chipsy

My mom, and to a lesser extent myself, have some attachment issues to old stuff. It's not quite like "Hoarders" but it's worse than it has to be, with lots of books and boxes and boxes of books, shelves buried behind boxes, etc.

Basically, all the stuff we have is a method of remembering the past, and if you are very sentimental, some of it crosses over into "If I get rid of the object, I lose the memory". Trashing stuff then becomes difficult because I have to get past that towards the practical element of "this is just clutter 99% of the time and it impedes my future self", on top of concerns like "I don't want to just trash it if it has value" which make it 10 times as difficult to eliminate stuff.

I'm attacking the problem now with a slow-paced weekly streak to clean and organize things. I don't necessarily throw things out every week, but I do document what I have and how to categorize it. That way I can make a decision without having to open a box and bring out the stuff.

True of an individual company or business unit and its major tech decisions, but businesses ultimately die. Thus we have a world where Cobol coexists with Node.js - companies saddled with old software never pay for a new system until it's "beyond too late". But a company with a greenfield project can come in and use whatever hot, hyped-up thing is out there, and it usually in their direct interest if it's free, because at that point they probably aren't terribly concerned about software quality.

You're reading it too politically. It says right up in the first paragraph:

> While LLVM is an excellent optimizer, it isn’t specifically designed for the optimization challenges of dynamic languages like JavaScript.

LLVM was, more-or-less, designed around C++ semantics. B3 is not going to be a better C++ compiler than LLVM. LLVM is not going to be a better JS compiler than B3. They're taking different evolutionary paths.

This doesn't change how we debate solutions. We do not have a magic-bullet policy instrument that targets "looters". We have lots of instruments that target easily categorized groups like "rich" or "poor", or people who break certain rules, which may or may not correlate with being a harmful person.

At the end of the day, agreement or disagreement on which bad people are the worst rallies a base, but does not produce ipso facto good governance. Careful consideration of the "liberty vs. security" question, while incorporating a multitude of perspectives on which liberties and which securities are of genuine concern, does. Win-wins are possible but not easy.

I love this statement, it's so true. We self-determine what the internet consists of. If we're unhappy with our addiction, we'll invent a better drug.

I see more of the rifts being a surfacing or metastasization of things that were smashed down and normalized before: Families that clamped down conversation to head-of-household preferences, people curating their public image at events, sexist and bigoted beliefs aired in limited forms and formats. A lot of genies coming out of bottles all at once.

A negative of empathy is that it's often encouraged through an environment of abuse. If it's going down, does that mean that we're becoming callous robots, or that people are increasingly liberated in their everyday lives?

It speaks to how finite we are around "knowledge." At the moment we reach understanding, we experience a sophomoric feeling of confidence. But as it fades farther and farther from our working memory, we become less fluent and more hesitant. The emerging pattern becomes one of "I can understand these interesting concepts, but it takes a lot of work and they don't last, so I have to choose to understand practically and situationally." And then in the end our bodies and personalities turn out to control our minds more than we might want to believe, as we turn away from one problem and towards a different one on some whim, never able to view the whole.

As I recognize this more in myself, I am more inclined to become a bit of a librarian and develop better methods of personal note-taking and information retrieval, so that I lose less each time my mind flutters. At the moment that's turned into a fascination with mind maps - every time I need to critically-think through a problem I start mapping it. In the future I might look into ways of searching through those maps.

Assuming apples-to-apples JIT technology, Pawn would still be faster because it's a barebones coding environment. Its semantics are roughly similar to C, but with even fewer features. The only definite way to outdo that is with something like Terra[0] where the program has meta-level control over its own compilation and execution.

[0] http://terralang.org/

Employees can easily experience tunnel vision even if they were happily dogfooding the product themselves:

http://www.theverge.com/2016/2/6/10926816/twitter-employee-e...

This kind of consideration has led me down the road towards XML, because it's the syntax that is powerful enough to model documents that bundle a mix of schemas(including source formats with their own idiosyncratic syntax). It is not a syntax anyone wants to type in or read, but that one advantage counts for a lot, given the right problem domain, because it pushes the semantic content to the center.

Basic rules

* Never follow accounts with blue checkmarks.

* Take the words of very popular accounts (even if they have no checkmark) with a grain of salt.

