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About

Thoughts

I survived for so long in the shell without using Ctrl+r to search history, I don't know how.

4:31 p.m. Jul 15, 2022, UTC-4

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"Half asleep and brainwashed"

-Moonbeam Rays, They Might be Giants

1:30 p.m. Jul 15, 2022, UTC-4

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the sober thoughts of a highly rational mind

1:23 p.m. Jul 15, 2022, UTC-4

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Do you know what day it is?

It’s Croc Friday!

7:55 a.m. Jul 15, 2022, UTC-4

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I’ve said this before but I want to reiterate that I don’t use mind-effecting substances, not even alcohol. The posts here are the sober

thoughts of a highly rational mind.

7:54 a.m. Jul 15, 2022, UTC-4

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funny silly

5:11 p.m. Jul 14, 2022, UTC-4

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I think my AirPods are gone.

Back to wired headphones like a pleb.

Pro: volume adjustment on the wire

Con: Can't play music from my watch

10:35 a.m. Jul 14, 2022, UTC-4

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Happy Tuesday

7:16 a.m. Jul 14, 2022, UTC-4

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Got my Selectric III electric typewriter working; it is over for you all

gemini://thoughts.learnerpages.com/media/b52d4d1d-9553-41fc-929c-ff6a8b13d83c.jpeg

10:48 p.m. Jul 13, 2022, UTC-4

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I've posted here before about how much I love binary search, right? `git bisect` go brrrr

4:31 p.m. Jul 13, 2022, UTC-4

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Can’t believe Paul spent 2 years rewriting Dark in ASP.NET, when it’s not possible to have more than ~1000 objects because all objects are

pulled from the database and manipulated in memory—there’s no querybuilder or anything.

3:29 p.m. Jul 13, 2022, UTC-4

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I hate it when someone I don't like introduces me to a really good song.

2:06 p.m. Jul 13, 2022, UTC-4

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"I believe in G-O-D / don't believe in T-H-O-T"

-Astronaut in the Ocean, Masked Wolf

2:00 p.m. Jul 13, 2022, UTC-4

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I love the number line in Wolfram Alpha results. Like yes I needed to know where this number is relative to other numbers next to it.

11:00 a.m. Jul 13, 2022, UTC-4

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Where are all of the people going?

Nashville?

10:13 a.m. Jul 13, 2022, UTC-4

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"https://matthiasportzel.com/contact/" 404s I hate this

9:52 a.m. Jul 13, 2022, UTC-4

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I'm disengaged. I don't feel like a real person.

9:11 a.m. Jul 13, 2022, UTC-4

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No posts on https://www.kqwq.me/thots in 3 days. It's like he missed that the point is to spam things quickly.

10:39 p.m. Jul 12, 2022, UTC-4

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Other people just don't feel real. I think it's because I've spent so much time online, my conception of what it means to be a real person,

what thoughts and feelings you have

no that's not it.

(Oh yeah side note, almost any time that I end a line without punctuation, I haven't forgotten punctuation, I'm indicating that I'm cutting myself off, stopping that train of thought. I use it in several places, including the About page. The exception is of course when I hit the character limit on the first line and move to the second like nothing happened.)

A fair amount of it is that I'm bad at talking. So I end up listening more than interacting with people—which is fine on Twitter, but does feel fake in real life.

I want conversations to move quickly and feel fluid. But I think slowly. That's why I actually enjoy talking to some people. When I'm talking to some people, I can keep the conversation on topics that I'm very comfortable talking about. Common ground like past shared experiences or programming or a specific kind of fluff. But that's like it. That's the limit of what I can talk quickly about.

I think it just takes time, with new people, for me to loosen up. To learn what things they're going to react positively or negatively towards. And right now I have no one in that sweet spot.

10:38 p.m. Jul 12, 2022, UTC-4

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Apparently I can mirror my phone to my computer, so that’s pretty cool.

When I was a kid you had to pay like $$ to the people that had an app that let you do that.

10:11 p.m. Jul 12, 2022, UTC-4

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I’m so bored I’m going to bed.

I need to figure out how to write, or develop a hobby that isn’t code.

9:57 p.m. Jul 12, 2022, UTC-4

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The wild thing about the web is that it is the world’s most platform for apps, documents, or computer programs in general.

5:35 p.m. Jul 12, 2022, UTC-4

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I've been thinking for a while that a Lindsey Stirling + AJR collab would be amazing but I didn't know there's a mashup on AJR's Soundcloud.

"I'm Ready/Take Flight Mashup"

Lindsey Stirling and Ryan are both iconic editors so having both of them on a song is overkill. And indeed, this sounds like Ryan just remixed Sterling into I'm Ready, with the violin as background. But it's still incredible, like ah!, Ryan with the up-tempo violin is great.

Edit (:17): I should make explicit that I'm working under the assumption that it was edited by Ryan based on the fact that it shows up on AJR's official Soundcloud.

4:03 p.m. Jul 12, 2022, UTC-4

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Can't believe they're making me write CSS.

They're not of course, I just have to add the bootstrap classes to the things, but it's like the same thing.

1:41 p.m. Jul 12, 2022, UTC-4

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Sitting in a library reading HN

12:54 p.m. Jul 12, 2022, UTC-4

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If classism doesn't exist than why am I so classist? Checkmate everyone

10:51 a.m. Jul 12, 2022, UTC-4

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Super Thoughts is such a fricking dumb idea, and I'm excited to share it with all of you tonight!

10:23 p.m. Jul 11, 2022, UTC-4

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I honestly didn't know that GitHub lets people with write access to the repo edit comments posted by other people. Iconic. Hype.

5:26 p.m. Jul 11, 2022, UTC-4

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I might grow to love screwing with things with `git rebase` and `git cherry-pick`

5:13 p.m. Jul 11, 2022, UTC-4

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It's wild how long we just coped without fragments in React.

3:11 p.m. Jul 11, 2022, UTC-4

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Love arguing with my co-workers about code-style in GitHub issues. Truly the peak of productivity and expression

1:52 p.m. Jul 11, 2022, UTC-4

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Why are words so hard

10:06 a.m. Jul 11, 2022, UTC-4

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I couldn't find my AirPods this morning and

My mental is so fragile that I can't

8:49 a.m. Jul 11, 2022, UTC-4

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I might have to re-watch Etho's Hermitcraft season 7. That was fricking goated. Basically the golden age of Etho. Which feels wild to say

because Etho has been so consistently amazing for 10 years now. But season 7 was something different.

9:49 p.m. Jul 10, 2022, UTC-4

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Internet, why do my eyes hurt?

5:07 p.m. Jul 10, 2022, UTC-4

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“My grandma managed to set up Signal and contact me on it without anyone explaining it to her, which if you knew her then you'd know how

much of a real technical achievement that was. That's an absolute win for privacy. Granted she did it accidentally because she thought Signal was replacing Facebook Messenger, but a win is a win.”

Modded Bear - Re: Signal

12:33 p.m. Jul 10, 2022, UTC-4

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Uh content.

Okay I’m going to bed. If I post after this tonight that’s bad

11:48 p.m. Jul 09, 2022, UTC-4

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“You do not delight in sacrifice, or I would bring it; you do not take pleasure in burnt offerings. My sacrifice, O God, is a broken spirit;

a broken and contrite heart you, God, will not despise.”

‭‭Psalms‬ ‭51:16-17‬ ‭NIV‬‬

11:47 p.m. Jul 09, 2022, UTC-4

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I think

Google.com in 2001 had 10 links. Google.com today has 15.

Many people, including at times myself, would claim that modern webdesign

has a inclination to minimalism. But that's a superficial preference at best.

Google has simplified its logo, but it hasn't simplified its homepage.

4:58 p.m. Jul 09, 2022, UTC-4

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To wish to be

4:52 p.m. Jul 09, 2022, UTC-4

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Love how I can open Snapchat for the first time in weeks and I have one snap and it's from Team Snapchat

4:29 p.m. Jul 08, 2022, UTC-4

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I have very little ability to talk about anything other than code.

4:04 p.m. Jul 08, 2022, UTC-4

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I'm "having a real one", as the kids say.

Ohoohooh i don't even have to type words here.

uharugalouighey

semllt

huruahu

shape

/-\

| |

V

Hehe

10:57 a.m. Jul 08, 2022, UTC-4

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I wish I could take the windows on my desktop and hug them.

10:55 a.m. Jul 08, 2022, UTC-4

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async do {
    // code here
}

would be a cool bit of JS syntax sugar, equivalent to

(async () => { /*code*/ })();

10:54 a.m. Jul 08, 2022, UTC-4

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I need to invest in some good fidget toys.

10:51 a.m. Jul 08, 2022, UTC-4

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I want a case for my Apple Watch that makes it ergonomic to hold like a (very small) phone.

10:38 a.m. Jul 08, 2022, UTC-4

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Not going to bed at like 11:20 last night was a mistake.

9:21 a.m. Jul 08, 2022, UTC-4

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I want my life to point to God. I want to be the voice of one in the wilderness who says, prepare the way of the LORD.

12:09 a.m. Jul 08, 2022, UTC-4

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gist.github.com has a notification bell at the top of the screen, but clicking it takes you to gist.github.com/notifications which 404s

11:24 p.m. Jul 07, 2022, UTC-4

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I’m so socially incompetent I feel pathetic.

11:12 p.m. Jul 07, 2022, UTC-4

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Time to first paint literally doesn't matter if half the content on the screen are loading spinners.

2:40 p.m. Jul 07, 2022, UTC-4

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I blamed strictly typed languages for having auto-generated "documentation" but Ruby does it too. It's utterly useless.

"auto-generated docs that list the types of your values does not count as documentation."

1:30 p.m. Jul 07, 2022, UTC-4

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Escaping a single-quote in a single-quoted string, in C, and most languages: 'they\'re'

Bash (and other shells): 'they'"'"'re'

11:29 a.m. Jul 07, 2022, UTC-4

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"Every Breaking Wave" is a good song.

8:50 a.m. Jul 07, 2022, UTC-4

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◯

7:47 a.m. Jul 07, 2022, UTC-4

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I’m tired but I want to make Super Thoughts

11:17 p.m. Jul 06, 2022, UTC-4

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The reason I don't make playlists is that it's really hard to get into the mindset that I was when I made the playlist so they don't stay

relevant.

I made a playlist years ago called "Electric Pop Hype" and it's fire but it's completely missing a bunch of songs and artists. But I don't feel confident about that to update it.

10:17 p.m. Jul 06, 2022, UTC-4

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Okay okay "My Club" The Asteroids Galaxy Tour

10:07 p.m. Jul 06, 2022, UTC-4

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"BöpGil" is closest to what I want right now but it could be a lot more hype.

10:01 p.m. Jul 06, 2022, UTC-4

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I need a song that bops harder than this.

9:57 p.m. Jul 06, 2022, UTC-4

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I will say I really prefer `function funcName () {` over `const funcName = () => {`

3:09 p.m. Jul 06, 2022, UTC-4

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The Planet needs a manifesto or a mission statement or something.

9:33 a.m. Jul 06, 2022, UTC-4

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These people on HN are arguing that Apple has more money than Google to spend on making a web browser.

Like I know Apple has more money than pretty much any other company, but Google is right there with them, and Google has a lot more incentive to push the web forward.

Anyways Safari is dead, FireFox is dead, long live Chromium.

11:25 p.m. Jul 05, 2022, UTC-4

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Open AI's website doesn't work in Firefox

9:22 p.m. Jul 05, 2022, UTC-4

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The thing that I can't stand about Elm is that it was created as this competitor to React, but they couldn't be bothered to come up with a

JSX-like syntax for DOM elements, so you're writing these Haskell-style arrays that represent HTML elements and it's ugly. It's ugly.

9:05 p.m. Jul 05, 2022, UTC-4

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Can't tell if this breakcore playlist is bad or what, but this could pass as lofi.

3:46 p.m. Jul 05, 2022, UTC-4

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10 fingers is too many. What am I supposed to do with all of these fingers?

3:15 p.m. Jul 05, 2022, UTC-4

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I have social anxiety so I have my own bug tracker in the Notes app on my computer so that I don't have to interact with other people.

3:08 p.m. Jul 05, 2022, UTC-4

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Listening to Tally Hall. What a bop.

1:11 p.m. Jul 05, 2022, UTC-4

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My favorite kind of 2FA is the kind where you can click "remind me later" and skip it.

8:42 a.m. Jul 05, 2022, UTC-4

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Unemployment is almost back to pre-pandemic levels

10:09 p.m. Jul 04, 2022, UTC-4

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gemini://thoughts.learnerpages.com/media/f725ccd0-67f1-439d-93a3-c62a13c5f051.png

10:03 p.m. Jul 04, 2022, UTC-4

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See sound

7:05 p.m. Jul 04, 2022, UTC-4

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Blogging is really hard because good blog posts are short but timeless.

5:55 p.m. Jul 04, 2022, UTC-4

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Writing pure functions in imperative languages is super powerful. (<3 JS)

2:07 p.m. Jul 04, 2022, UTC-4

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"So this morning I took the coward's way out and shipped a cron job that will simply restart the server processes one at a time every 4

(subject to change) hours."

9:30 a.m. Jul 04, 2022, UTC-4

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I suspect a needle and thread would be too powerful in the hands of one such as myself.

6:33 p.m. Jul 03, 2022, UTC-4

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Almost had a breakdown earlier, but realized I was just bored.

6:32 p.m. Jul 03, 2022, UTC-4

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Working on a theory I’m an empath

6:54 p.m. Jul 02, 2022, UTC-4

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Hacker News' favorite hobby is pretending like jQuery didn't exist.

8:27 a.m. Jul 02, 2022, UTC-4

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"It's the little things that I can't handle, and we're still in July"

7:52 a.m. Jul 02, 2022, UTC-4

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You know what's really scary? Almost all of these thoughts still exist in my head, along with a bunch of other thoughts that aren't here.

4:37 p.m. Jul 01, 2022, UTC-4

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Man there are a lot of thoughts on this website! I know that was the point but it's starting to scare me.

3:52 p.m. Jul 01, 2022, UTC-4

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Trying to get an emotional response out of me (the reader) by inflicting pain on your characters is like trying to make me laugh by

inflicting pain on your characters. I see a lot of dramatic writing as no better than slap-stick comedy.

1:13 p.m. Jul 01, 2022, UTC-4

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Thinking I'll change the background color in the light mode to `#FFFDFA`. Dark mode might go back to standard.

10:38 a.m. Jul 01, 2022, UTC-4

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I'm doing a little bit of everything.

10:36 a.m. Jul 01, 2022, UTC-4

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Firefox text input fields don't support Control-T this is pain

10:06 a.m. Jul 01, 2022, UTC-4

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Art and science are both the same thing. They are both the attempt to discover truth.

9:49 a.m. Jul 01, 2022, UTC-4

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I need to start getting 9 hours of sleep again.

9:16 a.m. Jul 01, 2022, UTC-4

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I should learn how to type.

8:51 a.m. Jul 01, 2022, UTC-4

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The world will be worse off without Technoblade's dry humor and his passion for the game.

His dedication in getting 10 million subscribers, 9 years after he set his mind to it, is inspiring.

"Technoblade never dies"

11:45 p.m. Jun 30, 2022, UTC-4

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Technoblade never dies

Rest in peace

11:26 p.m. Jun 30, 2022, UTC-4

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The computer science industry has gotten as far as it has by taking a bunch of simple things and stacking them on top of each other. It is

important we do not forget that.

5:00 p.m. Jun 30, 2022, UTC-4

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It's just frustrating that I have to keep up the illusion of my sanity for the rest of my life.

3:29 p.m. Jun 30, 2022, UTC-4

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I just want to pick a direction and start walking and not stop.

2:58 p.m. Jun 30, 2022, UTC-4

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If my watch is connected to WiFi it can download and play songs from Apple Music. Which makes sense but for some reason I assumed you had to

pre-load songs on it.

1:52 p.m. Jun 30, 2022, UTC-4

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It all flows back in so quickly, like water.

1:47 p.m. Jun 30, 2022, UTC-4

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Kind of can't believe I'm just unironically jamming to breakcore. Something about having chaotic music playing helps keep me from being

overwhelmed by what I'm looking at. Like it puts my mind in the mindset of "we have to focus!" keeps my mind from wandering.

11:47 a.m. Jun 30, 2022, UTC-4

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The big difference that I want to emphasize between FPG and Plato's theory of forms is that in FPG the *true* version of an object can never

be comprehended by a human. Sometimes people use "Platonic form" to refer to "my conception/idea of the of the object, as opposed to the version of the object in the real world" but that's just the difference between the object and your idea of the object. I'm saying there's a third thing "the real object" which is unknowable.

10:38 a.m. Jun 30, 2022, UTC-4

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What's so profound about the Frosted Pane of Glass epistemology is that it allows for a reconciliation of the statements "I 100%

believe X is true" and "It's possible I'm wrong." The epistemology recognizes, no! is founded on!, human fallibility. Because humans can't ever conceive the true nature of anything, and that is recognized, a statement like "I believe" is can be thought of as "I understand this to be true, to the best of my limited understanding."

10:29 a.m. Jun 30, 2022, UTC-4

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The active development on Grib is inspiring!

9:32 a.m. Jun 30, 2022, UTC-4

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Welcome to the software world!

9:01 a.m. Jun 30, 2022, UTC-4

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I read this Reddit comment probably when it was posted 7 years ago and it made such an impression on me. I haven't reread

it until today, I don't think, but I've remembered, if not most of it a lot of it (should have taken the goat, women are better at climbing than men, the three-strike system, climbing is more expensive than you thought, suave motherfool (at the time I was using a browser extension (that I wrote myself (okay it was a bookmarklet)) that replaced curse words with alternatives like "fool"), the perfectly-nested multi-level parentheses, ah!).

This is deep in the Matthias Lore Archives.

"suavemotherfool" was a computer password of mine for a while.

content warning, strong language, sexual themes

11:25 p.m. Jun 29, 2022, UTC-4

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Remembered I can watch TikToks to forget about the loneliness.

10:43 p.m. Jun 29, 2022, UTC-4

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Still not over the throw-away scene in *Check, Please* where he gets stuck talking like he's doing a post-game interview.

9:17 p.m. Jun 29, 2022, UTC-4

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I complained about my computer being too slow so my company upgraded me to a 2.6 GHz 6-Core i7 MacBook Pro <3. But like switching to esbuild

would have made more of a difference.

5:18 p.m. Jun 29, 2022, UTC-4

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The mouse just moving from one monitor to another is amazing. We totally could have ended up with one mouse per monitor and a keyboard

shortcut to switch.

2:52 p.m. Jun 29, 2022, UTC-4

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"The wand chooses the wizard"

1:58 p.m. Jun 29, 2022, UTC-4

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Decided I want this on my wall

University of Alabama Birmingham 19188 "Steamroller" formation poster

11:06 a.m. Jun 29, 2022, UTC-4

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This is your reminder to listen to unmarketable music

8:47 a.m. Jun 29, 2022, UTC-4

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I'm serious, I'm copy and pasting these JSX components from Next.js to NanoJSX+Deno and the SOLC go from 4k -> 1k somehow

11:48 p.m. Jun 28, 2022, UTC-4

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After examining many static site generators, I've landed on NanoJSX for my rewrite of MatthiasPortzel.com

Of course, NanoJSX isn't a static site generator, it just renders JSX to a string and I'm having to build all the loops to iterate over files and directories myself. :|

But it should give us very close to feature parity with cleaner code and 1/10 the page size.

11:42 p.m. Jun 28, 2022, UTC-4

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So, I can't paste into the Chromium browser console.

• All I want is software that works.*

I'm sure the anti-paste thing has forgotten that I opted into that years ago and is now in a corrupted state where I can't paste but also don't see the prompt that tells you how to allow pasting. (Or maybe it's only FF that has that prompt, IDK)

11:20 p.m. Jun 28, 2022, UTC-4

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https://chriscoyier.net/2022/05/11/🧠💭✏️/

9:42 p.m. Jun 28, 2022, UTC-4

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This is your periodic reminder that Student Loans slaps so fricking hard

https://youtu.be/hv5Dzqoi6Xk

9:00 p.m. Jun 28, 2022, UTC-4

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Kind of sick of people typing in all lower case to be hip. Like I never jumped on the trend because I kept expecting it to pass but

it's like the amount of lowercase required to be hip just keeps increasing.

Would it kill you to hit the Shift key?

(This is about the antisoftware.club manifesto which is 1,400 words of prose without any capital letters. If your Twitter username is lower case I don't care)

8:54 p.m. Jun 28, 2022, UTC-4

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Oh have I not gotten around to sharing Poolsuite yet?

Poolsuite.net

8:36 p.m. Jun 28, 2022, UTC-4

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Grabbed @matthias on https://cohost.org but I don't have an invite link. If you have one hmu

hmu stands for "hit me up." That's what the kids are saying these days.

8:29 p.m. Jun 28, 2022, UTC-4

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Firefox has a feature called alternate style-sheets, which allows websites to provide multiple stylesheets and users to select between them.

Theoretically, I could use this to provide you, my reader, with optional themes. But the problem is I don't want to give up that control. I don't want you to pick what my site looks like. I want us all to suffer together when I chose a psychedelic color theme.

8:08 p.m. Jun 28, 2022, UTC-4

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Today was a mistake

4:47 p.m. Jun 28, 2022, UTC-4

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One of the most important realizations that I've had is that mindless content consumption, reading Reddit, watching TV, requires mental

energy *afterwards* to process it. Even if I'm too tired to do anything except read Reddit, doing so keeps me tired after I've put my phone down and stopped.

4:27 p.m. Jun 28, 2022, UTC-4

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This is the attack surface

11:21 a.m. Jun 28, 2022, UTC-4

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In my opinion the weirdest git behavior is that if you have uncommitted local changes and try to pull, you have to stash, pull, then pop.

10:20 a.m. Jun 28, 2022, UTC-4

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This is not a game.

9:41 a.m. Jun 28, 2022, UTC-4

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You wouldn’t set it in literally our world, you’d set it in a semaphore-punk world, where communication technology stopped developing past

the invention of the semaphore, so that you could include the telegraph monologue mostly as is.

10:35 p.m. Jun 27, 2022, UTC-4

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Gritty, modern, adaptation of *The Count of Monte Cristo* where a black man has been unjustly convicted. Ah!

10:27 p.m. Jun 27, 2022, UTC-4

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The web standards committees show no sign of slowing down.

I legitimately think the addition of features to the web platform will stop when:

• a browser like Chrome gains enough market share that it can start vender-locking websites until it gains 100% market share
• a browser like Safari uses its platform advantage to capture enough market share that it can refuse to add features and hold the other browsers hostage
• JS becomes so bloated and unmaintainable that it becomes impossible to write bug-free websites (sic, we’re here already and no one cares)
• something radically different (ten times better than the web) comes along and the web dies

4:23 p.m. Jun 27, 2022, UTC-4

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Error-driven development works like this: you write a piece of code and try to run it. If you get an error when you run the code, you

write just enough code to fix that particular error, and nothing more. You repeat this process until you have the result you want.

This is exactly how I code

9:34 a.m. Jun 27, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I just love undocumented DSLs. Absolutely amazing. Nothing better.

Just invent your own syntax, claim that the abstraction is not leaky,

don't describe what you're doing anywhere. Aghghahhh

9:12 a.m. Jun 27, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Is it blasphemous to want to create perfect software? To want to be perfect?

8:41 a.m. Jun 27, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I gotta make a dramatic return to Khan Academy, I think that would be so funny.

7:35 a.m. Jun 27, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

At some point I need to do a meta-analysis of Thoughts where I talk about things I’m afraid of.

I need to figure out if my fear of being boring and my fear of losing control of my self both stem from a pride that keeps me from surrendering myself to God.

11:11 p.m. Jun 26, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

One of the few things that I’m really afraid of is being boring.

11:06 p.m. Jun 26, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Onion rings are just so topologically interesting.

8:37 p.m. Jun 26, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

cmd+shift+f to open Github Code Search on the current Github repository is amazing, just try it

10:01 p.m. Jun 25, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I'm crying inside. I want to be loved.

9:53 p.m. Jun 25, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

“I have no fear of drowning, it’s the breathing that’s taking all this work”

-Work, Jars of Clay

9:18 p.m. Jun 25, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

The best, bad, sequel titles:

• Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo
• 2 Fast 2 Furious
• Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel

I know what you're thinking. 'Matthias, it is a crime, to put what is undeniably the best sequel pun, "squeakquel" at third place.' But one of the factors that I considered heavily when rating was the ability to parody. And "The Squeakquel" only works as an Alvin and the Chipmunks title, whereas you can throw "Electric Boogaloo" after anything that ends in 2 and it is hilarious.

Also I would like you know that there was a Breckinridge Jazz Hand named Wyatt Mason II and we called him 2 Wyatt 2 Mason.

5:43 p.m. Jun 25, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

We have so much fricking more we can still do with computers. We're not going to slow down for the next 30 years at least.

I'm just thinking about like IDE/code-analysis features—we could totally have a button in the IDE that simulates running the code and generates all possible outputs. Like IntelliJ will point out if you can transform a boolean condition into a simpler equivalent form (like `if not (not a and not b)` -> `if (a or b)`, if I remember DeMorgan's). Why can't we do that with the entire program?

And like, I hate IDE features like type checking—but mostly because they're bad. It seems like I get false positives from TypeScript type checking 30+% of the time and an acceptable false positive rate for a static code analysis tool IMO is close to 1%. But that's something we can bring down in the next decade.

8:31 a.m. Jun 25, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Once you go retina you really never can go back.

8:42 p.m. Jun 24, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

The thing about pushing yourself hard is that it never feels like you're pushing yourself hard enough

5:32 p.m. Jun 24, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Apparently this means Firefox raced the cache and the network and it was quicker to transfer 3kb over the network than it was to read the

page from disk cache. That's iconic. This laptop has an SSD. I mean it's not a good SSD but it's an SSD. It read the other content (images+scripts) from the cache, so maybe since that took a little while, it was able to complete the download first. Still, the whole page is only 300kb. The server is in Utah. The internal SSD is literally 0% of the distance. It's quicker to roundtrip a couple packets to Utah than it is to read 300kb from the disk.

gemini://thoughts.learnerpages.com/media/bb873b11-9a20-4909-96b7-a4887389cb68.png

4:40 p.m. Jun 24, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

The thing about React and even something like hotwire.js is that you run the risk of making your site *seem* slower, even if you've actually

improved time to first content paint. There's a certain advantage in using the browser's native loading mechanisms in that users think 'the browser is loading.' On the other hand, if you serve a static page from a CDN, the user very quickly gets to see your, branded, loading component, while dynamic content is loaded from the site. But this can mean that the user starts to associate your site with loading, regardless of the actual loading times.

4:28 p.m. Jun 24, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Oh! Ah! There's a "Format messages with markup" option in slack this is amazing.

3:02 p.m. Jun 24, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

It is my opinion that one of the most comfortable positions possible is sitting on the floor with your back up against a wall and I will

never survive in polite company.

I mean seriously, your legs are straight and not supporting your weight, you have something to lean back against. You can lean your head back, but it's not like you're in a recliner.

2:50 p.m. Jun 24, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

This might be my new favorite Chromium bug.

https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=916460

First reported to Brackets in 2012

adobe/brackets #2419

Most recently reported to VS Code 12 hours ago

vscode/issues #153061

Brackets, Atom, and VS Code blame Electron, Electron blames Chromium. Chromium blames macOS.

atom/atom #1669

electron/electron #2617

I feel like there's a lesson here but I don't know what it is (besides from "complex software is bad"). Maybe "vertical integration is good"?

10:23 a.m. Jun 24, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I hate people and I’m convinced people hate me and I’m so lonely.

And I’m hungry

12:29 a.m. Jun 24, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

BeReal is over this is such an L

4:37 p.m. Jun 23, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Hm.

