snhly's comments

Yeah, but receiving ideas non-stop isn't really "listening" to them. A more accurate description of that passive activity would be "hearing". I get that surrounding yourself by interesting ideas and conversations is a nice passive way of entertaining potentially alternative views. But there are way better setups in which to do this. The YouTube algorithm is unlikely to challenge you to the same extent of, say, organising a family dinner where the racist uncle or communist cousin are in attendance.

Unless this is sarcasm, I completely disagree. Listening to thousands of ideas inevitably lowers the value you attach to each one, and lowers the barrier of entry for what ideas you hear.

> Desktop computing is the cursive handwriting of gen z+.

Just because a generation hasn't had the time to upskill and branch out into alternative technologies yet doesn't make their consumer choices prophetic.

Desktop computers are by far the better form factor, for the same reason that a spacious study room is better than typing in a closet. The main barrier is a financial one. Being able to do your work and your communication in a larger three dimensional space than the 5 inch smart phone window is a privilege. That's the main reason gen-z don't do it yet. They're mostly a bunch of broke people, at the bottom of the career ladder, near the bottom of the social capital ladder, and thereby still expected to reply immediately to bosses, colleagues, new love interests, additionally expected to do it all on their limited budget, which they choose to direct towards what they value most right now in tech: portability.

Once they have a bit of money saved up, and less pressure on them to be 24/7 on-call, I'm pretty sure they too will start installing desktops into the corners of their private studies. Especially when the myopia and neck problems start to kick in.

China do have new laws requiring people on the web to indicate with a watermark (or similar) if their stuff was created with the help of AI. See: https://cacm.acm.org/news/267778-china-bans-ai-generated-med...

Even if western governments adopt similar laws, however, I'm not sure if they would be that effective. People would start messing with the definition of AI. E.g. 80 years ago a spelling and grammar checker would probably have fit society's definition of AI, and both of those techs arguably have a cultural impact on the web. Spellcheckers lead to less new words or dialectal variations of words coming into existence, for example.

It is vaguely dystopian, true, but one thing I remember in order to sleep at night is that ChatGPT and the like are trained on human-written text. So we might currently be looking at ChatGPT at its very best, or close to its very best. Reasoning: from here on out, the stuff it trains on will be polluted with the automatically generated text. Photo copies of photo copies eventually lead to blurrier and crummier images of the real thing.

We can keep paying people to come up with optimisations to the algorithm itself, keep paying annotators to manually pepper human common sense into the system, but it's my theory that these payments won't keep up with the spread of automatically generated content in the source dataset and the negative impact that has on the language model that the algorithm outputs.

ChatGPT currently enshrines insight and style from 2020-2021 (more-or-less indistinguishable from insight and style from 2022-2023), but now that the system exists, rather than observing a rapid pace of new writing styles and original insights emerging on the web of 2024, we'll potentially see a slightly slower style/original insights emergence rate, then the next year an even slower emergence rate. This will continue until it reaches a stage where the spoken world of language and world wide web world of language have completely diverged, similar to the way 1950s film dialogue bore little resemblance to 1950s speaking styles.

Short-term, ChatGPT has called creative pursuits into question, but long term, I think such systems will strongly validate creative pursuits, and only really replace non-creative roles. By turning the web into a wasteland of written cruft, GPT will validate the need for human flourishes, error, divergences from the norm and the arbitrary rewriting of unspoken rules. I think only a strong AI raised like us in our own societies could infuse that kind of culture into its writing, but the process of developing such an AI would basically just be a reinvention of slavery, and we probably don't have the resources here on earth to support it longterm anyway.

Mastodon has way more moderation than Twitter, actually. And way better moderation, too. Rather than one universal moderation rulebook there is one set of rules for each instance. And the moderators themselves? In Mastodon land it's members of the community itself, not some poor peon who hates their life and has no connection to the community. I.e. Mastodon uses the original forum moderator model. Don't like the moderation rules? Move instance. (Mastodon makes it easy to do this while maintaining most of your followers). Instance getting too big to moderate? Redirect registrants to some other instance, or assign more moderators from your own community. It's grassroots. It works. It draws from a culture of moderation and community that has existed for thousands of years. Twitter's global town hall doesn't work. No global town hall has ever worked. Empires, monopolies, despots, all sooner or later crumble. Even with a few periods of one-size-fits-all thinking, technology and society always tends towards smaller, interoperable units (think email, phone networks, balkanisation, the web at large, the massive tree of human languages). It may take 5-10 years, but twitter will either fall or get broken down into a federated service itself.

Why can't he simply be judged on his "social competency" within working hours? Organising team builders and socials outside of contract hours is weird and vaguely feudal.

This is cool, but I actually place ignored paths into the gitignore manually. This way I will always see reminders when a new file needs to be tracked or ignored. Otherwise I would forget to track new config files. E.g. when a new program is installed, its binary will be ignored by a previous rule added to gitignore (/use/bin/*), but its newly created config files in /etc will come up red when I run `git status`.

