rwnspace

Anyone here remember LieroM8/Lierokit? Such good times hacking away at this game in year 8 with my mate. There's nothing quite like an automatic bananabomb-blunderbus and low friction/gravity to speed the game up...

I too prefer fizzy history. It's like Sodastream for your shell!

Skim [0] is a nice alternative to fzf [1], mainly for the fact you can call additional commands dynamically like so [2]:

    sk --ansi -i -c 'rg --color=always --line-number "{}"'

[0] https://github.com/lotabout/skim [1] https://github.com/lotabout/skim#difference-to-fzf [2] https://github.com/lotabout/skim#interactive-mode

Architecture is a sub-culture just like anything else. There's plenty of software we love that is buried under a hideous UI, because we understand how the construction and operation of our beloved is unique in concept, function or influence.

Lots of aesthetics is to do with prediction and surprise, and if you don't have the 'perceptual training' you won't be able to make much sense of the art or architecture which defies your expectations.

IANAA but I imagine the "Technisches Rathaus" building is supposed to be a bit like what's supposed to go on inside a technical academy - scientific reductionism or abstraction. The design exposes the 'idea' of the components of the building (the steel poles, obvious floor layout, bringing up the 'foundations' to ground level) and abstracts away the typically visceral particulars (receding the windows, using only design-relevant adornment).

I think there are plenty of interesting buildings that look absolutely disgusting in context, but which I'd probably enjoy and be able to 'see' properly if they were grouped together in their own little town somewhere, because I'm not in a mode where I expect to see traditional architecture.

At the same time, if I never see those buildings, how am I to know what novel aesthetics I'm missing out on?

This is what I've done the past couple weeks and it's going pretty well:

Start with plain Emacs. Print/write out the popular cheatsheets. Just make sure you know how to exit, access the documentation, and move around the windows/frames/buffers. Get Melpa & install some packages. Play with the config, adding keybindings, figure out hooks and so on. Copy some elisp functions from dotfiles on Github. Spam the documentation command on everything. Get frustrated with how much tinkering you need to do to get the crazy setups you've seen on blogposts. Stay motivated by consuming more content about custom setups. Discover the magic of magit and parinfer and dired. Look up some of the org-mode/PIM heroes on github, usernames: novoid, alphapapa, karlicoss

Install Doom. Tinker with it a bit. Take notes of your learning in an org file. Tinker some more. Go back to plain emacs for a bit. Then try spacemacs. Go straight back to Doom because it's faster and you now understand enough about emacs to be scared of spacemacs' layers.

Below are some links to help you along the way.

http://ergoemacs.org/emacs/blog.html

https://sachachua.com/blog/

https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/refcards/pdf/refcard.pdf

https://orgmode.org/worg/orgcard.html

https://cestlaz.github.io/stories/emacs/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0g9BcZvQbXU

https://zaiste.net/doomcasts/

Previous discussion from 2015-11-15: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10561064

I appreciate that you're "showing people the door", morph3us.

I've had mental health difficulties for quite a while, life handed me a good tangle to work through. I've had some upward movement in the last few months, and it's coincided with listening to the content produced by this gent, Dr Alok Kanojia, nick: Healthygamergg. [0]

He provides a set of frameworks (and demonstrates by example) for how obsessive, asd-leaning, smart, struggling people can go about growing a more functional pre-frontal cortex. He uses both familiar and relatively novel metaphors to convey the fundamentals of psychology in an interesting way, at least for a young-ish Western audience (drawing on video gaming and hindu/buddhist concepts respectively).

I have a really big problem with this 'should/ought-factory' culture online about how to behave. But if you relate to what I've said above, you should go check the channel out :)

[0] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClHVl2N3jPEbkNJVx-ItQIQ

Obligatory mention of emacs+org. I've tried everything and anything, and it seems to be a common pattern that people with a streak of perfectionism go through a long journey of dissatisfaction with tools, a journey which seems to settle in emacs+org-mode for many.

I really, really like the combination of Joplin, the Joplin extension and Pocket. The export tools offered by the Joplin extension combine well with the readability processing/formatting that Pocket applies. You can save a markdown-version, save URLs only, the complete HTML of a page, or just some text you've selected.

