ravenide's comments

That’s super interesting, I had no idea, but I just meant malloc’ing huge chunks of memory at a time and freeing it all at once.

Just wait until they figure out how to use arena/stack-based memory.

The core idea seems to be to map shortcuts to sequences of characters. My experiences suggest that this has promise. Using normal QWERTY, I currently type 160 wpm on average at 95%+ accuracy. I can get up to 180-190 if I risk letting typos through. I noticed that I unconsciously adopted a related idea to the one suggested here: my fingers automatically type out sequences of letters that I'm used to. For example, "-tion" is a common suffix. Instead of typing t, then, i, o, n, my fingers just bang out "tion" as one fluid motion, like a piano scale.

There's a special type of keyboard called steno that takes this further. Instead of typing out individual letters, your keyboard has about 20 keys, and you use "chords" of keys to type entire syllables at a time. Experts can reach upwards of 300 wpm. Here's a demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7AFutd9Gos. I tried to do this but it took too much time to learn.

Why are standups even a thing?

Like, what is wrong with my reasoning here? Meetings are maximally efficient when the exact set of people who all need to talk to each other are present, and no more. In a team of 7, only 1 or 2 other people might be affected by what I’m working on. The other people are just wasting time pretending to care about what I’m saying.

My experience working at tech companies in SF has suggested to me that most meetings, not just standups, suffer from this problem. The time cost of a meeting grows as O(N^2), and yet we routinely have all-hands, weekly syncs, etc. Yes, some level of communication is needed but when the time cost of these things is so tremendous, it seems irresponsible not to at least ask if what we’re getting out of it is worth the cost.

Meetings are apparently the one thing that no one tries to optimize, in our industry ostensibly hyperconcerned with optimizing things.

Disclaimer: I hate most meetings.

Is this tutorial interface (navigation, diffs, files/downloads at each step) custom made? It's pretty nice for this kind of format.

Stupid question, but without any video support at all, how do you even install the software you need to use it as a headless server?

I tried this. It is basically a slightly improved VSCode at this point.

Basically, most the slowness/bulkiness of IDEs does not come from the text editing portion.

“Even though I'm never expecting my game to read an empty string in from an s-expression, I didn't want that to be a limitation of the parser.”

This thing is never going to ship. Coming from someone who has written an IDE and wasted a bunch of time on the parser because it was the cool theoretical portion.

That’s fine, I assume learning rather than shipping is the goal here. A fine goal it is.

By the way, the problem is NOT that he wrote his own parser and other homemade tools. This is actually a great thing to do —third party tools usually end up being more trouble than they’re worth. The problem is that he’s ratholing on tiny details that don’t matter.

Is this the bash dude?

I love vim and have never met someone who used it more fluently than me. Yet I find it lacking. I can never get IDE features like code navigation and completion to really work. I use YouCompleteMe like everyone else but it’s just not as good as Jetbrains. It randomly stops working. Parameter hints don’t really work. This is for C++, by the way. The JavaScript situation is even worse.

My dream is also for vim to be the integrated, full-featured software package you describe, but at the moment I find it falls short.

If I’m understanding you correctly, for purposes of free will and moral responsibility, the details underlying the ‘control’ people have don’t matter—all that matters is that they change their behavior in response to feedback that what they did was wrong. In order to give that feedback, we need to take for granted the ‘they did’ part of the sentence. Is that a fair summary?

If so, I think I agree. But it makes me feel like we’re talking about different things. I think we may just have a namespace collision over the phrase “free will” (which I think is part of your whole point).

I guess my question is, if your main concern is being able to assign moral blame, defined as saying someone did something and that thing was right or wrong, why does that require free will? Without it you can still say people do things (in the car sense) and make value judgments about them. Why define free will this way, instead of in the straightforward sense of choice?

I find the 'control' part of this iffy. People's actions are caused by their thoughts, feelings and beliefs, but their thoughts, feelings and beliefs are themselves caused by various other things. This is why I think the root question is whether you could have chosen differently. If you could only have ever made one choice, how much control do you really have?