4:00 p.m. Jun 23, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

"Low Blow", HONEYMOAN, has 1,928,000 streams on Spotify and 7,800 on YouTube.

11:16 a.m. Jun 23, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I'm so absurdly screwed up

10:06 a.m. Jun 23, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

my-accept-line () {
    zle accept-line
    if [ ${#${(z)BUFFER}} -eq 0 ]; then
        if [[ -e .git ]]; then
            echo

echo -n ${"$(git -c color.status=always status)"[0, -1]}
        fi
    fi
}
zle -N my-accept-line
bindkey '^M' my-accept-line

9:21 a.m. Jun 23, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

If you'd like to follow along with my 1,100+ song library, I've copied it into a public Apple Music playlist.

Everything by Matthias on Apple Music

If you don't have Apple Music, just don't click that link. The Apple Music web interface does poorly with large playlists, and the songs that, by chance, ended up on the top are not, on the whole, reflective of my music taste.

9:39 p.m. Jun 22, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I have no social skills at all it is over.

5:38 p.m. Jun 22, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

A Stackoverflow developer survey respondent is more likely to say yes to "Do you use SVN" (5.18%) than "Are you a woman" (5.17%)

Only the hardest hitting analysis on Thoughts Learnerpages

3:51 p.m. Jun 22, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I have no idea why VS Code is unhappy with me. I'm turning smart code completion back off, I take back what I said about wanting some types,

IDEs are dumb.

gemini://thoughts.learnerpages.com/media/5f8d1a62-d698-40be-8d2e-b98badb6c9a1.png

3:12 p.m. Jun 22, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Infinity Drugs...

12:05 p.m. Jun 22, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I thought I'd never say it but I'm now working on a codebase that is too complex for me to keep it all in my head and I wish *shudders*

that we could just a little bit of TypeScript types on these objects.

11:33 a.m. Jun 22, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Every lodash function is available as its own npm module. This is iconic.

https://www.npmjs.com/search?q=keywords:lodash-modularized

9:25 a.m. Jun 22, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Apparently my Apple Watch has 32GB of storage space??

Brb downloading my entire 1000+ song library onto wrist so that I can leave my phone

at home.

11:32 p.m. Jun 21, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Looking up React Helmet and it's made by the fricking NFL I can't

10:55 p.m. Jun 21, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Design is so hard. It's so hard.

3:30 p.m. Jun 21, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Growing up both of my parents worked for non-profits. It was humbling to know that, indirectly, almost everything we had came from donations

1:10 p.m. Jun 21, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

"There's no such thing as stupid questions, only stupid people."

11:25 a.m. Jun 21, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Listening to The Nova Darlings again.

7:19 a.m. Jun 21, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

The thing about making your book stressful is that at some point you’ve made it too stressful and I have no desire to continue reading it.

7:18 a.m. Jun 21, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

“Learning how to program is hard but most people can do it. There are two requirements, really: emotional regulation and patience.”

2:35 p.m. Jun 20, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

“Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much

more valuable than they?”

‭‭Matthew‬ ‭6:26‬ ‭NIV‬‬

Lewis talks about living in the present in *The Screwtape Letters*, something that is hard for me. I can feel what Lewis means, what the Holy Spirit is leading me to—not a sort of “do whatever you feel like right now” but “do what you know you need to do right now and trust that it will work out for you.” I know that sounds easy, but my perfectionism makes it difficult. Perfectionism is useful when making decisions but after the decision has been made you just need to roll with it.

This sort of perfectionist rejection of perfectionism ties directly to the idea of “doing whatever is easiest.”

11:38 p.m. Jun 18, 2022, UTC-7

▔▔▔

I feel four emotions strongly. First of course, loneliness or longing, then pride, purposelessness, and one that is more difficult to

describe but which I would normally call the desire for perfection or frustration with imperfection.

5:53 p.m. Jun 18, 2022, UTC-7

▔▔▔

“People want an authority to tell them how to value things, but they choose this authority not based on facts or results.”

10:31 p.m. Jun 17, 2022, UTC-7

▔▔▔

You know what. I’m. I’m scared I’m not weird enough.

10:04 p.m. Jun 17, 2022, UTC-7

▔▔▔

Have you ever been more?

2:48 p.m. Jun 17, 2022, UTC-7

▔▔▔

I would sooner shut down a website than include a full-page cookie popup.

10:29 a.m. Jun 16, 2022, UTC-10

▔▔▔

“Neuewest Is For The People”

10:54 p.m. Jun 15, 2022, UTC-10

▔▔▔

Clive really argues that two people who f and then get married because they don't want to desecrate that sacred bond, even if they don't

really like each other, have a more solid relationship than two people who get married because they've fallen in love.

Remind me to edit with source/quote once I'm back near my copy of *The Screwtape Letters*

Edit (Jun 16, 9:05 a.m.):

For background *The Screwtape Letters* are an imagined collection of letters from one demon to another, so when it says "thanks to us" Lewis means "thanks to the work of the devil" and when it says "the Enemy" it means "the Christian God"

The Enemy described a married couple as "one flesh." He did not say "a happily married couple" or "a couple who married because they were in love," but you can make the humans ignore that.

…

The truth is that whenever a man lies with a woman, there, whether they like it or not, a transcendental relationship is set up between them which must be eternally enjoyed or eternally endured.

…

Humans can be made to infer the false belief that the blend of affection, fear, and desire which they call "being in love" is the only thing that makes marriage either happy or holy. This error is easy to produce because "being in love" does very often, in western Europe, precede marriages which are made in obedience to the Enemy's designs.

…

humans...can be deterred from seeking marriage as a solution because they do not find themselves "in love" and thanks to us the idea of marrying for any other purpose seems low and cynical. Yes, they think that. They regard the intention of loyalty to a partnership for mutual help, for the preservation of chastity, and for the transmission of life, as something lower than a storm of emotion.

-p 82-84

I think what's going on here is that Lewis is using a definition of "being in love" which today would be closer to "love at first sight." I don't think Lewis is saying that you shouldn't love your wife/husband. (Notice how he always quotes "being in love," I think to make it clear this isn't real love.)

Rather, I think he's defining "being in love" as the inherently childish, transitory, "storm of emotion" which exists only at the beginning of a relationship. And he further argues that basing a relationship on *that* feeling is a recipe for disaster. At another point, he describes how a new couple might be spontaneously moved to do things for one another which would be unreasonable and unsustainable for the entirety of a marriage.

But I just can't stop laughing at 'there's nothing wrong with getting married for the "preservation of chastity."'

10:38 p.m. Jun 15, 2022, UTC-10

▔▔▔

Been watching *The Umbrella Academy.* It's intense.

10:33 p.m. Jun 15, 2022, UTC-10

▔▔▔

The greatest advancement humanity has made since 1954 was realizing that Turing’s death was a tragedy.

Edit (10:32 pm):

Turing invented and then solved computer science.

12:07 p.m. Jun 15, 2022, UTC-10

▔▔▔

Yeah having a Moment

Everyone on Reddit hates me because I don’t support abolishing the church and everyone in the church hates me because I mostly enjoy using Reddit.

Of course that’s not true. Of course not everyone hates me. I know that.

But normally it’s like there’s a big voice in my head that makes sense and sometimes the small voice says or suggests things that clearly aren’t true and the big voice is like, no. But sometimes the big voice is saying that everyone hates me and the small voice is like, “obviously that’s not true”

Anyways I ate sometime, took some deep breaths, and walked around, and I’m feeling better.

10:36 a.m. Jun 15, 2022, UTC-10

▔▔▔

I have like these depressive Moments. It’s really hard to remember that they’re temporary, not normal, and I just need to ignore them as

much as possible.

Downvoted to -4 the other day for commenting on Reddit that telling kids about the existing of heaven and hell didn’t constitute child abuse.

10:00 a.m. Jun 15, 2022, UTC-10

▔▔▔

“Don’t hesitate to medicate”

5:26 p.m. Jun 14, 2022, UTC-10

▔▔▔

I love white rap so much omg

8:46 p.m. Jun 13, 2022, UTC-10

▔▔▔

A lot of my strict adherence to a moral code—I don’t lie, I don’t cheat, I don’t drink, etc. is motivated by ego more than morals.

9:25 a.m. Jun 13, 2022, UTC-10

▔▔▔

I say I want to be at peace, but I don’t. I’m restless. I crave novelty. You could make some complex argument about novelty being from the

devil, but by necessity it is different and the only reason to want something different is if you are unsatisfied with what you have; and so, a desire for novelty and unsatisfaction go hand in hand.

(From the plane a couple days ago)

9:16 a.m. Jun 13, 2022, UTC-10

▔▔▔

Someone gave me a MidJourney beta invite, this is too much power, please, I'm going to end up buying a subscription.

7:16 a.m. Jun 13, 2022, UTC-10

▔▔▔

I’m postponing the migration of Tweets onto this website. I realized there’s no real point and so I’m not going to motivate myself to finish

the annoying parts of the code. That is to say, I’m going to work on this website when I feel like it, and not for any other reason.

7:19 p.m. Jun 12, 2022, UTC-10

▔▔▔

Just watched a Love Death and Robots episode about how the 0.1% are going to escape the climate disaster by flying to Mars and leave

everyone else to die, and then at the end of the episode they drop a QR code for their NFT

What timeline are we even in.

3:24 p.m. Jun 12, 2022, UTC-10

▔▔▔

Add “Ocean Man” to the list of songs that are better than they have any right to be.

9:58 a.m. Jun 12, 2022, UTC-10

▔▔▔

Oooh, I could RIIR (Rewrite it in Rails) at the same time...

6:31 a.m. Jun 12, 2022, UTC-10

▔▔▔

The more I work on the Tweet migration, the more tempted I am to just refactor Thoughts on here entirely to support some sort of threading.

6:28 a.m. Jun 12, 2022, UTC-10

▔▔▔

Thinking a lot recently about one of the best sermons I’ve heard, in which the pastor took a bike wheel, and said ‘God is the hub, and we

are the spokes. The closer we get to God, the closer we get to each other, and the closer we get to each other, the closer we get to God.’ (One of the things that made it memorable is that it was about 5 minutes and was delivered through pointing at pieces of paper and the wheel—no talking.)

Willard in *The Devine Conspiracy* argues something similar—that being a Christian means surrendering your own will and joining God’s “kingdom” (here defined as the sphere of God’s influence, where God’s will is carried out) and that teaming up with God in this way is the most effective way of aligning your will with others.

6:33 p.m. Jun 11, 2022, UTC-10

▔▔▔

-10

11:09 a.m. Jun 11, 2022, UTC-10

▔▔▔

I think the thing that makes Tumblr so fun is that people can just keep adding posts until there’s a funny punchline.

3:59 p.m. Jun 10, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Still alive, somehow

2:56 p.m. Jun 10, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Programming is a kind of fantasy land, in that it is a world distinct from our world, with its own set of rules.

11:11 a.m. Jun 10, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

“I miss people. The human interaction. Seeing the emotion in their face.”

https://thoughts.learnerpages.com/?show=e593874a-8f17-4f97-af02-cad878e6ee0d

9:10 a.m. Jun 10, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

This is normal. This is a normal website. This is a normal website with normal thoughts. Filled with the normal thoughts of a normal person.

That's me, a normal person, with normal thoughts. God is good. I am something else. The small pain of finite meaning in the face of the infinite truth of everything.

Insanity.

Freedom.

I can do whatever I want. I have complete control. complete and perfect control over myself.

Right?

Surrender.

9:06 a.m. Jun 10, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

9 square is a hell of a drug.

9:50 p.m. Jun 09, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Wait is Waze a pun on “ways”?‽‽

6:34 p.m. Jun 09, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I wonder if I get kankersores because I talk to myself too much.

6:12 p.m. Jun 09, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Safari doesn't support regex look-behinds; the website I'm trying to use doesn't work; RIP, F, L, ratio

5:22 p.m. Jun 09, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Safari's devtools are so buggy. It's a shame, they're so good.

I mean maybe it's not possible for anyone but Chrome to make a web browser anymore.

5:13 p.m. Jun 09, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I'm going to be an old man using the Atom One theme. It's just so good. Especially Light is better than almost any other light theme.

I'm really excited for Catppuccin Latte to get ported places, because it seems pretty cool. But it's also hard to get sufficient contrast with those colors.

3:12 p.m. Jun 09, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Nice one!

Couriway voice optional

2:40 p.m. Jun 09, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

"Our software might have bugs, but at least I'm spending my time on the important parts of the job: custom slack emoji"

2:16 p.m. Jun 09, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

JavaScript is a functional language if you're not a coward.

10:49 a.m. Jun 09, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

The keyboard-only people are trying to use the keyboard for everything to save time moving their hand to the mouse, but like, have you tried

moving the mouse closer to the keyboard. Save a bunch of time that way.

9:11 a.m. Jun 09, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I'm so hungry this is pain and only pain.

6:06 p.m. Jun 08, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I am so fricking tempted to rewrite this site with Rails 7 and hotwire.

5:26 p.m. Jun 08, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I’ve posted 3 HN comments today and none of them have any votes, they all hate me.

5:12 p.m. Jun 08, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

My brain is somewhere else right now

5:10 p.m. Jun 08, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I'm employing a sophisticated debugging technique known as 'running the code and seeing what happens.'

4:34 p.m. Jun 08, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

GOATed fonts? Helvetica, Times New Roman, Avenir. Is Avenir just me?

4:10 p.m. Jun 08, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Can't fricking wait for the Catppuccin iTerm and VS Code themes to update with a light theme.

Hm.

It occurs to me I could update them myself.

Hm.

1:49 p.m. Jun 08, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

The comments in this codebase are driving me insane.

11:16 a.m. Jun 08, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I'm unfortunately not an infinite number of people. I want to be an infinite number of people but I'm only a finite number of people.

10:12 a.m. Jun 08, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Lodash has practically created their own dialect of JS.

I don't even know

This Thought brought to you by `_.isNil`

10:05 a.m. Jun 08, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

"The first, is that God is better than the world's best thing.

God is better than the best thing that the world has to offer."

-How Great, Chance the Rapper

11:15 p.m. Jun 07, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I just feel so sick to my stomach, so lonely. I have a headache every night. I'm too tired to do anything that I want to do.

I don't know, it could be worse. It has been worse. I just. uh.

10:40 p.m. Jun 07, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Gosh frick

2:09 p.m. Jun 07, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I am a genius, an intellectual mastermind.

11:53 a.m. Jun 07, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

“I think what we’ll remember most about BeReal is that we were so desperate to find a decent place to connect online that we were willing

to play by even the silliest rules of engagement. For the moment, it’s been pretty nice. I can’t wait until we ruin it for everybody else.”

Hot dang ��

11:15 a.m. Jun 07, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Two types of people in a Discord channel called #crimes, "I do not leave home without my carry pistol" libertarian and

"most police should be completely unarmed" liberal. They may disagree on gun policy but are willing to put that aside to insult the police.

10:00 a.m. Jun 07, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Siri reads the BeReal notification as "bareal" (as if it's one word).

3:17 p.m. Jun 06, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Kaleid

1:17 p.m. Jun 06, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Honestly I kind of miss TypeScript. I never thought I'd say it. I'm sure if I actually had to use Typescript I wouldn't be happy about it.

11:33 a.m. Jun 06, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Moving Tweets over here has stalled since many Tweets have pictures associated with them. (I posted pictures more frequently on Twitter I

think.) So I need to write code to download those from Twitter. And of course some Tweets or threads (I wrote a neat bit of code to unroll Twitter threads into a single Thought) have multiple pictures, and I have no idea what to do about that (this site only supports one piece of media per Thought).

10:59 p.m. Jun 05, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I love the "Most replayed" that shows up from people skipping over the ad break

gemini://thoughts.learnerpages.com/media/86c5f432-9dc3-4aeb-822b-55f1be2bdc55.png

7:50 p.m. Jun 05, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Pop quiz: You're a python programer. You have a web request that is one line with the Python standard library. No, what are you doing? Stop

pip installing requests. There's no reason to use requests. It's not. Ahhhhh

Banging my head into the wall.

requests is like jQuery for Python programmers. They just can't live without it and it looks exactly the same to me.

3:25 p.m. Jun 05, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I have over 900,000 pixels in my web browser that Twitter.com can control and it shows me one (1) Tweet.

3:13 p.m. Jun 05, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I'm working on migrating my old tweets into a backlog on this website. Wow. Re-reading is wild because I agree with most/all of them but had

forgotten most/all of them. As opposed to Thoughts, which I reread periodically frequently enough that I remember (or at least am not surprised at) most of them.

1:39 p.m. Jun 05, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Need to stop trimming white space from the front and end of posts here, I don’t know why I thought that was a good idea.

10:13 p.m. Jun 04, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I should make more art.

A salamander sitting on a rock by the beach.

A submarine and a police car with a hat.

10:06 p.m. Jun 04, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I just want to know everything.

6:52 p.m. Jun 04, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Something about Python requiring whitespace and my belief in the subjective nature of beauty in code and PEP8 and Black and Ruby.

3:57 p.m. Jun 04, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

One of the things about being "good" (read: experienced) at programming is that I tend to favor debugging techniques that leave as little

room for error as possible. If I have a line of code that doesn't work, my style generally is not to look at it or think about it or even "rubber-duck" at this point. I tend to jump immediately to assuming nothing and either wildly printing variables or binary-searching between the present and a previous working state.

3:18 p.m. Jun 04, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

People complain about JS's date support but I have a date in the form "Sun Jun 07 06:57:25 2020" and Python just won't handle it.

Only ISO dates in Python I guess. Going to have to like call out to JS or something I don't know.

Edit: nevermind I missed `strptime`

12:48 p.m. Jun 04, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I feel bad for the nvm maintainer. Because he's strongly opinionated that nvm should be written in bash. And I respect his opinion, but he's

wrong. And he has to deal with people coming in and telling him all the time that he should rewrite nvm in literally any language other than bash. And he has to explain to people that he actually really enjoys maintaining a 4,000+ line, single file, terribly slow, shell script.

11:59 a.m. Jun 04, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I'm serious I don't know how to turn this off.

I disabled the Python VS code extension. I still have syntax highlighting somehow and that's

all I really need.

10:27 a.m. Jun 04, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

In what world is this a helpful debugging experience????? I'm trying to type a print statement! Suggestions are disabled! Inline details are

disabled! Code verification is Disabled!

gemini://thoughts.learnerpages.com/media/bb8fc71f-3cb8-4444-b2be-c471f3c06227.png

10:18 a.m. Jun 04, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I am sick and tired of scrolling through VS Code settings trying to turn off popup ads (or "auto complete suggestions" as they call them)

10:13 a.m. Jun 04, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Stackoverflow does the thing where you lose karma yourself for downvoting someone, and I have to ask myself, ‘is it worth it to downvote

this jQuery user?’ And the answer is yes.

4:46 p.m. Jun 03, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

It makes me feel sad because I feel like it's a reflection on my character.

I don't regret my actions. Regret is not something that I frequently experience.

In short, I feel resigned to it.

I feel alone, both because I feel they don't want me, and because I know that my friends will be having fun without me and because I don't have another life setup, as much as I pretend that I do.

I'm scared. I don't know if I can do it.

"And, the trouble is, we don't know who we are instead."

1:23 p.m. Jun 03, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

“But Justo wasn’t crazy. He was just unwilling to submit to what most people considered normal.”

And

“He didn’t believe in perfection. How could he? Perfection was God. Unattainable. Perfection was really only the mask of ambition, and Justo wasn’t driven by ambition.”

12:46 p.m. Jun 03, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Word dump

ah frick these are words from inside my mind boy i do not have the sanity to create the things that I want to never be destroyed on this earth or in the heavens beyond our comprehenious in time sheep yelow words flow from my mind like they've never had a chance to escape before and this is the opening of the floodgates that destroys a city and a town and the world and everyone behind thier own minds is light oh

3:31 p.m. Jun 02, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I just touched the bottom of my mouth for the first time in a very long time. I was surprised at how soft it is.

3:29 p.m. Jun 02, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I need to remember to repeat myself. A lot.

9:08 a.m. Jun 02, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

"How do good men become a part of a regime? They don't believe in resistance."

-The Resistance, Josh Garrels

9:08 a.m. Jun 02, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Still not over Sterris, what an iconic character.

11:38 a.m. Jun 01, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I have iTerm set to unlimited scrollback and I'm just running this process for days without closing it. I'm going to see at what point iTerm

gives up on storing scrollback but I'm currently at 29,000+ lines with no issues.

10:08 a.m. Jun 01, 2022, UTC-4

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People assume that since Gemini doesn't have a lot of users it's free game to suggest things, and they don't understand that the protocol is

finished, people are using it, there is no intention to attract users, and there is no path to make breaking changes.

And the Gemini mailing list is called rude but I guarantee you if you go on the mailing list for any other project which is done and is in maintenance mode and suggest adding features the reply is going to be "no" in about that many words.

9:41 a.m. Jun 01, 2022, UTC-4

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People criticize Gemini based off of how well it fixes their problems with the web. And it's like impossible to describe to them that Gemini

was designed to fix Solderpunk's problems with Gopher.

If you want to fix your problems with the web, make your own protocol.

This HN user is like 'Gemini does nothing to fix the problems with embedding LaTeX on the web!' And I'm like. No. It doesn't. Did you expect it to? Sorry?

9:12 a.m. Jun 01, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Happy summer

7:33 a.m. Jun 01, 2022, UTC-4

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This new epistemology came to me when walking by the creek the other day. I may reject it before writing all of the aforementioned posts.

If I did reject it, it would be because it argues that there is a Platonic form to a chair, for instance.

The counter-argument is of course that my own inability to imagine the platonic form of a chair is in-line with the theory and doesn't disprove anything.

6:42 p.m. May 31, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

The different sub-posts of my new epistemology.

At the time of writing, only the first of these has been written. I may edit with others as they are written.

The frosted pane of glass

arbitration of self II

reject the number 1 as a knowable truth

allegory of the cave fails to recognize that our truth is not just a subset of truth

is a fundamental part of human nature (edit: and not a failure of our sensory input)

theorem, infinite complexity, and again, our understanding is not a subset

6:37 p.m. May 31, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

• *We can do anything we want.**

6:06 p.m. May 31, 2022, UTC-4

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Like compare

"We write code not just to be understood by the computer or other programmers, but to bask in the warm glow of beauty. Aesthetically pleasing code is a value unto itself and should be pursued with vigor." from Rail's doctrine page to "By using Black, you agree to cede control over minutiae of hand-formatting...You will save time and mental energy for more important matters." Black is a very popular Python code formatter. Django recently started using Black, for instance.

4:39 p.m. May 31, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Considering rewriting this website in Rails after reading

https://rubyonrails.org/doctrine

Javascript has this terrible burden. It has to be everything to everyone. It can't have a design philosophy that is 'do whatever makes me the happiest' because it has to be backwards compatible with Internet Explorer 4.

I love JS. But I don't enjoy writing it anymore. Okay, that's not true, I still love writing JS. But it's not a well designed language. It has a lot of pitfalls. The ecosystem is a mess. There's a lot of incredibly ugly JS that has been written.

Ruby embodies JS's flexibly, the syntax sugar, the blending of paradigms from every other language in a way that is both flexible and familiar. It gives you multiple options in a way that isn't confusing but is natural and freeing.

Python's just there. It's boring. In a way I think it tries to be. It doesn't focus on performance or doing anything differently or letting you do everything. It just lets you write code. And that's powerful.

But sometimes when I'm writing code I feel like I'm writing poetry. (Every time I write Haskell.) And Ruby gives me that feeling a lot more than Python.

I will say the Ruby people use these DSLs and I hate DSLs. I do want to be able read someone else's code without trying to figure out if they've overloaded `*` to mean "throw a cabbage".

4:35 p.m. May 31, 2022, UTC-4

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I love https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ because if you just assume that all of the graphs have a common cause you can argue that pretty much

any of them caused all the others.

This post brought to you by the HN commenter who blames the leveling-off in per-capita energy use for all of the others.

4:05 p.m. May 31, 2022, UTC-4

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Humans perceived a filtered version of truth, like looking through a pane of frosted glass. Humans' imperfection doesn't mean that we

perceive a subset of truth, but that everything that we see is slightly 'blurry'. We don't perfectly know anything.

We create abstractions on our side of the glass that let us talk about the thing that do exist on the other side, but those abstractions are not the true objects.

This epistemology can be used as an answer to many philosophical questions. Is math invented or discovered? Is physics invented or a universal truth? What is the platonic form of a chair? Where does a person's body start and end?

For all of these, there is a real answer, which completely defies human understanding.

I'll need to break this into more thoughts.

1:12 p.m. May 31, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

The absolute wizards over at Trader Joe’s made a granola bar with buckwheat, quinoa, and a couple other grains I’ve never heard of, and it’s

absolutely delicious. I want to know what their secret is. Probably honey.

Also they labeled it “Trader Joe’s Raises the Bar” which is the reason I picked it up, honestly.

12:33 p.m. May 31, 2022, UTC-4

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I don't think I ever disliked it, but ruby is really growing on me. Like I'd consider using it for a new project.

I think the webdev ecosystem moved to JS just because it lets you use the same language for front-end and backend, not through any fault of Ruby's. It seems to be a very strong, flexible language. It reminds me of JS in a lot of ways, or what I imagine a server-side-JS should be.

9:32 a.m. May 31, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I fricking hate the Youtube thumbnail/title meta. I'm about to unsubscribe from Tom Scott because I'm sick of "And you can too!"

I clicked on a video today in my recommended from a channel I've never watched. The title was "Can I pass an AP Music Theory Exam?" Just such a good title. It poses a question. If you want the answer to the question, you have to watch the video. No text in the thumbnail. It doesn't try to be anything that it's not. I have to assume that the person is a professional musician of some sort. And indeed, the first 10 seconds of the video lists the person's credentials.

None of this "These tiny dots are people!" *big arrow*. I would click on the video if the title were "A giant mechanical elephant." And at some point I think Tom would have used that as the title.

It feels insulting, I guess, condescending.

Like, maybe the people browsing Trending on Youtube are your target audience and you need to draw them in as much as possible, but it annoys me.

"Tourists could ruin everything!"

Whatever

Oh yeah it's not just Tom, that's just, how you write YouTube titles these days.

5:23 p.m. May 30, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I am just vibrating.

4:51 p.m. May 30, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Unfortunately a first American edition of the Count is like $27,500 dollars.

11:16 p.m. May 29, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Code

There, I have written "code"

9:30 a.m. May 29, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Slack still refers to their logo as an octothorpe, even though it's not an octothorpe anymore.

3:01 p.m. May 27, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

AAahahhahahahahahaaaaaaahhhhhahhahahhahhhhhha mmmhmhmmhmhmmmm hmmmhmmmhmmhmhhhmmhmhmhmhm

1:59 p.m. May 27, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Other than the fact that it's smaller than a credit card, I really like the magic mouse, more than I thought I would. I do wish it had a

tap-to-click option.

1:51 p.m. May 27, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

One of my toxic traits is that I really enjoy assuming that you know what I'm talking about, even if I know that you don't.

1:43 p.m. May 27, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

If I had a nickel for every time a girl told me I was autistic and should get tested, I’d have two nickels. Which isn’t a lot but it’s weird

11:42 a.m. May 27, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Instead of sending the email that I want to send before bed, the mail app on my phone froze when I pressed the send button.

I'm so tired.

10:56 p.m. May 26, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I feel like an addict. I just don’t know what I’m addicted to.

8:02 p.m. May 26, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I don’t have anything to complain about.

8:02 p.m. May 26, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Working on a theory that I’m allergic to tomatoes.

Working on a theory I’m insane.

Working on a theory that I’m autistic and masking so hard even I haven’t noticed.

Working on a theory I’m a trans plural girl.

