vijucat

During my M.Tech in Comp. Sci, I was requested to volunteer to be a lab assistant in a diploma course in programming in C for non-technical people. A Ph.D. in Philosophy was complaining that his program was not compiling. He wrote "exist(0)" instead of "exit(0)". I found this so interesting. Existentialism was on his mind, I guess. The program clearly exits by not existing any more? Can't argue with that!

I corrected him and went on my rounds. I remember that a bank manager was the best of the batch. By the time I circled back to my philosophy friend, he quietly changed "exit()" back to "exist()" and the program was not compiling again! This anecdote stayed in my mind.

There is a weird immature escapism involved in such sci fi story-telling. Most adults are capable of seeing that the biggest problems are internal. Inside ourselves, within families, and more broadly, on earth, itself. Hunger, injustice, the rise of dictators and those who have successfully subverted democracy, slavery and human trafficking. If he was supposedly as capable as his self-mythologizing claims ("Chess is an easy game; I won all games that I played"), he'd pick a much more earth-bound goal. Maybe reconcile with his estranged son-turned-daughter. How about that for starters? Or not get divorced for once? Is that possible for our self-confessed genius?

Thank you, very interesting!

Question: if I don't use TUIs or millions of lines of scrolling text, what am I missing by not using these newer terminal implementations? I use mintty on Windows and am pretty happy with it.

I love such stories. Right now, a lot of folks I know are struggling to find jobs, so I read the part about how he got a job the first day he was out of jail with some astonishment and nostalgia for the simpler days, when showing interest was often enough to land the job! Now, hoop number 1, the AI resume filter, is a strange obstacle that one has to jump through first.

Well, I'm on Windows (+ Cygwin) and wrote a Dockerfile. It wasn't that hard. git branch + worktree + a docker container per project and I can work with copilot in --yolo mode (or claude --dangerously-skip-permissions, whichever). vscode is pretty smooth at installing the VS Code Server on first connection to a docker container, too, and I just open up the workspace in a minute.

I've always been struck by how long sentences are in writing from a century or more ago. To my mind whose attention-span has been poisoned by YouTube Shorts (even if they are mostly about trigonometry) and Tweets (even if I tell myself that's the new newspaper), they are most difficult to read. I often have to restart from the beginning.

Albeit an extreme example, here's a sentence from Henry James' "The Ambassadors", 1909:

The principle I have just mentioned as operating had been, with the most newly disembarked of the two men, wholly instinctive - the fruit of a sharp sense that, delightful as it would be to find himself looking, after so much separation, into his comrade's face, his business would be a trifle bungled should he simply arrange for this countenance to present itself to the nearing steamer as the first "note," of Europe.

It's become a universal truth that you should probably not upgrade to the latest and non-greatest version of ANYTHING these days. Not Android, not Windows, not iOS, not macOS. It's just embarrassing how companies with market caps sometimes above $1T produce workslop.

I use Windows Update Blocker on Windows 10 to keep it "protected" from upgrades (!). I can see that critical security updates are occurring despite this, so it's a good compromise. For now. When Windows 12 is announced, Windows 11 may finally be usable.

I took care of IT for a startup hedge fund once. I was the quant's right-hand man, data engineer, visualization dashboard guy, everything. The quant needed to run a monolithic C++ program daily to chew through stock data and we decided a dual-Xeon server with 512 GB RAM would be great. OVH MG-512, for those curious.

Quant happy, boss happy, all good. Then the boss goes for lunch with someone and comes back slightly disturbed. We were not buzzword compliant. Apparently the other guy made him feel that he was using outdated tech by not being on AWS, using auto-scaling etc;

Here I am, from a background where my first language was 8086 assembly, and compactness was important to me. I remember thinking, "This whole thing could run on a powerful calculator, except for the RAM requirement".

It was a good lesson for me. Most CTOs know this bias and have unnecessarily huge and wasteful budgets but make sure they keep the business heads happy in the comfort that the firm is buzzword compliant. Efficiency and compactness are a marketing liability for IT heads!

They're great at creating test cases out of code and/or log file excerpts. They're good at run-of-the-mill tasks whose answer one can reasonably expect to find on StackOverflow. I'm using GPT-4.1 and Clause Sonnet Thinking 3.7 with vscode + GitHub Copilot

Wish I was taught things these in school. Psychology, CBT techniques, etc; I have always had a low EQ and learned a lot from basically messing things up, and from having a wife with super high EQ. Perception is reality for all practical purposes, despite the more mathematical wanting it to be not so, simply because the objective can literally not be perceived: each perceiver is subjective. Fixing this input layer would have saved me a lot of CPU churn, so to speak.

Somewhat related: sentence completions / fill-in-the-blank templates are shockingly effective at eliciting your inner thoughts which even you didn't know you were feeling. The idea is from Nathaniel Branden's work.

"What I regret right now is ____"

"What I should now is ____"

"I am become aware that ____"

You don't need to journal these on paper. Don't do these in public. You might find yourself overwhelmed by what comes out.