favorite authors, and I think this song is definitely in conversation with LeGuin. There's so much in there! The whole album is worth a listen (and several more) if you haven't heard it already.

Thanks for reading!

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhMo4WlBmGM [2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYFBNA7uaJQ

(Edited for formatting)

And here I am burning tokens on my GPT prompts with please-and-thank-yous in 2023 haha

Haha, I have to assume so, but honestly I didn't spend much time in the chicken coop because I thought it smelled bad. I'm not sure where the eggs went, also. And yea, on reflection, it probably wasn't, like, above-board to have kids working with live animals in school? I remember a friend getting pecked by a chicken once. This was a pretty agg-y area in New Mexico and most everyone I grew up with had at least some animals on their land, so it wasn't unusual.

Ah, they didn't have us apologize to plants - only to thank 'em. It wasn't a guilty thing we did, but it was a lesson to appreciate that they were growing and that we could enjoy them.

I'm surprised you didn't stop at the idea that it also implies plants have hearing and can understand language and process some kind of human meaning - I feel like those are more absurd than the idea than a plant feels. (More organisms on this planet demonstrate something like feelings than the capacity to verbally communicate.) But yes, I project the idea the plants have something like human feelings, and that's definitely a product of that kind of education reverberating through my life. It was a kind of spiritual lesson, and the school incorporated other spiritual elements like performing the Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address during some school assemblies and camping trips. I'm not confused about those as an adult.

I also know that a plant's experience on this planet is alien to mine, and it's silly to apply human meaning to what I think it's going through. I think our brains have enough space to hold these ideas up there though and reflect on them, and I think children deserve more than a functionalist education. I don't think I'm messed up as a result of that education, and I'm living a happy life - fair to say I had a heck of a time catching up on math and language in middle school though!

I went to a small Montessori school on the Rio Grande while I was growing up, and among the other "new age"-y things going on at the school, we would spend half a day every week in permaculture class. We spent that class doing things like gardening, constructing adobe stuff like ovens and a gathering space shaped like a turtle (the head formed a pizza oven too - it was really cool), collecting eggs from a chicken coop, recycling fibers and scrap paper into (very brittle) paper, and making tea out of the herbs we grew - mint, chamomile, lavender, etc.

One of the most profound memories I have from that school is of Ms. Susan teaching us to say "thank you" to the plants when we took a few of their leaves for the tea. We'd look at the plant, find some good leaves, pluck 'em off, and then say "thank you" and move to the next one. It was kind of an intimate moment to share with a mint plant haha. It was probably also very cute for the teachers to watch a flock of kids roam around a garden and stare intently at some herbs for an hour.

It was the kind of thing that really sinks in when you're a kid. I didn't know it wasn't a "normal" kind of education, and I just figured, "we take our time and say thank you to the plants when take something from them" was a general rule of life that the adults follow too. I really cherish those memories now! Sometimes I thought they were boring af at the time - learning about compositing toilets isn't really priority #1 for a 9 year-old - but I hope other kids growing up are taught a similar connection to nature today. We've gotta say thank you to the plants!

1. Understood! Yes, I agree about messing up the DOM, and I'm sure you've seen some egregious cases haha. asChild definitely enables some less deliberate choices when composing bits and pieces together and assumes some good habits around event handlers - probably not an approach that scales well for growing teams, but definitely convenient for hacking on things. Can I bum you for a link or some search terms for the "other approaches"? I'm curious about them.

2. You're spoiling us. Thank you. Re-visiting the hooks docs, I think I was just meant to use the `Aria...Props` interfaces the whole time haha. I have a feeling I overcomplicated some things in that codebase.

3. "you can only submit strings and not more complex objects" - I think this is the crux of the tradeoff. Frankly, the only thing I use Formik for when I bring it in is binding Zod schemas to form state to get validation messages in a pinch. If React Aria had a first-class schema-driven Form component or similar, I'd be a satisfied "customer".

Had another random question overnight -

4. Have y'all considered implementing anything in the realm of the "CSS Spatial Navigation" proposal? The conversation around it looks like it has gone quiet in the past few years, but I think there's definitely an opportunity for non-grid-y 2D navigation in web UIs.