Working on a theory that all of human existence is meaningless and that our ability to deceive ourselves otherwise is an evolutionary trait.

Working on a theory that everyone hates me.

Working on a theory that I’m a bad person.

Working on a theory that I’m addicted to novelty.

Working on a theory that Ted Kaczynski was perfectly normal and average in every way except for his predisposition to violence.

Working on a theory that I love anaphora because it satisfies both my desire for consistency and my addition to novelty.

Working on a theory that I will forever be alone.

Working on a theory that no one is actually happy.

Working on a theory that I will die to myself and embrace the system and be dumb and finally at peace.

I don’t know of a satisfying way to end this. I’m trapped in the same loops.

7:36 p.m. May 26, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

"`// TODO: ANYTHING BUT THIS`"

2:45 p.m. May 26, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Never seen this before.

MDN Proxy

2:26 p.m. May 26, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

"I am no more in control of my actions than a man with a gun to his head"

1:03 p.m. May 26, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Have I ever said that I'm infinite number of people?

12:20 p.m. May 26, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

"Hack the world" but in a Sl1pg8r voice.

10:00 a.m. May 26, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

The whole 'what's easiest' thing is weird because by definition the easiest thing is to do nothing. But for some reason when I ask myself

'what's easiest' I tend to answer along the lines of 'just do something quickly and consider it over with.'

9:41 a.m. May 26, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Leaving Dracula Daily in my inbox for days at a time and letting them accumulate before sitting down and reading a bunch at once.

Hmmm.

8:35 a.m. May 26, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Would you rather there be aliens, or would you rather that we be alone in the universe?

The question is not, “do you think there are aliens?”

As for me, I don’t really care one way or the other. I already treat most people like they are aliens, completely different from me. So aliens wouldn’t be any more scary. And if I knew we were alone in the universe I don’t think I would feel any more alone than I do now.

A little bit of angst before bed for you

10:57 p.m. May 25, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Just finished watching The 2:51.

I think it will be come to be known as just The 2:51.

After finishing the run Feinberg put his head down on the desk and cried for the next 5 minutes. He's been working so hard for this.

I would not be surprised if it never gets beaten.

Feinberg has cemented himself as a legend. Saying he's the AA GOAT would be insulting, we all know that. He could be the greatest Minecraft player of all time, period. Like when it comes to skill I don't think there's a better test of MC skill than AA and no one can beat Feinberg.

I don't even love him or his content, but I just have so much respect for him, because I can tell he has worked so hard and knows what he's doing and cares so much. Not to mention he's so fricking good. Like since Feinberg is alone on the leaderboard, he has to motivate himself, and he did, so you can tell it means something to him.

He's not after the popularity or beating other people, he's grind-ed to push Minecraft to its limits. And as someone that cares about Minecraft, that's something that I love to see so much.

10:22 p.m. May 25, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Is it too early to go to bed?

8:43 p.m. May 25, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

AAahhhhmmmm

8:43 p.m. May 25, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Seriously my phone goes in my hand so I want it to be smaller than my hand, and my hand goes on a mouse, so I want the mouse to be bigger

than my hand. Why are they the other way around?

"It's been decades since any phone designer gave a second, third or even fourth thought to ergonomics, truly."

-Solderpunk (the man the myth the legend)

2:55 p.m. May 25, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

One of these days I really want to try a mouse that's big enough to put my whole hand on.

I don't think I have abnormally large hands but I feel like computer mice are designed to be used with the finger tips and I want to put my whole hands on one.

2:50 p.m. May 25, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

What Django calls a view, Rails calls a controller, and what Rails calls a view, Django calls a template.

2:29 p.m. May 25, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Is there a term for thinking everyone hates you? I don't feel what I would describe as depressed but sometimes I feel like everyone in the

world hates me and is conspiring against me. I don't think it's that uncommon of a thing.

Or, I've mentioned on here before, the feeling that one small mistake is just decimating. ("Decimate" historically meant "kill 10%" but here I'm using it to mean "kill 100%.") Like I was driving and went "I don't know if this is the right way" then "well even if it's the wrong way, I've only lost 5 minutes, no 2 minutes, no more like 10-20 minutes, no all day, no everything I've ever wanted in life." And like, for a fraction of a second I believed that if I was going the wrong way it would lead to me being late to work and losing my job and never doing anything productive with my life ever again. Luckily, it turns out that I was going the right way.

8:50 a.m. May 25, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I think there should be more species of beetle.

10:55 a.m. May 24, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I’m scared.

4:01 a.m. May 24, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I’m Matthias.

I want to cry but won’t let myself. I feel so alone. I miss people. I miss myself. I love you.

3:56 a.m. May 24, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Feinberg coming out of nowhere to casually shave 12 minutes off of Feinberg's world record and get a 2:51, the first ever sub-3 in AA.

I know I've said it before but Feinberg is goated.

10:01 p.m. May 23, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Tailscale is sending 46,000+ packets/second to Luther for no good reason.

6:15 a.m. May 23, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Tailscale is using 400% of my CPU when my computer is idle.

All I want is software that works

(Please read this in an annoyed sing-song voice.)

6:13 a.m. May 23, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

This is breakcore

9:17 p.m. May 22, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Finished *Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby*. My head and also my heart and my stomach hurt.

6:18 p.m. May 22, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

"I don’t know. I’m confused. Is this growing up? Watching all your feathers come off? And even though some of those feathers were the most

lovely things?"

5:45 p.m. May 22, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Should I put 4'33" on my Karaoke album?

1:24 p.m. May 22, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I say this site is done but like there are still 27 things on my TODO list. It’s just that none of them are very important

1:14 p.m. May 22, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

The difference between *Dirk Gently's Holistic Detetive Agency* and *The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy* is that latter creates this

huge world around ours that is weird and surreal, but the Detective Agency overlays an incredibly weird world on top of ours that is minimally different but impossible.

Edit: subbed nicknames for full names of the books

10:18 p.m. May 21, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Why does my mouth hurt so much all the time?

10:12 p.m. May 21, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I have finished *Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency*.

Reading it in the middle of reading the *Poignant Guide* was perhaps a mistake. I remember a character living on the fourth level of a quadruple level bed (because of the flooding) which I believe was from the later book but I can’t imagine how it would fit into either.

The plot of the book, that is to say, everything except for Dirk’s character, is different from the TV show. But they both do things with the plot line that are unmatched except by each other. So in that sense I commend the show writers.

10:12 p.m. May 21, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

“This One’s For the Disenfranchised”

11:30 a.m. May 21, 2022, UTC-7

▔▔▔

I solved Semantle #112 in 101 guesses. My first guess had a similarity of 10.51. My first word in the top 1000 was at guess #92. My

penultimate guess had a similarity of 31.53 (920/1000).

Had friends helping out. Semantle is saved if played as a group activity.

12:56 a.m. May 21, 2022, UTC-7

▔▔▔

_why on code style

Edit: finally found this link again

_why's estate

2:21 p.m. May 20, 2022, UTC-7

▔▔▔

Maybe I need to not be afraid to repeat myself.

I hate repeating myself. I hate it when people repeat themselves and I have to listen to them say the same thing twice. It just makes me cringe. I can't listen to songs on repeat. My ears crave novelty. But like. If I want people to listen to me I know that logically I should say the same thing in multiple places and if someone reads the same thing on Discord and on here, that's not actually a bad thing.

2:16 p.m. May 20, 2022, UTC-7

▔▔▔

I’ve decided this website is done.

Or rather, would be done if this was the type of project that is it is possible to finish. I will of course continue to tweak and change things, but those things will bring us less decidedly towards a “finished” state and will instead be changes for the sake of changes.

Prominently, I still don’t have any markup support. I decided I cannot be faulted for merely displaying the text the user inputs.

12:02 p.m. May 20, 2022, UTC-7

▔▔▔

Starting a job writing Ruby on Monday. Reading the Poignant Guide

https://poignant.guide

Apparently _why named Tumblr? I don't know, Wesley didn't elaborate.

https://wesleyac.thoughts.page/#1651815057

4:57 p.m. May 19, 2022, UTC-7

▔▔▔

Sending emails as if I care

12:21 p.m. May 19, 2022, UTC-7

▔▔▔

The only person to blame is myself.

11:40 a.m. May 18, 2022, UTC-7

▔▔▔

I know what you're thinking, I know what you're thinking,

'Matthias, you claim to be a typography nerd, yet when I open my favorite

webbedsite, thoughts learnerpages, it is filled, absolutely stuffed, with straight quotes.'

I apologize. The plethora of straight quotes on this website is as much an affront to my eyes as it is to yours, I just don't know how to fix it without spending like 30 hours writing Zig code to implement a proprietary markup specification. Which I still plan on doing at some point, but there's also a certain beauty to typing in text and then having the same text emerge unchanged out the other side. Maybe I should just manually curve all the quotes. Hm.

10:17 a.m. May 18, 2022, UTC-7

▔▔▔

"for all other problems about life in general please use the questions page on billwurtz dot com."

10:12 a.m. May 18, 2022, UTC-7

▔▔▔

I wish I wasn't like bad at explaining things.

5:57 p.m. May 17, 2022, UTC-7

▔▔▔

People are like "I don't know who…is and at this point I'm too afraid to ask" and it's like, some internet micro-celebrity. I don't know who

Margaret Thatcher was. A Prime Minister of England?

5:38 p.m. May 17, 2022, UTC-7

▔▔▔

JS actually just has really advanced first-class support for optionals. Every variable is an optional and unwrapping is implicit

4:10 p.m. May 17, 2022, UTC-7

▔▔▔

Why would I listen to white noise when I could listen to 4'33" with the volume *cranked*?

4:03 p.m. May 17, 2022, UTC-7

▔▔▔

"Chrome is being controlled by automated test software."

3:50 p.m. May 17, 2022, UTC-7

▔▔▔

Someone remind me to figure out how vim modelines work.

1:18 p.m. May 17, 2022, UTC-7

▔▔▔

I just can't believe that everyone doesn't hate me. I hate me. I hate everyone.

1:12 p.m. May 17, 2022, UTC-7

▔▔▔

Happy Tuesday

12:58 p.m. May 17, 2022, UTC-7

▔▔▔

Hoping Dracula daily prepares everyone for my Count of Monte Cristo adaptation.

10:25 p.m. May 15, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Death, which like a claw tears us from this world. Some of us far too soon.

10:03 p.m. May 15, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Man it's been a long time since I've done anything on KA. I didn't mean for it to be this long.

8:15 a.m. May 15, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

The only thing I'm afraid of is losing myself.

3:52 p.m. May 14, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Maybe if I send enough emails I can be perfect.

11:13 a.m. May 14, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

It feels like there’s a huge weight on my heart. Like everything just sucks.

6:22 p.m. May 13, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Right, so the Mars-quantum particles post:

I was watching a video (BobbyBroccoli's *America's Missing Collider*) and one of the thing that the author claims is that the particle physics community does/did a bad job with public outreach and education about quantum science, and he contrasted that to the job NASA does with space education. And my first reaction was "but Mars is a real, tangible, object that I can see, unlike quantum particles." But like. I've never seen Mars. I can't touch Mars. My knowledge of mars as a planet comes almost entirely from cartoon drawings in space exhibits funded by NASA. Quantum particles are a little harder to explain; it's physically impossible to take a picture of one, for instance, but you totally could come up with a standard representation of quantum particles and push to popularize it like we did with the clipart atom representation. And again, it is more difficult since we discovered these particles more recently than we discovered Mars or atoms, so maybe it will get better with time. Quantum particles exist inside of everything, right here in front of us, and people know they exist, but we can't name them, don't learn about them, and can't picture them. It's difficult to conceptualize something that small, but it's also difficult to conceptualize an object like the Earth, so large it looks flat, or something like Mars, so far away that it can't be seen with the naked eye. Quantum physicists definitely could do a better job communicating.

11:14 a.m. May 12, 2022, UTC-5

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When I don't have my phone I'm forced to engage more with the world around me, but I do so in weird and not necessarily helpful ways.

That is to say, without my phone, I, and people in general, tend to focus on things that are interesting solely/primarily because of their proximity.

This is both a good thing and a bad thing.

9:05 a.m. May 12, 2022, UTC-5

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Gödel’s death.

11:35 p.m. May 11, 2022, UTC-5

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Someone remind me to make the post about mars and quantum particles

7:19 p.m. May 11, 2022, UTC-5

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Thinking about fractions. Maybe moving entirely to decimal expansions of numbers was a mistake.

6:45 p.m. May 11, 2022, UTC-5

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I can tell that some of you'll were very bad at the 'split this run-on sentence into two sentences' part of the SAT.

This is said jokingly. Tumblr grammar/style in particular uses the run-on sentence extensively, and I enjoy it.

9:47 a.m. May 11, 2022, UTC-5

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Claim: modern art grew in popularity when people started using art to decorate the walls of their houses.

9:24 a.m. May 11, 2022, UTC-5

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It's interesting the relationship between movement and sound.

7:54 a.m. May 11, 2022, UTC-5

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“Create a world of possibilities”

5:05 p.m. May 10, 2022, UTC-4

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Can’t believe I was like, ‘my life is too hard; I’m going to make it easier’ and then I did.

3:03 p.m. May 10, 2022, UTC-4

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Maybe human beings are just made to suffer.

2:53 p.m. May 10, 2022, UTC-4

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Youtube changed their font, they thought I wouldn't notice but I did because I'm a typography nerd.

9:06 p.m. May 09, 2022, UTC-4

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I set up Tailscale initially last night and was like, 'okay this lets me connect my devices as promised' But it also does other stuff

It's difficult to tell what the other stuff is. There's a lot of really cool settings (like exit nodes) hidden behind a couple of menus. It can't do everything, but it seems like it can do most things you want. The one thing I'm missing is exposing a local port to the public internet (i.e. port forwarding). Not that I would use that, I think the idea is that Tailscale gives you better tools for the same problem, but it would still be cool, I can still think of uses.

12:13 p.m. May 09, 2022, UTC-4

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Okay dang. It takes a minute to understand Tailscale's terminology, but once you do it's dead easy to use. Highly recommend

11:40 a.m. May 09, 2022, UTC-4

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Dracula Daily is amazing because it feels like I’m part of a fandom. Like I can go on Tumblr and there are people talking about the

characters and what happened today and not really saying anything but experiencing the same thing. And that’s not really something that I have with most of my media interests.

Like Blaseball or HermitCraft come closest, but somewhat integral to those is that everyone has a difference experience. Everyone has a different Blaseball team whose games they watch, or a different different Hermit whose videos they watch. And since everyone’s been participating for a different amount of time, everyone’s experience is really pretty unique. With Dracula Daily on the other hand, everyone’s reading exactly the same book at exactly the same time and it’s fun.

10:34 a.m. May 09, 2022, UTC-4

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Tailscale's whole fricking thing was that you installed it and it just worked. Well I installed it and it doesn't work.

Okay I had to re-authenticate my laptop. Now it just works!

11:10 p.m. May 08, 2022, UTC-4

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“Seventeen months captivity to a sailor accompanied to the boundless ocean, is a worse punishment than human crime ever merited”

Ah! Dante would spend another 9 years in prison. My heart aches for him.

6:32 p.m. May 08, 2022, UTC-4

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The app formerly known as iTunes won't play music. Have to use my phone or the browser version.

4:52 p.m. May 08, 2022, UTC-4

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I realized my default problem solving mode doesn't take into account difficulty, like at all. I've been repeating to myself for the last 2

days, "what's the easiest way of doing this" because otherwise I ask, "what's the best way of doing this" and that frequently involves doing way more work than is necessary.

9:58 a.m. May 08, 2022, UTC-4

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Oh yeah I changed all the audio files on this website to mp3's so they can be listened to in Lagrange.

Also I found out that since Astronomical Theater (my Gemini server) reads certificates into memory when it starts, since it's been running for three months, the certificates had expired. Hm. I'll need to fix that somehow.

11:23 p.m. May 07, 2022, UTC-4

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“Big Rock Candy Mountain” is a good song.

8:32 p.m. May 07, 2022, UTC-4

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Accidentally ended up on a toll road and had to use my 2019 War in the Pacific quarter. Kinda devastated.

12:15 a.m. May 07, 2022, UTC-4

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"Celebrate" could have been such a good song. Like it's good, but it's almost great.

5:29 p.m. May 05, 2022, UTC-4

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It's 56 degrees outside why am I sweating I hate this.

4:59 p.m. May 05, 2022, UTC-4

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“baby every me is me, we are the mask and the wearer”

4:40 p.m. May 05, 2022, UTC-4

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I have no brain cells I am a tree.

7:12 a.m. May 05, 2022, UTC-4

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I think I need to spend more time on Reddit. I think that would be great for my mental health. Yes.

2:25 a.m. May 05, 2022, UTC-4

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I'm just going to say it. We NEED more unity, we need more acceptance, we need more moderate voices. (tw politics below the fold)

I respect you. I respect you if you're trans, if you're religious, if you're pro-life or pro-choice or gay or straight or democrat or republican or too preoccupied to vote.

And that respect is so important. And the rhetoric on the political left recently is, 'you need to disrespect everyone who doesn't agree 100%.' And I mean, this is because I surround myself with extremely left leaning media/content. I spend most of my time on Tumblr and Reddit. I'm sure the right is just as bad. But's frustrating to know that no one there respects me or my views. There are a lot of directions this post could go and just about all of them are me complaining and/or having a breakdown.

I guess what I'm saying is that I think about posting about politics on here a lot, and I don't, because I don't care that much and I don't want to offend anyone. But I don't want you to forget that I am a human being and I do have opinions and views on topics that I don't post. And it's easier for you to just assume that I agree with you on everything, but I won't.

(The subtext here is the recently leaked supreme court decision. The coverage I've seen (again, from Tumblr and Reddit) has showed no little or no respect for the pro-life side, which is a position that I respect. But, as a man, I don't have particularly strong feelings about abortion, and a lot of other things get to me more.)

I guess, this is about me. Everything I post here is about me. I NEED more unity, more acceptance of moderate positions, etc.

I'm so tired and I'm procrastinating from doing work I can't take this aaahahhh

11:47 p.m. May 04, 2022, UTC-4

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I don't know who I'm supposed to be.

7:23 p.m. May 04, 2022, UTC-4

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Bang!

3:42 p.m. May 04, 2022, UTC-4

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I am a political commentator

2:41 p.m. May 04, 2022, UTC-4

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Aaahhhah

11:09 a.m. May 04, 2022, UTC-4

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The End of an Era of Dreams

11:44 p.m. May 03, 2022, UTC-4

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Why does Feinberg have 6,845 final kills I can't! Some men are just superior.

10:28 p.m. May 03, 2022, UTC-4

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In those days Peter stood up among the believers (a group numbering about a hundred and twenty) and said,

"Brothers and sisters, the Scripture had to be fulfilled in which the Holy Spirit spoke long ago through David concerning Judas, who served as guide for those who arrested Jesus. He was one of our number and shared in our ministry."

…

"For," said Peter, "it is written in the Book of Psalms: 'May his place be deserted; / let there be no one to dwell in it,' and, 'May another take his place of leadership.'

"Therefore it is necessary to choose one of the men who have been with us the whole time the Lord Jesus was living among us, beginning from John’s baptism to the time when Jesus was taken up from us. For one of these must become a witness with us of his resurrection."

So they nominated two men: Joseph called Barsabbas (also known as Justus) and Matthias. Then they prayed, "Lord, you know everyone’s heart. Show us which of these two you have chosen to take over this apostolic ministry, which Judas left to go where he belongs." Then they cast lots, and the lot fell to Matthias; so he was added to the eleven apostles.

-Matthias Chosen to Replace Judas, Acts 1:15-26

9:52 p.m. May 03, 2022, UTC-4

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This is a reminder that search here is still in beta. Hopefully I'll be able to add a link to it soon.

1:31 p.m. May 03, 2022, UTC-4

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I've lost control. I'm just done. Out of it.

10:48 a.m. May 03, 2022, UTC-4

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This website is a prayer.

(Didn't hit submit on this one last night.)

10:47 a.m. May 03, 2022, UTC-4

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"How great is our God." "Worthy of all praise." "All will see how great is our God."

12:44 a.m. May 03, 2022, UTC-4

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"Move" is just such a song that it dominates the whole album (*saintmoteltelevision*)

9:29 a.m. May 02, 2022, UTC-4

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Oh my word

11:24 p.m. May 01, 2022, UTC-4

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Search is fixed.

The issue was that I didn't specify a home directory for Django when launching it from Apache, so when it went to lookup the search template it looked it up relative to `/`. (Search is the only thing effected since the other template lookups are preformed relative to the `thoughts` app.) (This wasn't caught locally because locally the working directory inherits from the working directory of the terminal.)

Here's the weird thing. The commit that made this change renamed things, sure, but shouldn't have effected this behavior. I have no idea why it now decides that it needs a working directory set. I'm going to look into it more, will edit if I find anything.

10:57 p.m. May 01, 2022, UTC-4

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Fighting with NickServ again

10:42 p.m. May 01, 2022, UTC-4

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Happy May Day/Loyalty Day depending on which you celebrate

6:24 p.m. May 01, 2022, UTC-4

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The Sky is Falling Cinema

6:04 p.m. May 01, 2022, UTC-4

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It's thundering outside IRL and my first thought is legitimately "AA," I'm ruined.

5:00 p.m. May 01, 2022, UTC-4

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Alternate universe where my message is downloaded from the server.

1:15 p.m. May 01, 2022, UTC-4

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The issue I'm currently having effects the search index, so search is down indefinitely.

2:35 p.m. Apr 30, 2022, UTC-4

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Okay, let's just do everything.

2:35 p.m. Apr 30, 2022, UTC-4

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This is a little embarrassing so I might delete these in a minute.

2:21 p.m. Apr 30, 2022, UTC-4

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That failed but hopefully this one will work.

1:53 p.m. Apr 30, 2022, UTC-4

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This is a quick test post, excuse me.

1:50 p.m. Apr 30, 2022, UTC-4

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One of the things that's so nice about interpreted languages to me is that they have a 0-complexity build process.

1:45 p.m. Apr 30, 2022, UTC-4

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I'm still not over what a good game *World of Goo* was. Like top 5 games all time IMO. Not even gameplay wise, but the aesthetic, the story.

1:25 p.m. Apr 29, 2022, UTC-4

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Tried a MoonPie. Tastes like they haven’t changed the recipe since 1917. I couldn’t force myself to finish it.

12:15 p.m. Apr 29, 2022, UTC-4

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Absolutely incredible Wikipedia page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_films

You're like, 'this is a conspiracy theory or a coincidence' and then there are like 500 examples of movies about exactly the same thing released the same year. "Zzyzx" and "Zzyzx Road" both released in 2006 and "Both are thrillers about people trying to hide a dead body."

11:37 p.m. Apr 28, 2022, UTC-4

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For some reason when I have Better Touch Tool running, Minecraft freezes for about half a second when I left click.

10:59 p.m. Apr 28, 2022, UTC-4

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I just hate that complex software, like Minecraft for example, there are just these huge, easy to reproduce bugs, and we just accept that

they will never get fixed. If you start a Minecraft hardcore world, move outside of the spawn chunks (~500 blocks), and die, attempting to re-open the world will freeze/softlock the game. This behavior has existed since 1.14, released 3 years ago.

MC-157812 and MC-248926, having priority Important and Very Important.

(Before 1.18 you could open the world, but no terrain would load, so you could at least close the world again. In 1.18 the application just freezes and you have to quit it.)

And I can't even complain. Because this isn't even that bad of an issue. There are literally thousands (>8,000) open bugs. But Mojang's devs aren't working on fixing them, or if they are, they're working on the bugs in the snapshots that effect the new features and not the unglamorous bugs from 5 years ago.

There are some projects, like the micro text editor, for example, where there are hundreds of open bugs and the project is unmaintained. But the bugs are most weird, difficult to reproduce edge cases or feature requests, or the types of things that aren't a big deal. Like there's a very real idea of a "stale" bug report that just needs to be closed at some point.

But iTerm2 has almost 3,000 open issues and some of them are clearly not stale.

At some point humanity has to slow down and fix some bugs, right?

10:50 p.m. Apr 28, 2022, UTC-4

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I really want an operating system that doesn’t include any applications but does include all the tooling to make applications.

6:41 p.m. Apr 27, 2022, UTC-4

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I don't know if this is a hot take but Oauth seems like a bad idea and I'd rather create a new email+password account for every website.

3:27 p.m. Apr 27, 2022, UTC-4

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"focusing on the past is really only ego"

3:15 p.m. Apr 27, 2022, UTC-4

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I've already won, and this is just a victory lap.

2:48 p.m. Apr 27, 2022, UTC-4

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Man I want an excuse to write some Elm code.

1:09 p.m. Apr 27, 2022, UTC-4

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It is now time for Silly Songs with Larry, the part of the page where Larry comes out and sings a silly song.

Okay uh if you're a lawyer from Big Idea and you want to serve me a take down request please contact me at Matthias.Portzel at gmail, I just love following the law and I'm not willing to have this site taken down for copyright reasons.

gemini://thoughts.learnerpages.com/media/ae33409d-c7ee-415d-927c-0eecf6fefcf1.mp4

11:45 p.m. Apr 26, 2022, UTC-4

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You don't even know how much gets filtered from this site. Like The Count of Monte Cristo is so over represented because I'd rather admit

I'm daydreaming about him than that I'm daydreaming about any number of other fictional characters.

I can't decide if it makes or undermines the point if I don't mention other characters.

Like did Hermione really capture a woman and keep her in a jar for like days? What the hell is going on in Trevor's, *A Day*? Is Rachel's treatment of torivors inhumane?

11:02 p.m. Apr 26, 2022, UTC-4

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I realized that one of the problems with my life philosophy is that it's very easy to lose track of progress.

Going back to

"the first item on my

TODO list is: 'Make every piece of software in the world perfect.'"

Someone used the analogy of climbing/digging out of a hole, and it's like, I don't even feel like I'm in a hole, I feel like I'm in the middle of an endless, bottomless, pit. In my life philosophy there is no "good enough" and there is no "too bad" there's just this infinite vertical tube stretching above and below me.

And somewhere, miles above me, is "make every piece of software in the world perfect," but like, that's not what I'm going to do today.

So I need to focus on moving upwards even when it's not clear that I'm making progress, because the tube is so long, or because there aren't nice landmarks.

10:00 p.m. Apr 25, 2022, UTC-4

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I'm just waaayy too black and white as a person. Like the reason I have to say "always more nuance" is because I forget that there's nuance.

9:19 p.m. Apr 25, 2022, UTC-4

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Tumblr was bought for 1,000 million dollars, and sold for 3 million dollars. Elon's looking at 54,000 million for Twitter.

Version just gave Tumblr away for free, for all intents and purposes. Wild numbers.

1:55 p.m. Apr 25, 2022, UTC-4

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The only good thing to come out of The Eric Andre Show is the "We'll Be Right Back" clip.

9:31 a.m. Apr 25, 2022, UTC-4

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I use https://learnxinyminutes.com so fricking much. It's amazing.

Is it "bool" or "boolean" or "Boolean"? Who knows. cmd+f "bool"

2:32 p.m. Apr 24, 2022, UTC-4

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Here's an unpopular opinion. Having Show Invisibles on in your code editor is just better. I see mixed spaces and tabs so often

in coding projects and this wouldn't happen if people didn't use settings that made it visually impossible to tell them apart. Every editor has an option to allow you to see the whitespace in your code, and if you're using a good editor theme, it should be faint enough to be completely unobtrusive.

2:03 p.m. Apr 24, 2022, UTC-4

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I don't know why I try when I know it's going to fail.

11:57 a.m. Apr 24, 2022, UTC-4

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Please stop mentioning me on Slack, I don’t know what Slack is or why it exists.

