interroboink

I'm reminded of an old talk by Rich Hickey [1] (he created Closure, initially in semi-isolation over some years).

  > When was the last time that you thought about something for an
  > entire hour? ... Howabout for a whole day? ... or over the course of a
  > month? ... or a year? These are tremendously valuable moments, if you
  > get to have them at all.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f84n5oFoZBc

The article states:

  > The golf-ball-sized dice are now available to buy ...

So, not entirely just a math puzzle. But probably dice only math nerds will buy (:

I agree the math problem does not map well to a real problem players are having.

I like this article, but on some level I vehemently disagree with it?

The summary is this:

  > A writer needs readers ... Any worthy pursuit needs a mat.
  > ... Better to be pinned in public with courage than to train
  > endlessly in private like a coward.

And then I think of various shut-in artists that I admire. Take, for example, Henry Darger[1]. He clearly did not seek public recognition; he never showed his work to anyone. But I find it beautiful and fascinating. He was dealing with various internal issues through his art, and I feel lucky to observe it, even long after his death.

If I produced art like Darger (or Van Gogh or Kafka or others who did not try to push their work into the public view), I would be happy with myself.

But, on the other hand, I do appreciate some aspect of this article's thesis. "Putting yourself out there" does have value. This line from the article resonates with me:

  > Yet the Cave, despite its darkness of solitude and dampness from
  > sweat and suffer-porn, is comfortable. It lets us tinker with
  > our own delusions.

There is a certain risk of complacency when you spend a long time in your own bubble. Knowing that you'll be under the public eye does help dissolve that complacency, I find.

But it's not necessarily the solution. Some people get addicted to public recognition, and it twists their work for the worse. Some people know they've done something good, put it out for people to see, but don't receive the recognition they wish they had, and get depressed. Nick Drake comes to mind.

I think it really comes down to your own personality and which of these traps you're prone to fall for. Once again, "know thyself" is the real nut worth cracking.

Anyway, good article. Made me think (:

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Darger also see various images of his work at: https://www.wikiart.org/en/henry-darger

> is literally “post death” in Latin

Yes; I think what I described matches that meaning?

Post-death, as in: "it's over," "activity has halted," "no more work being done."

Death does not necessarily have a bad/negative connotation. It's just the end of something.

This is in contrast to the original comment: "something that went so wrong you had to kill it." Death does not imply something went wrong or that it happened forcefully.

I guess "autopsy" generally is talking about "finding the cause of death" so maybe that has a more negative connotation ("something (bad) happened, causing death, let's find it").

Ah, words with their fuzzy meanings (:

This might be terminology that's used differently in different places. For instance, in video games it is extremely common to use "postmortem" to mean "post-shipping."

Example: https://blog.codinghorror.com/game-development-postmortems/ Note the dual emphasis on both "what went right" and "what went wrong," not just one or the other.

I agree it's not a perfect parallel. But it was very much part of a movement that challenged traditional notions of what art was, and spurned similar debates and outrage as here.

Perhaps a more apt example would be Duchamp's "Fountain" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fountain_(Duchamp))

> the concept of perceiving content gets intertwined with how content was made

It reminds me also of the eternal "can we separate the art from the artist" debate, too. For instance, some people (myself included) find that their experience of some art that they previously enjoyed is soured when they learn that whoever made it is a Bad Person in some way. Neil Gaiman comes to mind as a recent example.

I think it goes beyond just creative people being more interested in the process behind the art. Even people who are more purely consumers care about where this thing that touches them came from. I think a person's experience of the art makes them feel closer to or entwined with that artist, even if they might be long-deceased. Or non-human?

> Meaningful art is not mass-produced, generated content.

Andy Warhol might disagree [1] (:

(I realize that's not exactly apples-to-apples, but y'know.)

Or there's "art is anything you can get away with," which I just mention to point out that this kind of issue ("what is art?") is not new. In some ways it seems like a good thing to get people, like you, riled up about these topics, arguing the merits of their point of view. That's how culture happens.

It's an interesting question you tangle with: is it art because of what the artist did, or is it art because of how the viewer/listener/etc receives it? Some of both? How much of each? If you encountered some art but you didn't know its provenance, and it had some emotional impact on you, would it still be art if you found out later it was 100% AI generated?

Like you say, it's all subjective, but it's nice to see random people on the internet talking about the nature of art, since it's something I care about too.

So in other words, thank you for being angry (:

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell%27s_Soup_Cans "... what Time magazine called the 'Slice of Cake School'—artists who treated the banal artifacts of contemporary civilization as legitimate subjects for high art"

Next, someone needs to make a stereoscopic "magic eye" font. Until the LLMs get binocular vision, I suppose...

