tslug's comments

Agreed.

In a gig last year, I needed to improve the build turnaround times on a Jenkins system. After learning everything I could about Jenkins, I realized the correct answer was to delete it and rewrite my own version that ran on the local system, which was way, way faster and much easier to debug and maintain.

Not having to commit/upload your code to a build server and then wait to get an executable/package back is an enormous time-saver just in that overhead alone, but even the build itself was faster, even though it was written entirely in bashscript.

Go figure.

I hope this works out, but it's easy to see how it can be abused. When those abuses are addressed, the fix will undoubtedly lean on the usual fundamentals behind investing in both non-profit and for-profit ventures: due diligence on the idea and team deploying it, taking risks, hard work, and a good bit of luck.

I've been playing for almost 30 years, and I think I've ascended about 40-50 times total. My latest 3.6 install, I've ascended 11 times so far, as Wizard, Monk, Knight, Archeologist, and Samurai. Pretty sure I ascended in the high 20s on previous install w/ 3.4, and I know I have ascended at least once with every character in 3.4 (Tourist was easier than I thought it would be). Can't remember my install before that.

I concur with others. Elbereth was useless w/o a wand of fire in 3.6.0. Taught me to learn new survival habits, like staying much closer to my pet and making sure I can always go from burdened to unburdened by dropping only a sack.

Ascending is mostly luck and discipline, and the discipline comes from practice and focus. I find playing nethack calming, and it's a good way to measure how well I'm able to stay in the moment. If I die stupid, it's usually because I'm not all there.

If I'm doing something new, and I am uncertain about what my odds are, I'll read the source code.

I've only modified the source in 3.6.0 to create a general random number generator using a more robust (and more consistent) algorithm than is likely used in most libc variants. My interest there was mainly in perfect cross-platform state reproducability given the same key sequence.

Agreed. Switching to vegan brought my TP use way down. Becoming gluten-free, however, was so transformative down there that I'm still having trouble adjusting.

I usually tear off the sheets before I'm done, so that if I go multiple rounds, my TP is prepped. Usually, that means I tear off 3-4 strips of 2 squares each if it's thick paper, or strips of 3 squares if thin. After going gluten-free, I rarely end up using all the strips, and I'd say about a third the time, I'm done after using my first two squares of it, so the rest is wasted.

I find a great substitute is olive oil where I'd use butter for non-cooking (eg. instead of butter on pasta or instead of butter on bread). It's not quite as tasty but still a huge improvement over dry, and it's healthier.

For cooking, I understand olive oil is unhealthy (I think you create carcinogens as a side-effect), as are many other oils, but that coconut oil doesn't do this because of its different melting temperature.

Totally agreed with this. Faces have further to go. We're not out of the uncanny valley yet.

We're also unable to create emergent materials right now, because we don't right now (and may never) have the horsepower to do molecular-level simulation to find out how light interacts with the surface. For similar reasons, breaking something open like an egg, a log, or slicing open flesh is never going to yield truly emergent results. To some degree, they'll always have to be artistically approximated on a case-by-case basis. Those approximations may have increasingly sophisticated interactions as time goes on, but I am reasonably confident they'll never truly simulate things at the molecular level.

Wont replace monitors, but you can do that now if you like. The main limitations are battery life and minimum font size (really pixel density on your retina).

Holy crap, xelxebar. Thank you! This is a game-changer. I've been wading through the bash man pages like a fool.

I learned when writing bash scripts for cygwin under Windows that Windows doesn't support copy-on-write fork()'s. This means that any new process is extremely expensive to fork, because it copies the memory from the process it was forking from, even if it doesn't need it.

As a result, I did as much as I could using only bash internals, and very rarely did I use pipes, because they always fork()'d a bash subshell in addition to whatever the process was.

In about 7k lines of bash script written to completely automate the iterative development of two games with a shared game engine featuring dockerized server containers, I was able to avoid using sed in almost all of it. When I did use it (pretty sure only two places), it was basically for mass substitution of variables inside of text files, and the multi-line syntax worked very nicely for this, as I could form the sed line with a loop over all the variables I wanted to replace.