11:20 a.m. Apr 24, 2022, UTC-4

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"You can run on for a long time, but sooner or later God'll cut you down."

9:27 a.m. Apr 24, 2022, UTC-4

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Perchance

9:26 a.m. Apr 24, 2022, UTC-4

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Protosocial

9:26 a.m. Apr 24, 2022, UTC-4

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Okay okay, the Count of Monte Cristo is an alias that is currently convient to use for the Matthias who has a similar personality.

9:31 p.m. Apr 23, 2022, UTC-4

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Yes, the Count of Monte Cristo does live inside my head and tell me what to do, cope.

9:26 p.m. Apr 23, 2022, UTC-4

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So I created the council of Matthiases (inside my head) in the hopes that one of the Matthiases would have a life philosophy that worked

and solved all my problems but so far none of them have.

They make good arguments and can help me solidify and enumerate options, but it's really a garbage decision making technique because after listening to them I still have to make a decision.

Some of the Matthiases (because I think you'll find this funny):

Matthias Portzel

Matthias 1.0

Matthias 2.0

Saihttam

The Count of Monte Cristo

Mel

Christian

The Matthias that wrote the about page (I'm not sure how to refer to him. System 1?)

9:26 p.m. Apr 23, 2022, UTC-4

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What would make this better?

Would I be happier in a culture that encouraged positive feedback? Where people complimented me. Or would that hurt too?

What is my real problem?

8:38 p.m. Apr 23, 2022, UTC-4

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I was really fricking confused when learning LISP because I kept trying to understand the datatypes and like the differences between them.

Like I'd see Lisp code use `hello` or `:hello` or `'hello` or `"hello"` and I was like, oh, it's got this special "token" datatype that you offset with `:` and it's got strings and it's symbols and they were all different things in my head. But no. Lisp has lists, and it has symbols, and that's it. And there's some syntax sugar/parsing rules where some symbols evaluate as values and some variables don't. `:hello` is just the symbol `:hello` (`:` isn't a special character at all as far as I can tell). The quote character means "don't evaluate the following symbol". Similarly `"` seems to indicate just that the symbol including `"` isn't evaluated. `(eq? '"hello" "hello")` is true.

This is a dumb post because I still don't know what I'm talking about and I'm kind of talking about common lisp and kind of talking about scheme/racket.

The point is, Lisp is wild. It's almost more like writing JSON than JS.

8:03 p.m. Apr 23, 2022, UTC-4

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I have encountered a roadbump. I have stopped.

7:35 p.m. Apr 23, 2022, UTC-4

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This is improv comedy.

7:44 a.m. Apr 23, 2022, UTC-4

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The voice in my head just won’t stop repeating that everyone hates me.

12:17 a.m. Apr 23, 2022, UTC-4

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Wait VS Code lets you diff every time you save a file, even without Git or a dedicated SCM. Wild

1:37 p.m. Apr 22, 2022, UTC-4

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"when I was in seventh grade, in the fall of 1963"

12:26 p.m. Apr 22, 2022, UTC-4

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Oh my word there is a canonical recording of 4'33". This is incredible.

It's got like a metronome sound and the occasional background noise. Not to mention the white noise. It feels like I'm there in the orchestra pit.

https://music.apple.com/us/album/433/406490689?i=406490698

https://thoughts.learnerpages.com/?show=4e7bee6b-dfdc-4775-89fa-cb97cff1a9c3

1:27 p.m. Apr 21, 2022, UTC-4

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I'm tired of living here. I don't want to exist in the universe anymore! I want to exist in the alternate universe where jan Misali uploaded

toki pona lesson three in March like they said they were going to!

12:33 p.m. Apr 21, 2022, UTC-4

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I have a theory that there are some people who just have the ability to get things done.

8:47 a.m. Apr 21, 2022, UTC-4

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Gemini users are just built different.

8:11 a.m. Apr 21, 2022, UTC-4

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I do not trust linters or auto-code formatters. `autopep8` is disgusting to me.

PEP8 is impossible to programmatically enforce.

PEP8 is ambiguous.

PEP8 defers to human judgment about what makes code look good.

You CANNOT implement a tool that programmatically enforces PEP8.

The fact that you think that you can, tells me that you fundamentally do not understand PEP8, fundamentally do not understand the concept of aesthetically pleasing code (which by definition subjective), and are either dumb or arrogant to try to implement it anyways.

We've been through this already. There was linting tool called `pep8`. And they CHANGED THEIR NAME because THE CREATOR OF PYTHON asked them to because PEP8 is not programmatically enforceable. And it was causing confusing from people who looked at the tool called "pep8" and assumed that it would output things that were consistent with PEP8 (which is impossible because PEP8 is subjective).

Please rename this tool

But now, years later, someone else comes along and they've figured it out! They've got an auto-code formatter that actually implements PEP8 correctly! And so they're going to call it autopep8! Despite the fact that it like, has open bugs, from years ago, where it syntactically changes the behavior of your program!, as is clearly required by PEP8.

https://github.com/hhatto/autopep8/issues/539

I've blocked the creator of auto-pep-8 on Github. I have no interest in interacting with them.

I have more respect for Black. I'm not opposed to the entire category. But the two paragraph introduction to Black does not mention aesthetics or PEP8 at all. Black's position is 'code should not be formatted by humans. Uniformity is more important than human judgment.'

I do not agree with Black's position. I think that code should be beautiful. And I do not use a linter because I do not believe that it is possible for the linter to recognize beautiful code.

Edit: The post was written under the assumption that autopep8 was a newer tool, which in fact it pre-dates the mentioned request to not call things pep8.

6:48 p.m. Apr 20, 2022, UTC-4

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I tried to turn off the pop-up boxes in VS Code when you have hover over something, and it kind of worked, but now there's an empty box.

gemini://thoughts.learnerpages.com/media/c601c7a4-e8df-4150-8e3d-5456d15c4360.png

3:57 p.m. Apr 20, 2022, UTC-4

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Javascript has a lot of annoying corner cases, but it makes up for it by being the most powerful programming language currently.

3:43 p.m. Apr 20, 2022, UTC-4

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I'm an infinite number of people and none of them are who you want me to be.

12:07 p.m. Apr 20, 2022, UTC-4

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Apache 2.0 License requires that "You must cause any modified files to carry prominent notices stating that You changed the files"

It's trivial to find pull requests on Apache 2 licensed software that don't include prominent notices stating they changed the files.

Why is that in the license? Do you really mean that? Like.

At some point open source-software licenses are just like a way to virtue-signal that you're not going to sue people. Especially for the FSF's recommended licenses (like Apache 2) which have 10 clauses that nobody reads. There's a patent infringement clause that I don't understand! but I think means that if you sue for patent infringement it opens you up to copy right lawsuit because you're not respecting the terms of the software license.

I don't get it. Why is it not enough to say "I waive copyright on this software." Why does it have to be "you can use the software AS LONG AS you CLEARLY INDICATE if you modify anything." FSF talks big about "unconditional right to modify" and then they stick a fricking condition on your right to modify. I could go on for a while. The point is. If I can't read and understand your software license, then I'm just trusting that you're not going to sue me and you might as reserve all copyright.

11:57 p.m. Apr 19, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Hofstadter's sense of humor in *GEB* reminds me of *Sideways Stories from Wayside School*.

I guess *GEB* is much less surreal. But the wordplay!

I haven't picked up *GEB* in months and I'm still not over "central dogmap"

2:42 p.m. Apr 19, 2022, UTC-4

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I am Matthias. I'm Matthias. Ahhh. Brain empty no thoughts just air. I wonder if getting 4 hours of sleep last night contributed to that.

Had some wild dreams last night. Your mind just kind of makes stuff up.

9:17 a.m. Apr 19, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

The problem with the Free Software movement is that it's trying to fix socioeconomic problems with a software license.

12:57 a.m. Apr 19, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I wish perfect music existed.

I wish I existed.

10:58 p.m. Apr 18, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

🅱️

10:58 p.m. Apr 18, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I think even when I "succeed" I still feel like I've failed if I haven't transcended. Probably a lot of my problem.

5:13 p.m. Apr 18, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

It's difficult to describe how cracked Feinberg's AA gameplay is.

AA is like Minecraft's 100% category. It's basically 'do everything in Minecraft'. And no one runs it because it's so hard. It's random seed, a random world, right. So you have to keep track of everything in the game and route these like 100 advancements, dynamically. RSG Any% is hard to route and you have to keep track of like 5 things.

Illumina, the undisputed GOAT of Minecraft speedrunning, got the AA WR a year ago with a fourteen (14) hour time!

It's impressive to watch, as a Minecraft player, because it looks like someone playing Minecraft normally, just super fast. Any% looks so different from normal gameplay, and AA doesn't.

So it seems like anyone could be the best. Or like, it requires so many different skills that no one can handle it.

But somehow Feinberg just wins. Feinberg has nine (9) runs between 3 and 4 hours. It's just insane.

I don't even like Feinberg. But it's just so impressive to me.

12:17 a.m. Apr 18, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I just open Feinberg's stream and he's just finished a 9th sub-4 hour AA run.

11:52 p.m. Apr 17, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

How do you get suspended from Mastodon? Please The_Quantum_Alpha what are you doing?

The_Quantum_Alpha was a user that hung out in the Vivaldi Discord server for a while. He and his fiancé used #off-topic as a group chat instead of like, texting each other. I think he eventually got banned for picking fights with other users and generally being rude. If you told him he was wrong, he'd bring up his multiple PhDs. There was a second woman who followed him around, I think it was like another girlfriend but I'm not sure, and it could also be like his daughter. There's a high likelihood, I guess, that it was a single person engaging in an extended role play. But I also like to believe there are people just that unhinged. Anyways I tried to find his Mastodon but apparently he got banned (from multiple instances), so yeah. Looks like he's hanging out on MeWe.com these days, but I'm not signing up for that!

11:49 p.m. Apr 17, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

The Vivaldi Discord server is fricking iconic

11:17 p.m. Apr 17, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

TD Ameritrade uses SMS TFA and I hate it.

10:22 p.m. Apr 17, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

"Global cooling" is a great Wikipedia article. It wants to ensure that you do not believe anything there, but it comes across too strong

and is only convincing me that global warming is a conspiracy and that the climate scientists are trying to cover up global cooling, the real crisis.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling

7:16 p.m. Apr 17, 2022, UTC-4

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My database is , uh, a table written on a whiteboard with “DO NOT ERASE” written next to it

4:53 p.m. Apr 17, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Gotta remember why I do this.

Soli Deo gloria.

1:25 p.m. Apr 17, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Happy Easter!

He is risen indeed!

8:31 a.m. Apr 17, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

be me

9:30pm

haven’t eaten dinner

hungry

remove 2lb of chicken from fridge

use by: Mar 31

dice

throw in pan for 20 minutes

add BBQ sauce

dinner

10:10 p.m. Apr 16, 2022, UTC-4

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Thinking about *Eli* by Bill Myers. It's really hard to do present-day Jesus, and I think Myers does a pretty good job. Although he cheats a

little bit by setting the story in a parallel universe which is more similar to biblical times.

5:35 p.m. Apr 16, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I have no problem reading serif fonts on paper, but for some reason I much prefer san-serif fonts on a screen.

5:31 p.m. Apr 16, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I'm just now learning that Java uses the *compiletime* type of a variable in order to do field lookups.

9:04 a.m. Apr 16, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

gemini://thoughts.learnerpages.com/media/8b7ac88b-8583-4a46-b9ca-dc37f613c7a3.mp3

11:40 p.m. Apr 15, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I wonder if LuaJit made a deal with the devil in exchange for its speed.

11:07 p.m. Apr 15, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I have a theory that I'm allergic to meat.

10:00 p.m. Apr 15, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

'You can call this a class and you can call me a teacher but we're on a learning journey together.'

-Josh

9:58 p.m. Apr 15, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I just want to shout-out modern food preservation techniques. I sometimes eat food that's weeks after its expiration date.

7:17 p.m. Apr 15, 2022, UTC-4

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One of the goals of Thu was to eliminate the distinction that Java makes between compile-time type and run-time type.

(It's difficult to draw the same line in Thu, since Thu has "variable type," which is like Java's compile time type, in that it can be determined semantically. But in Thu, it also exists at run-time in a meaningful way, whereas Java throws the compile-time type away. I don't mind having typed variables and untyped data.)

Unfortunately, I felt that static methods, or what Thu calls `typefunction`s, were necessary. Which means that any given keyword-property lookup could be in reference to a Type-function or a data-function, depending on how the data was declared. Maybe you could fix that just by requiring type functions to be called with e.g. `:` instead of `.`.

Edit! Nevermind, Type-functions are only callable by the language, i.e. there is no syntax to call them. I don't know if that's better.

2:11 p.m. Apr 15, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Re-reading the Thu design doc. I think it describes a really interesting coding style. It would be similar to writing code with a bunch of

`assert`s, with the intention of catching errors as quickly as possible at run-time. The Thu philosophy is to error as soon as encountering undefined behavior, but at runtime, not compile time. I don't see any other languages really doing that.

https://ourjseditor.com/program/S5ShEy

2:00 p.m. Apr 15, 2022, UTC-4

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Somehow my escape key broke. In software. It's not a keyboard or TouchBar issue; I've plugged in an external keyboard, and my computer

refuses to acknowledge that the escape key is being pressed. Happens across multiple applications. I guess I'm going to restart my computer but I don't know what would cause this.

1:01 p.m. Apr 15, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

"Extraregional" is such a cool term for a Minecraft speedrunning strat.

8:26 a.m. Apr 15, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

“They were more likely to do silly things, like die in tar pits,”

8:04 a.m. Apr 15, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Feeling sane enough today to do laundry and fold and put it away, which hasn't happened in a single day in, a long time.

7:51 p.m. Apr 14, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Moved my Mac to use the Catppuccin theme in a bunch of places.

2:34 p.m. Apr 14, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

It's weird how to get to the 4th floor you only have to go up three flights of steps.

12:40 p.m. Apr 14, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

The best way to describe my problem is that negative feedback hurts me more than silence does.

10:28 a.m. Apr 14, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Ah I have so much anxiety.

10:26 a.m. Apr 14, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

If I could remember people’s names I’d be unstoppable.

7:40 a.m. Apr 14, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

RFC 791 (IPv4) (1981) avoids "byte" in favor of "octet," which they define as an "eight bit byte." Ya' know, unlike those other-length bytes

9:29 p.m. Apr 13, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I'm sorry, Atom is too buggy, I can't take it, we're moving to VS Code.

I love everyone who has ever worked on Atom <3

8:45 p.m. Apr 12, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

All I want is one perfect website.

6:01 p.m. Apr 12, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

VoiceOver is so bad on this website. I can't figure out how to fix it. I'm so uuhhgggaashhh

5:59 p.m. Apr 12, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I want to print out each panel of "Choices", Monroe, and arrange them around around my wall in a non-linear fashion.

2:23 p.m. Apr 12, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

This is temporary.

10:58 a.m. Apr 12, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I should try posting poetry on YikYak.

9:38 a.m. Apr 12, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Thinking about our value of candidness. There's definitely a trend in making things seem spontaneous. That's something that I kind of wish I

had pushed back against in making this website. My Twitter was originally conceived as an experiment in spontaneity, which proved to be successful and was translated here, but at some point that morphed into a more intentional desire for the Thoughts here to be unrefined, which I would be uncomfortable applying more generally.

This is about YikYak, which is just this site but scoped by location and publicly available.

"poetry is dead in part because we value candidness"

9:38 a.m. Apr 12, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

The use of smartphones as a fidget toy is under appreciated.

9:08 a.m. Apr 12, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Working on a theory that I'm addicted to novelty.

9:06 a.m. Apr 12, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

WSL is going to kill Linux on the desktop. The future that we're *very rapidly* headed towards is Linux running natively in servers and as a

subsystem for development on Windows, which allows you to develop software targeting those servers, but it's recognized as a platform in its own right.

It's possible I'm wrong and WSL users are brand new Linux users, and the same number of people, or more, will use Linux as a desktop natively.

But I'm very concerned about the possibility of a majority of Linux users being WSL users, in which case Microsoft would have a lot of influence over the direction the Linux project goes.

11:44 p.m. Apr 11, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Oh my word, `python` is gone! It feels weird.

6:06 p.m. Apr 11, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I found my missing AirPod.

5:04 p.m. Apr 11, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I'm missing a single Airpod.

10:27 a.m. Apr 11, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

My problem is that someone mentioned Kant's *Critique of Pure Reason* like a week ago and now I have a tab open with a PDF of it.

I do not know when, if ever, I will close the tab.

10:17 a.m. Apr 11, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Slowly going insane.

10:10 a.m. Apr 11, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Why would I go to college, work hard, get a job at reputable company, when I could just make software that DOESN'T WORK and get paid for it‽

The Better Touch Tool buttons stopped working again. And then Vivaldi crashed.

Thankfully both are working now, but like. I pay money for these softwares for a reason. It seems reasonable to expect a minimum of functionality from them.

10:29 p.m. Apr 10, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Just realized `pacman` is short for *pac*age *man*ager and is not in fact named after the video game character.

8:07 p.m. Apr 10, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Apparently the search page on here `-term` to remove `term` from the search results. Huh. Advantages of using a pre-baked search library Ig

4:36 p.m. Apr 10, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Per-season numbers

[('Spring 2022', 231), ('Winter 2021', 692), ('Fall 2021', 386), ('Summer 2021', 375), ('Spring 2021', 317), ('Winter 2020', 410), ('Fall 2020', 584)]

This is the first one of these to show Winter 2021 with the new record of 7.7 Thoughts/day, beating out the first season of this site.

4:34 p.m. Apr 10, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I'm pretty happy with *Further Joy*.

3:53 p.m. Apr 10, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

The most effective questions explain the asker's current dubious understanding.

1:32 p.m. Apr 10, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

First version of the HPL is done. I don't have any software to release with it right now, however.

11:26 a.m. Apr 10, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

“The Grupo Bimbo family of baking companies”

10:15 a.m. Apr 10, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I’m addicted to Novelty.

10:08 a.m. Apr 10, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

XKCD 45 gets funnier the more times you read it. You’re a true XKCD fan when you find #45 funny.

10:07 a.m. Apr 10, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Being able to mute audio on a per-tab basis is so fundamental to modern browser use that it's hard to believe it was added like a couple

years ago.

11:16 p.m. Apr 09, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Dearth Vader is still such a good character

8:33 p.m. Apr 09, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

gemini://thoughts.learnerpages.com/media/8b9a60f6-bff3-43c1-8e22-6f10ef3e6a20.png

12:51 p.m. Apr 09, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Might email Thomas and ask why they don’t sell chocolate chip bagels.

11:04 a.m. Apr 09, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Welcome to whatever this is.

1:27 p.m. Apr 08, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

It feels like a “Happy Tuesday” kind of day.

4:47 a.m. Apr 08, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Didn't know Firefox did DNS over HTTPs, that's pretty poggers.

9:19 p.m. Apr 07, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

All I want. Is to be able to write React and SSR it. Gatsby is like using GraphQL for something. Like if you have data in the filesystem

Gatsby will import it into a graphQL database and then you can create pages based off the result of querying that database. But there's no docs on how to use that. I quote:

A GraphQL query is made in the second half of the file to get the Markdown data. Gatsby has automagically given you all the Markdown metadata and HTML in this query’s result.

Note: To learn more about GraphQL, consider this excellent resource

And then it links to a 45 minute video course on GraphQL.

4:14 p.m. Apr 07, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I switched to VSCodium from VS Code and it didn't keep any of my settings.

I'm still mostly using Atom, but there are some things Atom doesn't do well, like in-line git diffs or remote file editing.

2:47 p.m. Apr 07, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

It is, it's like there's a monster above, looming over me. I just want to curl up into a ball.

A little bit of anxiety and little bit of stress. But it's like mostly dread.

But I still find plenty, or at least enough, happiness down here in my little blob. I don't know. I want the new Regrettes album.

2:42 p.m. Apr 07, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Faceless.

11:00 a.m. Apr 07, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I’m still Matthias.

9:18 a.m. Apr 07, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

"you are now entering: Sparsely Populated, PA"

8:47 a.m. Apr 07, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Thinking about "The Flea" again.

12:25 a.m. Apr 07, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I almost suspect my pain tolerance has decreased with age.

5:55 p.m. Apr 06, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

To follow up on "Monads and Promises are the same thing", apparently his claim is that Monads and Promises and Optionals are all equivalent.

I see where he's coming from. Promises implement optional-style features. But they're also frequently used as a way to implement async functionality.

Edit (5:59pm): I am unclear on whether Monads in Haskell are frequently used for async tasks.

4:18 p.m. Apr 06, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Apparently there's no `Math.sum(a, b, […a, b])` in JS? What is this?

(…args => args.reduce((acc, v) => acc + v, 0))

4:07 p.m. Apr 06, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

UX is all there is.

2:41 p.m. Apr 06, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Have you ever starved yourself?

10:07 a.m. Apr 06, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Apparently Windows just doesn't include flag emojis. Suck it windows users. 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸

8:59 a.m. Apr 06, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

"I feel like me and 3D space aren't meant to be together"

"I feel like a two dimensional creature that just lives in a three dimensional world."

11:21 p.m. Apr 05, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Remind me at some point to write and license software under the "Handstand Public License"

8:39 p.m. Apr 05, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Listening to breakcore unironically.

7:49 p.m. Apr 05, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Let me try to say something about literature fiction, that is, the short story. It lacks plot. But plot I of course don't mean plot. I mean

momentum. It lacks flow. One sentence comes after the next in a steady beat but there's no crescendo.

Edit (2:52pm): This is, of course, not true.

2:02 p.m. Apr 05, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Somehow I just learned that Josh Wardle of Wordle is /u/powerlanguage, the Reddit admin in charge of the original 2017 /r/place (edit:

and like a bunch of other stuff at Reddit).

Something about the internet being small or there being a social elite.

12:02 p.m. Apr 05, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I'm working on a theory that people that say they're "grinding" aren't actually doing that much work.

7:46 a.m. Apr 05, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

"Maybe things will make sense if we kiss"

-I Love Us, The Regrettes

also, "I got so good at lonely"

11:09 p.m. Apr 04, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Okay I have a confession to make. I don't know how to use CSS Flexbox. Never used it.

10:54 p.m. Apr 04, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Apparently Monads and Promises are the same thing????????

4:11 p.m. Apr 04, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

The thing that just tears me up every day is that I enjoy writing. I have things to say, this website is my proof. But no one is interested

in listening to me. I want people to listen to me. My love language is you listening to me.

1:10 p.m. Apr 04, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I think I may be too frugal.

12:59 p.m. Apr 04, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Because I say I hate myself, and in a way I do. A part of me does. But there's another part of me that loves, not who I am, but something.

Copium

12:46 p.m. Apr 04, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

It's so hard to care about two incompatible things.

"How lucky am I to have two things I love"

-Christmas In June, AJR

12:44 p.m. Apr 04, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I'm still alive, somehow.

12:29 p.m. Apr 04, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Why is it all so hard?

6:26 p.m. Apr 03, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I was today years old when I realized U2's albums *Songs of Innocence* and *Songs of Experience* were a reference to William Blake's poetry

collection, *Songs of Innocence and of Experience*

10:50 a.m. Apr 03, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

For some reason there are multiple Hytale logos on /r/place. Like the game isn’t even out yet. I don’t get it.

8:45 a.m. Apr 03, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

LETS FRICKING GOOOOO!

11:11 p.m. Apr 02, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

April fools RFC for this year

https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9225.html

"The universal deployment of IP networks on Avian Carriers [RFC1149] is facing a multi-decade delay. After operators discovered that birds are not real…"

9:54 p.m. Apr 02, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I regret making that Thought. I listened to a single Lorde song and I'm over it. No Lorde phase for me.

8:31 p.m. Apr 02, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Yep, I'm definitely going through a Lorde phase.

8:14 p.m. Apr 02, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I'm the type of person who saves my receipts to add them to the growing pile of receipts on my desk.

2:01 p.m. Apr 02, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I'm so good at staying away from things that make me angry that it's easy for me to forget that I have anger issues.

1:45 p.m. Apr 02, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

It's difficult for me to describe how much content Tumblr put out for this April fools prank. There's like what would be 7 "normal" April

fools pranks in one.

- A bunch of random buttons that light up or make sounds or do nothing

- Crab button that adds crabs to the page. Clicking on crabs captures them and spawns money. Crabs display little textboxes of what they're on top of. If they stay alive for long enough, hovering over them gives a "Friend <3" textbox.

- Sponge button that covers the page with dirt and gives you a sponge to clean it off.

- A button that opens a tiny minigame with bars that you move up and down for points (I can't play it because the hundred crabs on my screen keep getting in my way)

- Wizard button that generates emoji spells, and a gravestone button that generates quotes

- Brick Whartley, a brick in a suit that is behind this click-a-thon. They have a Tumblr account and a LinkedIn account.

- Typing in the post box makes Honking sounds.

- I'm even sure how I got on this page: https://www.tumblr.com/humans.txt No idea how much content is here I haven't bothered going through it.

- There's a button that adds a train to the bottom of the page. Started that and forgot about it.

10:00 p.m. Apr 01, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Tumblr really gave us a Blorbo for April Fools day. What we really wanted. Brb connecting with Brick Whartley on LinkedIn.

9:06 p.m. Apr 01, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I want a functional programming language like Haskell but with Julia's Multiple Dispatch.

Haskell *kind of* has this. Types in Haskell can have different constructors, (which can be almost completely different, almost like subclasses or classes implementing an interface or something), and you can overload a function to work with different constructors of the same class. But what's beautiful about Julia is how much the language embraces overriding methods and using them for every different type imaginable.

3:56 p.m. Apr 01, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

An April Fools day prank from this website has been delayed indefinitely. Expect it (or don't) in a couple of weeks.

1:45 p.m. Apr 01, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

If you make the fake appealing enough, people stop caring that it's fake.

1:11 p.m. Apr 01, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Okay, so the problem was that w3m wants to edit textareas in an external editor, but it couldn't find vi.

This was throwing an error to stderr, but I can't see that when I'm inside of w3m. What's dumb is that my $EDITOR was set to neovim, since I don't have vi installed, but w3m ignored that. (You might be able to argue that you need vi to be Unix complient, but Linux isn't Unix compliant, so I don't think that's what's going on.) Anyways, apologies for the spelling errors, this was written inside Neovim from w3m.

11:42 a.m. Apr 01, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Okay so for some reason I can edit <input type=text> in w3m (by pressing enter), but I can't edit <textarea>'s, obviously.

11:34 a.m. Apr 01, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Managed to open this post page in w3m and authenticate. I can't figure out to input text into the textbox. How do people make applications

this bad? I can select the textbox but typing doesn't let me insert and the manual for this app hasn't been updated in years.

11:25 a.m. Apr 01, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

You know why I stopped using Atom? The spell correction is just garbage. Look at this.

gemini://thoughts.learnerpages.com/media/3f25eeff-e69c-4474-b3fc-fa5d70a0e68e.png

11:05 p.m. Mar 31, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I'm having to restrain myself from clowning on APL because the extent of my criticism is that APL385 is an ugly fricking font.

Like having it set at 13px is a bad idea, and forcing me to recognize characters that I've literally never seen before is super painful. But that only exacerbates the real problem which is this font. Look at that W. Who allowed that? It's like Comic Sans. 'This is my programming language, guys, you have to write it in comic sans.'

gemini://thoughts.learnerpages.com/media/0350ad3f-81f0-449b-9b90-f08403a63af0.png

10:10 p.m. Mar 31, 2022, UTC-4

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Shoot! I forgot Haskell has a native composing operator when I made this Thought.

The Thought in question

Combined with Haskell's implicit Currying, nothing is as true as

"Every so often I re-invent Haskell."