I have a similar system: I manage my dot files and a bunch of other configs by placing a git repository in my operating system's root directory, i.e. file:///.git. I use a .gitignore file to exclude most things from consideration while adding things to git. Transferring to another OS is as simple as copying the .git dir over.

I actually do use suckless tools, so I don't think I missed these points. I've read them many times over the years in fact. I've used i3 (which is quite suckless) and dmenu for a good while, mostly out of habit at this stage, and I've basically come to the conclusion that I mistakenly looked up the to the wrong people many years ago, and mistook confidently spoken dogma for wisdom. Snappiness and "outperformance" in the suckless world are usually defined via memory footprint, which is basically just metric Gerrymandering. You pay for that unremarkable performance edge by severely degrading your personal performance on teams, on other people's machines and in movie night situations when you're the only person who can control your esoteric computer.

I bought into the whole "do the minimal changes when they arise" thing for many years, but then I realised I was basically just slowly rediscovering what had already been discovered by plenty of others before me: the bundled desktops work fine, and they are not really the problem. The problem for me was actually just a need to feel in control while other things in life felt out of my control. That's probably why I still haven't kicked all suckless stuff entirely. But I would never advise anybody else to go down the suckless path. There are so many better hobbies to explore out there, incidentally so many hobbies that will put you in circles that are more enjoyable company than the suckless circles. Slowly iterating on your own personal set of keybindings and scripty doodads is the digital equivalent of spending an evening playing single player solitaire, except much less challenging.

Suckless can work well if you do things alone and uniquely within text, but when it is time to collaborate in three-dimensional space, you'll find yourself hiding your cringe "Suckless" desktop like a dirty little secret on TTY2. Because who wants to be that guy in the office? Imagine swiveling around to a bewildered colleague, who just watched you struggle to zoom in, scroll down or resize a window. Imagine having to explain to them what they're looking at.

Suckless also leads to wild misconceptions about your ability. It has the minimalist and snappy aesthetic of a hacker wunderkind's monitor, even though you're secretly doing equivalent work to everyone else within this setup, often at a reduced rate due to compatibility issues with the rest of your department. So what then? People start saying things like, "Oh, that Mike really knows what he's doing. Have you seen how bonkers his screen looks?" That's a lot to live up to.

Here's an interesting experiment: Pick a random Suckless fanboy on YouTube. Skim through one of their videos. Then skim through another video from 9 months before. Notice how everything about their work-setup constantly changes. These guys never learn to let things lie, never learn about the power of habits and the unique human ability to adapt to almost any interface, rather than forcing their immediate surroundings into a narrow stencil. Flow with it.

The fact that the blog post doesn't once mention bicycles gives a taste for the validity of its main argument.

Lichess being a project that is 85% written by one guy, and all other changes approved and read by him, he may have felt confident (until now) that he could maintain all the complexity of the software in his own head, and recall what to do and where to do it whenever he made changes. Seems bonkers to most of us writing software in teams, but compare this choice of workflow to ones made by others in similar situations: programmers in academia, who often work entirely alone, or Linus Torvalds in earlier versions of the kernel. Skipping testing is a common choice, especially when working alone and with a typed language. I could see Thibault bringing tests in now however. They would not have caught much in this case, because it seems like the problem came to light only when the software started running with real users.

Other than legacy stuff, I think the main reason programmers still use it is the fact that '1' is easier for them to call to mind than '256', or whatever else. So when you're throwing a script together really quickly, you'll prefer to type SHA1 instead of anything else. At least that's how my brain works.

A spyware platform company denounces spyware on its platforms. Pretty good PR.

...cameras might do the same thing, but only with considerably more effort, and due to the storage requirements of video footage, it's less likely that landlords would process the footage in time to form a simple entry/exit log. App-based fobs skips the whole processing step, and the data collection occurs on the phone, not on some device outside the owner's possession (the camera). I'd say it could be easily rejected by tenants in Europe based on GDPR, but not sure about America.

Worded differently: Minimum $15 (average: $35) each time your helmet is stolen/lost/forgotten (from my experience as a cyclist: this is a much more frequent occurrence than losing the bike).

We'd be adding a new legal requirement for cycling. This would of course discourage financially struggling groups with more pressing issues at the front of their mind. If someone is living well below the poverty line, and they or their kids lose a helmet, through theft or otherwise, they may just decide to start walking 3 hours to work/school each day for a while. $15 each time you lose it may seem small to us, but for some parent it could be a choice between buying a new helmet and buying 2-3 days of MacDonalds meals for the kids. The over-arching cause of cyclist death is bad cyclist infrastructure. Solutions targeting anything else are just red herrings and detraction. Bike helmets should be encouraged but not enforced.

PS mandatory bike helmets would inevitably drive up the price of bike helmets beyond minimum $15.