Oho! So excited about this. I’ve used a hybrid of Radix UI and React Aria on previous projects. Radix had a much nicer DX out of the box with pre-wired components, but my team was always apprehensive about the long-term support for Radix post-acquisition. Really excited to see React Aria adopting a similar component-based interface.

Couple questions/feedbacks if you’re still in the comments, Devon!

1. Radix implements an asChild prop to help merge the library components down into other components that might already have their own styling or behaviors. Did y’all consider supporting this sort of polymorphic approach? Or is there another way to merge components? The main spots where I’ve used it are buttons and dropdown triggers, so it might not be broadly applicable.

2. Is it easier to extend from the React Aria types with this interface now? My previous implementations with React Aria - I’ve always been a little confused about which inputs to the hooks are useful to include in the component’s props interface and how to correctly annotate them, whether that’s recreating the types or extending from the numerous options within the react-aria package. Radix at least has some suggestions for conventions, and I feel a bit more confident following them.

3. More on the feedback side - React Aria has typically implemented similar-but-different props for the common HTML form control attributes like “disabled” and “onChange” as “isDisabled” and “onValueChange” - I really appreciate these at one level for the internal consistency throughout the library, but I’ve found these choices make it a bit more annoying to integrate React Aria with other third-party libraries meant to “just work” with the regular attributes. E.g. spreading Formik form props for a field into a form control, but having to re-map the onChange prop to onValueChange. Definitely trade offs in either direction, but I’m curious how y’all made the choice and if there are some remediations y’all have found along the way?

Thanks so much for your (and the team’s) work on this! And on Parcel and the million other projects you’re building.

I had a similar pleasant experience with a Wooting 60HE keyboard I purchased recently. Updated my keyboard’s firmware and settings right in Chrome! So much nicer than downloading icky gaming peripheral software. I’ve been told a lot of that stuff is borderline spyware.

Excited to try it out with some ESPHome projects too now.

Hey, I spent some spare time noodling on a specialized tool for fretboard flashcards a few months back. I haven’t built decks for learning modes yet, but I’d be curious to hear what sort of format you’d find useful and I’m happy to give it a whirl. You can check it out at https://awhitty.me/fretcards/

I’d be really happy to hear any other feedback as well. So far I’ve implemented a crude per-session spaced repetition algorithm, but I’ve had a mind to build more decks, offline support, local-first spaced repetition, and some extra doodads.

I agree with other commenters - playing is the best way to get this stuff truly dialed in. Have fun with it, too! Drilling scales saps energy, imo. Best to eat a balanced diet.

I 100% agree, and I've only visited NYC a couple times.

Each time I visit, I try to eat at least one slice of pizza and one bagel every day. The thing that blows me away is how generally good they are, no matter where I buy them. Of course I'll look at reviews, but I won't walk more than 5 blocks to get a slice. Never been disappointed.

Same thing visiting Paris - you can hunt for the BEST croissant, but the remarkable thing is that nearly everywhere you shop, you'll find a really, really good one. I live near Arsicault in SF, and though they might make the BEST croissant in the US (and I will probably live a shorter life due to the number of them I put in my body every week), I'd trade that for a really good croissant on every corner.

I think it reflects having shared cultural values around the food and a knowledge in the community of what makes the food great both in terms of inputs and outputs, and I hope we never stop valuing good pizza!!

Looks like other commenters identified it as Blood Music, but this sounded a bit like “Steve Fever” by Greg Egan [0] to me. Similar themes! Great gateway drug to other Egan stories.

[0] https://www.technologyreview.com/2007/10/15/223446/steve-fev...

Saman worked on many things at Mapbox, most notably to me is the interface for Studio [0], which continues to be an impressive expression of a really advanced set of features for map design. He also explicitly mentioned a stint as an engineering manager at the company in the post- maybe you didn’t catch that? Or maybe you don’t consider management to be doing “actual work”? If you think the latter, maybe consider organizing at your own workplace?

[0] https://blog.mapbox.com/behind-mapbox-studios-new-look-874c1...