9:57 p.m. Mar 31, 2022, UTC-4

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"Passion is hard when you're going downhill."

8:57 p.m. Mar 31, 2022, UTC-4

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Hey fun fact my (and everyone's) SSH public keys are available from Github

https://github.com/matthiasportzel.keys

5:02 p.m. Mar 31, 2022, UTC-4

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Oh my frikcing word what the heck. So much to do. So much to do.

4:44 p.m. Mar 31, 2022, UTC-4

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Apparently learnerpages.com still redirects to a placeholder site? Just updated it to point to the (unhelpful) Luther landing page.

6:34 p.m. Mar 30, 2022, UTC-4

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Yes hello to Squishy who just found out about this website.

6:29 p.m. Mar 30, 2022, UTC-4

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Haven't posted anything today so uh happy Tuesday.

6:29 p.m. Mar 30, 2022, UTC-4

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I was bored so I laid down and fell asleep, just out of boredom and I just woke up ~10 minutes ago and my eye is watering and my nostril is

running and I don’t know what I did to my sinuses

Edit a minute later to add I’m not congested, my throat feels fine, I don’t have other symptoms of illness.

8:27 p.m. Mar 29, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

This is a hole I’m hiding in

9:09 a.m. Mar 29, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I'm. It's. Well. AHppy Tuesday I guess.

12:00 a.m. Mar 29, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Oh my word I'm addicted to content consumption I can't stop myself

12:00 a.m. Mar 29, 2022, UTC-4

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Have you ever driven yourself insane? Thought without thinking, wrote without writing? Consumed without consuming and read without reading?

I have. I do every day. This is my purgatory. My boulder. My pain. My cross.

It is a small cross, a light cross, and I carry it. There is something to be said for universalism. There is something to be said for anarchy and for death. There is something to be said for life and for everyone who lives it. There is something to be said for "the latest and closest plural approximation to singular prenatal passivity which science,in its finite but unbounded wisdom,has succeeded in selling their wives."

If there's a line, there's going to be people on the other side of it.

A mountain is a mammal. A soul that keeps singing long after it should have stopped. A voice that starts singing long after it should have started.

A cave, and in the cave, a mine, and in the mine, something, something indescribable, something valuable, something more than you and me, and yet nothing without us.

A nose. A nose and The Nose and in a piece of bread and above our heads. I'm tired of not being able to say what I mean. I being unable to describe the angle through which I view the world.

A movie to end moving.

11:44 p.m. Mar 28, 2022, UTC-4

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Really kind of surprised Apple Music 1 is still on

9:42 p.m. Mar 28, 2022, UTC-4

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When developing, fixing bugs, a lot of the time that looks like deleting a big block of code and rewriting it. I find myself getting

addicted to that mindset. This works for single bugs, but there's a temptation to apply this to whole projects, to just replace whole code-bases, or even to real life (e.g. just 'reorganize everything in my room' or 'reinvent myself'). I've generalized this as 'trying to jump from imperfect to perfect.' It makes sense at a super small scale. You can take a single bug from 'broken' to 'fixed' without intermediate steps. But with complex software or anything analog, like real life, you have to iterate incrementally. You have to take small steps at a time. The exception of course is when your current system doesn't let you increment anymore. When you've hit the limit of what the current system can handle, only then does it make sense to tear down the system and start over. To rephrase: people often re-write apps because they have too many bugs or don't have enough features. Instead, you should rewrite an app when you *cannot* fix bugs and *cannot* add features.

The Excellent "Things You Should Never Do, Part I"

5:08 p.m. Mar 28, 2022, UTC-4

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You call yourself a nerd and you're not even in the Discord.js server?

8:17 p.m. Mar 27, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Forgot to eat lunch. This is a problem.

1:57 p.m. Mar 27, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

It's like I can't engage with the things that I'm supposed to. I feel disengaged.

1:02 p.m. Mar 27, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Forgot how detailed my skin is. Examining my finger prints.

12:57 p.m. Mar 27, 2022, UTC-4

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Good morning.

9:09 a.m. Mar 27, 2022, UTC-4

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Hur dur I don’t even know. I changed the password back because I had changed it to 4 characters because I kept having to re enter it because

I hadn’t set a max_age on the authentication cookie. Just kind of funny, since you can see source now I don’t need to use this as a change log for the website itself.

10:56 p.m. Mar 26, 2022, UTC-4

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Working on a document called "Become Systemd-pilled"

10:32 p.m. Mar 26, 2022, UTC-4

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I use the search page of this website so fricking often, like at least once a day.

10:31 p.m. Mar 26, 2022, UTC-4

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I've decided caring about what 'is' and 'isn't' a 'word' is dumb and if I end up contributing to the invention of a new word that's a good

thing. This is about "unironically." Also reading Donne and seeing the number of words that are no longer "words" but are still perfectly understandable. "Emparadised" Also e.e. cummings, of course, "mostpeople"

11:00 a.m. Mar 26, 2022, UTC-4

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I forgot that "Party Rock Anthem" is like unironically a good song.

10:56 a.m. Mar 26, 2022, UTC-4

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/r/unixporn is fricking wild because of the absolute variety of window managers. There are just always window managers I've never heard of.

11:16 p.m. Mar 25, 2022, UTC-4

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One of these days I'm going to really go through drawabox.com. I started it once but gave up when they expected me to like practice drawing

things for hours. Although that sounds strangely appealing now. I need a hobby like that…

9:06 p.m. Mar 25, 2022, UTC-4

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I feel like my problem is that I don't have enough whiteboards.

8:58 p.m. Mar 25, 2022, UTC-4

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I'm Matthias.

8:56 p.m. Mar 25, 2022, UTC-4

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I could make Linoleum Club in like a day if I made it an invite-only Discord server with a web portal instead of making it a whole website…

6:36 p.m. Mar 25, 2022, UTC-4

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Oohh wo oo wo oo whoa

3:19 p.m. Mar 25, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Oh my word I just love spending money on food.

12:08 p.m. Mar 25, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

The “Overture” from *Living Room* is just so many feels. It’s so good.

11:28 a.m. Mar 25, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I want to be weak.

9:55 a.m. Mar 25, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Okay none of us are running off into the woods and living alone. We're all in this together.

9:48 a.m. Mar 25, 2022, UTC-4

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I watched like a four hour VOD of Twitch Rivals after my last thought, so yeah

11:07 p.m. Mar 24, 2022, UTC-4

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I'm just so dead. I just want to sit here and do nothing.

7:22 p.m. Mar 24, 2022, UTC-4

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The problem is that there aren't words in my head struggling to get out. My head is crammed full of emotions and ideas and transcribing them

is a chore. But I have to do it because otherwise the ideas, they would overflow and start spilling out sloppily.

6:49 p.m. Mar 24, 2022, UTC-4

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It's shocking how refreshing it feels to me to open this website with new colors.

These colors are based on ones color-picked from my driver's license. I had to adjust the beige, such things are terribly hard to get right.

12:52 p.m. Mar 24, 2022, UTC-4

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Stopped Chime, I can't take this I'm unhappy with everything and it's beeping at me.

10:01 a.m. Mar 24, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

There's just so much negatively in me, oh my word.

10:00 a.m. Mar 24, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Screw it I'm adding a beige-ish light theme, keeping this as dark theme.

9:57 a.m. Mar 24, 2022, UTC-4

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The fact that I've lost respect for so many other people means that I've lost a lot of respect for myself and I assume that other people

don't respect me.

9:56 a.m. Mar 24, 2022, UTC-4

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There are still open bugs in OJSE I hate this.

https://github.com/OurJSEditor/OurJSEditor/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+label%3Abug

9:55 a.m. Mar 24, 2022, UTC-4

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I'm TERRIFIED of my own hubris.

I'm terrified of another OurJSEditor. Of thinking that I know better, that I can make something better than anyone else and then committing myself to it. And sinking hundreds of hours and thousands of lines of code and years of my life into it. For nothing.

I'm thinking about *Primer*. What terrifies me about that movie is the unlimited hubris of the characters. (Spoilers may follow. I recommend watching the movie unspoiled for full effect.) They just keep thinking that they can fix things, that they can make everything perfect if they just go back in time one more time. And it just introduces so much complexity so quickly and they were really in over their heads before they even started. And I honestly don't know if the directors intended for the point of the movie to be that you don't understand what's happening. But I didn't understand what was happening by the end of the movie, and that just made the apparent confidence of the characters so much more impactful. They couldn't stop. They couldn't let themselves believe that they had already lost, and so they just stayed trapped in the same impossible, infinitely complex, puzzle. I don't fear being trapped in a time-loop Groundhog-day-style, at least not any more than the next person. Like it would terrifying but I know it's not going to happen. But trapping myself? Wasting years of my life dedicated to a puzzle that everyone else can see is impossible? That scares me because it could happen.

9:40 a.m. Mar 24, 2022, UTC-4

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Shoot. Frick. I'm going insane again. And I really can't afford to this time.

12:06 a.m. Mar 24, 2022, UTC-4

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Oh yeah shout out to *To Save a Life* by the way, fricking iconic.

5:08 p.m. Mar 23, 2022, UTC-4

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Sometimes I wonder if my motto, "always more nuance" is a cop-out. But I don't think it is. I can find more nuance in anything, and I crave

that nuance. Once I've found it, I always feel more satisfied, like I have a more complete view.

5:07 p.m. Mar 23, 2022, UTC-4

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“But even when you’re on the side of less power, you can have agency within that. You’re not automatically a victim, you’re just more likely

to be one.”

5:00 p.m. Mar 23, 2022, UTC-4

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What's so funny to me is that, while the front page of HackerNews has a clear bias and topic and hivemind and echo chamber, people just

submit whatever the frick they want to /new. Like this is just some girl describing how wild the party scene was at her High School.

There are people, accounts, who just submit things to Hacker News all day every day. Like there's no way they are reading these articles, and thinking, 'yeah that fits on HN', they're just posting for the fun of it.

4:34 p.m. Mar 23, 2022, UTC-4

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All I want to do is consume content

9:35 a.m. Mar 23, 2022, UTC-4

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Help my sanity slipped away from me agaiaannn…

10:26 p.m. Mar 22, 2022, UTC-4

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Just jumped to the middle of *Without Bloodshed* again because I was thinking about it. There's like 2 paragraphs of a vegan "indulging"

in a ham and cheese sandwich.

he fought to muster the will to eat. His choice of a meatless sandwich did nothing to help matters.

…

He dropped the meatless sandwich into a trash bin and found a ham and cheese on rye. His eyes widened and his mouth watered as he unwrapped it, took half, and found its heft was due almost entirely to meat and cheese. Instead of being stuffed with lettuce and tomato, the sandwich consisted of what appeared to be a dozen slices of ham, three of Swiss cheese, and a thin layer of Dijon mustard. Rapture radiated from his tongue as he took the first bite.

This guy's been a vegan for 5 years and there no explanation of why he's decided to eat meat now? Not to mention this person gets shot like 5 paragraphs later. If I were the editor of this I would cut not only this paragraph but the entire fricking character.

9:57 p.m. Mar 22, 2022, UTC-4

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Bad social media ideas with Matthias. Something like Tumblr, but you're only allowed to post original content.

9:30 p.m. Mar 22, 2022, UTC-4

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Hmmmmm Might make this website beige. Great color, beige.

9:31 a.m. Mar 22, 2022, UTC-4

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“Married on a Hill” is a really fricking good song.

10:47 p.m. Mar 21, 2022, UTC-4

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Pouches are underrated. We should bring back pouches.

10:46 p.m. Mar 21, 2022, UTC-4

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It's wild how humans still haven't run out of things to do with the idea of functions.

The idea of a function is really weird when you try to define it. Fundamentally it's about re-naming variables within a given scope. And all of modern mathematics and computer science rests on how powerful that concept is.

3:57 p.m. Mar 21, 2022, UTC-4

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I'm going to miss fast mode plus.

12:41 p.m. Mar 21, 2022, UTC-4

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I don't know if I did this one justice.

gemini://thoughts.learnerpages.com/media/0d91ed9b-2b4c-4593-9868-b0860744a85d.mp3

10:26 a.m. Mar 21, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Trying to clean some things up.

10:20 a.m. Mar 21, 2022, UTC-4

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Someone needs to do to technology what Moneyball did to Baseball.

Unfortunately, Amazon's doing the best job.

11:51 p.m. Mar 20, 2022, UTC-4

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Like, if you locked our views on technology, (which generally is that more technology=better), and didn't allow society's view on technology

to change, and didn't allow the engineers working on the technology to significantly change their approach, what does technology look like in 100, 1000 years?

How does the smart assistant in my microwave communicate to the smart assistant in my toaster oven? How big is my iPhone L (pronounced "50" of course)? Is there a subscription service that lets me order ballpoint pens?

11:08 p.m. Mar 20, 2022, UTC-4

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I'm interested in a sort of futurepunk, call it "computerpunk" if that's not taken, where computers have been integrated into every aspect

of our lives in an ugly way. Cyberpunk and whatever Black mirror is doing glorify the computer systems themselves too much. And as someone who works with tech a lot, it's not very believable or interesting to me that a well-functioning computer system either is used for bad purposes or else fails to integrate well with humans. Because that's what Black Mirror is, is computer are these different, ethereal things, almost beings, that can't co-exist with humans. But like, humans are broken, flawed systems too. But Black Mirror isn't actually interested in making a point about computers, they're making a point about humans and society and values.

So to restate the prompt, what if everything we owned was made out of circuit boards and wiring, and it didn't effect our lives at all.

10:56 p.m. Mar 20, 2022, UTC-4

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I think you have to realize that Tech is a bubble.

The number of Computer Science majors can't and won't increase exponentially.

It is, of course, very difficult to say how it will be before that bubble pops. It may not happen in my lifetime. But at some point the rate of technical increase has to slow down (at least when referring to computers as we know them). Then question then becomes, is a given piece of technology (or code, in my case), useful outside of the current rising tide.

10:42 p.m. Mar 20, 2022, UTC-4

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"I don't really make content, I'm more of a performance artist"

-Joehills

https://clips.twitch.tv/RoundSmallCakeTheRinger-ZJmzodfiPfqk86EG

10:04 p.m. Mar 20, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Ahh I miss Blaseball.

8:57 a.m. Mar 20, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Listening to breakcore ironically but like also with the distinct knowledge that I could see myself listening to this unironically.

10:53 p.m. Mar 19, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Me aggressively disabling like every VS Code setting.

Yes I caved and switched to VS code. I just want (perfect) syntax highlighting for every language.

8:37 p.m. Mar 19, 2022, UTC-4

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It is I, Matthias.

2:25 p.m. Mar 19, 2022, UTC-4

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I'm going to stop going through Aphyr's internet presence now.

Literally shaking and crying right now.

I should have stopped at Unifying the Technical Interview.

I should have stopped at 'author of Jepsen'

I should have stopped at his LinkedIn account username

I should have stopped at "A History of Leather at Pride"

But nooo I had to open his mastodon.

AAAAAAAHHhhhh

11:31 a.m. Mar 19, 2022, UTC-4

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Like the code written in those posts is bad. But in order to say that it's bad, you can't argue that it's aesthetically ugly or difficult

for the author to maintain or that it's buggy or slow or stylistically inconsistent. You *have* to appeal to other code that has been written. It is bad because it is different.

In "Typing the Technical Interview" the programmer implements a program in Haskell using only types, never instantiating the types or creating variables or values. But it works. You have to appeal to the fact that there's a way that you're supposed to write this type of program, as ordained by the creators of the language and endorsed by every other person who's ever written Haskell.

https://aphyr.com/posts/342-typing-the-technical-interview

10:42 a.m. Mar 19, 2022, UTC-4

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The thing that makes "Reversing the Technical Interview" and the rest of the series so good is that it's a social commentary. It's not about

the code itself. The absurdity of the code exists to emphasize the absurdity of computer science as a whole, socially and technically. It describes someone who fails to conform to the computer science industry's social ideals about how code should be written. Importantly, it's written from the perspective of that person, so we get to see that their ideals are (at least mostly) internally consistent. And since the code that they write works, and since they're particular about it (they have a personal style-guide), we're reminded that the style of code that we write is a social construct. Which isn't to downplay the more obvious tone that makes fun of the main character. They're dumb for not being able to adapt their style to the environment.

10:31 a.m. Mar 19, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I don't even write Haskell. I've used it once or twice. But in that short time it introduced me to so many features that I love and that

are so intuitive and useful that I feel like they should be in every programming language.

`where`/`let` clauses that are expression-scoped!

Guards!

Pattern Matching in general!

Implicit Currying/partial function application!

The ability to create your own infix functions!

And the ability to call native operators as not-infix, and pass them around as values!

List comprehensions!

Infinite Lists!

Any of those could be added to any language. They don't require a strictly-typed, functional, language to use.

8:46 a.m. Mar 19, 2022, UTC-4

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At some point in the past I made my phone’s vibration pattern (e.g. when someone calls me) “Matthias” in Morse code and then forgot about it

12:51 a.m. Mar 19, 2022, UTC-4

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I’m wallowing. A little like a whale.

9:09 p.m. Mar 18, 2022, UTC-4

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Infinite anxiety.

4:56 p.m. Mar 18, 2022, UTC-4

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The more I program in other languages, especially LISPs, the more impressed I am with Haskell's partial function application.

And their ability to make any function infix, man I just really like Haskell. (Except for its type system, I have no idea what a Monad is and I have no desire to learn.)

4:38 p.m. Mar 18, 2022, UTC-4

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Another word dump

Okay fine we can word dump sheep yellow flowers, actually poe and edger and summing s and aah my mind my brain is full of thoughts thaat don't have meaning and yet are more thaan the sum of their parts and thier soul and their fingers overflow with light and with meaning.

I don't know if these word dumps are interesting to other people. They're low effort, even for this site. (I use them like a pre-writing exercise, like warm-up.) But I kind of enjoy coming back to read them. I'll probably keep posting them, but clearly labeled like this one.

4:37 p.m. Mar 18, 2022, UTC-4

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Submitted "On Creation" to a poetry contest. what is this.

4:30 p.m. Mar 18, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

"D: Like poor ferrets who have to use Web Explorer."

12:56 p.m. Mar 18, 2022, UTC-4

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I would have just, not opened the forbidden book. Like RIV to you but I’m different.

8:39 a.m. Mar 18, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Brain is off, no thoughts.

8:48 p.m. Mar 17, 2022, UTC-4

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Apparently today is Saint Patrick's Day.

7:37 p.m. Mar 17, 2022, UTC-4

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I really like daylight savings time and I’m unhappy that we might get rid of it. It’s so interesting and fun.

7:28 p.m. Mar 17, 2022, UTC-4

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I love systemd. It's like the perfect mix of like, user friendly and high-level, but super fricking powerful.

I use systemd instead of `network-manager`. I use system instead of `cron`. Etc.

$ systemd-analyze calendar '*:00/15'
  Original form: *:00/15
Normalized form: *-*-* *:00/15:00
    Next elapse: Thu 2022-03-17 18:00:00 EDT
       (in UTC): Thu 2022-03-17 22:00:00 UTC
       From now: 8min left

5:54 p.m. Mar 17, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Zig doesn't have ++.

What do these languages have against ++?

4:58 p.m. Mar 17, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

You have to earn your happy ending (in literature at least).

In contrast, you don't have to earn bad endings.

3:25 p.m. Mar 17, 2022, UTC-4

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I'm trying to use VS Code's remote editing ability, but it's failing with an error. Researching the error brings me to a Github issues page,

but Github 500s for requests made from logged in users right now. AAhhhhhh. Please Microsoft.

11:22 a.m. Mar 17, 2022, UTC-4

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Wish TextMate was still active.

11:11 a.m. Mar 17, 2022, UTC-4

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Hipsters are like nerds except they don’t like technology and have gone outside.

A little like me.

10:43 a.m. Mar 17, 2022, UTC-4

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Ad blockers are a myth. Ad blockers promise to "remove the ads from the website." But the ads are an inseparable part of the website.

What the ad blocker does is create a new website that approximates the real website, but without ads.

I'm not interested in the version of the web created by extensions. I'm interested in the real web, as created by the authors of the websites.

If a website has ads, either I respect the author and I value the content enough that I'm willing to endure the ads for the content. Or I don't, in which case I clearly don't value the content very highly and the burden is and should be on the author to improve their content or remove the ads.

If a website is an ad-infested piece of garbage, I don't want to pretend that it's not. I want to know that it's an ad-infested piece of garbage, so that I can close it.

In the web paradigm, websites have complete responsibility for their functionality, content, and appearance. The text and content of a website is 100% determined by the website author. But so too is the appearance, with CSS. The website author can of course abstain from using CSS, but a web browser doesn't step up and provide styling. It provides *defaults*, but those defaults are an implementation detail. The client, the web browser, has to implement a mechanism by which website authors can style websites, and as an implementation detail, they have to set defaults. At no point is the browser *responsible* for styling the website—the browser is responsible for providing a mechanism for the website to style itself.

Extensions change that. With a browser extension, suddenly the extension also has some responsibility for the appearance of the page. Which might not seem like a big deal, but it is. The extension could break the page. The extension could fix any number of infinite things that are broken on the page already. The extension is responsible for deciding what is an ad and what isn't. And to their credit, ad blockers do a really good job at this. I do trust and respect uBlock. But I don't want to have to trust uBlock; I don't need another thing that can fail. If a website's bad, I want to blame the website. If I see ads on a website, I want to blame the website, not blame my ad blocker.

I intentionally avoid making the "support creators" argument here because a lot of time ads are not a viable or healthy longterm monetization strategy. And moreover, if you take pride in your content, it's very hard to do ads in a way that preserves the quality and tone of your content. Ads are, by definition, someone else's content that you've been paid to interject into your page.

But at some point, when I read a website that has ads and has content that I value or enjoy, I am glad that I'm supporting that content by viewing the ads along with it.

Like, if you can't be bothered to watch a 30 second ad before your Youtube video, why are you on Youtube? Find something better to do with your time. Read a book. (And I say that to myself.)

10:59 p.m. Mar 16, 2022, UTC-4

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114 open tabs. This is near the most I'll have open before closing the window. There's no way I'm going to scroll up to tabs more than a

couple hours old. (I use Vivaldi, which has a vertical, scrolling, tab bar.)

10:07 p.m. Mar 16, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

“If you could transit between the web and gemini space seamlessly, gemini capsules would become little more than curiously retro-looking

web sites.”

6:34 p.m. Mar 16, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Oh my word the longing in my heart is so strong.

1:25 a.m. Mar 16, 2022, UTC-4

▔▔▔

What if Etho uploaded! Wow, that would be pretty cool.

1:32 p.m. Mar 15, 2022, UTC-4

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What if they are giants

1:31 p.m. Mar 15, 2022, UTC-4

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Today on 'HackerNews Text Posts Sorted By New':

"I (M/40) have fallen for someone (F/32)…"

9:22 a.m. Mar 15, 2022, UTC-4

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Hello, good morning, etc, etc

8:36 a.m. Mar 15, 2022, UTC-4

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I sit, composing a poem; no, composing a moment.

1:03 a.m. Mar 15, 2022, UTC-4

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Safari on the front page of HN again. All the same points.

"PWAs from the beginning would have prevented Facebook from collecting data for the last decade in the first place"

Facebook–Cambridge Analytica scandal could have been prevented if only Apple had allowed PWAs to send push notifications 10 years ago…

(This is sarcasm.)

"Here I am still waiting for ES2018 regex look-behinds"

"Web MIDI? Still surprised that's missing on Apple"

Whataboutism at its worst. 'BuT whAt aBouT WebUSB?'

Don't even get me started on "Lazy loading images is at best user hostile"

12:29 a.m. Mar 15, 2022, UTC-4

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WHY. IS. SOFTWARE. SO. HARD. IN. 2022.

gemini://thoughts.learnerpages.com/media/f111ae3a-0914-457d-90cb-45fbac059657.png

11:45 p.m. Mar 14, 2022, UTC-4

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Seriously this is the best I can come up with

const data_one = [1]u8{1};
const data_two = [2]u8{1, 2};
const data_three = [3]u8{1, 2, 3};
const data_four = [4]u8{1, 2, 3, 4};
const data = [4][]const u8{ data_one[0..], data_two[0..], data_three[0..], data_four[0..]};

In JS this is `[[1], [1, 2], [1, 2, 3], [1, 2, 3, 4]]`.

And I recognize that JS is allocating that on the heap and I want Zig to allocate it on the stack so that I don't have to worry about memory management. But it's clearly possible, I don't understand why it's so verbose.

I can't let myself use that code because I don't know Zig and I have to assume there's a better way of doing this, so I've been researching for 3 hours now.

11:22 p.m. Mar 14, 2022, UTC-4

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Do these people not include data in their code?

I'm constantly looking for ways to abstract data out of code. Having a global constant with

data that the rest of the program acts upon is a super common pattern in my code. But apparently, the system programming program never do that. Or I mean maybe they just do it in n lines and don't complain.

11:09 p.m. Mar 14, 2022, UTC-4

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This is the same problem I had 4 years ago in C.

https://stackoverflow.com/q/49958452

11:07 p.m. Mar 14, 2022, UTC-4

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I feel like I can't complain between C is not any better. Like, the "solution" is to define everything ahead of time and take pointers.

11:05 p.m. Mar 14, 2022, UTC-4

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I hate this. I want to represent the data `[[1], [1, 2], [1, 2, 3], [1, 2, 3, 4]]` in Zig and I cannot figure out how to do it.

11:01 p.m. Mar 14, 2022, UTC-4

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Where did it all go wrong?

6:54 p.m. Mar 14, 2022, UTC-4

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Me committing crimes against both music and Linux at the same time.

3:28 p.m. Mar 14, 2022, UTC-4

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Zig doesn't have generics per se, but it allows you to pass around types as compile-time values. Which is basically the same thing.

11:40 a.m. Mar 14, 2022, UTC-4

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The reason Gemini needs to be simple is that transferring responsibility for layout (& design & format) to the client means that the

client design needs to be capable of handling *any* semantically possible Gemtext document.

In short, this is reiterating one benefit of Gemini: it is impossible to have a Gemini site that looks bad.

But I had previously argued that this advantage is independent of Gemini's simplicity. That is, I'm imagining an interface (which I've named Actually Flowers) which allows for significantly more complex documents (read: Turing-complete applications) to be created, while not giving those applications any control over their own visual appearance or layout. I'm holding out that it might still be possible to achieve this, but I don't think I appreciated the difficulty of saying: every theoretically possible application has to look good. At some point you have to tackle that problem by limiting the scope of possible applications. Which Gemini does in an extreme sense.

2:00 a.m. Mar 14, 2022, UTC-4

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My desktop is full of screenshots of bugs in software.

3:26 p.m. Mar 13, 2022, UTC-4

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All I want, is to retreat into a remote cave, and spend my time looking into the future and writing down prophecies, to be found by future

heroes in their time of need.

12:43 a.m. Mar 12, 2022, UTC-5

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I need to maximize something

11:48 p.m. Mar 11, 2022, UTC-5

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I'm really not interested with defending my points, in structuring an argument. If you can't see what I'm saying, moreover, if you're not

willing.

No.

Something else

I believe ugh well rip.

11:44 p.m. Mar 11, 2022, UTC-5

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There are a couple of interesting things about Random.org

• The service provided is so simple that anyone could implement it.
• It's marketed for reasons that are technical gibberish that are pointless and no one cares about.
• The interface is quite bare-bones and unremarkable.
• People (users) feel a need to bestow personality upon it.
• (The domain name Random.org is a single word. I'm not yet sure if this is interesting.)

