publicdebates

WSJ not tryna be found negligent in any social-media addiction trial.

"Rule 6: Don't waste time on syntax highlighting unless you're incompetent."

You don't think AWS is internally built on massive amounts of open source?

Isn't this the same debate as airports post 9/11, whether you can have both privacy and security? Seems conclusive, no.

And a difference in price that amortizes about the same.

And starting fires or making coats used to be forms of art, now we just buy a Zippo and a London Fog and call it an afternoon. Jobs evolve to specialize. I call that progress.

Also it looks like[1] Luau is the official Roblox Studio scripting language, and is baed on Lua 5.1 (possibly LuaJIT?) which means it's behind mainstream Lua.

Not sure which Lua versions the others are based on.

[1] https://create.roblox.com/docs/luau

Many of us would love a TypeScript analogy for Lua.

There have been some attempts:

Luau (5.2k, last week, https://luau.org/, https://github.com/edubart/nelua-lang)

Nelua (2.3k, 8 months ago, https://nelua.io/, https://github.com/luau-lang/luau)

Terra (2.9k, 3 days ago, https://terralang.org/, https://github.com/terralang/terra)

Teal (2.7k, 2 days ago, https://teal-language.org/, https://github.com/teal-language/tl)

The Luau author is always on the official Lua mailing list, and it has twice as many stars, so it seems likely to win the long term popularity contest.

It uses refcounting, and GC for cycles. Sounds good. Why don't more Lua-likes?

The article says it's repurposed.

Human history is full of cases where silly mistakes became precedent. HTTP "referal" is just another example.

I wonder if there's a wikipedia article listing these...

They're definitely going to do it at some point in the near future, mark my words.

These are fine times. Just need a little extra cash for cigars, that's all. Had two yesterday, made the money by selling Premium Snowballs in Chicago for $2 each (made $50 that day). Life is fun.

Looking for remote side quests.

. . . . Ideally 5-20 hour projects with fixed prices.

. . . . . . . . Ideal range is ~ $50-500 USD

. . . . I can do any web stuff fairly quickly.

. . . . . . . . I won't do anything related to AI.

. . . . I'm on a fixed income from book royalties.

. . . . . . . . Just trying to make some cigar money.

. . . . I've got 20+ years experience with 20+ languages

. . . . . . . . Most of my resume is classified. Quiz me.

Hit me up, contact@lowkpro.com

    Keywords: Assembly C C++ Objective-C ObjC C# JavaScript TypeScript Rust Ruby Rails Python Django Lua Clojure Java Kotlin Visual Basic VB.net Go PHP Swift Lisp HTML HTML5 CSS CSS3 React.js Next.js Vue.js Astro Hugo &c. ad nauseam

That list (or any similar list) would be so helpful if it had a health column, something that takes into account number of contributors, time since last commit, number of forks, number of commits, etc. So many projects are effectively dead but it's not obvious at first sight, and it takes 2 or 3 whole minutes to figure out. That seems short but it adds up when evaluating a project, causing people to just go to a well known solution like Lua (and why not? Lua is just fine; in fact it's great).

The for loop is odd. Why is the word counter in there twice?

    counter :: int

    for counter in <1, 10-counter> (
       print(counter)
       print(" ")
    )

Using backfor to count backwards is an odd choice. Why not overload for?

    backfor counter in <1, 9> print(counter, " ")

This is confusing to me. Maybe I'm misunderstanding the design principles, but the syntax seems unintuitive.

A new one seems to pop up every year, and some every 13 or 17 years.

I don't know why they do that, but it's really the main (only?) drawback to KDP.

My guess is that they do expand, but only when genuinely needed for long-term. They probably keep a certain amount of blank books in stock, and ration them out to PoD books somewhat evenly, with established books getting higher priority.

This was the video that singlehandedly got me all those sales I mentioned earlier: https://www.tiktok.com/@alwayscandid/video/73180668430448755... ... honestly it's quite poetic how it all turned out. I did almost no work making a book, I made way more money than I ever deserved, I wasted all of it, and now I'm sleeping in my car. It's very fair, it's more than fair. It's generous.

How likely is a future where Microsoft

(a) gives us back 2000/XP/7/11 options for UI,

(b) gives us a desktop-first experience when we have keyboard/mouse plugged in,

(c) stops turning every OS feature into an ad, and makes it utilitarian again,

(d) and focuses 100% on making a stable OS and high quality dev/office apps?

It would be so nice if they just forked a commit from ~2005 and started from there.

(Maybe Copilot will mess up & erase commits so they have to? One can only dream.)

KDP usually cuts off high volume sales at a certain point, in order to give other books a fair amount of copies to print on demand. Usually it takes a few weeks of sales, but I sold so many copies that evening, from a single 10M view video that someone posted, so they cut it off that night for two or three weeks I think.

The main one is a deep sense of defeat. The app would keep me there longer than I want. I would waste money ordering doordash, or lose sleep, or get drunk, or all of the above. Each time, I'd feel like I set myself back a little too far. I'd try to ignore the feeling, but wouldn't know what to do. What's the default action? Keep scrolling. And of course I'd just keep missing more such personal deadlines. Then I'd feel more defeated, and keep scrolling. It just spirals further and further down, far past rock bottom. Maybe it's what advancing the Kola Superdeep Borehole felt like.

Scrolling videos, commenting, expanding my algorithm by searching for similar stuff to what I liked, sometimes watching lives, sometimes hosting lives or joining lives. Maybe about 70% scrolling videos and 28% lives and 2% creating.

I should mention that I was very financially successful due to TikTok. Around Christmas of 2023, my book got over 20M views and shot up to #122 on all Amazon books, until KDP just stopped offering it within a few hours. I wonder how high it would have gone.

But due to that success, I lost both drive and purpose. I had already made it, and it wasn't clear what else I could offer the world. So while I thought about it, I scrolled to pass the time. But that scrolling was endless and addictive. And I never made any progress on figuring out the question of what I'm good for.

TikTok's algorithm is significantly better and therefore more addictive. I'm speaking from personal experience, having spent about 12-14 hours a day on TikTok for probably 360 days during 2024. Getting banned from it was one of the best things that ever happened to me. Too bad it only happened in Jan 2025. Will never get that year back, or the mental health I lost from it. (I'm not going to sue, though I could definitely win such a suit.)

Windows 2000 was peak. All improvements from XP onwards were negligible.

You misunderstand the nature of newspapers. Playing devil's advocate just a little here, I absolutely can see the financial benefit of an author taking a single epitome out of a group of near clones, even a random one among them at that, and placing him right on top of a pedestal positioned just before a podium. The more details the audience drowns in, no matter how truthful, the more you simply clutter your narrative with unfortunate facts and drown out the whole point. I'm not saying the author is lying, nor advocating it. But sometimes a slice of the truth is more useful than the whole pi of it in a given moment for a given story.

For now. Twitter used to have a free API also.

I would pay $10 for this.

Honestly yeah.

I clicked it thinking it was an MDI app.

This is excessively beautiful, both the website and the library's UI.

But I have to ask: what's the rationale on dedicating such an elaborate and gorgeous website for just a library? Are you hoping to get hired for web design? Are you seeking fame and repute? Do you merely do it for the love of the game? Why, for the love of all that's good, pray tell why put all this effort into mere documentation?