patal

I see. Thanks for your answer.

The very first sentence is: "Hi, here’s the bot-in-chief, Aga, with a little foreword."

Am I to understand that Aga is an AI bot? I see nothing mentioned about this in the FAQs or the webpage. Makes me wonder if this zine may be written by AI agents reproducing the old hacker magazine aesthetic.

Or is "bot-in-chief" some kind of tongue-in-cheek formulation that I can find nothing about online? Aga is listed as "Editor-in-Chief" on the About page.

nice, thx

Sure, if they push one after the other. If they push at the same time however, does Git handle the sync on its own?

How would I sync access, if more than one people ssh-pushes onto the git repo? I assume syncing be necessary.

iTerm2 is on 45ms and more in this measuring: https://danluu.com/term-latency/

There, it's distinct in that other terminals have lower latency on the same system.

Without writing the number down, it's up to Ballmer to decide that aspect, because you cannot look into his brain, or prove that he didn't commit to a prior number. Therefore, it's fair game.

Thanks for taking the time to answer. I don't understand why in the dj combination, j is able to reach under d for what looks like a kerning of about -4, when the auto_kerning_min property is set to -1 or -2, keeping Fj apart.

Impressive work!

In the "mixed-case kerning pairs" quality testing image, I notice that the letter "j" sometimes reaches under the previous letter, like in "Fdj". Sometimes it creates a lot of space, like in "Fjo". Is there a stylistic reason for this? The Fjo spacing is the only thing that stood out to me.

Kudos

Their AIW+ riddle is just ridiculous. It contains so many ambiguities, that there are several correct answers, even though the authors claim there be only one.

Which is really unfortunate. Because now it only shows that LLMs have problems answering ill-framed riddles.

I like the riddle. But the framing is unfortunate. When divising riddles, you want ambiguity where it serves the riddle, but be precise elsewhere so that the solver doesn't get needlessly distracted.

Their AIW riddle is: "Alice has 4 brothers and she also has 1 sister. How many sisters does Alice’s brother have?"

Now it should've been: "How many sisters do Alice's brothers have?" or "..does each of Alice's brothers have". Why single out a specific brother, when you haven't introduced this topic, and it is irrelevant to the riddle? Naturally, a human would ask "Which brother?", fully knowing that it is not important to the riddle.

Since this grammatical distraction puts an additional burden on the LLM, the authors muddled their original goal, which was to provide an easy riddle. I think it may have also muddled their data.

"Last Chance to See" by Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine. About Adams and Carwardine travelling the world to document several animals on the brink of extinction (by then 1988). Very entertaining and raising questions about the responsibility of human globalization. An all-time favourite.

"Never In Anger" by Jean Briggs. About her living 17 months among Inuit in the 1970ies, documenting how the Inuit see emotions and raise their children without any shouting or violence.

"Shots in the Dark - Japan, Zen, and the West" by Shōji Yamada. About the culture exchange between Japan and the West in the early 20th century and how several perceptions of Zen got constructed in the process.

"Gödel, Escher, Bach" by Douglas Hofstaedter. About core ideas in logic, music and art, and their connections. I always find something new there.

"In Praise of Mastery" / "芸談" by Tanizaki Jun’ichirō. An essay about the japanese pursuit of mastery. It's a fascinating window into the arts perception in late 19th century Japan.

Webster's Dictionary of 1913. A great resource for looking up original meanings of words. I find it very useful for naming stuff in programming.

"Woe Is I" by Patricia O'Conner. A witty grammar book. O'Conner's entertaining style makes it easy to grasp the grammar topics and come back for more.

It's funny though

1. "graphic representation of writing systems" and "text" mean the same thing to me. Do you mean text as spoken?

2. I think the pronunciation should not be encoded into the text representation on a general scale. You would need different encodings for "though" and "through" in english alone. Your example leaves the meaning open, even if being read as text. If I was the editor, and the distinction was important, I'd change it to "For example, the cyrillic letter 'c'".

I understand that Unicode provides different code points for same-looking characters, mostly because of history, where these characters came from different code sheets in language-specific encodings.

Yeah, I don't see it either. If being run without --help or --version, true can only ever return EXIT_SUCCESS.

However, I find it interesting that true and false use the very same implementation.

Thanks, this is really handy. The JS version does so not what I expect, and it certainly doesn't do what I want.

I see. Thanks.

How do you feed sensitive data to ChatGPT? I've got no account, therefore no idea. I thought you just ask it questions, or task it to write some code. How does the sensitive data get there?

Where do you get that from? The citation says:

lithium metal

OR

lithium ion cells

OR

batteries

What I really want to do with Git, but haven't found a way to do, is to compare diffs. Often I have a merged a feature on some main develop, but need to backport these changes to some older release branch. The backport has some merge conflicts, indicating that much has changed on develop since. Now I want to see that the set of changes (the diff) on main develop is basically the same as the set of changes (the diff) on the old release branch. I want to diff their diffs. Anybody any ideas?

I know what you mean by those alarm bells. But in that very article: "I also spent a lot of time in Brussels agitating for the passage of the GDPR". If anybody's justified calling themselves activist, surely that's Doctorow. I'm sure you'll find more reasons, if you just search what he actually does, for about 2 minutes.

I think of Black Adder here, where the credits ordering is different in every episode. In one episode it's ordering by disappearance, in another it's by precedence in the royal lineage, in another it's by Geographical Order, and so on.

This is in the first season.

Thank you so much for this pointer! It's glorious.

On the face of it, it's regular ASCII code. But I wonder if they hid something inside?

What do you mean? Whales and dolphins are mammals, too. I searched for the deepest-dive mammal, too, and found Cuvier's Beaked Whale.

That's exactly the parent's complaint: Git's tooling and user interface is (unnecessary) complex.

I contacted Thomas several years ago about an Open Source project that he didn't maintain anymore and which I wanted to maintain. He was very cool about it and put maintainership in my hands. I wish him the best of luck, too.

Sure. But you gotta see the benefit of a "-b" flag creating a branch in every Git command consistently (where it makes sense). That would be easy to remember!

How so? Every MATLAB code base I've seen rolls their own unit computation. The symbolic toolbox costs money and I've seen it on university installations only. The unitConvert command is rather new. Neither mechanisms are native to MATLAB and have awkward call patterns.

The article only considers quoted arguments. Quoting should be recommended for test, and OP probably even has a formal check for quotes being in place. However, let's just set that aside for now. Quotes are optional. And if you don't put quotes, then yes, you need to use `[ x$var = xval ]` to address empty variables.