sonicrocketman

Author here. Great to see this making its way up HN! I've been thinking about this topic for a while and it's nice to see people engaging with it.

Well and succinctly said.

Apropos

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jG6NNnoNC80

Oh wow, I think I remember learning about this in middle school. I totally forgot.

Ooh will check out! Thanks!

That's lovely! I do the same now with a few friends. Postcards, letters, etc.. It's a blast. Just got some Strathmore letter paper too. So much nicer than what I was using.

Good to know. TBH I haven't checked. I have some cartridges too (for a different, cheaper fountain pen) but if none of those work, I'll scout for options.

What got you into writing letters?

Writing letters is so much fun. I have a blog post in the works about that too. Glad to hear you enjoy it.

I'll def be looking around. I have some bottled ink already, but this is a huge concern. Hopefully the fine tip has decent portion control. That helps a lot.

It's basically just designing a dictionary data type. I recall the Python devs talking about a lot of this stuff from the early days.

Everything is related.

I've blogged about this before too!

https://brianschrader.com/archive/the-practicals-of-writing-...

But I'm in the process of upgrading my pen. I ordered a TWISB ECO.

I wrote a thing about a related idea nearly a decade later (2022) and it still holds. Email is great.

https://brianschrader.com/archive/on-the-web-the-best-outcom...

Thanks for reading the source post!

This is a valid concern, I think. However I'd point out that extraneous detail and world building are not the same. If information serves the purpose of explaining the world then by definition it isn't extraneous. Though adding information certainly reaches a point of diminishing returns at some point.

I think the point of Chekhov's gun is more that unless you can justify the inclusion of the info, then it is extraneous and extraneous info should be removed.

You are too kind

https://archive.is/2025.04.27-121610/https://www.theatlantic...

I posted on Mastodon today about how helpful tools like this are for building mathematical intuition. Animations are no substitute, but they can also do what lecture never could.

Mastodon post: https://mastodon.social/@sonicrocketman/113884920858897541

I thought exactly the same thing.

I’m left-handed too, and I’ve always felt that I struggled with handwriting partly because of that.

Though after smearing my hands with ink for the past 12 months, I can say that with some practice cursive has turned out to be fine. These days even the dip pen I’m using dries faster than I’m writing.

I've solved this in several ways that depend on the need.

1. Multiple small notebooks. I love ~50pg, 5"x7" lined notebooks. They're cheap, and portable. Just get one for each project.

2. I usually allow myself 1-2 extra pages for longer thoughts or things that will require follow-up. That almost always works.

3. Indexes. Set aside 20pgs at the front (or back) for a table of contents. I do this with my longer notebooks (~200pgs) and I never have trouble finding things. If you need to continue a section later on call it "Project X (cont.)"

I feel like #3 is something that generations before us knew implicitly that we've forgotten.

[edit: grammar]

[Edit: Addendum]

Also, always date your entries. That helps a lot.

For my daily-driver, I use a Schneider Fountain. The exact two I have aren't made anymore, but I linked the most similar one I could find.

The dip pen is actually just one of those almost-novelty quill-looking ones. I cut off the ornamentation and just use it as a regular dip pen. Works great. It came with a set of nibs including one that is basically just a traditional fountain pen. That nib is the one I use the most.

Importantly, dip nibs often splotch ink because they're coated with oils by the manufacturer. I found out much later that you need to prep the nibs before you use them (either by wiping the oils off or lightly burning it off, which is what I did). That fixed the splotchy-ness for good.

Lately I've been considering some nice wooden dip pens.

Fountain Pen: https://www.amazon.com/Schneider-Fountain-Light-Barrel-16820...

Nib Prep Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VE12e60BA6E

[Edit: Addendum]

Cursive felt slower to me at first, but now writing those print samples in the post felt slower than the cursive sample. It's really important to just practice the strokes. I spent an hour a day for almost two weeks just writing "the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" over an over to get the strokes right.

I was already somewhat familiar with cursive, and I knew it was a ~more proper~ way to write in that cursive is designed to lessen strains on the hand and be easier to write at speed. Also I wanted to. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Hey all,

Don't be too harsh on the code. It was thrown together in an hour.

I used the method from the paper (linked on HN earlier this week) but had to tweak the code as it was both unclear what the input types should be and had a few bugs. Hopefully I didn't break it during the process.

The classifier seems to work fine and gave me seemingly reasonable results from my admittedly limited testing.

Mostly this was an exercise to teach myself about this method, though I do have a possible use case for it in the future.

Very cool to see such a classic CS problem applied to new domains. Feels like a programmer's version of pharmaceutical drug repurposing.

I've been using BBEdit since college and I love it. I was and is my primary text editor for all of my development (except Java and Swift which basically require an IDE).

Also, it's funny: I am only marginally older than BBEdit. I can't imagine running a software project for so long, let alone so successfully.

Keep up the great work BareBones!

Direct from the mouth of the other half of the team:

We used Xstate over react-router by using a parallel machine:

- One for application state - One for view state

We had to hack the innards of the events a bit to get the two machines to communicate. This allowed the view to re-render the jsonschema form at the exact right time, and not flicker on multiple state transitions.

In hindsight, graphql wasn’t as necessary as we initially thought. The important part was storing the mutation as a string as an xstate transition parameter. We used federation, so it did help us deal with multiple backends.

All database. Versions were handled by having a core machine that pulled the kiosk’s workflow from the server and ran it as a submachine. So the code on the device (core machine) could switch sub machine workflows on the fly between runs.

Sure. Check bio. Email in blog's about page.

Unfortunately no. It was proprietary.

(we pushed to open source the guts, but to no avail)

Both of us reminisce about it though. We literally retooled the fleet of devices in a weekend to adapt to COVID and it worked. We interfaced with tons of hardware and even ran a customized debian image, all powered by RPis. Truly a nerd's dream project.

The real benefit for our project was being able to statically define, and therefore export the business process the app would follow. Once it's exportable, it's validatable and configurable.

IMO the JSON was hard to read, but we had a plan to build a GUI config builder that exported the state flows.

I was one half of a team that heavily leveraged XState in 2020. We used it to build a general-purpose kiosk app (in Electron) that could be updated remotely using an Xstate configuration served by a graphene-django app. One of the most technically impressive pieces of software I've ever had the pleasure to work on. (I mostly did server/backend stuff).

The entire kiosk device could be repurposed on the fly and Xstate + JSON schema form allowed for completely customizable & swappable UI.

Shame the project died.

Sandwiches are but one part of the equation! For full context see the taxonomic definition of Sandwich (domain Catino, kingdom Cincta).

https://iifrp.org/rfc/RFC-5.html

(disclaimer, I wrote this spec)

From the Bill Text, services must include:

(E) Historical versions of the terms of service and change logs.

This alone is a big improvement.

https://trahan.house.gov/uploadedfiles/tldr_act.pdf

Edit: adds link