I have some boilerplate HTML that adds spoilers and a couple other bits to make my rendered notes look nicer and help me study, along with a couple of templates for embedding YouTube videos, Spotify and Github Gists. Most of this is on the Joplin forums, I encourage you to take a look if that sounds appealing to you.

There's a mobile app, and Joplin exposes a REST API the extension uses - I have a few hacky scripts to help me use Joplin as a CMS for a website (still a messy WIP, might show this & the templates to HN soon).

I'm exploring Emacs & Org-mode right now since it pairs well with Haskell, which I'm learning during this whole lockdown thing - even with all my Joplin-based stuff I can see why people accept the trade-offs and buy into it completely. Now might be a good time to try emacs+org out, for those lucky ones just riding lockdown out at home.

> it's one gigantic imposter syndrome trigger

Yes, this was exactly my experience when I first encountered the repo for this project a couple years ago [0]. I actually still remember what it was like to read this for the first time.

From the perspective of someone who has been impaled on the hedgerow of despair, trudged through the endless shale of '5-minute-must-reads' and fought their way through the jungle of 'lazy tutorials rehashing a languages main beginner resource', I see why these kinds of things are created and upvoted/proliferated by developers who are no longer beginners. They're probably helpful to a minority I expect to show up in this thread. But to me these roadmaps are pathological (no pun intended) - inducing a cocktail of fear, apathy, and perfectionistic mania.

If you happen to be a beginner reading through this thread and thinking of using this map - don't. Get a feeling for the territory first. Don't worry about all these empty terms. Once you have a feeling for this programming thing you can use your powers of prediction, analogy, and noting minor differences to learn new stuff. You don't have to (you don't WANT to) jam it all into your brain at once. I took that route and it makes it really hard to play and explore for yourself, it was so painful and inefficient.

Go the naturalistic route. It's not wrong unless it doesn't work, in which case it's still not wrong. It's all good. Have fun. Make yourself laugh. Do it stupid, who cares. Edit/break/play around with stuff, maybe go Codepen [1] if that sounds fun. Maybe you want structure and streamlining, go see if FreeCodeCamp is for you - you'll tick off half the boxes here without even realising it, and that half will be the half that's worth anything to you :)

[0] https://github.com/kamranahmedse/developer-roadmap/

[1] https://codepen.io/picks/pens/

I think corporate upper management are the only echelon of business capable of such waste and cynicism, maybe they noticed that traffic was going to the wiki and not the dedicated support pages.

I highly recommend a dive into Wikipedia re: Goethe, all sorts of interesting views and people are connected to or inspired by Goethe and Goethe's view of science; Rudolf Steiner, Francisco Varela, Gregory Bateson and Evan Thompson to name just a few worthy names to search for.

Agreed. Maybe only useful for laptops used as 'kiosks' (launching directly to app without a window manager)?

Vim is for students and men going through a mid-life crisis, actual grown-ups use the one true editor, ed.

Indeed, and that's exactly the model much of the world uses for adult education. Except that better early-years schooling has at least as large and probably much bigger effect on the future productivity and health of society.

> All it's doing is introducing false epistemology and complicated nomenclature for concepts that are obvious.

How else are pseudo-intellectuals supposed to make their money these days? /s

I enjoyed the Meadows book about it and although I didn't read it with a critical eye, I didn't find it misleading or obfuscatory. It's written in plain language.

If anything, it's got quite an ecological feel to it (and boils down to something like "testing inputs to a system willy-nilly is really stupid without a broad idea of the interactions between things").

I think talking about cognitive biases in the context of building and understanding complicated/complex systems is the point of 'systems thinking'. Just having a name for that kind of exercise is useful. Just like everything else, it gets taken too far, or stretched into a flimsy product to be sold to the managerial class.

We don't need any more arms races, thank you. It doesn't take much to work slightly less hard (or less publically), communicate in a way that's efficient with other people's attention and time, and stop humblebragging on social media about your lifestyle and material goods.

It's not good to wear training wheels all the time. Worrying about the minutia of communication makes you less able to see what is being said, and makes you look for confirmation of your predictions/worries instead.