It turns out for most bash scripts, you can do the most common sed substitutions using bash's rich variable substitution expressions. For instance, you see in a lot of bash scripts calling commands like "dirname" and "basename" to get the directory and filename of paths. There's a much faster way to do this in bash:

  path=/tmp/my/path/to/stuff.txt
  dir="${path%/*}"
  file="${path##*/}"
  other="${path/stuff/other}"

That dir line means "delete the shortest string that matches /* from the end of the string". That file line means "delete the longest string matching */ from the start of the string." That other line means "replace the word stuff with the word other in this string".

Capitalism is a an extremely old game design, an MMO created to solve the complex barter chain problem. One of the game's many exploits is that sociopaths (and anyone they train through reward to override their sense of empathy) have an unfair advantage.

The key to the exploit is at the heart of the core gameplay mechanic, which is that every transaction in capitalism is a codec that decimates the complex history and state of the values and liabilities of a good or service down to a single number- the price.

So hiding the abuses of others is one of the many exploits you can hide in the compression artifacts of this global codec. The key workarounds for the exploits in scalar money commerce come in the form of laws, regulations, and investigative journalism. These are all extremely high-latency, low-reliability workarounds.

Scalar money commerce was invented as a low-tech, distributed hack to solve the complex barter chain problem. It worked, but it always had issues, and it didn't scale well.

We need to evolve beyond this primitive system of commerce that decimates everything to a single number at each transaction to one that journals state with long vectors of information tracking millions of dimensions of value and liability, and that uses more sophisticated game design and graph algorithms to solve complex barter chain problems.

What I don't recommend is going through programming exercises on the web, which seems to be a popular path that usually ends in stall-out.

Whether young or old, I think it's important that the person start by asking themselves what they would like a computer to do for them. From there, you can start to bite off small pieces of the challenge, slowly making progress towards something they actually care about.

Agreed. Please add this to Spotify, Linus!

Since becoming vegan, I learned you really have to focus on nutrition, because there are important nutrients in eggs, dairy, and meat that aren't in all kinds of vegetables/fruits. If you don't stay on top of this, it's easy to become malnourished on a vegan diet.

One of my main go-to databases has become nutritiondata.com, which gives overviews of the nutrition information in pretty impressive detail on just about any dish or ingredient you can imagine.

"The flu destroyed her organs. She didn't even know it."

Wait, what kind of flu was this, Ebola Zaire? Since when does influenza destroy organs?

Taking the flu seriously is definitely advisable, but something sounds amiss here.

Yes, in general, available work will decline significantly as will pay. That said, there will be an ever-narrowing niche for work that requires extremely high skill and that pays unprecedentedly and increasingly high returns. This is because every time a piece of software antiquates a former programming market, that software requires a shrinking group of even more talented coders to develop.

We're seeing this in machine learning right now. Machine learning can replace a lot of the code we used to implement with expert systems or rote heuristics. If you can develop that code (and not many can), you can command unusually high salaries, but there will come a time when developing machine intelligence becomes fairly straightforward itself. In fact, this is already beginning to happen. And then even these coders with their rare skills will start to see their salaries fall.

This has been a consistent pattern throughout the history of software engineering. However, I believe we're going to see salaries fall off a cliff soon, because I believe we're actually quite close to automating good software engineering in general.

It's going to be amusing, as a lot of the best coders feel particularly superior and entitled to their impressive compensations.

I'm not overly focused on the concerns of a small minority of the population. The elite have their own challenges, but they have enormous resources with which to tackle them, and while some of them would not be thrilled about high transparency, some would embrace it, just as long as there were better protections for the transparent, which there currently aren't.

I get the sense that I'm upsetting you, and I don't mean to do that. I'm sorry if I said something to offend. I want only to engage in an open discussion about this and to offer a different point of view. I believe in it very strongly, and I have given it a great deal of thought and even given talks on how to operate an economy within such a system. I by no means think it's foolproof, nor Utopian- just better.

I'm currently under deadline and a bit pressed for time, and I feel like we might have a more effective conversation over skype. Feel free to email me at [email protected] if you'd like to swap contact info and chat about it further.

I'm no less skeptical than you as to our natural inclinations, but I do think it helps people be more respectful of others when they know the world is watching.

