mvonballmo

I like to say that I don't care if it's inaccurate, as long as it's precise.

Hypertalk <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperTalk> lives.

I also think we should be thinking more long-term. How understandable is the history when you're trying to figure out why something changed? I usually try to tell the story of what changes are being made rather than treating every clump of commits as a "PR" that's just going to be squashed together anyway. I think a lot of valuable information is lost by doing that. But I realize that that train has left the station for most, so I'll just shut up now.

+1 for SmartGit. It's much more intuitive and flexible than the JetBrains UI, which still inherits so much terminology and behavior from its "unified" view that includes being able to handle Perforce changelists. It's a bit of a mess and generally trips new users up more than it helps. If you're comfortable with it, then good for you but I've had a lot of students not being able to grok it really well.

I would imagine that you could use it to write automated tests for Canvas code (maybe charts?) running in Node, e.g., jest with snapshots.

Thank you for summarizing this so well.

For me it was Termination Shock that finally convinced me to stop reading his books. He just likes to write really long, repetitive and wildly overly detailed books. I was entertained by SevenEves and Reamde but I'm open to the possibility that I might very well react as I did to Termination Shock if I tried rereading them.

Edit: I've read and very much enjoyed a ton of Stephenson (Cryptonomicon, The Baroque Cycle, Anathem) but his recent stuff is tailing off for me. I don't know if it's me or him.

I'm using the [Bypass Paywalls](https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome/blob/ma...) extension but it looks like that's been DMCA-ed in the interim.

It's not just you. My reading is that the flaw was toxic Java users made the developers feel so bad about the feature that they canceled it out of spite. I'm almost certain that's not what it was but that's the only information in there.

I think that there's something up with that page. There may be a pathological path when suitable GPU support is not available.

My machine slowed down tremendously, with a YouTube video in another tab pausing entirely until I managed to close the tab. I tried again with Task Manager open and saw a process named "System Interrupts" with 75% of the CPU before I choked off the tab again.

I think the morality he's speaking to is the scalability of using that strategy. If everyone does it, then the system overloads and breaks. If only a few individuals do it, then those individuals willing to arrogate more resources to themselves "win". What makes those individuals so special to society?

I'm using the word "morality" to mean what is beneficial to society, within reasonable definitions. Please allow me to just hand-wave that away for now.

It's thinking about what are the ramifications of your actions on others? Why should you benefit and not others? Because you thought of it first? Because you're better at using this technique? Is this the kind of behavior that society wants to promote to achieve its goals?

We tend to use "morality" as a shortcut for meaning "not actively destructive to others." ... or something like that. I know we have to agree on which goals does society have, does society actually have goals, etc.

Or can we just let individuals pursue what they think are their own goals and hope for the best? And what best are we hoping for? Are we hoping that the system stays the same enough so that you personally will move toward your own goals? What if this pursuits prevents others from achieving theirs? What mechanisms do we have for changing things if we detect pathological behavior that will lead too far toward a place that everyone would consider to be "bad" (e.g., no food being produced).

Dog eat dog OK with everyone? What if this behavior ends up being so destructive that it affects even those who were initially excelling? What obligation do we have to others to keep the system working for them? Do we only think about that in terms of the eventual benefit to ourselves?

Morality's a big topic. I've probably mucked it up, but I'll leave it there.

As they explain in the article, a row-less layout with columns is quite common in the non-web world. They acknowledge that some people are arguing that it's not needed because nobody's using it (on the web). Nobody's using it (on the web) because it's not possible in CSS.

The argument is that the popularity of the layout in contexts where it's possible is a strong argument for enabling it on the web as well. This is not a layout that they just thought of and are trying to invent.

A "row-less" grid fits very well in the current CSS Grid specification, in that it can reuse the very powerful column-definition property as well as sub-grids. Their examples very convincingly show how orthogonal these features are.

Mostly, you just write grid-row-template: masonry and everything else just works with it. This is nice. It doesn't become harder to use the grid layout than it already is IMHO.

The drawback is mostly for browser-engine authors, for whom the bar for "fully supports CSS Grid" will be set even higher. They also mention that it might avoid "performance traps" where an implementation that needs to support all features of grid might be slower at some parts of grid layout than it would be if the specification were simpler.

If there were a separate display mode, then you'd have to repeat the grid-column specification for the masonry layout, which seems a shame.

From the retrospective.

And yet I do know that you can write complex, relatively bug free code without tests, because I did it.

I do know that you can write complex, relatively bug free code without anyone looking over your code, because I did it.

If no one uses your app then who cares if it crashes.

If many people use your app and it crashes, they’ll tell you and then you’ll fix it.

Those four statements are contradictory. What they're saying is not that you don't need testing or code reviews, but that you can get your users to test for you.

I figure the author probably does test their code (everybody tests, even if that just means running the app), but not rigorously or in a way that you could say gives one the security of regression tests.

No-one worth discussing the issue with claims that it's impossible to write complex code without automated testing. I'm a huge proponent of automated testing, and I wrote a relatively large, cross-platform renderer without a single automated test back in the late 90s/early 00s ... it just took a long time, and I became increasingly terrified of making changes.

Edited for formatting.

I honestly hadn't considered that when I asked someone to use Signal or Threema instead of Facebook Messenger that they would think I was a pedophile or drug addict. Food for thought.

It very much used to work like this, pretty much exclusively.

More recently, though (especially, the last couple of years), browser vendors work very closely with standards groups, contributing there, and looking for feedback from other browser vendors. At least in the CSS and JS space, the extensions to those standards have proceeded largely as a group effort rather than as you described.

