silves89

Thanks for this background! I encountered dolosse or something dolosse-like at Praia da Ilha de Tavira, in the Algarve, here: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Farol+de+Tavira+Molhe+Oest...

I think this is the reason.

For a deeper look at this philosophy of craft you won't do much better than The Beauty of Everyday Things, by Soetsu Yanagi: https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/the-beauty-of-everyday-thing...

I'm an experienced software engineer and ceramicist and I enjoyed this essay. I have stuff to say.

There are some wonderful industrial ceramic designs, e.g. Royal Copenhagen. But most of it is cold. Despite that people still become attached to their factory-produced porcelain mugs, because we want our daily objects to be our life-companions. We demand certain qualities that lead to intimacy. Studio pottery is a direct line to these deeper relationships, so when people own studio pottery for the first time they rarely want to go back. It's a red pill moment.

Studio pottery is not a luxury. You can buy a mug from one of the finest potters in the world for £50, and you can buy a beautiful piece for £25-£30. These might bring years of pleasure, and that registers with our customers as fantastic value. So there are plenty of studio potters all over the world who make a living with their craft.

However the product of craft-produced code and AI-produced code are, for a customer, mostly the same. So my fear is that writing code by hand will become little more than a challenging and pleasurable distraction, like a big-brained version of solving sudoku, whereas making pottery will always have a value that outstrips it's factory-produced counterparts.

But I think there is a parallel between clay and code here. There are night-school potters who just love making and getting away from their fucking screens. I have love for every one of these people. And there are those who take it much further, who read the books and design the kilns, who wood-fire in shifts over many days, who study glaze chemistry, who create objects no one has imagined before. And in software there are the line-of-business enterprise coders, and often they're handle turners who would really rather be doing something else but there are those who take it much further, who read the books and language specs, who work on foundational open source tools and study compiler design, who create idioms and paradigms no one has yet conceived of.

All that's very interesting. But for me the commercial side is prosaic and a bit dull. The pleasures of both are the creativity, which is itself a way of re-enchanting my materialist and bewildering late-capitalist way of life.

In the late 90s and early 2000s there was a bunch of academic research into collaborative multi-agent systems. This included things like communication protocols, capability discovery, platforms, and some AI. The classic and over-used example was travel booking -- a hotel booking agent, a flight booking agent, a train booking agent, etc all collaborating to align time, cost, location. The cooperative agents could add themselves and their capabilities to the agent community and the potential of the system as a whole would increase, and there would perhaps be cool emergent behaviours that no one had thought of.

This appears, to me, like an LLM-agent descendent of these earlier multi-agent systems.

I lost track of the research after I left academia -- perhaps someone here can fill in the (considerable) blanks from my overview?

That's a great question! It comes up for me a lot.

I can walk through my local woods and listen very carefully but I don't think I could read a recipe book and pay attention to an audiobook!

So for me and I guess for most people it depends on the intensity of the activity and on the nature of the book. I have gradually found where the balance is for me and I've learned to hit the pause button or rewind 30 seconds.

I also pick different types of books to read and to listen to. I _love_ having an engrossing story as an audiobook. And popular science is a great listen, e.g. I loved the audiobook of Stolen Focus. But with physical books I tend to choose more involved or complex novels (e.g. Deep Wheel Orcadia), poetry, and for non-fiction books that are more specific to my interests (psychotherapy, ceramics).

Can I read a physical book when I'm running? Can I read a physical book when I'm doing house work? Or throwing pots in my studio? Or knitting? Or cooking? Or driving?

Can I stay focused if I'm just sitting and listening instead of reading? Absolutely not.

There's no 'vs' here. They occupy different spaces. All hail text, whatever form it takes.

The Terms and Privacy Policy links at the bottom don't go anywhere.

Thank you! I'm on my 3rd draft of a novel so that's actually super lovely to hear.

I was en route to St Helena and I had several days of a raging fever on Ascension, and my memories of the place on either side of my illness are suitably strange. I remember walking through a landscape of sharp, anthracite grey volcanic rock and throwing a banana peel into the sea, to watch the fish churn around it like piranha. I remember going past a rock covered in paint -- everyone who was determined to never come back added a new splash of colour. I think it was right next to 'the worst golf course in the world'. I remember leaving the barren low-lands and climbing the mountain switchbacks, into rainforest-like verdancy. A very odd place.

Normal firebricks wouldn't withstand mid or high fire temperatures. They'd crack or melt or both. An iron grate wouldn't fare well either. You could probably make modifications to the fireplace that could make it possible, but that that point you'd probably decide to take the whole thing away from your wooden floor/carpets.

It's scary for me too! And way less economical in the UK than electric. My small electric kiln costs £5 to fire. My big (perhaps 4 times the size) gas kiln costs £70-£80.

I'd much prefer firing with wood. But I'm too suburban and firing with wood takes much more effort in prep and during firing, but it's a pleasant and exciting experience! Which gas firing is not.

