piekvorst

rc [1] replaced it with a far more telling >[1=2] and >[1=] for closing.

1: https://p9f.org/sys/doc/rc.html

How can one trust a dishonest, manipulative person?

Knowing Greek, Latin, and Plato is very useful for a philosopher of his times. I’m far from being a fan of Mill’s contributions but he aligned himself well with the western history of philosophy.

But if you imply that philosophy as such isn’t useful, it’s simply wrong, if not arrogant. Everyone needs philosophy.

I agree and I think it’s a nice explanation that fundamentality (characteristics upon which everything depends or would not be possible) is contextual.

You can learn JavaScript and code for life. You can’t learn React and code for life.

Yeah, JavaScript is an illusion (to be exact, a concept). But it’s the one that we accept as fundamental. People need fundamentals to rely upon.

Ads (at least in the classical pre-AI sense) are by orders of magnitude better than preventive laws

The way English uses this vast vocabulary is beautiful.

When I have this problem, I catenate two outputs:

    man curl |grep -e -L
    man curl

This way, I have all the matches at hand. When I pick the one I need, I select the line and search for it, finding the next occurrence in the full man-page.

Checking sub-command section is trivial as well. Because the editor remembers the exact location of the cursor, you can always go back to it after scrolling up and down however you feel like.

For this scenario to work nicely, you have to have run the commands from a text editor. I use Acme [1], it’s optimized for this style of work and doesn’t shy away mice. (I think that the traditional TUI cannot be as smooth.)

So, to hell with AI.

[1]: https://p9f.org/sys/doc/acme/acme.html

In other words, a free system is inevitably ruled by hypocrites, while in dictatorships they are rejected that opportunity. This is another variant of “in democracy, people cannot rule because they’re stupid.”

Statists, failing to admit their guilt, blame everyone but themselves.

And no, the truth does not get through, even after centuries.

I don’t deny that the current state of the U.S. is unfortunate, even irrational. It has been this way for a very long time.

Freedom is the foundational root, not the current fruit. And it’s a testament to freedom that she could withstand for so long.

I didn’t want to say that a ban on infinite scrolling is a literal censorship. Sorry if I made that impression.

I thought that if one thinks that it’s right to violate property rights, the form of the violation is only a matter of time. Today infinite scrolling, tomorrow unpopular opinions.

This is what any anti-intellectual perceives about the other side of the conflict: monstrous brute, having no other means to enforce his power except through force. In fact, this attitude reflects primarily his own psycho-epistemology.

I think that at least one thing from the least is feasible.

I have started using Arch in 2016 and it was stable back then. Are you describing an earlier era?

Censorship comes

I have recently switched from 7 Plus to 16e. Now I make typos all the time. I still do not know who I should blame primarily, my muscle memory or Apple.

I can relate. I enjoy the feeling of being free to close any window because it takes so little effort to bring it back. So, during a day, I close around a hundred of windows.

And it really helps to not think about accumulated junk.

The trick is to make the workflow really dynamic so that the process of managing it doesn’t stand in the way.

Some folks prefer to accumulate. I think this is fine as long as they make a system comfortable to navigate. Their approach wouldn’t work if they had to use a dynamic system that forced them to manage their dozens of sessions all the time. Conversely, their tools seem to be slow for a dynamic user.

Isn’t vi good enough?

For my workflow, yes

I don’t think it’s a severe security vulnerability. The same thing can happen with $home/bin.

What's illegal about intentionally making money for being addictive? "Unfair"? Maybe. But not illegal.

That’s impressive. I don’t object to the fact that they make humans phenomenally productive. But “they code and think” makes me cringe. Maybe I’m confusing lexicon differences for philosophic battles.

I think it can solve about any leetcode problem. I don’t think it can build an enterprise-grade system. It can be trained on an exiting one but these systems are not closed and no past knowledge seems to predict the future.

That’s not very specific but I don’t have another answer.

It can code in an autocomplete sense. In the serious sense, if we don’t distinguish between code and thought, it can’t.

Observe that modern coding agents rely heavily on heuristics. LLM excels at training datasets, at analyzing existing knowledge, but it can’t generate new knowledge on the same scale, its thinking (a process of identification and integration) is severely limited on the conscious level (context window), where being rational is most valuable.

Because it doesn’t have volition, it cannot choose to be logical and not irrational, it cannot commit to attaining the full non-contradictory awareness of reality. That’s why I said “never.”

> Chief among all changes is that machines can code and think quite well now.

They can’t and never will.

Yet another nail

I think that regular black-and-white /bin/diff is solid for that kind of job. I use it all the time. I have seen people being mad about reading its output but I think that this attitude is unfounded.

“Despicable” is by an order of magnitude softer word compared to “Apple can legally take your salary”

Sure, Apple is greedy. But it doesn’t deserve what is usually assumed: legal persecution.

People are beginning to realize that prompt is a bottleneck and design problem, that traditional workarounds (history, aliases, complex autocomplete) don’t work. But running scripts in a traditional way, full file, from the top to the bottom, is inconvenient, too.

What about this instead: select any number of lines, in any file, and pass it through to the shell. You get convenience of text editing, file management, and shell’s straightforwardness.

(This approach was tried and cemented in Acme, a text editor from Bell Labs.)

Although I don't use dwm and tmux anymore, tmux keyboard control is nasty and some uniformity is always a good idea.

No prominent writer has ever said that writing came easy to them. I think it’s not wrong to feel this way.