11:43 p.m. Mar 11, 2022, UTC-5

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I finished my *Beyonders* re-read. It's wild, difficult to describe. Mull does very different things than some of his other books, and yet I

don't think he does what he thinks he's doing. He's said at a couple of points that *Beyonders* is intended for more mature audiences, but that doesn't really come across to me. He juggles perhaps more characters or plot devices, but the detail of each suffers proportionally, so it's not significantly more complex. And the stakes are no higher than *Five Kingdoms* or *Fablehaven*. The plot feels very out-of-control, but that just makes it cheesier when everything falls perfectly into place.

8:51 p.m. Mar 11, 2022, UTC-5

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Wow, Siri is really bad. Like 1/10 times she just doesn't answer me or otherwise fails to execute the command. What the frick. Can you

imagine if a software button didn't work 1/10 times? Ridiculous

8:43 p.m. Mar 11, 2022, UTC-5

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Oh yeah I’m still alive. Been away from my computer

3:14 p.m. Mar 10, 2022, UTC-5

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Oh. Oh no. It’s happening again. Frick.

7:37 p.m. Mar 07, 2022, UTC-5

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Remind me in three years to submit GRIBFILE #1 to Hacker News.

Edit: I've decided 1.5 might be a better place to start.

7:16 p.m. Mar 07, 2022, UTC-5

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"Your laptop screen has turned a gorgeous mix of purples, owing to the extreme cold, but the code is still dimly visible within. It reminds

you of a frozen lake at dusk. A liquid crystal."

7:09 p.m. Mar 07, 2022, UTC-5

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I'm still not over this. How can you have such mastery of both the English language and Java bytecode.

“But… those aren’t even the same type. That’s… that’s illegal.”

“If it were meant to be illegal,” you remind him sagely, “Sun Microsystems would have made it unrepresentable.”

6:56 p.m. Mar 07, 2022, UTC-5

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Frick, I forgot about "On Creation." I should re-read my old stuff more frequently.

6:27 p.m. Mar 07, 2022, UTC-5

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I have been informed that Rigby is not down and Luke just changed URLs without telling anyone.

Had to edit the link on the Thought from Jan that referenced it.

6:23 p.m. Mar 07, 2022, UTC-5

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The thing I don't like about Twitter is that it's people-focused, not topic focused. I really enjoy Twitter right now, but because I follow

people that I'm friends with.

It's difficult for me to follow like, topics, on Twitter. I'd be interested in some recreational mathematics content on Twitter. And so I follow @standupmaths, @Ayliean, and @3blue1brown. But Matt tweets about their dog and Ayliean tweets about about Scottish school Covid restrictions and I don't really care. And Grant only tweets when he releases a video.

Like I actively do not want to see political content. And that means that I can't follow any tech journalists on Twitter because all of them will retweet political content.

I'm not trying to criticize these people. I understand that this is how Twitter works. I'm just pointing out that this is how the system works, and that the system could work differently.

Tumblr has a similar problem. I told Tumblr at some point I was interested in Math, so it recommended I follow a blog with "mathematics" in the name. Well, it was just some person's blog. And they re-posted a lot of cool math, including a fair amount of original art. But they also have some mental health issues and they used this unassuming "mathematics" blog to share life updates. It would honestly be comedic, the juxtaposition of "cool fact about the Fibonacci spiral" with vaguely-suicidal ramblings, were they not of course vaguely-suicidal.

I suppose, then, that Hacker News and Reddit suffer from the opposite problem, dedication to a topic at the expense of the human element. But at least I know what I'm getting into.

5:31 p.m. Mar 07, 2022, UTC-5

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GCS d- s !a C+++ M++ UL+ w-- E--- W++++ !N PS+ PE++ Y+ !PGP !tv b++ G e h+ !r

-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----

Version: 3.1

GCS d- s !a C+++ M++ UL+ w-- E--- W++++ !N PS+ PE++ Y+ !PGP !tv b++ G e h+ !r

------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------

On one hand, the concept of a geek code is like right in line with "20 | gay | they/them | autistic" in a Twitter bio. On the other hand, age is the only label that overlaps at all.

I wonder what happened to the types of people that would have unironically used this. Some Gemini users fondly remember their time on Usenet (I think there's a Gemini/Gopher Usenet forum that was recently created, but "!N"). But what about all the people that were cringy kids on Usenet and are now being cringy on Twitter?

Oh yeah I guess I should link: https://web.archive.org/web/20050210083932/http://www.geekcode.com/geek.html

5:10 p.m. Mar 07, 2022, UTC-5

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Apparently, the ideological fantasy portrayed in the Starbreaker universe was extremely commonly discussed in the 1990s-era internet.

4:57 p.m. Mar 07, 2022, UTC-5

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I'm pretty sure Ender IO is incorrectly calculating bonus items from a SAG Mill with a grind ball.

2:11 p.m. Mar 07, 2022, UTC-5

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Language without lambdas or functions, only a set of standard library functions that allow chaining and composing.

2:00 p.m. Mar 07, 2022, UTC-5

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Something about the README for EnderIO saying it's licensed under CC0 despite the fact that the LICENSE.txt is the Unlicense. Quality.

1:55 p.m. Mar 07, 2022, UTC-5

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Matthew Bolan is streaming himself scrolling up and down in a linear algebra textbook without talking and he has 6 viewers.

9:12 p.m. Mar 06, 2022, UTC-5

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Rigby is down again, RIP.

Do I have writing there that’s not backed up? Did I not learn from last time? Who knows.

8:56 p.m. Mar 06, 2022, UTC-5

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The reason surrealism? is so hard to do in any meaningful place is that it requires not just the aesthetic appreciation of nonsense but

also the belief that realism (or what most would call the truth) is actually not useful.

This is about 9front’s code of conduct and also the about page of this website.

6:45 p.m. Mar 06, 2022, UTC-5

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Wilderness Survival is a good band.

6:31 p.m. Mar 06, 2022, UTC-5

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Who tugs on the strings?

6:11 p.m. Mar 06, 2022, UTC-5

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I need to eat food. it is very important i am falling askleep because i not have any energy byecause i not have any food thaink you

6:09 p.m. Mar 06, 2022, UTC-5

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"I have a statistics minor and some proficiency in R, so I am the most qualified person to solve this problem."

5:29 p.m. Mar 06, 2022, UTC-5

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My heart aches. It longs for something.

5:04 p.m. Mar 06, 2022, UTC-5

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There's something beautiful about the act of concatenation.

5:03 p.m. Mar 06, 2022, UTC-5

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Adding features without removing them is

6:21 p.m. Mar 05, 2022, UTC-5

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Weather’s finally warm enough to unicycle

3:18 p.m. Mar 05, 2022, UTC-5

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Unmitigated is such a good word.

1:05 p.m. Mar 05, 2022, UTC-5

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Thinking about downloading all of Tumblr.

I wonder if The Linoleum Club can capture some of Tumblr's aesthetic?

12:15 a.m. Mar 05, 2022, UTC-5

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Blackout poetry is weird because you either blackout negative words and say the opposite thing from the original author or you blackout

superfluous words and say the same thing. It's hard to use blackout poetry to add nuance.

11:28 p.m. Mar 04, 2022, UTC-5

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Didn't eat dinner again today. This is a problem.

11:18 p.m. Mar 04, 2022, UTC-5

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I'm cold and hungry and tired

9:14 p.m. Mar 04, 2022, UTC-5

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Youtube keeps fricking serving me ads in Spanish. Why? I only speak English. I've never watched anything in Spanish. What? I'm signed into

the same Youtube account I've had for 15 years. Google has 15 years of watch history. And not a single video in there is in Spanish because I don't speak Spanish. I'm watching a video in English. And yet. Google decides to show me an ad for the Pixel translating Spanish into French. Which I also don't speak, for the record.

Why is Google collecting all my data, ostensibly to show me better/targeted ads, and yet they can't even match the language of the ad to the language of the video I'm watching. This just seems like such a dumb, basic, failure of the system.

11:05 a.m. Mar 04, 2022, UTC-5

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It is March.

Also I just woke up and I’m not sure why I was asleep or what I should now be doing. Perhaps making waffles?

9:41 p.m. Mar 03, 2022, UTC-5

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I am no longer angry at the editor of the abridged version of The Count of Monte Cristo. I forgive them, and I feel sorry for them.

1:46 p.m. Mar 03, 2022, UTC-5

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I am still Matthias.

10:02 a.m. Mar 03, 2022, UTC-5

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I am, for some reason, alive.

7:41 a.m. Mar 03, 2022, UTC-5

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I should write a manifesto. For my life.

I tried but it would be very long. Without explaining, much less justifying, it would look something like:

I think therefore I am; there is a God; God is good; Truth is absolute; Truth is infinitely fractal; human perception is inherently finite; pragmatic analysis must be used; logic is useful, but inherently limited; people are good; people are inherently flawed; independence is good; creation is good; etc.

11:38 p.m. Mar 02, 2022, UTC-5

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My ideas are not linear I hate the linear nature of the English language I want something else.

11:00 p.m. Mar 02, 2022, UTC-5

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My utter disinterest in the question of identity is striking. Made more so by my fascination with the answer.

10:56 p.m. Mar 02, 2022, UTC-5

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This is my empire.

This is art created by someone with something to lose.

You and me are in this together. We're doing something.

10:51 p.m. Mar 02, 2022, UTC-5

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“Where did wonderland go?”

10:19 p.m. Mar 02, 2022, UTC-5

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"You've been making choices out of desperation for too long"

"Break the pattern. Take control of your life, Todd. The instant you take control, interesting things will happen. I guarantee it."

-Dirk Gently (S1E1)

8:54 p.m. Mar 02, 2022, UTC-5

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Writing and programming and art and creation are about control. (Whether they should be or not.)

9:59 a.m. Mar 02, 2022, UTC-5

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There’s something about growing up that I still don’t understand.

12:57 a.m. Mar 02, 2022, UTC-5

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Aesthetically I still haven't figured out what Dirk Gently (2016) was doing.

12:52 a.m. Mar 02, 2022, UTC-5

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Hm. I'm still alive.

10:56 p.m. Mar 01, 2022, UTC-5

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I can't take it.

7:07 p.m. Mar 01, 2022, UTC-5

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I wish I could say, "have you no empathy?" But I have empathy.

4:04 p.m. Mar 01, 2022, UTC-5

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My space bar has stopped working normally. The ugly side of this keyboard has finally reared its head.

I just, I'm going to have to get the keyboard replaced again. Apple's going to think I'm running an AppleCare scam but legitimately the TouchBar, screen, and now the keyboard have failed me. And since the computer is all glued together they really only replace the top-half or bottom half, so I'm going to have gone through 2 entire computers. How do you even make a computer with a life-expectancy of one year?

1:22 p.m. Mar 01, 2022, UTC-5

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I hate the OSI's response to public domain. It's literally just vague fear-mongering.

They provide no examples. They're just 'this is confusing. I'm not a lawyer and you're not either. It's impossible to know what "public domain" means. Anyone who wants to use public domain software should talk to a lawyer. You might not actually be able to use it. If you're still confused, read 3 months of mailing list archives from 2012. You think that's unreasonable? Then trust us, just use an OSI-open-source-approved license.'

They do argue you shouldn't CC0, since a) CC0 explicitly disclaims that the author may hold a patent on the content and b) CC0 doesn't include a disclaimer of warranty. (Which is a result of CC0 being intended for media, not software.) But like, there's no mention of the Unlicense or Zlib or BS0 or similar.

Sources! Because I apparently I hold myself to a higher standard that the OSI ("if the thought of reading all those conversations is daunting, please take that as more evidence that it's just better to use an approved Open Source License if you can!").

One of the prominent anti-Public domain lawyers retracts his statements when it's pointed out that he is contradicting the Ninth Circuit.

The Unlicense. The Unlicense is verbose, and claims that its verbosity is necessary to safely public-domain software. Which doesn't exactly help. But it does address all of the concerns of the OSI and is OSI approved. The list of sources at the bottom is also pretty good.

There are other OSI approved licenses that are also effectively public domain: 0-clause BSD, Zlib, etc.

Libertarian Propaganda (please read) (Also see links at the bottom of this page.)

The OSI's 1000 words that say nothing in their FAQ.

Another 1000 words on the OSI's website that repeat the same bland talking points. "It’s probably safer to use a license like MIT instead." (Just in case I haven't made my point well: This quote is dumb. If I want to public-domain my code, saying "just don't" isn't helpful.)

(This post was inspired by the Gemini user who claimed that most people who don't support the OSI are trying to profit off of open source.)

8:09 a.m. Mar 01, 2022, UTC-5

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List of things I hate in order of how much I hate them:

Myself

Everything

Everyone

I hate VS Code I hate Microsoft I hate everyone who said VS Code is good I hate open source I hate GitHub I hate everything.

12:24 a.m. Mar 01, 2022, UTC-5

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Is there a canonical recording of 4'33"? I would like to listen to it now.

11:08 p.m. Feb 28, 2022, UTC-5

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This is art by someone with nothing to say and nothing to lose.

10:20 p.m. Feb 28, 2022, UTC-5

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Hey look it’s March in UTC.

7:57 p.m. Feb 28, 2022, UTC-5

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Ya’ll need to Tweet more, I’m bored.

7:57 p.m. Feb 28, 2022, UTC-5

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I may be married to JS but every weekend I go out and have an affair with a different functional programming language.

7:39 p.m. Feb 28, 2022, UTC-5

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I almost feel like I'm bad at context switching. Like I cannot stop myself from doing something that I'm in the middle of doing.

This is a theory.

7:32 p.m. Feb 28, 2022, UTC-5

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Had some thoughts on the airplane earlier. Probably won’t post them.

6:15 p.m. Feb 28, 2022, UTC-5

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Aahhahhhahahaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

9:37 a.m. Feb 28, 2022, UTC-5

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For some reason my phone clears cookies for this site like every time I lock the screen and I have to log in again.

9:37 a.m. Feb 28, 2022, UTC-5

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Like, LISP like languages tend to say ‘data are lists and functions are lists everything’s a list’ and they make it easy to change from

data to a function. But in making that transition easy, they emphasize that the transition is necessary.

JavaScript doesn’t let you change from data into a function since from the perspective of the JS programer, functions already are data.

9:08 a.m. Feb 28, 2022, UTC-5

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One of the things that I really like about JS is the tendency to treat functions as data. Even other functional languages tend to be worse

about treating functions as operators.

6:21 p.m. Feb 27, 2022, UTC-5

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Kind of excited to start a new season here, just a couple of days. I’m thinking about changing up the colors. We’ll see.

3:52 p.m. Feb 27, 2022, UTC-5

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I really like the zlib license. I might move to that over the Unlicense for my public domain things.

https://www.zlib.net/zlib_license.html

3:48 p.m. Feb 27, 2022, UTC-5

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This is incredible

https://aphyr.com/posts/341-hexing-the-technical-interview

2:55 p.m. Feb 27, 2022, UTC-5

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I do not appreciate the loop macro at all. It’s so ugly to me. If functional code is so good, why do you need DSLs?

11:51 a.m. Feb 27, 2022, UTC-5

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Some people understand the power words have. Those people tend to be LISP programmers.

“Agree politely, but delete nothing. Never apologize for who you are.”

11:32 a.m. Feb 27, 2022, UTC-5

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The K-Pop to international politics pipeline.

9:26 p.m. Feb 26, 2022, UTC-5

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“Fall in love with nothing.”

10:23 p.m. Feb 25, 2022, UTC-5

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“I could show you incredible things.”

-Blank Space, T Swift of course

5:12 p.m. Feb 25, 2022, UTC-5

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Happy snowing

9:55 a.m. Feb 25, 2022, UTC-5

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I can’t sleep. There are too many unfinished stories.

2:47 a.m. Feb 25, 2022, UTC-5

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I feel like the Hellmouth Sunbeams spend too much time on the “sunbeams” parts and not enough time on the “hellmouth” part send tweet

2:34 a.m. Feb 25, 2022, UTC-5

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Just realized that this page has been at this URL for too long and I basically can't ever change it.

8:49 p.m. Feb 24, 2022, UTC-5

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Oh my word. Bob Lyon is making live-editor issues like it's 2015

8:29 p.m. Feb 24, 2022, UTC-5

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I did end up eating dinner, around 7, so that's pretty cool.

8:19 p.m. Feb 24, 2022, UTC-5

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I want to eat dinner tonight but it’s unclear if my executive dysfunction will allow me to. Or if I will be trapped here.

6:29 p.m. Feb 24, 2022, UTC-5

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I miss Etho

5:11 p.m. Feb 24, 2022, UTC-5

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All I want is for the Lock Picking Lawyer to actually pick the locks. I don't care that you found a lock at walmart that you can open by

shoving a bent bit of plastic into its keyhole. If he doesn't say "little click out of one," it's not worth my time to watch the video.

12:05 p.m. Feb 24, 2022, UTC-5

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I think a lot about the decision to add `let` to JS instead of changing the behavior of `var`. That’s what backwards compatibility looks

like.

11:11 a.m. Feb 24, 2022, UTC-5

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I hate this but I don’t see how else to do it. That what I need, is someone to show me the way.

3:12 a.m. Feb 24, 2022, UTC-5

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A picture of a whiteboard. Overlapping text in different colors reads as follows.

[Black text, not overlapping anything else:]

No.

I

Who

is. Your friend.

right. Or.

Surrender to the system.

Become more than yourself.

[An untranscribable scribble]

U

Europa.

Somewhere else

Someone else

Has created

And destroyed

More than I will ever see.

[Blue text, sideways, underneath red text:]

Some say

Life is about something.

They miss that life is everything.

This not poetry.

This is prose. An essay.

Of course

[Black text, upside-down, underneath red text:]

Pale flowers.

Left for hours

Sun above

A dress.

Stress

[Red text, written over the last two blocks:]

What is this if not me?

Who am I if not this?

To live for _____

Sorry.

This is not poetry

This is not art

This is some words on a whiteboard.

That shouldn't have been written.

This is nothing.

I'm sorry.

Except I'm not

And these words are everything

These words are poetry and they are art

These words are life

They're me and you and the connection between us and they matter

2:33 a.m. Feb 24, 2022, UTC-5

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The Magician poem

I once saw a man do a magic trick

Misdirection, he didn't say

He did nothing with one hand that looked flashy

While with his other, he suffered

So too, these words.

2:22 a.m. Feb 24, 2022, UTC-5

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Parker MacMillian the first has unfathomable energy.

Like they just keep nerfing him, we’re on, what, IIIII. And he’s still cooler than he has any right to be.

12:33 a.m. Feb 24, 2022, UTC-5

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I feel like it is time for me to rewatch Dirk Gently.

11:13 p.m. Feb 23, 2022, UTC-5

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Node.js moment

Also these 3 htop screenshots are from 3 different servers.

Also I don't understand what's going on, I don't think node.js is actually using that much memory.

gemini://thoughts.learnerpages.com/media/ffd9679a-5c1b-4c07-8789-abcf39f103ab.png

9:47 p.m. Feb 23, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

If it's possible to develop memory-conscious apps in node.js I don't know how.

Also, this is why I haven't released Astronomical Theater

yet, this honestly doesn't surprise me.

gemini://thoughts.learnerpages.com/media/41c37211-15d0-4cbb-9f1b-82e6cf799845.png

9:37 p.m. Feb 23, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

4GB of swap might have been excessive.

gemini://thoughts.learnerpages.com/media/f9b33086-c254-4c6b-bef8-26ffad624e60.png

9:03 p.m. Feb 23, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

AUR is just *down*. RIP.

5:42 p.m. Feb 23, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

ES claims to not have aliases, but will do a lookup for variables of the form "fn-CMD" when CMD is run, and replace them if they exist.

So aliases look like:

fn-l = "ls"

I think they did this so that functions could be syntax sugar for as follows:

fn l {
    ls $*
}
# Is the same as
fn-l @ {
    ls $*
}

Where `@ { … }` is already the syntax for a lambda.

Still seems pretty bad.

5:21 p.m. Feb 23, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

So I theorized about this block-based language. And ES has "program fragments" that are basically just my blocks.

https://thoughts.learnerpages.com/?show=55b51146-2a55-471b-8957-6ac3dc929427

{ echo "hello"; echo "world"; } # prints "hello\nworld"

x = { echo hello, world }
$x # prints "hello, world"

myfunc $x # Calls myfunc with the block x as a parameter

Since ES is a shell, it can get away with doing what I didn't want to do, which is conditionally expand and evaluate the block based on position, since you have to use ` to reference variables in ES anyways.

(ES is based on rc, it's possible rc does the same thing, I don't know.)

5:00 p.m. Feb 23, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Wait, you mean you don't use `es`?

https://wryun.github.io/es-shell

4:37 p.m. Feb 23, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Activity? On the live editor??

2:40 p.m. Feb 23, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I picked up a computer from like 2006, but it's 64 bit, so I can just put modern Arch on it. Which I think is kind of beautiful, and it

makes me a bit sad that things are moving towards Arm. We're in the x86-64 golden age of computers.

11:21 a.m. Feb 23, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Something about Bethesda moving to Steam even though Steam takes a 30% cut. Maybe Apple isn't evil.

10:12 a.m. Feb 23, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I think, that part of the reason that programming languages don't support out-of-the-box exact arithmetic is that it's possible to construct

arbitrarily "complex" numbers.

something something Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, "There is no recursively related notation-system which gives a name to every constructive ordinal" -Church and Kleene (from GEB)

8:37 p.m. Feb 22, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I wish I had Thought deleting uh this was a python code example that was wrong sorry Python

6:21 p.m. Feb 22, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Tell me this isn't dumb, I fricking dare you. Defend this behavior, you won't.

julia> parse(BigFloat, "0.1") + parse(BigFloat, "0.2")
0.3000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000017

6:17 p.m. Feb 22, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

All I want out of a programming language is being able to add `0.1` and `0.2` and get `0.3`. Is that too much to ask?

6:13 p.m. Feb 22, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

"I runne to death and death meets me as fast"

2:40 p.m. Feb 22, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Why does fricking Julia use IEEE floats?

All I want is arbitrary precision numbers and it feels like `bc` is the only language that supports them.

11:10 a.m. Feb 22, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I don’t remember the last time I made a good decision.

6:34 a.m. Feb 22, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I miss seeing people smile.

1:09 a.m. Feb 22, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I’m so lonely.

1:08 a.m. Feb 22, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Has this website peaked yet?

5:48 p.m. Feb 21, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Good morning.

5:48 p.m. Feb 21, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

The Italian shadow government that controls me has instructed me to now do things.

5:48 p.m. Feb 21, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

The use of "wimdy" to mean a 'an unlikely outcome' is possibly my favorite example of the evolution of language.

2:26 p.m. Feb 21, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

All of my clean clothes are on my bed, so I will have to sleep on the floor.

12:11 a.m. Feb 21, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I have decided to make a quesadilla

5:53 p.m. Feb 20, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Why is life so hard? Why am I always hungry?

5:12 p.m. Feb 20, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

'Through Jesus, everyone who believes is freed from everything from which you could not be freed by the law of Moses'

-Acts 13:39, paraphrased

10:23 a.m. Feb 20, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Good morning.

9:36 a.m. Feb 20, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

The other day I was thinking, 'why did I delete the KA organ harvesting roleplay discord server.' And I just found some chat logs.

Let's just say that I no longer regret deleting it.

(Note to self: the transcript is in my DMs with Robert)

12:48 p.m. Feb 19, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Good morning.

9:04 a.m. Feb 19, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

This website is actually just an IP-gathering honeypot. If you're not using a VPN right now, I've saved your IP into the Apache log files!

11:28 p.m. Feb 18, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Option number 1: Submit homework assignment I've already done.

Option number 2: Eat dinner

Option number 3: Play Minecraft

Wanna guess which one I'm going to do?

6:37 p.m. Feb 18, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Why don't stores sell chocolate chip bagels?

10:44 a.m. Feb 18, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Why is it snowing?

10:42 a.m. Feb 18, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I'm unimpressed with alt-j's new album. It feels like it's trying too hard to be deep and emotional. And what I historically liked about

Alt-J was how light their songs were.

1:30 a.m. Feb 18, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

The Sphinx vs. The Count of Monte Cristo

11:36 p.m. Feb 17, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Running 100m in 30º weather might not be the best way to stave off an anxiety attack, but it works. My heart is now angry at me for

different reasons.

8:10 p.m. Feb 17, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

There's something else, some other problem that I have. Not just the desire for perfection, but some sort of anxiety. I'm so stressed.

It's like my mind and my heart expect or need to be in a fight or flight situation and so when I'm a bit nervous about a group project they're like, 'this is it!' and my heart rate is 103.

I think I need to exercise more.

8:01 p.m. Feb 17, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Checking if there are any new Thoughts for me to read.

7:56 p.m. Feb 17, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

"No, you're good"

3:37 p.m. Feb 17, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

"ONE WAY"

2:29 p.m. Feb 17, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

AoT hasn't dropped off yet so I'm basically just waiting for it to end so I can start my anime arc.

10:33 a.m. Feb 17, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Michael M (@MikeMcl on Github, default profile picture, no bio), maintains decimal.js, which has 1.7 million users. XKCD 2347 moment.

10:30 a.m. Feb 17, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

This is the death of the author.

7:22 p.m. Feb 16, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

AAAQAHHAHAHHAHAHHAHHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHHAHDAWUDHAUOWDHAW DNAWI DANW DAW DAN WDAB WIODNBAIW ONDAOIWN DAIPWND AW DAOIcant'it sall in my head

ajlwdba jlwndk;waln ldjan o;awipnb djnawip odnaipw dnao[wjnd aopinwdalksndklnalknsdklansdklnmklmklmkllkmlkmlkmkmaas alsdmsad mklamwdklm saklmmsakldmlk malkmsdlk malksmd klasmdlk msaklm klmadlkma alksmd lkasmd l/kasmndfl jajlnajklnefbjkaeln kf;anf lkanef ipoj[

6:54 p.m. Feb 16, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

"Naughty Programmer's Madness"

12:11 a.m. Feb 16, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I would bet money that Astronomical Theater (my Gemini reverse-proxy/server) has a directory traversal bug.

10:49 p.m. Feb 15, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Every time I think I know Javascript it throws me a curveball.

I expected `[undefined].toString()` to return `"[undefined]"` but it instead returns `[]`.

`(undefined).toString()` is an error but `undefined + ""` is `"undefined"`.

4:47 p.m. Feb 15, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I think this is what they call a data crime

I'll give you a hint, the x-axis is unix timestamps

gemini://thoughts.learnerpages.com/media/8d063e30-7ce9-4407-8446-2ed5e475bb52.png

2:32 p.m. Feb 15, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Getting in arguments with people on the internet.

9:00 a.m. Feb 15, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I am still alive, for the time being.

9:00 a.m. Feb 15, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

This is my attempt at blackout poetry. It gave me slightly more appreciation for the medium, but I still think blackout poetry is dumb.

The source is some random book. I used exactly one page. I tried to persevere layout when transcribing for this site, but it’s obviously imperfect. “Mutilated and deformed” is the name of the chapter in the book, and I left it in at the top of the page.

Edit: uh I forgot the link to the actual post. It’s the one from a few days ago

8:45 a.m. Feb 15, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Don't listen to Watsky, take your meds.

8:18 a.m. Feb 15, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

"Sandstorm" by Darude is like unironically a good song.

7:09 a.m. Feb 15, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

What happened to "They can never say he sold out"? Bellion?

6:10 a.m. Feb 15, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Thinking about *Check, please* again.

Honestly I probably just need to read more fiction, my standards are so low.

But like, so many things don’t meet my standards. Like none of the *Check, Please* characters are great. They’re good, but the story and worldbuilding is amazing. One of very very few non-fantasy stories to do 5-star worldbuilding.

12:15 a.m. Feb 15, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

It’s really impressive how much personality Bois gives the satellites in *17776*. He can’t use environment or appearance or actions, really,

to create personality. He has to do it all with dialogue. And he does it so well.

• insert Lunchables scene here.*

12:05 a.m. Feb 15, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

"You are not God."