The raw clay wouldn't be vitrified, so it would be porous and would seep or leak. A glaze is a glass, more or less, and to get the silica to melt you need a flux. There are different fluxes for different temperature firings, but suddenly things are getting a little more precise. Without substantially levelling up the kiln tech and design you'll be at best low-fired and probably using lead as a flux. E.g. terracotta and earthernware.

Early peoples would have used wax or fats to seal pots like these, to make them functional. People do that with modern pit-fired pots too, or use other sealants.

I designed and built my own high-fire kiln, but it uses industrially made light-weight insulating and refractory brick, and gas burners, and I use Orton cones to know when I've hit the right amount of heat-work, and a pyrometer to take temperature readings. But some brave souls make their own bricks, and look at the colour inside the kiln to know when they're at temperature.

You can eat as many fermented foods and do as much tai chi as you like, and you can get therapy and manifest and go on retreats. But nothing improves life as much as a 4-day week.

I've been working four-day weeks for about six years.

It's a force-multiplier for contentment. No other life change comes close. I'm grateful every week and like you I'm never going back.

Another reason for using tmux: never worry about changing your muscle memory for splits and nav ever again.

I've been using tmux for five or six years. In that time I've used Linux and MacOS and several different terminals. But how I navigate around a terminal has stayed the same thanks to tmux.

Another reason: put complex tmuxinator configs in source control and start up a bunch of stuff for your project with a single command.

I have very similar use-cases, and I also I found makefiles a bit limiting. I wrote lk[1] to make this sort of thing easier, and you can just write plain bash functions instead of makefiles.

[1] https://github.com/jamescoleuk/lk

I grew frustrated with the compromises of makefiles for this and over the years I wrote a couple of alternatives, run_lib[1] and lk[2]. Now I write files full of the bash functions I need and use lk to explore and execute them. I.e. it's a consistent interface accross projects.

[1] https://github.com/jamescoleuk/lk

[2] https://github.com/jamescoleuk/run_lib

I found stdx to be a useful set of sign-posts. But it's not been updated in three years. E.g. it suggests `error-chain` instead of `anyhow` and `thiserror`.

There is a way in which Rust reduces mental effort: a compiled program is more likely to work in the way you expect. It cuts out a swathe of post-compile testing and prodding, or at least, it does in my experience. I can't speak for the other people who have voted it "most loved language" six years running, but that's one of the reason why I love it.

It was the phenomenal Rustlings course that got me over the learning hump.

I actually found it a bit rough at first but it seems OK now. That took maybe four weeks. But perhaps I was motivated to persevere because many regular deodorants give me a painful rash.

It might not be quite as effective as commercially sold deodorants. Obviously I'm only one data point but if I use it once a day I'm odor free for at least 24 hours.

Bicarbonate of soda works as a deodorant. I have a small pot by my bathroom sink. Dab in two damp fingers, under the arms, no smell. It's more effective than any deodorant I've tried, doesn't give me an allergic reaction, is better for the environment, and is very cheap.

Fiction can be moving and transforming. The typeface, cover, colour, and smell of a book can work as mementoes -- when I pick up a book I read when I was 23 it might remind me who I was then, and it might remind me of the journey to where I am now.

I don't have any data but I don't think this isn't true at all. I have read at least two articles describing the extra lengths publishers are going to in order to compete. I have bought many beautiful hardbacks released since e-readers took off.

I like the look of this. Why would I use it over Taskwarrior?

I develop using Linux but sometimes I have to use macOS. Mostly I work locally but sometimes I work on remote boxes. tmux means I get a consistent experience where ever I am.

I'm not fully versed in what iTerm can do but tmux does splits and tabs. The tabs are very useful. I can also use tmuxinator so I can start up with a standard set of splits and tabs very quickly.

There are the issues you mentioned. But once it's configured I don't find those troubling. And once you change the prefix to something sane it's really nice to use. I enjoy moving around tmux. So for me there are big benefits and tmux is one of the first things I install on a new machine.

Utterly extraordinary. Watching my daughter play in my friends' gardens made me want to move out of the town and into the suburbs, so she can have space for a paddling pool. I'll buy a bigger, duller car for her and her impending sibling, without thinking twice about it.

What I see when I stand outside ASDA are a bunch of normal people, and then some poor people who struggle to buy food and pay their rent. I don't see fancy clothes and designer pushchairs, I see old tracksuits and second-hand pushchairs, I see people who don't have jobs and feel bad about themselves.

Demand for food-banks in the UK has soared. But if only they didn't spend it on fags and wide-screen TVs they'd be able to eat.

The value of a university education does not principally lie in how much money you can make afterwards. Many people go to university to learn, to build a philosophy for life, to meet and engage with other engaged people.

But I paid orders of magnitude less so maybe that gives me the freedom to be more contemplative.

I guess everyone loves a story that makes themselves special.

I'm not lonely IRL, and I find real value in online social networks.

My cousin has ME, and she is lonely. Online support groups have really helped. A friend of mine, who has been single for a while and I suspect quite lonely, is currently getting heavily laid because of Guardian Soulmates.

But I agree with the goal in a roundabout way - too much of my online time is un-productive - not informative in a useful way, not entertaining, and often emotionally and psychologically draining. I want to spend less time online too.