The fact that moral responsibility requires the assumption that people have control doesn't mean people do have control. It just means that people who like moral responsibility (including myself!) have an inconvenient reality to contend with. It means we have to find some way to run a society morally despite the shaky grounding on which we find ourselves.

I would find the compatibilist argument more convincing if it simply said, here are some beliefs that would benefit us if we assumed they were true, rather than saying they are true. We can define free will as 'the assumption that is needed to make moral responsibility work,' and we can even make that assumption in order to have a practical, working framework for moral responsibility, but it still doesn't prove the assumption is true.

The problem I have with relating consciousness to free will is that consciousness seems to me to be about experiencing your thoughts, not controlling or exerting them. Sentience has a subjective quality to it, but it’s not clear it has any power. Imagine a machine that could control your neurons and manipulate your thoughts. I imagine you’d still experience those thoughts as a conscious person, and even experience the feeling of ‘having’ those thoughts, even though the thoughts are being selected for you.

My view is that the universe is a big movie. Consciousness is just a lens through which you get to watch the movie. But the movie script is already written, or being generated by mechanisms out of your control. You just get the immersive experience of the “feeling” of being one of the characters, including the feeling of making each decision—which are being/have been made for you.

> The Frankfurt cases debunked the full principle of alternate possibilities (PAP), so I disagree that PAP is why people care about free will.

I didn’t know about Frankfurt or PAP. Thanks for telling me!

As far as why people care about free will, I dunno, almost everyone I meet insists free will exists, and when I ask why, they insist that they have a choice, and then I say “but you could only have made one choice,” and at this point most of them become absolutely incandescent with disagreement.

I guess I don’t agree that because something is proven false, people will stop caring about it and wanting it to be true.

I think one way out of the blame problem is to recognize that blame being an abstraction (I’m becoming a broken record) doesn’t make it less useful or meaningful. Assigning someone the blame as a killer still gives us the knowledge to act (e.g. separating them from society). But recognizing that ultimately everyone is a victim of fate in one way or another allows us to simultaneously have compassion for the people we’re locking up.

> Free will is just as real as cars.

This is true. They're both abstractions. I think the important property we ought to care about is how easily each abstraction breaks down, in the sense of leading to an untrue belief.

Calling a car a car is mostly pretty safe. Although a car is just a shorthand for a bunch of atoms, no one is going to use that fact to take issue with me saying that a car hit me at 40 mph.

Free will is ontologically like the car, but breaks down faster. It implies one could have chosen differently than one did. That's the whole reason people care about free will. But where the fact that cars are just a bunch of atoms is mostly uninteresting, here the fact that 'you' are just a collection of cells is of tremendous relevance, because your 'choices' are themselves just cellular activity. If you try to use the free-will abstraction to claim people 'could have' acted differently, the details underlying your abstraction will start to give you trouble.

Actually, the car abstraction has edge cases too. If you bolt something onto a car, is it still part of the car? What if that thing was what hit me? What if it was someone else who bolted it on? In these cases, what a car 'is' comes under needed scrutiny as well.

“Quantum mechanics disproves determinism and therefore disproves free-will-skepticism” is an asinine argument I hear parroted everywhere and it drives me bonkers.

Ok, say quantum mechanics is at play and your cells don’t behave deterministically. Is that randomness somehow your free will? Are you willfully collapsing wave functions or whatever?

The real reason free will doesn’t exist is not to do with determinism, but the fact that you don’t exist. You’re a collection of cells that, regardless of whether they behave deterministically or randomly, are out of your control. The concept of “you” is just a high-level abstraction, a shorthand, that falls apart as soon as you dig into the details of what’s going on (as all abstractions do).

For what it's worth, if they'd just made the feature opt-in, I actually think it's a great feature. I'd love a Triplebyte page that I can link to instead of a resume (that's what I originally imagined when I read the email).

I'm a huge fan of Triplebyte, they got me two great jobs I never would've gotten otherwise (I didn't go to college, my resume usually gets automatically tossed). Their mission to fix credentialism succeeded with me. Hope this setback doesn't deter them from building more great things.

Thank you for not incorrectly saying "that begs the question of..."

I don’t understand this mentality tbh. Why do you need the ability to drop into any standard install and go? Don’t you use one computer as your main machine?

You’re right.