hoosieree

This struck me as well. There seems to be something magical about finding a good aesthetic within the router's constraints (sharp intersections but rounded line endings).

It fits with my theory about why APL's glyphs look "better" to me than newer unicode-based symbol languages like (BQN, Uiua, etc). I think it's because APL's symbols were developed to be hand-written on chalkboards. Those constraints are much more severe compared to a purely computer-based font.

Have you checked out this demo?

https://youtu.be/C8--cXwuuFQ?list=PLUyyOw61zxiJXMihb4PjYbGHE...

The 3d pan/tilt/zoom visualizations of the trigraphs are especially nice to look at.

I love these kinds of tools! For part of my PhD research I made a bunch of digraph heatmaps of (differently-obfuscated variations of) stdlib binary files (raw byte sequences and asm mnemonics shown side-by-side):

https://alexshroyer.com/misc/digraphs.mp4

There are often bright spots in these kinds of visuals that you end up seeing over and over again (e.g. clusters of ASCII).

Imagine being so close to understanding something, but your whole identity requires you to not understand it.

Venture capital (VC) is fundamentally at odds with good business. VC demands exponential growth from a finite world; something has to give. What usually happens is the company grows to the point that it's impossible to keep the "professional fakers" away. Then the Iron Law[1] kicks in, or enshittification[2], or both.

Do you want the benefits of a small company (sustainability, happy employees, happy customers, good products)? Then build a small company. If you want the opposite of those things but also lots of money, try your hand at the VC blackjack tables. Maybe you'll be lucky and this time, it will be different.

[1]: https://www.jerrypournelle.com/archives2/archives2mail/mail4...

[2]: https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

Small objects like powerups appear and disappear as the player moves (even without backtracking), the ammo count is constantly varying, getting shot doesn't deplete health or armor, etc.

You're absolutely right, cash is indeed inconvenient. But all digital payments make you pay a middleman "platform" which tries to extract as much of the transaction as possible while providing the minimum possible value. Oh and by the way this platform's also trying to become a monopoly so it can eventually provide less than the minimum value without losing you as a customer.

Crypto claims to be a solution to this, but in practice approximately all crypto transactions go through a middleman (exchange) which takes a cut. It's unreasonable to expect your barista to go through the effort of accepting crypto payments without involving an exchange.

Cash doesn't have this problem.

I'd love to be proven wrong about this. Is there a digital payment method that runs on phones that doesn't subsidize a middleman?

Exactly! Otherwise you're giving control over the money to someone else, who will use that control to further screw over the already marginalized service worker.

Income taxes don't affect every person equally though. Plenty of Very Rich people earn zero income.

If you must tip, only ever use cash. Otherwise you're also subsidizing Square, Toast, Visa, Stripe, etc. Did they give you exceptional service today? Use cash.

Data brokers are a scourge. They should be illegal, or at the very least regulated.

For example, here's an idea for one such regulation:

    If the company purchases aggregated salary data, they must publish their own salaries for at least 1 year.

I basically never rewatch movies, but I've seen Dune (2021) at least 8 times. Will probably do the same when part two comes to streaming services. Something about Villeneuve's version really captures the awe of Herbert's universe for me.

One more - The Princess Bride.

Just add more AI, that'll solve everything.

[edit] unfortunately I think I need to point out the above is sarcasm. Because there really are people using AI to review AI-generated code, and they do not see the problem with this approach.

Amazing, that hits the spot.

Tables can be very nice to work with in a text editor with some convenience features like automatic alignment and tab-to-next-cell. At least that's my experience using tables in emacs with org-mode files. But I imagine there's quite a lot going on behind the scenes to make that work, plus there's some inflexible syntax used to recognize when your cursor is in a table.

But I like your approach of leveraging monospace fonts to work as informal tables.

I wonder about the other direction - how much can you remove from Markdown until it's no longer useful enough for wide adoption?

How about:

    one heading level only
    no nesting (of lists or styles)
    tables can only contain plain text (not even links!)
    either indented or fenced code blocks, but not both

But keep the html escape hatch. If anyone needs one of the missing features, they can drop down to html. Just a bit more friction.

