bhrgunatha

Enjoyed the article very much, especially the part about music not being a language and the dive into syntax and semantics, but this...

> The only way to recognise which pop song (from one popular training set) this score comes from is the lyrics. The melodic line has little similarity to the original recording.

...strikes me as plain nonsense. I can play that line on my guitar or keyboard and know immediately which tune it is even without the lyrics.

Am I misunderstanding something?

It does seem to fail quite a lot - so much that I bookmarked the wayback machine which has a good deal of it archived.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20180128095717/http://community....

Arch's default is Python 3, but there are still many official Python 2 packages, mostly in community i.e. adopted from the AUR:

Core: 1

Extra: 96

Community: 822

AUR: Over 2300 depending on how you search

It even has a name - SARGable - able to use an index on the [S]earch [ARG]uments but still easy to get tripped up.

https://www.definitions.net/definition/sargable

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/799584/what-makes-a-sql-...

Ultimately I'd prefer a slight tweak - for example eee/111 or similar but I'd still prefer fff/000 to the ridiculously low contrast foreground/background trend in recent years. Perfect example: https://peach-melpa.org/ - on my equipment and with my eye sight, that's literally unreadable.

Looking at the table is bad enough, but I imagine most people looking would think "Aaah binary" and convert to decimal: 1, 6, 7, 4, 5, 26, 27, 24, 25, 30, 31, 28... That's cruel :)

Luckily there are browser extensions like Stylus [1] to help fix these design decisions that don't account for those of us with poorer eye sight or older screens.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/styl-us/

No need really, I found how to extract the rss feed just by searching:

https://superuser.com/questions/78415/get-rss-feed-from-itun...

Maybe Apple will change/throttle the endpoint in the future but for now it's not authenticated.

Or there was a big trend where they only links were to an itunes page which a) requires itunes to be installed because b) there is no direct link for the rss feed.

I had to write a scraper to find the underlying rss feed for itunes only podcasts.

I think you've assumed the wrong premise. At least for me. It's not the highly customised things, it's the accumulation of the small things that are either missing, inconvenient, slightly annoying or somewhat different to your needs.

Every package developer makes choices about how their package works (and built-in behaviour too), but sometimes that clashes with what you want, or is somehow inadequate.

It's those small conveniences that have a disproportionate impact.

I'm not saying you can't do similar in vim or there aren't other ways to achieve the same goal, I'm saying that over time, those minor improvements have a huge impact.

Here's 2 examples:

1) Splitting a window horizontally by default splits 50:50 but on a 16:9 monitor I usually want the new buffer (right) to be smaller than my current buffer (left). So I override the defaults.

2) I use paredit for lisp based languages, but (as far as I'm aware) there's no built in-command to copy (or paste) the s-expression surrounding the cursor's current position.

I often find myself wanting to do exactly that e.g. in a let or a cond form in Racket. So I wrote a couple of small functions to do just that, bound them to keyboard shortcuts and I've now made a minor extension that fits exactly what I want to do. Since lisp is based on s-expressions it turns out this extension to someone else's package is incredibly versatile and useful.... TO ME!

    (let [<CURSOR>(x (some-function with args)] 

I press my chosen key-combination and it becomes

    (let [(x (some-function with args)] 
         [<CURSOR>(x (some-function with args)] 

ready to edit the new s-expression

No discussion about inconsistent spelling and pronunciation is complete without The Chaos by Gerard Nolst Trenité, a non-native speaker!

http://www.businessinsider.com/english-spelling-pronunciatio...

> Not to sound like I walked uphill in both directions back in my day

Local minima?

However some people (me!) definitely have some bio-mechanical impediment.

I can clearly remember at school, 10 -12 years old, during winter after heavy snow, my friends all sliding downhill, feet absolutely flat on the floor, sat hunched as low as possible.

Absolutely impossible for me - I couldn't get my backside within 30-40 cm off the ground no matter what I tried.

Teaching is part skill and part craft and like so many other creative areas there are plenty of different styles that can appeal to different personalities and preferences. It's a constant tension and there will always be room for imagination, creativity and even art in teaching. Prime example - http://poignant.guide/

I devoured books growing up but a couple of years ago I suddenly realised that I hadn't read a book purely for pleasure in a long, long time. I mean years long.