* Use your account to converse or pontificate, not to advertise your personal brand.

* Avoid jokey one-upmanship. It is tedious.

* Avoid detailed explanation until prompted. Brevity makes for misunderstandings.

* Follow people you do not know personally.

* Follow artists.

* Follow journalists.

* Follow minorities.

The reason to use Twitter is to get perspectives that have no other outlet - no advertising, no backing, no organization behind them. These are voices that are so faint that they could be tuned out any other way, and they don't get covered in the paper the next day, because they're going outside of the narrative lines. That is why you do better avoiding the blue checkmarks and people who would strive for them.

I like the "mob programming" concept because it offers a potential win-win here. Not that I've tried it yet... but it doubles down on what works with pairing and acts to diffuse the stress.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mob_programming

Folding kick scooters are a good compromise for urban commutes. You can take a fall on them if you push hard or take a steep slope, but they generally aren't going to go above 15 mph, so it's more like running everywhere and you can walk in everywhere carrying it.

You'll never get around the source of the problem, which is that it's not the priority of the artist to figure out how to name and organize things. It's the same as bothering developers to "update the wiki". Pick a convention and structure the culture around that by providing a spreadsheet of assets or an equivalent document. Maybe the artists "own" their assets, so you lead with their username. Maybe you're building the environments collaboratively, so you lead with the environment first. Maybe you envision the project being a long-term thing like an MMO, so you start with the year and month. These are things that a good producer will keep their eye on, because they reflect how the team is communicating.

The most important thing, from the technical standpoint, is that your asset pipeline is robust and can handle weird things. The engine shouldn't consume files haphazardly, it should deal with "built" assets, where you can trace things from the in-game content back to the source file. A configuration layer usually appears to give an in-engine ID to a loaded asset, because files and assets do not map 1-to-1. You can choose to fight the organization battle in that layer, rather than in the file system. When you have a slick IDE like Unity, this is all built into the GUI, but a custom engine can just use a batch process to do the same.

Version control is useful - not a DVCS, because it doesn't scale to binary assets, but SVN or Perforce. Artists will groan about waiting around for the VCS to resolve things and the inevitable problems with locking, renaming, and deleting stuff, but their lives will be better off overall if it's in their workflow loop. It's "10 hours waiting on SVN Updates" vs "30 hours debugging project history".

Here's an article on "import" vs "export" based pipelines, where the thing being "imported" to the engine is a common, standardized format that every tool can export - rather than one proprietary tool the team happens to use:

http://people.cs.aau.dk/~bt/GameProgrammingE09/Pipeline.pdf

A lot of the excitement in a project comes from learning: "can I do it," "what will happen," etc.

After a certain point in your life, you grow convinced that you've seen it all before, and that has a way of draining you of excitement. Children are a common tipping point because they also make you less selfish. Nobody is asking you to make those projects, so it has to come from within, and if you act only for others, you never get around to it, because there's always another household crisis looming in the distance.

The only way to pull through is to turn it into a habit, instead of relying on your whims alone.

If I might extrapolate with anecdotes, I know some people who are prone to extensive storytelling about every event. This leads them tremendously astray at times, because to make a better, more truthful story they weave in their hopes, fears, and biases. A short news item becomes another data point in making the myth of conspiracy, invasion, or the inherent failures of the other. And self-encouragement to act on a task tends to take the form of saying out loud, "it'll be better when it's done."

But in both cases, talking it up does nobody any good. It's the mind being directed towards rationalizations about the future as a destination, a place to arrive at with a tidy fairy tale ending, and life doesn't really have those. What life has a lot of is journeys conducted by routine, accented with pivotal chance events. Whatever happens, you wake up the next day and continue. And that is depressing if you're convinced that an ending should take place!

I tried to rediscover this fun with modern languages in the last year and figured out how to do it:

Don't use most of your language's features.

Write a lengthy main loop. Use a lot of statically-sized arrays. Use plain old data instead of classes. Use primitive types and some indirection instead of a high-powered metaprogramming solution.

If you need the fancy stuff, it's all there (unless you're working with Go) -- but YAGNI really does apply.

If you mean to say that society is a construct, well, yes. You learn that in the 101 course.

That does not lead to a "this is bullshit" conclusion, unfortunately, because we act on the stories we tell ourselves.