I didn't read the article. Does this include money lost on NFTs and crpyto? ducks

Azure is the worst of the 3 cloud providers. Horrible developer experience and documentation and reliability.

Really? I find Microsoft's documentation for Azure (in English) to be quite thorough and helpful. Their tools are well-designed and quite powerful.

Perhaps those of AWS and GCP are even more amazing, but I wouldn't call Azure "horrible" by any stretch of the imagination.

Agreed, it requires user-participation. However, LastPass could be proactive about this, perhaps including the number of rounds in its security check. It could tell you that your legacy account should be updated and guide you through it. That would be helpful. I have the standard 100,100 iterations, but had no idea that this was a feature I had to keep track of.

I was a longtime user of TimeSnapper, but stopped tracking time entirely for a while. I've recently started with ManicTime and am very happy with the UI and features. It takes very little time to track, even when you don't auto-tag.

Documentation for internal consumption often makes assumptions that no longer hold outside of the company. It might reference internal machines or drives that will not be available. It might take shortcuts that will be confusing enough that it will be worse than having no documentation at all. It might just be a few bullet points that refer to asking the right person internally.

If you've ever taken over a department at a company, and inherited the documentation, you've experienced this. It's sometimes better to just reverse-engineer the current state of things than to try to use outdated or misleading or very sparse documentation. Documenting the current state cleanly takes time, effort, and capability. It's an ongoing effort that requires budget and capacity.

And, most of all, it requires that the company see the need of having a good knowledge base, despite such a thing being a short-term cost that only pays out in the long term, and then, in ways that you won't be able to ascribe to one department's budget or another. Corporate structures can get in the way of cross-cutting/long-term benefits.

Also worth nothing, if you have multiple machines: the cloud-sync works flawlessly. Just boring.

Ah, the Strugatskys! Absolutely highly recommended. That was my favorite book of theirs as well.

Summa Technologiae (Electronic Mediations) by Stanisław Lem (1966)

From my notes:

"This is a non-fiction work translated from the original Polish. It is not a light work: it encompasses Lem’s complex and intricate musings and theories on technology, nature, genetics, cosmology, philosophy, biology, information theory, ecology, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, cybernetics, robots, programming, identity (cloning), human nature and how these all relate to mankind’s possible future or lack thereof. He discusses the likely shape of galactic civilizations as well as the possible composition or origins of its components, where their intelligence comes from, where it would likely develop, where it wouldn’t, why science fiction is lazy and, above all, he keeps the discussion rigorously supported by data, even when he seems to be engaging in the most whimsical flights of fancy."

"It is not an easy read, but it is legitimately a work of staggering genius. You don’t have to agree with him on everything, but you can’t argue with his method, with his intellectual rigor and devotion to the scientific method to reduce the ineffability of who we are and where we’re headed."

Agreed. I wrote up some thoughts about the "Rebase considered harmful" article in one called "Rebase considered essential" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3864>

"Who decides where one level of granularity stops and the next begins? I think it’s the author of the commits. My workflow over the last ten years is based heavily on being able to massage commits so that I can prepare what I share to the server repository, where it can no longer be changed. I agree that there should be an unalterable history, but disagree with the author on where that history begins."

"My workflow is considerably different than it was before I used Git or had access to rebase. I would now be much less efficient if I didn’t have rebase. It would make me constantly focus on cleaning up commits before I really care to. You could make the argument that cleaning up afterward takes more time, but I haven’t experienced that to be the case. Instead, I want to be able to set the priorities rather than worry about committing something that I cannot undo."

Honestly, Azure DevOps is a solid replacement. The integration is really good and the "Boards" software really feels like they're eating their own dog food. Their Wiki software is Markdown stored in a Git repo (unlike Confluence's mess). It's fast, permissions are relatively intuitive and fast, etc.

It's worth a look if you're evaluating.

JetBrains Space is another alternative, but I have no experience with it.

The author has been living and teaching in France for years now. He reads and speaks many languages besides French and English.

When you're writing holistically, the point often only comes at the end. Or, sometimes it's about the journey and the friends you make along the way.

A commentator upstream declared that there is only one purpose to writing: to impart information. I disagree strongly. That may be what that commentator expects from writing, but I'm in it for many possible things.

I like writing that tickles my fancy, or entertains. I like writing that teaches me something, even if it seems tangential to the purpose of the essay or book. I like writing that doesn't even try to teach me anything. I write a lot just to get my own thoughts clear---in my own head, not someone else's.

Not everything is for everyone, all of the time.

That's OK. You can just walk away, even without registering your opinion.

I think Justin's erudite and learned style provokes those who feel he thinks he's better than the reader. I've been reading him for a long time and nothing could be further from the truth. He just likes to write about things and sees connections where others would not.

Sometimes it takes a while to explain those connections.

I'm almost done with the book he wrote about. I quite like it and have learned a lot.

It's impossible for me not to think of this (Idiocracy, 90s, 2 clips): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=py37IFuKxYw

I've been reading Justin's work for years. The length of his essays is not due to a lack of editing down his rambles, but that he has a lot to say. I think he's one of the most consistently interesting writers right now.

There are some writers who would strongly benefit from an editor who could at least help pare down repeated points. I'm almost certain that Justin isn't one of them.

Even for others (Glenn Greenwald springs to mind), I wonder if something would be lost. I may prefer one formulation; someone else may be tickled by another. Diluting an essay down to one acceptable version might be an unacceptable loss.

I dunno. I'm just glad someone's thinking deep thoughts and simultaneously a gifted writer.