I set myself a habit of 30 minutes each night before bed of reading fiction (because to me it's more pleasurable.)

It's wonderful and I really enjoy losing myself in other characters and their situations. It's not as visceral as movies or TV but a much deeper experience.

It was a big struggle though, but the immersion did get easier with prolonged practice. If I miss a night now I actually feel like I've missed out. I stress that it was a conscious and deliberate effort over several months before it even started to feel natural and effortless again.

It's a comprehensive list of books. There's a link in the very first paragraph to an essential/recommended list:

https://www.haroldserrano.com/blog/best-books-to-develop-a-g...

I noticed it translates repeats into a form with a required first character/group so 5{2,4} became 55{1,3} - see https://regexper.com/#5%7B2%2C4%7D

> I like the idea of a 'sane' subset of LaTeX that is easy to publish to the web.

That's probably the only approach that really makes sense:

During the past decade I was surprised to learn that the writing of programs for TeX and Metafont proved to be much more difficult than all the other things I had done (like proving theorems or writing books). The creation of good software demand a significiantly higher standard of accuracy than those other things do, and it requires a longer attention span than other intellectual tasks.

There is a list of contributors at the end of each book, but it's only their site user name with a link to the profile.

I used to use NoScript. It was a revelation to see how much junk just disappears when there's no javascript.

Now I find uMatrix better but the first rule I created was:

* * * block

Since that was the basic starting point for NoScript.

Then slowly build up your whitelist of sites to allow javascript as desired/needed.

I think it looks beautiful.

And what's more, what an absolute joy to find something published on the web where the text has both good contrast, weight and width.

I'm totally fed up having to use the browser's developer tools or firefox reader mode because the text has font-weight 200/300, slightly darker grey on light grey text and uses less than 30% of my screen width.

It's so sad that this is such a rare treat on the web these days.

I will (almost certainly) never switch from my current configuration to use any of these all-in-one package bundles, but I do like looking through them for ideas.

My only real complaint is (according to my experience) unless you happen to understand some mathematical concept/s involved in the question, it's incredibly difficult to get some insight or clue for how to go about solving it.

The forums are a fantastic resource once you already know how to solve the problem.

I discovered the problem after I managed to break video playback while configuring the newly installed browser.

Firefox has an "advanced" setting (about:config only) to prevent media automatically playing which was preventing playback - even with the video player's buttons. about:config | media.autoplay.enabled | true -> breaks the player.

However there's another anti-tracking option that prevents embedded videos even being displayed - Preferences | Privacy & Security | Tracking Protection | click [Change Block List...] -> 'Basic' works, 'Strict' doesn't .

I have Firefox Nightly installed now (with no extensions yet) and a blank profile which works so there's no need. I do appreciate the offer to help though.

I turned off NoScript, and uBlock doesn't show any blocked requests (the only privacy add-ons I have.)

Still no video.

The player loads and shows an image, the video bar shows background video loading progress and even clicking to certain parts of the video shows different image clips. Just no video. So I've just given up.

> to 1318x686, which by itself is already unique,

Is it sticky though? I don't know how the spoofing works, but if the next time, the same site gets a different size, wouldn't your profile become less identifiable across visits and other web sites.

> Firefox has just broken people's workflows that were set in place for years

I don't think that is highlighted enough - the majority of the discussion is focussed on cosmetics, but it takes a lot of effort to break habits and muscle memory that have developed with daily use over many, many years (since Phoenix [1] in my case.)

It's also going to take a huge amount of time and effort to research, learn and configure replacement extensions. I really don't need that stress for something as important as a browser, so I'll stick with ESR as my daily tools as long as possible and build a new profile e.g. using Nightly as time allows. It's far from a trivial exercise.

[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/community/2013/05/13/milestone-phoe...

DTA lite (web extension version) was planned for release along with Quantum, but was delayed. [1] I still don't know how limited it will be compared to the XUL version though.

[1] https://www.downthemall.net/delays/