md224

What if the person you're replying to really, really likes Zig except for this one aspect of it?

I don't smoke, but my understanding of that book is that it basically reprograms your associations re: smoking and quitting smoking.

Before you read that book, quitting smoking is perceived as a loss of something that made you feel good. The permanence of this loss -- the anticipation of living the rest of your life without this source of comfort -- leads to cravings.

What the Carr book does is install a new set of associations: smoking is disgusting and your life is going to be so much better once you free yourself from this completely unnecessary weight that's been dragging you down. Instead of viewing quitting as the loss of something good, you learn to view it as the act of freeing yourself from something bad. Now, when you think about a future without smoking, the anticipation is positive: you get to live the rest of your life without this terrible thing intefering with it! And all you have to do is just stop doing it! Sure, you might have a little bit of physical withdrawal for a little while, but isn't that worth it to be permanently free of this awful thing that's been ruining your life?

That's the basic gist, as far as I can tell. In a way, it's just about being optimistic about a life without cigarettes instead of pessimistic.

TIL Substack runs on Heroku.

I thought it might be referencing an upside down G.

I think "this new standard" was referring to WebDriver BiDi, not WebContainers, so you might be misreading them.

That being said, I agree that the blog post made it sound like WebContainers is some kind of standard, and I also found that to be confusing.

Maybe it's just me but this seems like a misuse of GitHub orgs...

I really dislike the concept of "rationality", or at the very least the way it gets used. I'm sure there are cases where everyone would agree that someone is behaving irrationally, but a lot of the time the label of "irrational" hides assumptions about value and tolerance for risk.

If an entrepreneur decides to prioritize certain factors over others, who's to say that's "irrational"? Is there an objectively correct way to run a business? I just find the whole idea so tiresome.

The interesting thing about this is that YouTube is clearly trying to make it more difficult for non-official clients to stream video, as is evident from the required workaround described here:

https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/issues/29326#issuecom...

The legal defense of youtube-dl is premised on the idea that there's no circumvention occurring [0]. I 100% support youtube-dl and I want YouTube to stop interfering with it, but I also think we're being a little too cute when we pretend like ytdl isn't circumventing anything... it seems obvious to me that YouTube is trying to put up roadblocks and we're trying to get around them. I would feel better if we could find a way to defend ytdl without the pretense of acting like this cat-and-mouse game isn't going on.

[0] https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2020/11/2020-11-1...

I think the person you're replying to is agreeing with you.

I think it's actually the opposite. Because so many people think they have a gluten allergy, restaurants offering gluten-free options don't feel the need to take it so seriously.

"So what if there's a tiny amount of gluten contamination... it's not like these people are going to die, right? They're probably just on a fad diet."

Diluting the meaning of a medical condition is not a good thing.

> And if we were to take it even further? If we chose a subculture that was online, and we never went outside? Then all the stress would be gone; if one doesn’t walk down the street, one isn’t bothered by strangers in such close proximity.

I'm not sure how to parse this: is this meant ironically or as a genuine endorsement of physical isolation as a way of life?

IMHO, this aspect -- physical isolation -- is the biggest problem with the move towards digital subcultures, and I'm not sure how it can be solved.

> I don’t think that works because the N-1 dimension is contained in the N dimension.

I'm not sure that's right. Each dimension is linearly independent [0] from the others, which means e.g. you can't add up a bunch of width and get height, or add up a bunch of length and get width. So in an important sense, they're not contained within each other.

You might be thinking of how a 2D plane contains the first dimension within it, but that's not the 2nd dimension... that's two-dimensional (a combination of two dimensions).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_independence

The "Concept" idea is very cool... seems like it would make it really easy to construct refinement types and build validation into the type system.

> Mathematical proofs don't use models.

Maybe the person you replied to was taking a model theoretic perspective?

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/modeltheory-fo/

> “There’s no one trump card, no one criteria really that can tell us this is absolutely, without a doubt melanoma.”