The bad guys are the citizens who work to maintain their own ignorance and do nothing to maintain and uphold the rights they enjoy; who don't demand freedom of press; or understand the consequences of these policies, policies eroding their rights to congress and converse freely without fear of suppression.

I don't judge the government for exploring facial recognition technology - there are motivating utilitarian arguments and they have the tools right in front of them. They are doing /something/, even if I think it's deeply wrong. But I do judge those who stick their head in the sand, or sit on their laurels, and that includes myself. We also have motivating arguments and the tools to express them.

I don't want to be part of generation of citizens whose children will say they learned nothing from history - beside the Nuremberg defense.

Btw, you might be interested to know that if you activate the Web Clipper service, you can interact with Joplin's REST API on port 41184. I have been using a hairy mess of shell scripts to achieve similar functionality (Joplin-as-CMS).

I'll have to clean it up and put it on GitHub this weekend!

If I didn't have the "Ikea effect" with my current Void install I'd be using Solus. Straightforward, sensible and clean. Plenty of useful and interesting software in the repos. Good enough UX for developers and your nan.

I encourage everyone to try it, but before you do, remind yourself that it isn't Arch or Debian-based, so if you use some unusual software you may well need to build from source.

- too many poorly-formed opinions providing hard and fast rules about what other people should do without any consideration of the spectrum of situations and abilities

- knowing what there is to learn within any topic and what order you should tackle things

- whether advice about what to learn in some topic, how, and in what order is any good or not

- when to quit or stick when a certain approach doesn't seem to work

- how to test your learning, and how to assess your efficiency

- how to sustain motivation while playing the 'teacher' (i.e. co-ordinator) role when you'd rather learn, and the 'learner' role when you'd rather teach.

- how not to make certain important things be associated with pain and boredom, when approaching them in a free, open, playful mode would make them stick much better

- how to avoid or undo damaging perfectionism about resources and approach and personal standards for outcome and ability

---

Self-learning is extremely difficult and I don't advise it to anyone, although I wouldn't discourage trying it either.

The traditional didactic models you already know are the best. The problem is getting the right people to teach the right subjects, and ensuring free and open access for all people of all ages.

Ultimately effective self-teaching tends to mean you implement the classical methods but in non-traditional formats.

I find it's usually only those with top percentile proclivity or motivation for a given subject can sit down with a textbook and notebook/repl and absorb information as effectively as the rest of us would with a good teacher and engaged classmates.

If you're like me and you're unable to go to Uni but want to self-teach programming/CS, learn the minimum required to get into a related apprenticeship-style position and throw yourself into it.

If you want, you can alias man to call `tldr $1` or `curl -s "cht.sh/tar" 2>&1` first, then call man, then pipe the output into `cat` and again into `less`, like so:

  man() {
      (tldr $1 ; man $1) | cat | less
  }

Edit: rewrote without the `&&` conditional

Instead, learn fex:

https://www.mankier.com/1/fex

There's a Firefox extension named OneTab, it aggregates all your open tabs into a single page, closing every tab except the OneTab. I have mine pinned. That, or Ctrl+Shift+D in Firefox to bookmark all tabs. I tend to have 10+ tabs open myself but the thought of that many tabs gives me the heebie-jeebies.

The dangers of a free Internet people, the proles are becoming self-aware!

A minor extension of the idea here and of the GP - I have aliased 'yt' and 'ytm' to target two different config files in the same folder path you gave.

I heard that the convention was to set the duration of the amber stage to something around the time it takes a fast-walking pedestrian to cross, so that you could start crossing near the end of a pedestrian green signal without being on the road during green for drivers. Unfortunately at some crossings these days, the full duration of the green signal isn't long enough for me to fully cross before it turns to amber (and I probably walk about 4x faster than your garden-variety old dear with a stick).

Take an hour to sit in a quiet room without any stimulation. You'll learn a lot about your mental situation, and understanding where you are is really helpful for understanding where to go (if anywhere).

FYI you can manually trigger synchronization in both the mobile and desktop browsers, the option isn't buried very deep in either and is the only workaround I've found to avoid delays!

Edit: on mobile it's under Hamburger > Settings > Firefox Account

Yes, Northern R'Lyeh closed many of their routes recently, which caused unknowable horror to descend over Innsmouth (among others on local stopping lines).