Within city limits, certain types of large vehicles should always be allowed, like public transit, emergency response, and commercial delivery trucks. Those drivers already get special training and/or special licensing.

Otherwise there should be nothing bigger/faster/louder than a standard gas-powered golf cart.

Bonus: golf carts are fun. When was the last time you had fun driving at 25mph?

This happened during my morning commute today:

Another cyclist and I stop at a stop sign, him waiting to turn left, I waiting to turn right, onto a main road (which notably does not have a stop sign).

A car traveling straight on the main road comes to a complete stop and waves at us cyclists with a "go ahead" hand gesture. We remain stopped, because the car has right of way.

Meanwhile there's a small traffic jam forming on the main street as some maintenance vehicles are waiting for the car to move so they can turn onto the side street. If us cyclists were to follow the car driver's "instructions" we would have to violate right-of-way for multiple flows of traffic.

Finally the car driver gets fed up at everyone else's insistence on following the law. Makes a rude gesture, shakes their head, and continues straight. The maintenance guys can finally turn, then the bikes.

I guess my point is: car drivers need to do a better job of following the conventions and laws of the road.

I'm just not convinced that swapping out "<ol></ol>" for "[]" actually addresses any of the problems.

> If Web 3.0 is already here, where is it, then? Mostly, it's hidden in the markup.

I feel like this is so obvious to point out that I must be missing something, but the whole article goes to heroic lengths to avoid... HTML. Is it because HTML is difficult and scary? Why invent a custom JSON format and a custom JSON-to-HTML compiler toolchain than just write HTML?

The semantics aren't hidden in the markup. The semantics are the markup.

Probably easier to get people to change the name from README.md to RENDERME.md.

> tech products tend to be natural monopolies

Based on what evidence? Isn't the simpler explanation "VC wants big return; VC funds tech; therefore VC encourages monopolies"?

"No metal in the microwave" is good general-purpose advice but a reasonable person might notice that the microwave interior is basically all metal so there must be more to that advice than meets the eye.[0]

[0] Microwaves also contain transformers.

Building an interpreter for myself, can confirm. Saying "no" to feature requests is especially hard because I'm the one requesting them!

I always thought the information density advantage of ternary disappeared once you put it in the real world:

- harder to discriminate values as you pack more in the same dynamic range

- more susceptible to noise

- requires lower clock rates for (wired) transmission

- requires more complex protocols for (wireless) transmission

- representing 0 or 1 as switched states uses "no" power, but getting a switch to be "halfway on" uses a lot of power

Just want to say this is the most ergonomic take on value semantics I've seen. The "~" is cleaner than Swift or Hylo's "inout" keyword.

You can land a plane anywhere you want. Once.

I've had the exact same feeling. I think this is some latent cultural zeitgeist that more people are starting to notice.

My thought was to start a "philosopher's club", for Platonic friendships. Right now it's just me and one neighbor meeting every 2 weeks for coffee, but I think an ideal size might be around 3-4 "regulars" plus 2-5 sporadic attendees. Big enough to get boisterous but small enough to carpool.

Location: Bloomington, Indiana (US citizen)

Remote: yes

Willing to relocate: Minneapolis or Ottawa

Technologies: PyTorch, K, C/C++, static analysis, embedded systems, compilers, containers

Résumé/CV: https://alexshroyer.com/pages/cv.html

Email: contact@alexshroyer.com

About me:

I want to build meaningful+good things alongside kind+smart people.

Machine learning PhD[1], EE, decade+ engineering experience. Comfortable with soldering irons, FPGAs, (gradient|recursive) descent, and distributed systems. Commuter cyclist, wannabe musical instrument builder.

[1]: https://alexshroyer.com/papers/dissertation.pdf

Nice site. This and 100r are an antidote to the soulless corporate AI slop that's slathered over everything these days. And a webring too? Don't mind if I do...

Netflix is really thinking outside the box with all these Black Mirror spin-offs.