hoosieree

"the work is mysterious and important"

"send me your prompts instead"

The purpose of a system is what it does.

People don't respect the chasm between "obviously no mistakes" and "no obvious mistakes".

"You're right, that was your battleship. My bad! Would you like me to launch rockets at another target?"

This should go without saying but unfortunately it really doesn't these days:

This kind of corporate behavior is bad and will end up hurting somebody. If we're lucky the fallout will only hurt Nvidia. More likely it will end up hurting most taxpayers.

0d (parked) - null program easy

1d (train) - easy. just one lever

2d (car) - hard. super hard. why is it so crowded? who thought this was a good idea? you let teenagers do this?

2.5d (plane at takeoff or landing) - almost as hard as car. fewer pedestrians.

3d (plane flying) - easy even with all those extra levers

I found building musl easier than uClibc, Xephyr, newlib, or (especially) glibc. Glibc is an Ouroboros of hacks at build time.

Array languages don't just have shorter tokens, they have fewer of them. A small token set is practical because your language's users can only keep a finite number of things in their working memory.

This constraint leads to symbol overloading. But careless, rampant overloading results in the same problem - too many things to remember. So you have to constrain your overloads.

With these constraints, if you want to design a practical, usable, general-purpose language (without forcing users to define every useful thing themselves), you have to choose composable abstractions. Prioritizing a single data structure (arrays) lets you focus your design effort and historically has good mechanical sympathy with the available computers, but there could just as easily be an "APL, but for associative maps" type language.

My point is "good terseness" comes from a holistic design approach, and simply making a bad language more terse will makes its flaws more obvious.

I ended up with Emacs and org-mode. One of my friends used Vim and Pandoc to the same effect. I didn't quite have to write my own tool but each new LaTeX template foisted on me was hours of work that could have been spent doing research. My impression after seeing my peers work with Mendeley, Notion, Overleaf, etc. was they looked prettier at first glance but didn't solve my problem.

Over time I developed the opinion that LaTeX is an unnecessary tax on scientific progress. It's insanity to keep using it when HTML exists.

Or a 4-hour workweek.

AI also happens to be a perfect scapegoat: CEOs who over-hired get to shift the blame to this faceless boogeyman, and (bonus!) new hires are more desperate/willing to accept worse compensation.

I never before considered that a password generator could be fun. My mind has been changed. Now I believe they should be fun.