-Napkin.pdf

9:36 p.m. Feb 14, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I wish I had the Panera bagel toaster in my house.

2:47 p.m. Feb 14, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

The legends over at Github looked at Markdown and went, 'nah, not complicated enough.'

https://github.blog/2022-02-14-include-diagrams-markdown-files-mermaid/

What is this.

This is why we need Gemtext.

Like, *Markdown* has feature creep.

There's actually a lot I could say here. This ties into *all* of the reasons Gemini is important. This is what I mean when I say you can't embed simplicity inside a complex system.

2:39 p.m. Feb 14, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

The colors on my external monitor so fricking washed out. It makes Vivaldi look awful. And I can't fix the color settings because something

magically reverts them every time I do.

1:27 p.m. Feb 14, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Sometimes I forget how much code I've written.

1:26 p.m. Feb 14, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Thinking about the One True Comic

11:22 a.m. Feb 14, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Mentally translating Toki Pona's "o" as "boi, "

6:13 p.m. Feb 13, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

CoFH "Don't Be a Jerk" License v2 has shot up my list of favorite licenses.

It's basically all rights reserved, but you're allowed to fork, modify, or use it (but not redistribute it). It allows derivate works, provided they are at least source-available. Basically, it's what people think they're getting when they blindly add an open source license to a project.

5:38 p.m. Feb 13, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I had a bunch of thoughts earlier when I was in church and driving but I couldn't post them then and I don't feel like posting them now.

1:28 p.m. Feb 13, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

"Here needs no spies, nor eunuchs; her commit

Safe to thy foes, yea, to a marmoset."

- Elegy II "The Anagram" John Donne

Honestly, I'm speechless. Donne just murdered her right in front of me.

6:48 p.m. Feb 12, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Donne really said, 'Why'd you let that mosquito stick its thing in you but you won't let me stick my thing in you' except the year is 1590

and it's like 400 years too early to be arguing that virginity is a social construct. There's ahead of your time and then there's 400 years ahead of your time. Legend and a half.

One of the things that makes the poem so enjoyable is that you can totally picture Donne's girlfriend smiling and rolling her eyes as Donne explains the grave injustice she has committed in killing the mosquito that he's using as a metaphor.

Sorry for Flea-posting again.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46467/the-flea

6:17 p.m. Feb 12, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

There's totally a line in the Cloudflare WARP FAQ that implies that they're going to selectively give your IP to sites that pay them.

9:48 p.m. Feb 11, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Cloudflare WARP is a free VPN. It seems reputable. It doesn't come up in the VPN conversation because Cloudflare doesn't advertise it as

such, they really don't want to complete with the "VPN" providers for some reason.

Edit: Oh so you know what it is. Is they're really focused on encrypting your connection to HTTP websites and running DNS over HTTP. And in some cases, like if a website is hosted on Cloudflare servers itself, then they don't bother e.g. hiding your IP address. So they can't advertise it as a true VPN. But it works for me. No more unencrypted DNS!

9:12 p.m. Feb 11, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

0 open tabs on my phone. For the first time in literally years. It feels so good.

2:24 p.m. Feb 11, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Every so often Vivaldi's performance gets worse and I feel like I have to toggle hardware acceleration to fix it.

2:19 p.m. Feb 11, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I re-downloaded Apollo. I have an addiction.

1:32 p.m. Feb 11, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

The masculine urge to disconnect from contemporary society and join a Hutterite colony oh my word.

9:35 a.m. Feb 11, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

"IT IS STILL 100 SECONDS TO MIDNIGHT"

https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/timeline/

Climate change is as concerning to people now as nuclear war was 70 years ago. The former is much less concerning to me than the latter.

12:53 a.m. Feb 11, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

"a sketch of time of a time of dust"

4:01 p.m. Feb 10, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

All I want to do is play Minecraft, you know?

3:56 p.m. Feb 10, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

"MUTILATED AND DEFORMED"

arguments on

justice critique the

system based on injustive violating

his own Similarly, to

parish is

violation

companies operate

"unjustly, capriciously, cruelly," people

support the bad and wasteful

Similarly

unjust

"tyrannic disposition" later

observes

love mortifies

inferiors

lord over that

human dignity vir-

tual ubiquity inefficient institution

workmen are "always just and equitable"

hours allow leisure

efficiency issues,

prompt masters to

rest living

stress

justice besides

cloath lodge

share produce themselves

Finally,

3:44 p.m. Feb 10, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

"nothing mortifies him so much as to be obliged to condescend to persuade his inferiors"

3:07 p.m. Feb 10, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

"Infinity Pools" by The Technicolors is so good. It's not like The Technicolors' normal stuff.

2:28 p.m. Feb 10, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I'm still alive.

2:23 p.m. Feb 10, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

"Touch me"

2:08 a.m. Feb 10, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

This is the creation of a new thing.

2:05 a.m. Feb 10, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Counselor's trying to diagnose me with fricking ADHD.

1:53 a.m. Feb 10, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I want someone to slap me

11:44 p.m. Feb 09, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

What the frick what the actual frick Trazlander is back???? And nobody told me?

gemini://thoughts.learnerpages.com/media/1df5441c-53f8-41d0-b01f-c7af4e1b1dbc.png

9:42 p.m. Feb 09, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Man I wish the Linoleum Club existed.

8:50 p.m. Feb 09, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Absolutely quality HackerNews text posts today.

• A tor link to a black market site literally advertising a hit man for hire.
• ‘How do you cope with wasting all your potential?’ …I have an “IQ higher than 99.8% of people”…
• ‘How many calories am I burning sitting in my chair writing code?’
• “What’s the ultimate technology stack that top-tier hackers use?”

Absolute insanity. Who are these people?

Some quality runner ups as well but I can’t post everything.

8:43 p.m. Feb 09, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I deleted Apollo from my phone and like 30 seconds later find myself searching for it because I can’t find it.

Ahhh

Apollo is a Reddit client btw

8:20 p.m. Feb 09, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Oh my word I have a bad headache I hate this

6:07 p.m. Feb 09, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I wonder if music is a drug.

4:58 p.m. Feb 09, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

An ekphrastic

Corners pieced, stapled, sharp,

Threaded, pull taunt,

Edges, lines, angles

angled corners pieced

Threaded, pulled and tied

taunt string pulls corners

angled corners and lines

threaded, tied taunt

string slips through corners

angles and corners and lines

gemini://thoughts.learnerpages.com/media/e1a1f942-4f1d-4ac2-bcd0-528ff9eceb51.mp3

2:55 p.m. Feb 09, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Me trying to explain to Reddit users why I'm not going to boycott Chick-fil-A because their CEO is homophobic. (Currently at -6 points.)

1:45 p.m. Feb 09, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Hawtie and Hawtey are two different ranked bedwars players. (I'm pretty sure.)

Ranked Bedwars is like such a small community it seems like a wild coincidence.

10:34 p.m. Feb 08, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

My finite motivation, when taken in the limit with my infinite mind is non existent.

3:47 p.m. Feb 08, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I'm a big fan of continuous deployment. If you have code available, it should be the same code running in production.

12:24 p.m. Feb 08, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I have complete creative freedom.

9:47 a.m. Feb 08, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Good morning.

8:44 a.m. Feb 08, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I said this and then I fricking popped off.

https://thoughts.learnerpages.com/?show=8f027781-2a8c-4b71-a91a-7516764ecaeb

I'm on track for most posts ever this season.

11:35 p.m. Feb 07, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

This Thought might have been interesting, but my thought process getting there was pretty dumb.

Something about 'humans act like NPCs'

But the examples that prompted it were like, someone wearing the same jacket every day, or wearing a T-shirt for the club they were in. Like. I'm not wrong. But also. 'Humans walk places because that's the easiest way of getting there and they're lazy and therefore they are like NPCs.'

I think there's something there… But it's not nearly as interesting as I thought at the time.

10:34 p.m. Feb 07, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Today on cursed code with Matthias:

def test(value=[])
    return value

a = test()
b = test()
a.append(1)
print(a) # [1]
print(b) # [1]
print(a is b) # True

8:43 p.m. Feb 07, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Possibly my favorite Javascript feature is this:

function foo() {
    let x = 0;
    return {
        inc: function () {
            x++;
        };
        get: function () {
            return x;
        }
    };
}
const obj = foo();
obj.get(); // 0
obj.inc();
obj.get(); // 1

And this is obviously an ugly shim for OOP-style encapsulation that isn't needed. But this is just illustrative of the most common use for this feature.

And this feature isn't something that I normally use, or that is good practice to use. But if you couldn't do this in a language, it would just feel underpowered. (This does require functions to be passable by value, which similarly I think it very powerful.)

(You actually can do this in Python 3, with the `nonlocal` keyword, fun fact.)

4:30 p.m. Feb 07, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

This feels big.

I just released the source code for this site.

https://tildegit.org/matthias/WhisperMaPhone

It's not like totally un-ready. But it has lots of room for improvement.

2:03 p.m. Feb 07, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Okay it's the `syntax` variable not the `:syntax` command. `:set syntax=markdown`. Obviously.

11:57 a.m. Feb 07, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

The Vim learning curve is just so unbelievably steep.

I have a file without an extension. I want to tell Vim to syntax highlight it as markdown. In a GUI editor, that would be a button. But I've read the Vim help pages for `:colorscheme` `:language` `:syntax` and `:highlight` and none of them can be used to change the language Vim thinks the file is. (`:language` is for changing the interface language.)

11:55 a.m. Feb 07, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Entertain me.

8:21 a.m. Feb 07, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Wordle would make a good subject for a meta-study of game theory and cheating.

Since Wordle is fundamentally about finding information, and yet, the information is right there in the source code if you're willing to peak behind the veil.

So you end up with a whole spectrum of amounts of information that you can convey, in between knowing nothing to knowing tomorrow's word. And it's really hard to define a strict line between cheating and not cheating.

Like, is using hints or guides in a puzzle game cheating?

I think this gives rise to the more fundamental question of 'what is platonicWordle?'. Since you inherently come into it with knowledge of English words, and yet, everyone has a different list of five-letter English words in their head. Someone who doesn't know English very well is playing the game at a different difficulty.

I think what I'm getting at is that cheating, and to a boarder extent, playing, puzzle games is a function of your mind. And no matter how tempting it is to turn the game into a black box of re-playability, that's just not the nature of the game.

1:22 p.m. Feb 06, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I almost want to write a second About page. I like the length of the current one and don't want to keep updating it, but I also feel like

there are a number of important cultural elements that I didn't know or forgot to include.

This is impossibly such a garden. This is distributed as an informational message by The Library of Nomad. This is a sparrow, falling.

9:14 p.m. Feb 05, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

tenpo pini la mi sona ala e ni: toki pona li musi

8:50 p.m. Feb 05, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

It's honestly profound the difference between "nothing can be perfect" and "everything can be better."

Obvious there's an attitude "half-full/half-empty" difference. But there's also logical difference. Saying that something isn't perfect doesn't imply that it can be better.

Edit:

Similarly, the second also implies a qualitative aspect that the first doesn't. It's not a binary, perfect or imperfect, it's about being better.

5:52 p.m. Feb 05, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Hacker News role-playing Among Us lolol

5:17 p.m. Feb 05, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

https://arunkprasad.com/log/unlearning-perfectionism/

Focus on pursing excellence. Success and failure aren't ever in our full control. All we can control is what we choose to do right now, in this moment.

Focus on better outcomes. Any real situation can always be improved. (Don't worry about making it perfect, that's not possible.)

52% is better than 51%.

5:16 p.m. Feb 05, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

"She dwells in puddles for fear of the ocean."

This is a puddle.

3:09 p.m. Feb 05, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Humans have a tendency to act like NPCs, follow social norms, be boring, because it's easier.

11:53 a.m. Feb 05, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I wish I could write a poem to do justice to Matthew 10:29.

“Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground outside your Father’s care.”

‭‭NIV‬‬

2:06 a.m. Feb 05, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

“I choose marble and the Catholic Church because /

They say no, to natural beauty that lures us and kills us”

2:00 a.m. Feb 05, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I almost cried looking at /r/Sh*ttyPoetry.

It’s not good poetry. But it’s there. And there’s so much of it. 10 poems being posted a day every day for 10 years. Most with 1 vote. Seen by no one. But that’s not why they were written. No one fishes for popularity on a subreddit with more posters than readers. No one hopes to kick-start a literature Nobel by opening /r/Sh*ttyPoetry. Just people with words filling their heads and overflowing. Just poems, crafted for the art of it, and shared because they could be, and maybe they could mean something to someone else. “But actually flowers”

1:41 a.m. Feb 05, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Siri forces me to say "Non-stop from Hamilton" every single time.

7:57 p.m. Feb 04, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

The internet is collapsing into a parody of itself.

5:35 p.m. Feb 04, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I'm starting to think Linus personally dislikes me.

4:55 p.m. Feb 04, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

"Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(8,3)"

Yeah that's about what I expected from dd-ing to the hard drive.

Now the question is how to fix it. I didn't think this far ahead.

12:53 a.m. Feb 04, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

`dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb`

I know what I'm doing I promise /s

I have no idea what I'm doing.

12:47 a.m. Feb 04, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I'm going to start using all-caps more. It's an alternative to markup features, which is nice because it doesn't require markup.

11:30 p.m. Feb 03, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

"Do YOU have redeeming social value?"

10:09 p.m. Feb 03, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Can't get over the fact that the Jazz Hands looked at a player named "Zee Phantom" and went, yep, ze/zir pronouns.

12:17 p.m. Feb 03, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I get it, everyone in the world hates me

12:38 a.m. Feb 03, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I am stuck in a world with no responsibilities, no passion, nothing.

12:30 a.m. Feb 03, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I miss the old Matthias.

10:42 p.m. Feb 02, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I’m a real person, I swear.

4:11 p.m. Feb 02, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I exist as a parody of myself.

3:10 p.m. Feb 02, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Sometimes I’m afraid of the music as well.

1:07 p.m. Feb 02, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I guess I'm probably being too harsh, and I'm just not hearing about things like I used to. I found https://colors.withgoogle.com, which is

exactly the type of thing I'm talking about. A fun, marking gimmick. And it seems to have been created less than a week ago. But man I had to look for that.

12:35 p.m. Feb 02, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Google used to publicize their R&D as a form of marketing.

You can't do that when you remove the Google branding from it.

You could view self-driving car R&D as a Marketing Expense. Instead it's listed as a loss in the "Other Bets" category of Alphabet's quarterly report.

12:28 p.m. Feb 02, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I think the Alphabet creation/split really killed the culture at Google.

I have no evidence to back this up of course. But it seems like Google had this great culture of experimentation.

I'm just thinking back, Google did Google Maps in 2005 at a time when they were a *much* smaller company.

Now they have a much larger budget, and they're not doing the same types of things. I think part of that is that Alphabet exists and Google has been relegated to handling the day-to-day operation of existing products. Google's not supposed to branch out and do self driving cars or anything radically different. On the flip side, Alphabet is the *parent* company. They're bigger and so they have to be operated like an investing firm. They don't have a "culture of experimentation"—they're trying to diversify a portfolio.

I think Google would be in a lot better place today if they had created an R&D subsidiary instead of a holding company.

12:23 p.m. Feb 02, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I'm a little worried

9:27 p.m. Feb 01, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Everything exists to do one thing

And nothing does its thing well

The bluetooth won't connect

the left earbud is dead

the microwave beep

can wake the dead

The car won't start

The house will burn

We will all stumble

• Who, in the vast domain of humanity,*
• Has the power the will the reason to*
• Fight the broken dark scary imperfections*

There exists more than we can imagine today

But it will exist at the end of time

The world is full of problems but

The world is full of people

3:43 p.m. Feb 01, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I'm bad at imagery.

3:33 p.m. Feb 01, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Me and Saihttam and God and generic male narrator #1 and [redacted] have lived in together in my head for years but suddenly I realize that

there's a female voice in here with me and I'm going insane. Sexist.

2:07 p.m. Feb 01, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Wait let me try a word dump fump liump insanity brains and frycooks and sheep flying through the air at amillion miles an hour. Tuesday is

today and yesterdaya dn rails lines and fear and conjestion.

1:49 p.m. Feb 01, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

There's a voice in my head that isn't mine.

I'm calling her Mel.

I'm think I'm going insane this time.

1:46 p.m. Feb 01, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

How do you write at all?

1:35 p.m. Feb 01, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I can't take it. I want to use simple software but it's like people think simple software means that it's bad or something.

Installed lwm. I can't figure out how to open an application. I don't want a fancy fuzzy-finder application list with professionally made icons. But I NEED TO BE ABLE TO OPEN AN APPLICATION. IT has to be POSSIBLE.

So I decided to try to ask for help in #linux on Libera.chat, right. Sounds reasonable. I don't have a window manager working, so I decide to install irssi, which is a very popular terminal-based IRC client.

It open with, I kid you not, 'if you're new, open our website to learn how to use irssi'

It is inexcusable in my mind to have to read online documentation to learn how to use software, period. I'm not learning a programming language. I'm trying to connect to an IRC server. I don't have a window manager installed.

So I open, in `links`, irssi.org (luckily irssi.org doesn't have any JS, so it works), select "Read Tutorials" > "Startup How-To" > "First Steps."

We're now a different program and 4 levels deep to try to learn how to connect to an IRC server. IRSSI doesn't *do anything* without walking through this. But it gets worse.

It explains that it's configured with some default servers, and gives the example that we can use `/CONNECT liberachat` and `/JOIN #irssi` to join. That sounds great. That's all I want. I close `links`, open issri again. Enter `/CONNECT liberachat`. Doesn't work. Liberachat isn't found. It's not a preconfigured server.

And like. I'm using a terminal-based IRC client. I want minimalism. This isn't "Discord is good because it has stickers." I want pure-text communication. And I can't figure out how to use.

So I search for liberachat on my phone because I can't remember their domain name. And I open a second tab on my phone with the irssi docs because I now need to add a new server. I try it without the port, hoping that the port is standardized in 2022 but no. The examples given in the irssi docs don't specify ANYWHERE how to add a server including the port, for the record. So I try "irc.libera.chat:6697" and that doesn't work and then I try "/connect irc.libera.chat 6697" and that at least tries to connect but I get 'connection closed by remote peer' instantly.

I give up at this point. I use neovim as a my primary editor. I'm no stranger to terminal apps. But I can't guess how to use your software.

1:25 p.m. Feb 01, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

The biggest IRC server is Libera.chat.

Irssi is a very popular terminal IRC client.

The default port for servers in irssi is not the port

used by libera.chat.

It is virtually undocumented, and certainly unclear to me, how to add a server that doesn’t use the default port.

12:26 p.m. Feb 01, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

All software is bad.

12:16 p.m. Feb 01, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Cannot get over how based bill wurtz is.

“all 16 personalities belong to myers-briggs. depending on which way i answer the questions, i get to read a different one of their personalities”

9:57 a.m. Feb 01, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Good morning. A full 3 of my brain cells are awake to greet you today.

9:48 a.m. Feb 01, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

They’re extending HTTP to add a whole new verb. Absolute nightmare.

I understand the use case. Working with graphQL is currently painful. I just kind of can’t believe that something so fundamental to the protocol is being extended at this point in time.

(Gemini is not extendable.)

8:45 a.m. Feb 01, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

This website plays with boundaries. But it does not try to break or surpass boundaries, because then they wouldn't be there to play with.

12:20 a.m. Feb 01, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Words still have power.

12:16 a.m. Feb 01, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

We just write so much poetry and so little of it is appreciated.

https://www.reddit.com/r/nonpoetry/comments/moge74/translation/

gemini://thoughts.learnerpages.com/media/8c87c12b-cefd-4d22-8b04-21b8018f266b.mp3

12:11 a.m. Feb 01, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I've been thinking a lot about mutual respect recently.

I realized I don't respect random people on the internet but want them to respect me

A little bit of mutual respect goes a long way, and I think we have way too little online.

9:44 p.m. Jan 31, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

"I am addicted to nothing. That is, to being addicted to nothing."

I am addicted to being free.

10:57 p.m. Jan 30, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

People really just say things don't they.

10:51 p.m. Jan 30, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I forgot how bad my website set up was. The absolute path to the certificate file for the Gemini version of Thoughts is hard-coded into the

source code for MatthiasPortzel.com

10:24 p.m. Jan 30, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Listening to music on wired headphones for the 2018 vibes.

10:20 p.m. Jan 30, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

The thing I don't like about writing tests for code is that it's really hard to write good tests and too easy to give yourself a false

sense of confidence.

If there's an edge case you're forgetting about, you can write 10 tests covering basic cases

assert(sum(1) === 1)
assert(sum(1, 2) === 3)
assert(sum(1, 2, 3) === 6)

And that tells you nothing about the behavior if the last element is `NaN`.

And if you think, "oh I wonder if this works with `NaN`" you can try it or look at your code without importing a testing framework. The hard part about avoiding bugs is predicting the edge cases, not testing if it works in the edge cases.

I don't know, I don't get it.

10:06 p.m. Jan 30, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I have like 4 things going on, but they're all in my head at once and it's too much.

9:44 p.m. Jan 30, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

The Blaseball fan's struggle is to remove the L from the second position of words it belongs in

9:00 p.m. Jan 30, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

"but actually flowers"

8:47 p.m. Jan 30, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

GoodTimesWithScar is an inspiration. Absolutely incredible.

I don't even watch his videos regularly, but I have a large amount of respect for him.

8:31 p.m. Jan 30, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

We live in a purgatory where 97% of text is UTF-8 encoded but we can't write tools that assume arbitrary text is UTF-8.

7:09 p.m. Jan 30, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

The C preprocessor will replace `??<` with `{`, in case you don't have a `{` key.

Okay, the C standard requires it. It looks like GCC and Clang actually don't do trigraph replacement unless you request that they follow e.g. `-std=c17`

6:18 p.m. Jan 30, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

• Removes banana from the duffle bag on my floor*

5:38 p.m. Jan 30, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Reflexive build word dump brain freeze declogged and free and fly and me and life to the end of the full cup. Inside and outside, behind but

Not before. Meaningless and full despite. Free. Sky above. Me.

4:02 p.m. Jan 30, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Now what?

10:53 a.m. Jan 30, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Daniel himself has updated my HN username so that’s pretty cool. Might start commenting there again.

12:21 a.m. Jan 30, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

It appears that I'm going insane.

3:35 p.m. Jan 29, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Last short circuit the Moist Talkers beat us 18 times in a row *but* we won 2 consecutive games this short circuit, breaking the streak.

"Nobody beats the Jazzhands 20 times in a row"!

11:25 a.m. Jan 29, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

The cycles are coming again they're starting over the pain. It's hot in here.

I want to throw up. I want to

To quote myself, "Past like 10pm the solution to existential crises is simple; go to sleep, deal with it in the morning."

Hopefully I was wiser then than I am now.

11:40 p.m. Jan 28, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Hacker News sorted by new is just some guy, linking his own Medium post linking to a Google Doc describing how Satoshi Nakamoto is Elon Musk

11:34 p.m. Jan 28, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Oh my word so much drama about Python 2 depreciation in 2022. My word.

5:44 p.m. Jan 28, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

• The golden age of the Internet hasn't happened yet.*

4:28 p.m. Jan 28, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

This is where we are.

4:23 p.m. Jan 28, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Cursed sorting algorithm that always returns a sorted list, but sometimes sorts increasing and sometimes decreasing.

4:07 p.m. Jan 28, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I think the serverless people have some really interesting ideas. I definitely have a lot of respect for them.

8:24 p.m. Jan 27, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Vivaldi crashed on me earlier. Spark crashed just now. This is pain.

All I want is perfect software.

8:02 p.m. Jan 27, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Mutual respect.

8:01 p.m. Jan 27, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I looked at my TODO list and it has things to do. What is this.

7:49 p.m. Jan 27, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

"Unlike most IETF efforts, this document is not embarrassed to clearly state that we are simply stuffing more stuff in while we have the

editor open."

3:56 p.m. Jan 27, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

When I say it's hard being a perfectionist I mean that I had to unplug my external monitor because the color profile on it was off.

3:43 p.m. Jan 27, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Someone suggested that the interview couldn't have gone any better if Fox paid them off. And like, I could almost believe it.

It has motive, which most conspiracy theories lack. Not just for Fox but for corporate America. That's the angle /r/AntiWork should be taking. Like you could sell that so hard. Ban that one person from the subreddit, and post an announcement about how they were bribed to throw the interview. It's like they haven't even read the instruction manual on how to start a communist revolution.

Oh yeah context I guess is important: https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/sd9ohb/whats_going_on_with_rantiwork_and_the_fox_news/

2:08 p.m. Jan 27, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

• The members of /r/AntiWork are surprised to learn that the subreddit is communist.*

So I've said before that Reddit is a left wing cult.

I retract that statement. My new theory is that the vast majority of Reddit users are moderate/centrist, but lack the critical thinking skills to realize that there are members pushing an incredibly left-wing agenda.

"I checked out the sub a few times, and I didn't realize that it was supposed to be anti-work (against work) [I thought it was just people talking about] bad bosses, bad companies to work for, and advice for people that are facing conflict" (+389)

You joined /r/AntiWork, and didn't realize it was about the abolition of work? They're not exactly subtlety about it. The description of the subreddit is "A subreddit for those who want to end work." The sidebar links to /r/Anarchy.

And they get publicity, they get a radical leftist on TV making communist talking points, and suddenly, the subreddit backtracks? Why?

This goes back to me taking everything literally. If you say you want to abolish work, I'm honestly surprised that you have a job at all. Next you're going to be telling me that Tumblr user @death2america doesn't want to abolish the United States.

1:49 p.m. Jan 27, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Socialist revolution has turned to anarchy and infighting and it hasn’t even started yet!

1:17 p.m. Jan 27, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

The key to understanding the Trolley Problem is that there's implicitly an antagonist who is responsible for constructing the hypothetical.

9:25 a.m. Jan 27, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

If this is what that looks like, then I’m not interested.

Remind me to decline if I’m ever offered a Nobel prize.

12:13 a.m. Jan 27, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Blaseball on one screen, Minecraft on another, just vibing.

9:59 p.m. Jan 26, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I still can't get over the quarter that Apple made up over 100% of the mobile phone industry's revenue, because Samsung recalled all the

Note 7s and posted a huge loss for the quarter. So Apple made more money than every phone company (including Apple), combined.

9:49 p.m. Jan 26, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Culture is a flat disk.

9:34 p.m. Jan 26, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Writing code for me is like a jigsaw puzzle. If I see two pieces that connect, I'm going to grab them off the table and put them together,

even if I don't have anything else that they connect to. So it's really weird to do code analysis on my programs before I'm done writing them, because they're not complete, and they're not even internally consistent.

(I don't want to sound like I'm the only one that thinks this. There's some really interesting work being done to try to design editors and type checkers around "holes." But it's all experimental for now.)

6:48 p.m. Jan 26, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

You don't understand how hard it is to be a perfectionist.

6:43 p.m. Jan 26, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I'm like almost ADHD when writing code. I'll start writing something, and be half way through a line, but my mind has been working on the

next line, so I jump down and write that line before I forget it, and then I go back and finish the line I was originally working on.

I think this is why I get so frustrated to with like anything that tries to analyze my code as I'm typing, either to give syntax errors, or even auto-indent it. Like your auto-indenter is going to be wrong if I took a break in the middle of writing my function, and I'm writing the line that calls the function. I don't mind it if I can fix the indention obviously, but like some editors *force* indentation, and I have to go back and add closing brackets to the function declaration above.

6:43 p.m. Jan 26, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

You can't embed sanity within an insane system.

6:16 p.m. Jan 26, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

• Ben Shapiro voice*

'Curious how your blog post about how Gemini is good, is shared over HTTPs.'