Since you seem to know, and I am curious, doesn't CIE[1] effectively use RGB to describe its space, too? Eg: the r̅(λ) g̅(λ) b̅(λ) color matching functions? Or is there something else in CIE you're referring to?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIE_1931_color_space

I know someone who went to Reed College, which has semi-famously not suffered from grade inflation[1]. They send your transcripts out with an explanatory note, so that the recipient will not view the graduate poorly when they see the numbers.

Interestingly, at Reed, there is a low emphasis (or even anti-emphasis) on grades — a student has to go out of their way to obtain them. Instead, emphasis is on written feedback and discussion, to understand one's performance on assignments.

All this to say: de-emphasizing grades in school is not necessarily a bad thing, and does not necessarily harm the reputation of the university. It can be a sign of good priorities (eg: learning, rather than numbers-gaming).

[1] https://www.gradeinflation.com/Reed.html

I feel there is a balance to be struck between a project that is popular (where if you run into problems, you will get good support), and one that technically gives longer-term support (but if things go wrong, that support might not be very good).

I haven't used a lot of different distros, but for me, Debian has been a good balance of those factors. You may need to do more upgrades per decade, but the ones that you do are more liable to go smoothly.

Just my 2¢ on the topic (:

It's a bit of an "if a tree falls in the forest but nobody hears it, does it make a sound?" quandary. Sure, maybe some aliens in a distant galaxy understand quantum mechanics better than we do. That's great, but it has no bearing on our little bubble of existence.

Though perhaps more to your point, if some superhuman AI is developed, and understands things better than us without telling us about it (or being unable to), it could perform feats that seem magical to us — that would concern us even if we don't understand it, since it affects us.

But I think in the frame of reference of the commenter you were replying to, they're just saying that the low-level AI used in this specific case is not capable of making its results actually useful to us; humans are still needed to make it human-relevant. It told us where to find a gem underground, but we still had to be the ones to dig it out, cut it, polish it, etc.

Short-lived branches are likely referring to "bookmarks" in Mercurial. Or they could also just be un-named anonymous heads. These are different from what is exposed by the "hg branch" command.

Mercurial's "branch" was generally intended for long-lived things. Think the "stable branch" or a "version X" support branch for a project.

The branch name is baked into the commits that use it. You can hide them from the UI with "--close-branch", but they will still exist forever in the commit history. This is both a good thing and a bad thing, depending on your desires.

This is different from Git's "branch" which is basically just a pointer to a commit. It is not part of commit history, it is just a convenience for the developer. Later, Mercurial added "bookmarks" which are similar.

FYI: Matt Mackall is now Olivia Mackall [1], so that can make searching for things harder. Looks like they work at Valve, now? Agreed that they were a really stabilizing and healthy personality in the project, and made a lot of good early decisions, which Mercurial has continually benefited from. Eg: the commitment to backwards-compatibility [2].

[1] https://repo.mercurial-scm.org/hg-stable/rev/d4ba4d51f85f

[2] https://wiki.mercurial-scm.org/CompatibilityRules

A recent funny story on this topic: https://idiallo.com/blog/what-is-copilot-exactly

HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47603231

Indeed, the Wikipedia page on fractal dimension[1] uses the coastline paradox[2] as a leading example.

  [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal_dimension
  [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coastline_paradox

> Don't laugh

I laugh (:

But good for you, whatever works. Personally, I can't do music with much lyrics or narrative; I find it distracting.

But to each their own!

For others interested, perhaps a more straightforward example is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGHkigtPcIA

The one in the article is the same essential technique (structurally speaking), but with a lot more decorative flourish.

  > there are billions of souls on this planet. They're not a rare thing
  > like say, gold. They're very easily produced, by two people getting it
  > on. That leads to a harsh conclusion: human beings aren't that valuable
  > as individuals. We are in fact very disposable and replaceable.

I appreciate the perspective you're offering here, and I don't entirely disagree, especially from an economic angle. But I do want to offer a counterpoint:

Lumps of gold are largely interchangeable. It's just a mass of gold atoms that we don't differentiate between, so one lump of gold is as good as another. But people are not like that. If you were to painstakingly transform a lump of gold into a beautiful sculpture, it would be worth more than its face value. And if a person transforms from the lump of flesh they are born as into a unique individual, they are worth something more, too. Two gold sculptures would not be interchangeable, to an art aficionado, and two people are not interchangeable in that way, either.

On the gross large scale, yes, we're all lumps of flesh squidging around on the planet; a uniform slimy patina on a tiny ball of dirt. And our various large-scale systems and policies (economic, political, etc) treat people in this way, too, in varying degrees.