Does this bother anyone else? I really hope that level of uncertainty doesn't extend to too many other types of cancers...

You're misreading this sentence:

> I am of the opinion that resolving trauma that causes a person to "zone out" and sleep walk through life can have equivalent effect to psychedelics.

The phrase "that causes a person to 'zone out' and sleep walk through life" is meant to describe "trauma", not "resolving trauma".

You should read it as "resolving (trauma that causes a person to 'zone out')", not "(resolving trauma) that causes a person to 'zone out'".

No, "piggybacking" refers to the posting of related material on HN after the original material becomes popular. The posting on HN is the piggybacking, not the writing of the material itself.

> A pattern that has come up a few times in my code is the following: an object has a property which defaults to an expression based on its other properties unless it’s explicitly set, in which case it functions like a normal property. Essentially, the expression functions as a default value.

Having a dynamic default value makes sense, but instead of having the object reconfigure itself on the fly, why not design a single virtual field that intelligently chooses between two distinct sources of data? For example, you could write a class like this:

    class MyObject {
      #customFoo;

      get foo () {
        return this.#customFoo ?? this.#getDefaultFoo();
      }

      set foo (val) {
        this.#customFoo = val;
      }

      #getDefaultFoo () {
        // dynamically generate and return foo value
      }
    }

That way you could get a dynamically created value up until a custom value is set, with the option to switch back to the dynamic default simply by setting the field to null or undefined.

Also, I'm not sure if you were implying that it's a good thing, but the concept of "properties which execute code to produce side effects when they are get or set" seems a bit risky to me, especially the "get" part... it can make it very difficult to reason about the state of a system when simply accessing a property on an object has side effects. Obviously side effects don't need to be avoided at all costs, but IMHO it's best if they only occur during explicit function calls.

The belief that zero is neither even nor odd makes sense once you consider a statement like “An even number of Unicorns exist” or “I possess an even number of magic lamps.” It’s technically correct, but it also sounds kind of strange, simply because we’re not accustomed to assigning parity to an empty collection.

The thing you're missing is that each of the tweets in a thread has its own set of replies & quote tweets, some of which may themselves be threads. [1] This is why I like to think of Twitter as a fractal annotation platform: it allows people to write commentary on specific portions of other people's commentary. Twitter's innovation is that it forces the writer to divide their text into annotatable segments before publishing it.

I think it's great that we're coming up with better tools to facilitate the process of writing modular text. Hopefully these tools will make it clearer to writers what Twitter threads are for and reduce the prevalence of behaviors like splitting sentences across tweets.

[1] Unfortunately Twitter's thread-composing UI isn't available when writing a reply to someone else's tweet. It would be nice if they fixed this. (Perhaps the reasoning is that a multi-tweet reply would work better as a quote tweet. I still think it would be nice to have the thread UI available for every tweet, regardless of the context.)

To be fair, a lot of reasonable people would say "no witness could change my mind" if I asked them "what witness testimony would convince you that politicians are secretly Lizard People from the planet Venus?" So I don't think this is really about rejecting facts & reason... it's more about having really strong priors that the rest of us don't share.

Yeah, this is pretty close to how I see it.

The key is making it clear that switching doors will always switch you from Lose to Win and vice versa. Switching doors is equivalent to switching outcomes. That's the critical fact, IMHO.

Once that's accepted, the rest falls into place: there's a 2/3 chance that you picked a Losing door, so there's a 2/3 chance that you'll benefit from switching outcomes, and since you're guaranteed to switch outcomes if you switch doors, there's a 2/3 chance that you'll benefit from switching doors.

> Aaronson came up with a rewriting system with seven symbols and 11 rules that was analogous to the Collatz procedure.

Has Aaronson written about this anywhere? I'm curious what system he came up with & how it maps onto Collatz.

> Thats what I thought made this a mind bender.

