bch

you can't turn a river around with a stick

Somebody forgot to tell this[0] guy.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dashrath_Manjhi

You can appreciate the world and still do Hard Work to make it better - definitely not mutually exclusive. Be unreasonable. Be Progressive.

Temper it all with Desiderata[0], since we’re being philosophical.

[0] https://www.desiderata.com/desiderata.html

I love the social/cultural aspects of our engineering discipline.

I always thought of that as “yak-shaving,” or “bikeshedding.”

I think of yak-shaving as ending up (by lack of discipline, or perhaps out of necessity) working on some supporting aspect of a supporting aspect of a supporting aspect... in service of the original task.

So, a potential time suck, for sure, but "perfection is the enemy of completion" doesn't have to be that deep - if we're throwing out more clever phrases and war stories - another phrase that comes to mind about just "polishing" and insisting it's not good enough to ship yet is it's (slightly NSFW)

"just like masturbation - it feels good, but you're only f*cking yourself". You need to ship.

Bike Shedding I think of as social - nearly Peter Principle in practice - everybody thinks they've got something to contribute to the construction of the bike shed because it's a thing that's easy to manage, and people want to be helpful and/or make a mark.

“let's not make perfect the enemy of good."

Nuanced, but I’ve heard “don’t let perfection be the enemy of completion”, which is real in the cases of not shipping because one is constantly polishing/perfecting, or, as I heard sitting beside phk[0] at BSDCan commenting on rejecting some environmental sensors into FreeBSD, something to the effect of “We need ‘good’, not ‘good enough’.”, which draws a line at accepting janky “solutions” that are architecturally weak, or otherwise look obviously problematic.

[0] https://people.freebsd.org/~phk/

I can't replicate atm, but I now think it had to do w scientific notation, not octal - so "1e234..." into a text column. And istr "strict" solving my problem, but...

I'll see if i can find the case - my description was a bit hand-wavy because it was a while ago, and just drawing on memory -- not that your explanation couldn't be true, but I thought I exercised that possibility. For your part, you'll remain sceptical it wasn't the driving language when I tell you it was Tcl, which is indeed the origin of this "manifest type" we're discussing :)

I had a UUID (partly?) mis-converted to a number if the UUID started w (from memory) something like 08123… which was parsed as octal. Confusing, annoying, fixed w “strict” and a complete table rebuild.

Good catch. We've run into a problem somewhere along this journey of comparing the compression strength of a snails tooth to the tensile strength of a spiders web.

Good read, and I think a sort of living mindset, or “process, not product”, though seems to be follow-on/reaction to Perl’s TMTOWTDI (Tim Toadie)[0], and Python’s response(“There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it”)[1].

[0] https://perl.fandom.com/wiki/TIMTOWTDI

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_of_Python#Principles

Then your manager asks you to wrap it in a GUI so your coworkers can use it, and the cycle is complete.

when you are already in the terminal, launching a TUI app is just faster than switching to a GUI window. So it's still about "terminal or not" for me

I’m principally a terminal person too, but my first thought was tmux cut/paste buffer (to transfer data whether TUI or CLI), not speed-of-launch.

That's why we use the %fill of an Olympic Sized Pool - doesn't matter from what continent the field comes, they fill the pool equally.

If people would just take the time to actually learn and appreciate the Analytical Engine they could bypass _all_ that noise...

If they've got billions to rent out, they're not using it...

What a vector (no pun intended) for malware or other computation…

Where LaTeX[0] is the collection of Lamports macros over Knuths[1] TeX[2].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaTeX

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Knuth

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeX

stuck to SQLite instead

Different level of abstraction. I don’t think it’s highlighted enough either - this latest (1.0) and the previous 0.9.x are mutually incompatible, requiring essentially a dump/restore. It is mentioned (I forget which file ottofmh), but should be a

*HIGHLIGHT* in the CHANGES.

Sounds like a trip to the hospital.

^-- this comment was typed on a computer, similar to the computers the worlds most advanced AI is developed on, so you know he knows what he's talking about.

Notable users: GNU HURD Project (Shipping any day now).

Everybody else is a fungible cog.

TFA is a good little read - couple things come to mind

  1) Knoll’s Law [0][1]

  2) The ways I feel when I’m working on a hard problem in an area of my expertise and  some person starts in with “Why don’t you just…”. Enough people have come to me in such a situation with such a comment that I think it mostly translates as a sort of shibboleth for “I have no real idea what I’m talking about.” Now to find out if this is a teachable moment, if I have to maintain a sense of humour, or find out if I’m actually one of the days lucky 10,000.[2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erwin_Knoll

[2] https://xkcd.com/1053/

Nice. I like it. Advanced history mgmt in between commits is compelling.

For me, it'd be primarily having more than one undo

Do you mean infinite undo? nvi has that. I'm not sure what you mean "set up as a tree" wrt undo, but i'll look into it. I think of nvi's undo as linear - I can 'u' to "undo" and implicitly set my "undo direction" "backward in time" (as one would expect). If I want to "undo, even more", '.' (dot, period) to "do that last command again" is what I'll do. If I want to "undo an undo", 'u'. That has the effect of moving the "undo direction" back towards the state of the buffer we had at the beginning of our discussion here.

...and, now I see your edit ;)

^[u..........:wq

can’t remember ever meeting anyone who chose vi over vim

Pleased to meet you.

Most of my console dev time is spent in *BSD, where nvi is where I land. I find the the default creature-features of vim annoying, so I end up having to configure it to be a bit more quiet, and I don't know anything so compelling about it (a vi clone (to an extreme, acknowledged)) that nvi isn't a good enough place to be. I have vim installed, but it's not my go-to.

"The performance is off the chart!" <basic chart is displayed to illustrate(?) the point>

More seriously, obviously a ton of work in an incredibly competitive space, and an incredible machine (without getting into competitive comparisons/minutiae). Was watching a techtechpotato[0] quick post pre-launch about "why is this even being tried?", which was also interesting. What an age we live in.

[0] https://youtu.be/JdB722MK380?si=GnLAYqT9ZecMhWCS

tray screen is very nice

If you're talking about the screen on the arm w grab handles, I'd say it looks very practical, but looks like a design for a public space - like an accessible screen for buying tickets in a fairground.

Pardon the pedantry, but I the current abbreviation of the price ("Shutterstock to pay $35M") should be "$35MM".

No evidence is provided for the safety of THC vaping products.

That's not the point - gwerns article dismantled the NYT article. If one read (or heard about) the NYT article and used it as "proof" of "vaping is bad", gwern is saying: "not so fast". That's not to say "vaping is healthy", nor even "vaping is not unhealthy" - just that this article isn't the proof you're looking for. Vaping (legal flavoured nicotine (which is what's on trial)) could be horrible - simply citing instances of why this is so isn't actually done in the article.

If it matters, I'm not condoning vaping or smoking at all.

The beer went from local to Bud and Bud Light. Then according to my wife, it went from Bud to Kirkland (the brand you find at Costco)

So, back to local breweries? /s

I didn't realize he was Canadian - as a child I got so much mileage out of Machine Language for the Commodore 64[0]. I used to think of my program, get out sheets of graph paper and flip through a table of opcodes I wanted to use, get their decimal rep, and write out the list of numbers in a long column, then go to my computer and POKE them into place and watch a spite come to life, or the screen change colour. So much fun had with that book.

[0] https://archive.org/details/Machine_Language_for_the_Commodo...