JellyBeanThief's comments

JellyBeanThief | 21 days ago | on: Resist and Unsubscribe (Scott Galloway)

I could get behind "exercise", as in your rights (while you have them), and your power (to stop relying on specific conveniences, businesses). Combines with imagery of gaining strength, independence.

JellyBeanThief | 1 month ago | on: Provenance Is the New Version Control

This was the very first thing I thought when I was taught about requirement traceability matrices in uni. I was like "Ew, why is this happening in an Excel silo?" I had already known about ways of adding metadata to code in Java and C#, so I expected everything to be done in plain text formats so that tooling could provide information like "If you touch this function, you may impact these requirements and these user stories." or "If you change this function's signature, you will break contracts with these other team members (here's their email)."

JellyBeanThief | 3 months ago | on: We Need to Die

> One guy with a tendency to procrastinate extrapolates his expierence as a universal truth without providing any grounding.

Other commenters here are doing that too, more or less. But yeah, no one's proposing forced immortality. We have a cultural habit of assuming our right to choose for everyone else, we see people doing it even when they're actually advocating for universal rights to choose.

If you're sufficiently bored at age 450 or 45, go ahead and end your life. Your life belongs to you, not to other people. Just don't harsh the mellow of the person who's happy reading books until age 45,000.

JellyBeanThief | 9 months ago | on: Ann, the Small Annotation Server

Web Annotations are what we need right now. Let people write and scribble all over webpages and share with other people in an open, vendor-neutral format. Choose who you trust, from journalists to organizations to neighbors to experts to conspiracy theorists. Let commentaries and interpretations appear overlaid on government websites and documents, Wikipedia, opinion pieces, social media, Archive.org, anything and everything. Let it be out of the hands of the content hosts.

JellyBeanThief | 1 year ago | on: Building a Knowledge System That Enhances Rather Than Replaces Thought

> the ability to organize things freely in space

This is the key. It's not enough for digital tools to just put things in folders or tag them. It's the links themselves that need elevation. People need to add metadata to links, they need to apply rules specifying what links to crawl and how to arrange them in space, they need to specify how content should be displayed in islands of connected content. Then they need to be able to arrange islands on a 2d, 2.5d, or 3d canvas.

We have information input and retrieval solved. For some reason it's taking a real long time for people to get to spread out.

JellyBeanThief | 1 year ago | on: Carlsen quits World Rapid and Blitz championship after dress code disagreement

> I think this falls squarely in the realm of bureaucratic administrators who have nothing better to do than assert their power and maintain the illusion of a connection between talent (great chess players) and the trivial signaling games of the upper class (the style of pants one is wearing).

I concur except about the bureaucratic administrators. I think they do this because the upper class will replace them if they don't do the work of asserting the upper class's power.

JellyBeanThief | 1 year ago | on: The transition from GIMP 2.x to GIMP 3.0 took two decades

It's not misinterpreted. Misinterpretation is an accident that happens when a good faith message can be reasonably interpreted in multiple ways, and the listener's choice is not the speaker's choice. A good faith message is one where the speaker deliberately removes all likely ambiguity they can foresee.

When a bad faith message is "misinterpreted", it's because the speaker was not interested in communicating successfully in the first place.

There exist two things:

1. A name which amuses the developers by honoring an uninteresting bit of historical trivia.

2. A name which contributes to the project's health and success by attracting new users.

One of these things must be selected as more important than the other.

As far as whether GIMP, in and of itself, succeeds or fails, pretty much no one cares. If GIMP vanished, and the practical value lost to the world was big enough, some new project would spring up to take its place. Maybe Krita would expand its scope. The Blender team sure has bank to play with. Whatever.

But what lots of people do care about is the success of open source in general. When software is expensive and closed, fewer people get to use it, and the fewest of them are screwed if what they need is too niche. When software is free and open, more people get to use it, niches become less niche, and niches that remain niche can be filled by anyone with enough DIY motivation. And because all of the benefits of open source rely on a large user community, attracting users is very important, both to individual projects and the whole community.

And right now, the solution the open source community has to offer the world is an embarrassment. This is bad. The GIMP project is selfishly pissing in the water supply the entire open source community is trying to build. No one is going to take that trivially.

JellyBeanThief | 1 year ago | on: Self-Documenting Code

I was thinking exactly the same. You can write

    if (cond) { cons }
on one line and get more readable code admittedly a few chars longer.

JellyBeanThief | 1 year ago | on: Do AI detectors work? Students face false cheating accusations

> As someone who studied physics and came out with a 2.7 GPA due to studying what I wanted (the hard classes) and not cheating (as I did what I wanted) - I can say that there are consequences to this approach.

I can, too. I wanted to learn, but I also wanted to achieve a high GPA. I had a privileged background, so I got to retake classes after earning Cs or Bs until I got an A, without cheating.

The consequences: My degree took a long time to get, cost more money than my peers in the same program, and I now have a deep-seated feeling of inadequacy.

JellyBeanThief | 1 year ago | on: X reinstated in Brazil after complying with court demands

> The word is “post”.

Most posts on reddit aren't called posts. They're called comments. And nobody called posts on Twitter "posts" either. They were tweets.

If you go around talking about a website's posts, and the people who use the website call them something else, you're going to sound uninformed.

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