But you are living your one and possibly only life (just like everyone else). And you have taken a unique path through that life (just like everyone else), and I'd just encourage you and/or others reading to cherish that, both in yourself and others, even if (or especially if) the systems in which we live don't seem to. It is something that can't be taken from you, because it is intrinsic to you, and that is a value beyond "what someone will pay for."

Just my 2¢

I have the same problem with the mouse (little page marker overlay covers the down arrow).

But using keyboard arrow keys work for me.

Well, I wrote what I meant, but I meant to be facetious (:

My sense is that there is a narrow slice of software developers who genuinely do flourish in a pair programming environment. These are people who actually work through their thoughts better with another person in the loop. They get super excited about it and make the common mistake of "if it works for me, it will work for everybody" and shout it from the hilltops.

Then there are the people who program best in a fugue state and the idea of having to constantly break that to transform their thoughts into words and human interaction is anathema.

I say this as someone who just woke up in the wee hours of the morning when nobody else is around so I can get some work done (:

> you are back to the same problems that certificates have.

Some of the same problems. One nice thing about verifying content rather than using an SSL connection is that plain-old HTTP caching works again.

That aside, another benefit of less-centralized and more-fine-grained trust mechanisms would be that a person can decide, on a case-by-case basis what entities should be trusted/revoked/etc rather than these root CAs that entail huge swaths of the internet. Admittedly, most people would just use "whatever's the default," which would not behave that differently from what we have now. But it would open the door to more ergonomic fine-grained decision-making for those who wish to use it.

I recently learned about the fact that Sichuan peppercorns are actually related to citrus, so was looking for where the connection is... As it turns out[1], there is a "citrus family" (Rutaceae[2]) and a citrus genus (Citrus[3], in that family). The Sichuan plant is a member of the family, but not the genus (that would be Zanthoxylum[4]). Confusing!

  [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47248319
  [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rutaceae
  [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citrus
  [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zanthoxylum

Also, this is a pretty good page on citrus (both family and genus): https://www.clovegarden.com/ingred/citrus.html

A bit of an aside...

From the article:

  MetaPost is written in literate programming language WEB, then generating
  Pascal code from it. Hence the tooling and developer experience around
  it is quite suboptimal. Extending it is also almost impossible.

It's unfortunate (and a little funny to me) that a literate programming language, the whole purpose of which is to remain highly maintainable for future generations, is a stumbling block to development. Maybe we need literate build systems, so people can even begin to do development in the language proper? Or maybe the whole "literate" concept harkens from an increasingly-bygone era where it was assumed that a maintainer would spend a long time getting to know the existing system in detail, basically reading a book's-worth of material on the subject as they do their work.

Does anyone know a google-able term for split keyboards that have doubled keys down the middle column (B/N, G/H, T/Y, 6/7)?

I see one instance on this page of a keyboard with double "B" key ("Alice layout"), but not the others.

I've been interested in trying a split keyboard, but I like to type those middle keys with either left or right hand depending on the moment, so all the split keyboards I've tried have ended up somewhat annoying, for that reason.

I didn't see it on the feature list, but it might be nice to allow it to run as a cron job and send email for reminders. These days, most mobile phones have an associated email like your-phone-number@vztext.com (depending on carrier), so you can send yourself text messages about chores and whatnot.

Or, perhaps just as good, have a way for it to dump out data as json, and could be consumed by some other send-the-email tool. There is the "-json" sqlite option, of course, but I'm not sure if your schema is meant to be stable.

I have a perl script for reminders like this that has been super handy over the 10+ years I've been using it. Never bit the bullet to put it in a nice UI or have a backing DB like this project, though.

I went down this rabbit hole a while back — there's a fascinating history of various scientists' investigations into the blue sky, across many decades, with some back-and-forth between Russia and Europe. Einstein eventually made a connection between it and the seemingly-unrelated issue of "critical opalescence," by showing that the fluctuations of densities is responsible for the scattering, not just a simple "individual molecules floating in space" analysis that Rayleigh originally performed. But funnily, for an ideal gas (such as our atmosphere), the formula works out to be the same.

So, "Rayleigh scattering" is the common term still used today, but there is a deeper reason for the formula being correct — it remains correct even when molecules are relatively close together, such as in the lower layers of our atmosphere.

I found this nice paper[1] giving an overview of the timeline, various discoveries, etc: http://users.df.uba.ar/bragas/Web%20roberto/Papers/sobelman%...

Django aside, I think this is a really important point:

  Being able to abandon a project for months or years and then come back
  to it is really important to me (that’s how all my projects work!) ...

It's perhaps especially true for a hobbyist situation, but even in a bigger environment, there is a cost to keeping people on hand who understand how XYZ works, getting new people up to speed, etc.

I, too, have found found that my interactions with past versions of myself across decades has been a nice way to learn good habits that also benefit me professionally.