Philosophers of technology. People whose mission is purely to facilitate a conversation about where we really are and what should be done next, and are given the backing and platform to work on and diffuse radical messages within a context different from existing organizations.

Everyone's chained to a reliance on borrowed ideologies of yesteryear, sometimes repackaged to fit the times. There are small whispers of other ideas, but they take so, so long to enter the public sphere.

Gold isn't particularly real, as resources go. It doesn't have that many practical uses.

That's what makes gold rush economics similar to bubble economics: Everyone decides to chase after a nebulous source of value.

San Francisco has always been the Gold Rush City.

The crucial aspect is the "crunch per bit" of HFT. We know that an electronic system is mostly an improvement over having pit traders yell at each other all day.

What we do not know and cannot prove without experimenting is whether our electronic markets benefit from following smarter, more complex rules of play instead of the same ones faster.

Art is at its best when it presents questions. If our games declare random winners, or can be played perfectly to a predictable conclusion, they have stated a definite answer about strategy, and lack room for further investigation, which is distasteful to enthusiasts.

That said, games also say something about the societies that play them. Monopoly's popularity in spite of its unfairness speaks to that. Playing it, and winning, reinforces a certain fantasy about becoming a property owner. The casual player believes: "This is how life works."

The argument made is a corollary of "openness to experience" indicators for creativity - just, with immigration, once you make the big leap more of the new experiences automatically come to you during ordinary life.

If you're already seeing exciting new things happening around you(and they aren't the same exciting new things everyone else sees), you may be getting as much of the effect as needed.

I'd love to see some more details about this work, in a form like the OP's blog. Simulation results hold a big appeal to the HN crowd and I think you'd find a good audience for them.

A non-falsifiable situation is true of almost everything macro-economic, so you're sunk from the beginning. Might as well bow out of arguing that any of this is more than simple faith.

Voxels with a texture index vs. voxels with a color index is not really a big distinction in my eyes. They're both integers. The way in which you resample them, as well, is not invalidating. Otherwise "pixel art" would also be invalid as it's built around display output methods that are not mathematically correct(NTSC signal, square LCD pixels, etc.).

The environment is good overall, but marketing has become more complex for indies, since it's no longer directed through a platform owner - it has to go to an audience beyond "game players" to make a big impact. This has stymied a lot of developers who are new to marketing, but it also points the way forward.

The advantage isn't really in that resources can be wasted by adding a feature like garbage collection, but that if you are going to have features like that in your programs, building it in at the OS level is a better way to go about it, as it aggregates the resulting issues in one place, where it can be better managed(at a whole-system level).

I find the sturdy feeling is mostly derived from the specific devices in question. My "main" laptop has looser ports than my old netbook; when I connect some brands of flash drive, they tilt a little bit out of the port. But with other brands the fit is solid. In all cases we're talking about USB2 devices.

I've been taking an interest in mind mapping/concept mapping software lately and some of it crosses over into outlining and task management, for example Vym[0].

For now, though, I am using these tools in a more disposable fashion for brainstorming sessions -- I find the mind-map format very effective for exploration. I transfer the data into other software when I'm ready to linearize it into a document.

[0] http://www.insilmaril.de/vym/time-management.html

Remember, the stuff we want to get rid of by automating is the boring stuff! And we discourage automating it now because our economic model is centered on full employment with abundant labor. What this model has produced is consumer demand that is perpetually shaped by price sensitivity, which encourages bullshit work, bullshit results, and bullshit pay.

We don't need more packaged food with the top ingredients being one or more of "HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP, MILK PROTEIN, SOYBEAN OIL". We don't need fashion that falls apart within one season. We don't need pay-to-win video games, or advertorials, or Buzzfeed. Neither do we need gold Apple Watches, $9000 pens, or palatial mansions. Scarcity of our environmental resources is real, but scarcity in manufactured products? Hardly! We can and should shift towards a quality-centric model - practical quality, not slapping gold leaf on everything.

What we have inherited is a way of seeing the world that is not really using our full potential, but is simply insistent that it is the climb to the top that produces the rewards, in spite of ample evidence to the contrary. BI is not the solution to all of that, but it will shift the demand profile towards quality in all sectors and allow consumers the option of choosing quality. If some of those consumers are "wasting their time" noodling on a guitar, so what? They aren't working at McDonald's.