508 karma · joined June 14, 2017
Then the voice came in. Once the game hit the airwaves, it slowed. Had to. The ball waited for the broadcast.
Out of the dead-ball fog came the home run. No more bunting, no more clever thefts of second. Now it was swing, admire, trot. Alongside the homers came the walks and the strikeouts. Fewer balls in play. More staring, less running. Time thickened, and the nature of the game was trending towards longer games.
World War II shaved minutes from the clock. With so many players overseas, the talent pool shrank. The games got shorter because they became simpler. When the talent came back, the games got longer, largely because, after 1947, the game was flooded with previously segregated talent and players who were returning from overseas.
In the 60s, pitchers took over. Dominance from the mound. ERAs dropped. Batting averages plummeted. In 1968 they called it the Year of the Pitcher, then called the rulebook to fix it. Scoring came back, and with it, longer games.
Television followed with commercial breaks and camera angles. The game had to pause for sponsors. The seventh-inning stretch now came with a soft drink.
In the 70s, the bullpen became a revolving door. Specialists. Situational matchups. Every pitching change added minutes. Coaches walked the mound like they were heading to confession.
And the game kept expanding. OPS rose. More runners meant more pitches. More strikeouts meant more throws. Every batter became a saga.
If you look at the graph, you can see a trend that matches well with changes in baseball. We could probably break down every high and low to describe the shift based on rules, personal changes, etc.
Then came the pitch clock. No more dawdling. No more meditative pacing between pitches. And now a reliever has to face at least three batters in an inning. No more one-pitch exits.
It’s not that baseball got lazy. It got layered, commercialized, optimized, and strategized, but it forgot about time management.
The graph shows an outline, with the trends representing a chapter in baseball history, which is very cool.
Now, time for a Metamucil and a nice nap before my standup.
She baked right up until the end, whisk in hand, oxygen tank nearby, unapologetically dusted in flour like a retired magician still performing card tricks at the grocery store. Diagnosed with a rare lung condition, one that typically affected middle-aged Black men, which she most definitely was not, Grandma took the news with a shrug and a Bundt cake.
Every treatment day, she'd show up to the clinic armed with two to three dozen baked goods and a stack of handwritten recipes. "These are for YOU to bake," she'd announce, passing out snickerdoodles and no-nonsense instructions. "Because baking keeps your mind off being sick, and out of daytime television. Okay, maybe not that last one!"
She never trusted the measurements on store-bought mixes. "Don't trust the box!" she'd warn, scribbling revised amounts in large, looping script over any corporate estimate. Boxes, after all, were not to be trusted. Not in baking. Not in medicine. Certainly not in life.
At her funeral, two or three of the clinic men came, not with flowers, but with Tupperware. Cookies. Cupcakes. Homemade tributes, slightly lopsided, carefully but imperfectly iced, and utterly perfect.
Somewhere, in the vast afterlife, she is smiling and saying, "See, I told you," while waiting for the next batch to be ready.
The core tension is between replication and creation. Yes, some things will always resemble what came before. A hard-boiled detective novel usually has a corpse or two, a bottle, and a wisecrack. But the artistry and work are in what you do with the formula. Take Les Roberts, for example. He wrote detective novels, sure, but he set them in Cleveland, gave them local color, and turned Northeast Ohio into a character. That's authorship. That's presence.
You can absolutely ask an AI to plot the story. But the soul, that point, is what you bring to it: the choices, the voice, the friction.
What gives me pause here is that I don't feel that presence. The project looks good, but it feels like Windows XP. Smooth, clean, and generic. I can't tell what this person's actual skills are. From the post, they clearly put in real time and effort. They learned something and got it working. But what I see is replication. Competent, yes. But flat, in my opinion.
If I were in their shoes, someone who would struggle to replicate this, I'd still treat that as step one.
Okay, I copied it. Now, what can I improve? What parts of the interface feel off? Where could I take a risk? Then, show the before and after.
So here's the long-winded point.
Why stop at imitation? Why not go further? Why not show that you can replicate something, build on it, shape it, and own it?
That's the more profound concern I have about AI collaboration. How do you show your work in a world of infinite templates and effortless iteration? How do you show your soul, or if you are too shy to bare your soul, at least a differentiator, that means you should be hired?
(I say this with the absolute irony that I used Grammarly to ensure this collection of words somewhat resembled a coherent thought. In the words of Dirty Harry, "A man has to know his limitations."[0]) ---
[0] Probably a misquote.
Most of the documentation I read seems to have been created by a sleep-deprived robot in a stand-up or by a caffeinated squirrel with memory issues. So, I am searching for a voice to bring something different to talking about broken pipelines, observability bills expanding faster than my waistline, and heroic config file linting for the impatient.
I aim to make writing (and reading) my documentation tolerable (and perhaps even FUN!). I hope to make the next person who has to read my written word laugh and absolutely confirm my clear lack of sanity.
I have also moved back hard to using TCL as my scripting language. I like it too much, and bouncing between Python, Go, and such for DevOps glue tires me out.
For systems, I love using plan9 (9front) to solve problems, which grounds me to C, awk, sed, and the rc shell.
I still booted my system up occasionally when I had it to remind myself that you didn't have to write HUGE programs to do stuff.
Now, I want to write a text adventure game again. Where are my Turbo Pascal disks?
I had TI Forth, the huge accessory box, a disk drive, the works. It was fun, I learned quite a bit and have forgotten most of the Forth that I learned.
So, for my major writing projects it is: * Outline, snippets, and drafts with a fountain pen. * Writing, re-writing, etc. on WordStar. * Typeset (i.e.: prepare digitally) on my regular systems. This is the only place I get distracted.
It's still one of my favorite "I can't sleep" movies.
Of course, I also do most of my scripting in TCL, so I'm a wee bit biased.
It gives me good consistency between Mac and Linux (or WSL), so I highly recommend plan9port as a gateway to plan9 and 9front.
Bwahah! Bwahah!
Hmm, yea. I guess I'll have to take a look and see how they handled it. Thanks for the link!
Kudos to the folks that are writing the parser!
Lots of math with crude estimations for stuff. It's not Moneyball-related, just odd things I like to wonder.
Spent a lot of time learning the kernel and support "kits" and porting some of my large baseball related code to it.
Could'a been a nice little operating system despite forcing me to learn C++ better.
I'm going to be giving it another go here in a bit, I got a small little personal project where I'm going to make a serious attempt to curse at it for a bit.
Always had a great experience. Interesting talks and I have sat down and had conversions with Maddog, Zonker, and a number of other interesting names in Open Source and Linux.
Fun time and great people, wish I had the time this year to visit!