I don't know if I'd call it a mind bender, but it does demonstrate that if one holds that all groupings of two individuals must be uniform with regard to an attribute A, then it follows that any grouping of individuals must be uniform with regard to A.

A simple proof by contradiction:

1) Assume some group of more than 2 individuals is not uniform with regard to A

2) There must be at least one pair of individuals for which attribute A differs

3) Create a subgrouping of one of those pairs

4) Now we have a grouping of 2 individuals which is non-uniform with regard to A

5) But we originally held that all groupings of 2 individuals must be uniform with regard to A

6) Contradiction! Hence a non-uniform grouping with regard to A is impossible, Q.E.D.

I have a pet theory that Twitter is the ultimate annotation platform that’s been right in front of us the whole time. The reason it doesn’t seem like one is because it blurs the line between “annotation” and “conversation”.

I think the dynamic is similar: while a normal annotation is a comment on a fragment of text, a Twitter reply is (or at least can be) a comment on a single portion of a longer thread.

Two notable differences:

- While a typical annotation platform takes a freely-written text and allows any segment to be annotated, Twitter forces the author of a thread to compose their text with the segment boundaries in mind.

- While a normal annotation system doesn’t allow you to annotate the annotations, any given “annotation” on Twitter may itself be a thread which allows for annotation. It’s recursive!

Maybe the above is a stretch, but personally I think it’s an interesting way to think about Twitter.

He doesn’t even mention protests or protestors in those quotes, so why do you believe he’s equating rioters and protestors?

It seems like you’re reading the words “riots” and “rioters” and assuming that they must be Cotton’s terms for “protests” and “protestors”, but why make that assumption?

I’m a bit confused, since the section you emphasized appears to prove Taibbi’s point: Cotton called for force against “lawbreakers”, not “protestors”. You can argue that the troops would in practice end up attacking both groups, but that’s a separate question from “did Cotton suggest deploying troops to attack protestors?”

If Cotton explicitly stated that all protestors were in violation of the law, then I stand corrected, but otherwise I’m not convinced this is as cut and dry as you make it seem.

I want to take this opportunity to make an important point: I could easily have accused you of disinformation for promoting what appears to me to be an illegitimate “spin” on Cotton’s column. But I didn’t because I know you’re just trying to call it like you see it. What I want you to understand is that this is what everyone is doing, Matt Taibbi included. We’re all trying to interpret things as best as we can. Sometimes those interpretations don’t line up, but that doesn’t mean everyone who disagrees with you is purposefully spreading disinformation. (Maybe some are, but I believe most people are trying to be accurate.)

It seems to me like the main purpose of moderation is to make sure posts conform to the theme of the subreddit... to keep things on topic. Almost everything else can be taken care of by the downvotes of the community members.

A subreddit is like a community where every citizen has a gun. They can police themselves by downvoting each other... the only thing mods need to do is make sure the theme of the community stays on track.

I'm the sole mod of a subreddit with over 600k subscribers and I basically do nothing. My case is admittedly special because the subreddit is a weird kind of "game" with very specific, well-defined rules about how to reply to posts (and a bot that deletes replies that violate this rule), but in general I feel like people don't have enough faith in the ability of a community to handle itself. Occasionally I've had to ban people who are spamming /new with disturbing content, and I did end up setting some useful automoderator rules, but otherwise I find that the community runs itself.

I've gotten a few messages from people over the years saying they're unsubscribing because they wanted me to take a more involved role in moderating the content posted to the subreddit, removing posts they thought were "low quality". That's fair, but I don't think it should be up to me what counts as "low quality"... I'm just one person. The beauty of a community is watching it develop organically from the actions of thousands of people, not molding it into some shape you happen to prefer. It's like an organism, and it has a mechanism to achieve homeostasis: upvotes and downvotes.

Did you have nasal congestion? If so, that could explain the loss of taste. The olfactory system plays a significant role in taste perception.

I don't think CD4 cells are the same as antibodies, right? I assume that when we test for antibodies, we're not testing for CD4 reactivity...