They've seen this with police officers wearing body cameras. They receive 93% fewer complaints. That's a profound difference.

If you had dinner at a restaurant, the restaurant knows, and if you used a credit card to pay for it, the payment processing company can figure it out by correlating the menu prices with the total bill. If you cooked dinner at home, you used groceries, and the supermarket has a record of what you bought there. If you googled a recipe, then google knows. If anyone intercepts your sewage and analyzes it, they will know, too. Your gas company knows how much energy you used on the burner. Your electric company saw the power spikes from your blender and microwave, and it saw your fridge compressor turn on. If anyone left Siri or Google Assistant or Amazon echo on during dinner, then they know. Anyone going through your trash can see what wrappers you threw out, or any leftover food.

What you had for dinner exactly is indeed "private" as you describe, but you see where I'm going with this? Your effective privacy is being pushed into a corner, because it's now possible with all of the little bits and pieces of clues you leave everywhere and the advent of big data to correlate these pieces into such a precise picture that your effective privacy is approaching zero over time.

Yes, it's harder to make something more private than it is to make it more transparent. Absolutely. You can go nuts trying to make your life as private as humanly possible, and then all it takes is one exception to the rules, like surveillance in the name of national security, followed by an unfortunate misuse of that data or an unfortunate hack, and now your eggshell defense of privacy has failed, and you have no cultural or legal infrastructure protecting your now very transparent life.

Ask anyone famous how hard it is to maintain a private life. It's much easier to go in the direction of transparency than backwards towards more privacy.

If you want to be more private, that means that no matter the level of encryption, you can never post your brutally honest thoughts in facebook or twitter or HN ever again. You can never let people know where you're visiting. What you're eating. What you're wearing. Who you're dating. You have to clam up. Because whether or not you've encrypted everything, you still leave fingerprints, not only in the IP addresses but in piecing together all the information you're sharing in order to home in on the identity of the poster.

It takes an enormous amount of effort to obfuscate your writing style and all your proper nouns, and it's not just effort. I think it costs you a piece of your humanity.

To answer your question about watching the abuser, if all information is broadcast (like literally broadcast openly on 802.11ac, for example), then in all likelihood, the people closest to the sources of these broadcasts are going to be the folks who can make the best use of the data. Too far away, and you won't even be able to pick up the signal. If someone further away can see value for reviewing it, then it's going to make sense to incentivize someone closer to archive and host it.

Putin and Erdogan get away with what they do because of asymmetric information. If their misbehaviour is similarly broadcast, then it levels the playing field.

And it changes journalism from being about leaking information and more about better analysis of information, its veracity, its implications, etc, as information would go from being valuable to being a commodity.

Right now, the wealthiest do appear to be writing the tax code.

And no, I do not think you should override the wishes of the people the data is about (within reason). That's central to my point. It turns knowledge into responsibility instead of power.

Yes, I mean everyone, including the dictator you would have abusing the system, so that he could be seen doing it and thus would not be above society's agreements himself.

Replacing capitalism is a fine idea too. Even Trump, the original fan of capitalism, is making a show of kicking out folks who might have lobbying ties.

In fact, if you think about how a healthy family or healthy company works, the first thing they do is push capitalism to the outside, because it tends to make people upset.

That's why you're not encouraged to share salaries with each other or why you're not encouraged to put up advertisements encouraging people to come to your office for consulting for a 20% off for a limited time only. That's why when Mom serves you breakfast, you don't pay her $10, and kids don't say, "I dunno, Mom. Joey's Mom down the block serves a much more competitive breakfast and is offering 50% more love."

When you reduce the value of the goods and services people provide down to a scalar, it becomes trivial to compare people on a line, and that way lies drama.

If you think about it, the idea that the clearly multidimensional value of goods and services can be formally represented by a single scalar is ludicrous on the surface of it, and now that we have cell phones that can do a billion vector operations in one second, there's really not much reason that we shouldn't be migrating to a more accurate and powerful way to represent value using long, sparse vectors. This actually goes very nicely with broadcast surveillance, because you can repurpose all that information to capture far more attributes and information on any good or service all the way down the supply chain.