It's like these people have never read https://gemini.circumlunar.space. Which opens with 'Gemini will not replace the web.'

1:52 p.m. Jan 26, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I can't be. The person

I want to be.

3:29 p.m. Jan 25, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

It's hard to teach tech because you want to start with simple, older technologies, because they're simpler, but they're also bad.

Like how do you teach someone about HTTPs and not HTTP? But you also have to make clear that websites in 2022 probably shouldn't be using HTTP.

1:17 p.m. Jan 25, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Aaahhhaaah

1:13 p.m. Jan 25, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

How is this the first time I'm reading Steph Week's wiki page?

"Weeks is readily identified by his nine eyes and nine hands, each carrying a bat. The bats are named after the nine days of the week"

11:13 a.m. Jan 25, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Jands really put all of the chaotic energy into one player. Munavoi is the chaotic scapegoat of the team.

11:06 a.m. Jan 25, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

The thing about Blaseball is that it's not a game, it's a cultural event. And as long as you know about it, you are participating.

Confused? So is everyone else. You can learn more about Blaseball, but it's structured such that you're pretty much always confused. The people that don't know what Blaseball is, provided they know *of* it, are just as much participants as anyone else.

10:38 a.m. Jan 25, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

'Just write simple HTML'

• Simple HTML is 100X more complicated than Gemtext!*
• Markdown is 10X more complicated than Gemtext*

11:38 p.m. Jan 24, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Gemini gets so much hate for being different. I can't take it.

And like, since there's so little substance to Gemini, you really can't criticize it for anything but being different, but man, people do.

Like, there's no argument you can make against Gemini that you can't make against either a) Twitter having a character limit or b) any protocol that is not HTTP(s)+HTML.

11:37 p.m. Jan 24, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Is it time for something different?

9:34 p.m. Jan 24, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I wish I had a flying desk.

5:35 p.m. Jan 24, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I should totally start a crypto/Web3 arc. Ah! Matthias with an NFT profile picture, I can see it.

11:41 p.m. Jan 23, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

"I know I'd rather lose my life / than have to lose myself"

-Chemical Angel, Watsky

"But baby maybe it's a problem when you got a problem / and you get addicted to the cure"

-Tears To Diamonds, Watsky

Anti-anti-depressants is such a take.

10:50 p.m. Jan 23, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

“This is not an endorsement of arson.”

6:28 p.m. Jan 23, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Blaseball is back bay-bee

4:47 p.m. Jan 23, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Best sub-league again, Bop.

4:47 p.m. Jan 23, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Re-reading "On the Arbitration of Self" which I haven't read since I wrote it, and like, wow. Rhetorically I'm off the wall.

"Though intuition cries out in protest, logic ignores it."

If I forgot that I wrote that, and you showed it to me, I wouldn't believe you that I wrote it. It does not match any writing style that I've used for anything else as far as I can remember.

https://rigby.krikorian.ca/post/8410098d-b13e-44e2-a244-b59fdaf080cc

(Let me know if this link breaks, I have a backup.)

2:54 p.m. Jan 23, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

"What's bigger than Everything?"

-Only Connect - Series 10 - Episode 5

1:11 p.m. Jan 23, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

"Are we back?"

The start of The Incomparable 2021 Clip Show is so good. They just open with the clip loop. Off the bat.

12:34 p.m. Jan 23, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I'm so tempted to do it. I'm so tempted to just do it. To just drop $60 for Audio Hijack.

10:26 p.m. Jan 21, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

It's interesting, since I've added a search page here, I've started to use this more as a personal knowledge repository. Which was really

not how it was built, but like, if it functions like "for free," then why not?

10:20 p.m. Jan 21, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Writing a LISP in Vim. Feels wrong somehow. And yet, so right.

9:53 p.m. Jan 21, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I’m firmly in the lowercase “into” camp. I think they decided on the wrong way.

They decided on following the capitalization of official media, but no other Wikipedia page follows “official” portrayal over rules of grammar. See, e.g. the Wikipedia page of any band or company that stylized their own name in all lowercase.

But like, I’m sure there’s a reason that they decided the way they did and I haven’t read the 40,000 word argument or the Wikipedia style guide or anything.

8:18 a.m. Jan 21, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

For some reason it’s easier for me to compliment people in Toki Pona. Normally I’m not very good at complimenting people.

Which is kind of ironic, since TP is supposed to be “polite by default.” Like, I don’t need to end all my sentences with “sina pona” but I want to.

sina mute li pona.

7:53 a.m. Jan 21, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

My generation has an interesting relationship with poetry.

This post brought to you by /r/nonpoetry

7:07 a.m. Jan 21, 2022, UTC-5

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You can’t tell me e e cummings wouldn’t use neopronouns. Like the type of person who always wrote his name in lower case would totally be on

board with more interesting pronouns. (Unfortunately, I’m not about to guess what pronouns, that’s a slippery slope to retconning the gender of historical figures.)

7:07 a.m. Jan 21, 2022, UTC-5

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People explaining UDP/TCP are like, 'TCP orders your packets, UDP doesn't. UDP stands for Unreliable. UDP is bad, TCP is good.'

• Always more nuance.*

1:17 p.m. Jan 20, 2022, UTC-5

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Like if you get a 100% on a test, you're not just perfect, you've transcended the level of the material being tested.

10:51 a.m. Jan 20, 2022, UTC-5

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I don't just want to be perfect. I want to *transcend.*

10:47 a.m. Jan 20, 2022, UTC-5

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You can't run from your typographical responsibility.

10:47 a.m. Jan 20, 2022, UTC-5

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I hate time I hate the concept of time I hate entropy I hate that everything falls apart if I don’t actively hold it together.

2:59 a.m. Jan 20, 2022, UTC-5

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I can't control what I think about.

2:44 a.m. Jan 20, 2022, UTC-5

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I'm playing chess but everyone else is playing checkers. But like, the game is actually checkers and I'm just overcomplicating it.

1:11 a.m. Jan 20, 2022, UTC-5

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If I had a shovel I'd go make an igloo right now.

12:59 a.m. Jan 20, 2022, UTC-5

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I'm infinite people and none of them are real.

12:56 a.m. Jan 20, 2022, UTC-5

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And now, for something different.

10:00 p.m. Jan 19, 2022, UTC-5

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Even the Brandon Sanderson fans don’t like the *Rithmatist.*

It’s not that they don’t like it, but Sanderson just has written so much that there has to be something missed.

9:46 p.m. Jan 19, 2022, UTC-5

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There have been days that have seen me better.

In other news, I crafted a master infusion crystal.

8:06 p.m. Jan 19, 2022, UTC-5

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There's this guy on Youtube that posts railcart videos, and the comments are all "is this safe?" and like, your alternative is trainhopping

1:07 p.m. Jan 19, 2022, UTC-5

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Okay going to bed.

1:59 a.m. Jan 19, 2022, UTC-5

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Down to 18 open tabs in Safari on my phone. I haven’t been at 0 tabs for as long as I can remember. I was at 150+ just a couple weeks ago,

I’ve been whittling them down.

12:54 a.m. Jan 19, 2022, UTC-5

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Muted the Vivaldi Discord server. We had a good multi-year run, but I don’t check Discord enough anymore to stay on top of messages there.

12:52 a.m. Jan 19, 2022, UTC-5

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Like, my brain has so many sources, so many pieces of media that I've consumed, that like, I could never come up with an original idea for

the rest of my life and just pass of things I've read on the internet as my own ideas. And like, I'm not Googling the question and copying an answer. I mean, I saw someone discussing this point on the internet 4 years ago and internalized their opinion and I honestly don't know if their opinion is mine or not because I haven't researched it myself but I somehow know enough to have a conversation about it. Like, I could pitch you 30 different video games, which are just blatantly stolen from Khan Academy, but I know that the original programs were unpopular or deleted and the games have taken on a new life in my head. If I wrote a cross-over fan fiction between two works that have probably each been read by ~1000 people, and I change the names of the characters, at some point does this become an original work? If every line of my poem comes from a different Reddit comment, is it my poetry?

9:51 p.m. Jan 18, 2022, UTC-5

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It is difficult to understand the mood that I am in.

9:41 p.m. Jan 18, 2022, UTC-5

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There were a lot of scenes in *Polar Express* that pushed the boundaries of how I conceptualize human interactions.

9:38 p.m. Jan 18, 2022, UTC-5

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Turning on Tap-To-Click (I'm lazy)

9:32 p.m. Jan 18, 2022, UTC-5

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Blorbo from my shows.

9:32 p.m. Jan 18, 2022, UTC-5

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Thinking about *Check, Please!*

8:19 p.m. Jan 18, 2022, UTC-5

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Man Covid is really going to screw up a generation. It’s going to be wild.

6:03 p.m. Jan 18, 2022, UTC-5

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I just know that if Donne was alive today he'd have a fricking baller Twitter account.

3:53 p.m. Jan 18, 2022, UTC-5

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Donne really said, 'why do girls never go for nice guys but let themselves be used by mosquitos.' In 1590.

3:46 p.m. Jan 18, 2022, UTC-5

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I think one of the things that makes the flea so iconic to me is that it's like satire. Like it's not only funny, and the time period and

everything, but also, it implies the existence of a very different poem, which makes more legitimate arguments. And Donne didn't write that other poem. possibly the GOAT.

3:40 p.m. Jan 18, 2022, UTC-5

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It's been 400 years and "The Flea" is still so funny to me. What a meme of a poem.

3:18 p.m. Jan 18, 2022, UTC-5

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Hit 1,000 notes.

gemini://thoughts.learnerpages.com/media/8c4127a6-47d7-482c-be27-7e5f7c51e5f4.png

3:01 p.m. Jan 18, 2022, UTC-5

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Throwback to that time in 2018 when I went through a limerick phrase.

2:51 p.m. Jan 18, 2022, UTC-5

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Something about poetry.

2:31 p.m. Jan 18, 2022, UTC-5

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Big fan of the Great Fire of London. 1666 was a good year.

2:06 p.m. Jan 18, 2022, UTC-5

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I microdose insanity to keep me sane.

12:54 p.m. Jan 18, 2022, UTC-5

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Reddit /r/dataisbeautiful users absolutely visceral upon encountering someone who tithes.

1:38 a.m. Jan 18, 2022, UTC-5

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The problem with IQ is that it's one dimensional. (Aside from other obvious problems.) I think a 2-dimensional IQ test could be really

interesting.

7:02 p.m. Jan 17, 2022, UTC-5

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Maybe it's a good thing that I don't know how to use Wattpad.

6:20 p.m. Jan 17, 2022, UTC-5

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Ok hear me out, Agan Harrison Outskirts head canon.

5:32 p.m. Jan 17, 2022, UTC-5

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Made banana bread around 10 or 11 today. It’s all been eaten.

5:24 p.m. Jan 17, 2022, UTC-5

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“where does the photograph end?”

4:40 p.m. Jan 17, 2022, UTC-5

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It's not that I'm ignoring you, it's just I'm not paying attention to you right now.

3:54 p.m. Jan 17, 2022, UTC-5

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Processing is still something else. Writing p5 is kinda fun.

2:44 p.m. Jan 17, 2022, UTC-5

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I love browsing Hacker News by new. The front page tends to be the same topics, but New gets weird. Not least because of the "Ask HN" posts.

There are a lot of Ask HN posts made, most of which seem to take Hacker News as a divine bestower of knowledge. It's like Quora but a super specific demographic.

Ask HN exists to function like Ask Reddit. But it gets used like StackOverflow or worse, /r/Relationship_advice.

'Ask HN: How to deal with join pain?' 'How to stop people from stealing my SD cards' 'Should I buy my 4 year old color blind glasses' A whole bunch of questions that technically fit because they're tech, but should really be Google searches. 'Where to buy cables?' 'What YouTubers make JS tutorials?' Ah. The internet.

12:21 a.m. Jan 17, 2022, UTC-5

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Not me, trying to make playlists.

9:43 p.m. Jan 16, 2022, UTC-5

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Let's go!

9:40 p.m. Jan 16, 2022, UTC-5

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Maybe arrays were a myth the whole time.

Can you imagine if we didn't have arrays?

9:07 p.m. Jan 16, 2022, UTC-5

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Can't believe they delayed the Blaseball broadcast. I'm so excited. I want Blaseball to be back.

9:01 p.m. Jan 16, 2022, UTC-5

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Feature creep turns things that are boring into things that are bad.

For an example, let's say Mark is working as an engineer adding a smart assistant to a microwave. Mark has been effected by the disease of feature creep. (Whether Mark uses his own product, or is passionate about microwaves, or particularly cares about his job doesn't matter.)

When most people see a normal microwave ("base" microwave), they're bored by it. They've seen it before. When Mark sees a base microwave in his friend's house, because he's been effected by feature creep, he thinks "this microwave is bad because it doesn't have a voice assistant."

I'm being very particular with my wording. It's possible that Mark uses and loves his voice assistant microwave. But it's possible he doesn't. It's possible that he would be legitimately inconvenienced by the lack of a voice assistant. But the "feature creep" disease doesn't care about practicality. It effects the way Mark thinks about his friend's microwave, which Mark has never used.

It's not about liking features or missing them. You can be a smart-home enthusiast, of the opinion that all microwaves are best with voice assistants. But if you don't spend all your time around voice assistant microwaves, like Mark does, you can walk into your friend's house, and see a base microwave and not think anything of it.

Feature creep isn't about wanting more features. That's the other point. Mark doesn't want a camera or a TV or a laser projector in his microwave. Feature creep doesn't make you want more features.

Mark isn't dumb. Mark knows that not everyone has a smart microwave. He still calls a base microwave a "normal" microwave. It's not that the goalposts have moved. But a voice assistant microwave is not impressive to Mark anymore. And a base microwave is actively unimpressive.

Like, a golfer who starts passionately playing golf, practicing every day, and getting better, still knows that par is the standard, and knows that they're getting better. The first time they get better than par, they get a certain rush from it. The 100th time they get under par, they still know that they've a good job, but they don't feel the same way.

It's not an addiction either. Addictions cause you to suffer withdrawal or negative effects. Feature creep doesn't have negative mental effects, not really. It's just desensitizing you to existing features.

6:49 p.m. Jan 16, 2022, UTC-5

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Feature creep fails to convey the need.

5:49 p.m. Jan 16, 2022, UTC-5

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Working on my A* implementation again. https://ourjseditor.com/program/t462QC

2:40 p.m. Jan 16, 2022, UTC-5

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I'm so fricking slow I have to go non-stop if I want to get anything done.

2:39 p.m. Jan 16, 2022, UTC-5

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"How do you write like you're running about of time?"

2:03 p.m. Jan 16, 2022, UTC-5

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I think Gemini could have benefitted from more creativity in its medium. More than just a blog, while still being minimalistic of course.

Like this website, for example. Is pretty simple, but is also more interesting than a blog.

12:13 p.m. Jan 16, 2022, UTC-5

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This recording is from like 4 months ago. Apparently my standards for readings were higher than or something, so I didn't post it.

I've had "nothing means, nothing only means" stuck in my head for days.

Source is https://www.reddit.com/r/seventhworldproblems/comments/pisi8g/runprotocolsoul_mate/hbsprqo/

gemini://thoughts.learnerpages.com/media/6e56bd7b-4d40-4a24-ada1-8bbaef7060f4.mp3

12:11 a.m. Jan 16, 2022, UTC-5

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Did the universe just come into being a minute ago?

9:52 p.m. Jan 15, 2022, UTC-5

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"ERROR: We've reached an unreachable state. Anything is possible. The limits were in our heads all along. Follow your dreams."

7:27 p.m. Jan 15, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

My ideal web browser would be Safari with mouse gestures.

3:07 p.m. Jan 15, 2022, UTC-5

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One of the things that I can do with this website that I can't do with most other mediums is pretend that my experiences are shared or

understood by everyone here, while acknowledging that they aren't universal. I'm not describing that well, but it makes sense, trust me.

12:08 a.m. Jan 15, 2022, UTC-5

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I want friends but don’t want to talk to people. I just want to listen to them. It’s a struggle.

6:03 p.m. Jan 14, 2022, UTC-5

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I still live in 2012.

3:18 p.m. Jan 14, 2022, UTC-5

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Am I supposed to have friends?

3:17 p.m. Jan 14, 2022, UTC-5

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Working on my new Mira Cole head canon.

2:44 p.m. Jan 14, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Everyone else is only a single person, but I am the conglomeration of infinitely many people.

11:23 a.m. Jan 14, 2022, UTC-5

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I just have to write a web server. How hard can it be?

10:26 a.m. Jan 14, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

My real problem with editors is that I am unable to write code with any theme other than Atom One Dark.

10:51 p.m. Jan 13, 2022, UTC-5

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I'm Matthias.

5:58 p.m. Jan 13, 2022, UTC-5

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Definitely a fun reading, will hopefully revisit it in the future. (From last night, edited to remove a break.)

gemini://thoughts.learnerpages.com/media/84b847da-978a-47af-92e3-59fce13cede9.mp3

4:16 p.m. Jan 13, 2022, UTC-5

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The SCP wiki has started fricking adding all sort of JS and cosmetic weirdness. The content! It's not about anything else!

4:04 p.m. Jan 13, 2022, UTC-5

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Poetry attempts to capture

That emotion which surrounds us.

It tries to describe. It tries to portray.

The world and ourselves. The world.

Words in a loop like a lasso

attempt to capture leaves.

The words describe ourselves,

Evoke emotion unbounded

And feeling and meaning. Pain and joy alike

Poetry is words given power, words brought to life.

3:36 p.m. Jan 13, 2022, UTC-5

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Winter 2021 Hytale update is all "we're far from done" & "we've been prototyping some fairly dramatic changes." I'm moving my release

estimate from late 2022 to 2024.

Oh my word I thought that was conservative. But somewhere else on their website they say "we no longer expect to be ready to launch Hytale before 2023 at the earliest, and it could very well take longer."

They were acquired by Riot in 2020, and the FAQ says

Will this acquisition delay Hytale?

We’re still aiming for Hytale to be playable by everyone in 2021.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that the acquisition has delayed Hytale. We'll be lucky to see it before 2025 at this point.

2:23 p.m. Jan 13, 2022, UTC-5

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Can you imagine the person from Hypixel that had to explain to the Cloudflare engineers that their users have the server ping displayed on

the screen at all times and that if the latency increased by so much as 30ms, users will notice and complain. Network engineering nightmare.

1:45 p.m. Jan 13, 2022, UTC-5

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Uh. If I’m not on drugs, why do I feel so much?

9:45 a.m. Jan 13, 2022, UTC-5

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Apparently *Sky* and *Journey* are different games.

9:32 a.m. Jan 13, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Good morning!

8:32 a.m. Jan 13, 2022, UTC-5

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I tried to do a reading of "Introduction to New Poems". The piece has so much energy and such a quick tempo, while also

being a total tongue twister. I was proud of it after finishing, I only really paused once, but listening to it again, I end up hesitating on every fifth syllable because cummings has invented a word. Might post it tomorrow if I remember.

12:07 a.m. Jan 13, 2022, UTC-5

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"You and I wear the dangerous looseness of doom and find it becoming."

11:35 p.m. Jan 12, 2022, UTC-5

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Everything I've ever written is poetry.

I talk to myself a lot. And even if I'm not talking out loud, I have a constant narration in my head. And so almost everything I write is first said, and so is intended to be said.

11:26 p.m. Jan 12, 2022, UTC-5

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Oh, you know what else won't hurt me? Only Connect!

10:21 p.m. Jan 12, 2022, UTC-5

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https://billwurtz.com/questions/questions.html will not hurt me

9:45 p.m. Jan 12, 2022, UTC-5

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My problem is that I am on anti-drugs. That is to say, I am doing not every drug. Which is kind of a lot. Possibly an uncountably infinite

number of drugs that I am not doing.

6:28 p.m. Jan 12, 2022, UTC-5

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Countdown on the top of XKCD.com. What is it for?

https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/Countdown_in_header_text

12:00 p.m. Jan 12, 2022, UTC-5

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I've editing some old posts to fix some super minor typos, but they're things that have been bothering me for a while, so it's pretty nice.

11:22 a.m. Jan 12, 2022, UTC-5

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That's a lie. I do care. I care about everything. I want this website to be perfect. But I don't know where the 500 errors are and I don't

like Google and I have other things to do so I'm going to try to convince myself that I don't care, so that I can move on.

10:54 a.m. Jan 12, 2022, UTC-5

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Google has emailed me to inform me that this site is returning 500 errors and will be downgraded in search results. I don't care.

10:49 a.m. Jan 12, 2022, UTC-5

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Muffins are like fruit created by humans.

10:46 a.m. Jan 12, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Blorbo

Tumblr is on like 4 levels of irony.

7:13 a.m. Jan 12, 2022, UTC-5

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It would be so cool if I could compile my code.

5:52 a.m. Jan 12, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

.

gemini://thoughts.learnerpages.com/media/50c88625-2086-4633-b56c-34d18aeba305.mp3

5:46 a.m. Jan 12, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Now that I have editing on here, it's weird because I have to make a bunch of decisions about what gets edited and what doesn't.

Let's say, I can fix typos. Because that's why I added editing.

And I can edit content with a disclaimer (like "Edit:" or "Edited at [time] for [reason]").

And I can edit stylistically/formatting whenever I want. (Like if I invent a custom markup format I might need to go back and update links that are currently Gemini or markdown formatted).

I'll try to avoid editing content.

5:44 a.m. Jan 12, 2022, UTC-5

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Kinda missing the expansion era NGL

Re-reading the Blaseball wiki page for the Turntables mod. "Any Win earned from a non-loss during the Regular Season will be converted to an Unwin." One of the most beautiful things I've ever read.

5:27 a.m. Jan 12, 2022, UTC-5

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Apparently, WILLOW is Willow Smith, Will Smith's daughter, and made "Whip My Hair" back when she was 10. Doesn't change the fact that

"Transparent Soul" fricking slaps.

5:20 a.m. Jan 12, 2022, UTC-5

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Tom Scott's "gamer-adjacent culture" Twitter thread lives in my head rent free.

Tom Scott on why he won't make a video on a video game:

I'm not writing off video games. I was on a charity Among Us stream yesterday, it was fun. But I am writing off that gamer-adjacent culture, and trying to avoid the perception of even being _remotely_ connected to it.

5:18 a.m. Jan 12, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Nate Ruess just does whatever the frick he wants.

5:10 a.m. Jan 12, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I really just say things on this website don't I

5:06 a.m. Jan 12, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

It's if day for Winnipeg

4:52 a.m. Jan 12, 2022, UTC-5

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After my last Thought, I immediately went to bed. So I guess my sleep schedule looks like this now.

3:14 a.m. Jan 12, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Why can’t I keep my eyes open?

8:11 p.m. Jan 11, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Chilling at inbox zero. We’ll see how long it lasts.

5:52 p.m. Jan 11, 2022, UTC-5

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Oh yeah I forgot to mention that I finished my re-read of Five Kingdoms on the 9th. It was very good. Definitely an epic story.

It also partially inspired a lot of the previous Thoughts, but that should go without saying.

3:37 p.m. Jan 11, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

So.

This is the end of an age.

I want my life to mean something. Not to other people, but to myself. I want to have meaning.

But I don't want a small meaning. I want an infinite meaning. I want the world in the palms of my hands.

Or at least to be a finger of the hands that hold the universe.

Every moment has meaning.

Would it really be worth it, to save a world if I couldn't remember it?

Would I go home?

"Do you fear being shaken by the shoulders like an etch-a-sketch. Being mugged for your memories? I do. They are my first most prized possession."

I want my memories to be valuable.

I want to see the stars.

"Do you feel it in your bones?"

Not 'what do I want'. I want everything. I want infinity. I want infinite perfect worlds with infinite perfect things and infinite perfect people.

But who do I want to be? Do I want to be a god? Do I want to be more?

Anything I create will be less than me. And I am imperfect.

I want to be perfect.

I want to spectate. I want to fly.

I want to be Matthias. I want to be weird to be memorable. I want people to remember me. But who do I want to be.

I want to know. I want to know what I am doing. I want to have confidence that I am right. Not to fly, but to fight. For a cause. For the right cause.

I am nothing without other people.

"He just needed saving from himself."

I want to be powerful.

3:33 p.m. Jan 11, 2022, UTC-5

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Thinking about becoming an English teacher just for the aesthetic. The vibes.

2:40 p.m. Jan 11, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I am filled with anxiety.

2:29 p.m. Jan 11, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Checking if there are any new posts on my favorite website, Thoughts Learnerpages

11:33 a.m. Jan 11, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

My `git` pager is screwed up again :/

8:57 a.m. Jan 11, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

"Was somebody saying something?"

8:51 a.m. Jan 11, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Reporting bugs in open source projects 🥰

7:46 a.m. Jan 11, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I had a fricking bracket in the directory name so of course it didn't build.

This is the first and last time I use special characters in my

filenames.

6:57 a.m. Jan 11, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I don’t know what Wordle is. I feel out of the loop.

5:56 a.m. Jan 11, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I have failed in my attempt to compile code for my ESP module.

11:19 p.m. Jan 10, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Fairly big update today. Everything looks exactly the same, except for the few things that don't.

10:24 p.m. Jan 09, 2022, UTC-5

▔▔▔

toki ala toki e toki pona?

12:52 p.m. Jan 09, 2022, UTC-8

▔▔▔

“A wave. A great and terrible wave of darkness will swallow us. Eternal night. An end to hope. Where do you hide from a shadow bigger than

the world? Can we fight the night? Can we outrun darkness? The wave looks over all, growing as it consumes, engulfing everything.”

12:30 p.m. Jan 09, 2022, UTC-8

▔▔▔

“I found out / your like, the real Matthias / wow”

11:53 a.m. Jan 09, 2022, UTC-8

▔▔▔

What’s wrong with me?

9:17 a.m. Jan 09, 2022, UTC-8

▔▔▔

My concern with the metaverse is not that it's impossible to make, but that you would end up making something like EVE Online.

8:48 a.m. Jan 09, 2022, UTC-8

▔▔▔

Rigby really is dead. RIP.

12:10 a.m. Jan 09, 2022, UTC-8

▔▔▔

I think part of my problem is that I wait until I’m quite tired to do anything.

11:31 p.m. Jan 08, 2022, UTC-8

▔▔▔

“My sorrow is an ocean without shores”

10:22 p.m. Jan 08, 2022, UTC-8

▔▔▔

mi wile moku

7:12 p.m. Jan 08, 2022, UTC-8

▔▔▔

I finished my re-read of the fourth Five Kingdoms. (I think this was my 3rd time through it, I reread it right after I read it the first

time.) It looks like I won’t be able to read the 5th book before tomorrow, unfortunately.

7:06 p.m. Jan 08, 2022, UTC-8

▔▔▔

How do you explore the vast world that is humanity?

7:01 p.m. Jan 08, 2022, UTC-8

▔▔▔

“You could see your surroundings best during the day, but when could you see the farthest? At night. The stars.”

5:37 p.m. Jan 08, 2022, UTC-8

▔▔▔

My life doesn’t have a villain, a plot. This is the same problem I face in my writing.

12:03 p.m. Jan 08, 2022, UTC-8

▔▔▔

One of my personal mottos is “always more nuance.” Truth is fractal, and the more detail you can provide, the closer you get to the truth.

12:00 p.m. Jan 08, 2022, UTC-8

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I was born at the wrong time, but like, by a couple of years. If I had been born 5 years earlier I would be such a chad.

11:46 a.m. Jan 08, 2022, UTC-8

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I’m stating the obvious but Toki Pona has a tiny vocabulary. If I want to say “good morning” the closest I can get is “tenpo pona”

11:37 a.m. Jan 08, 2022, UTC-8

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Good morning!

10:24 a.m. Jan 08, 2022, UTC-8

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• Wait a minute!*

Toki Pona is just Lisp without the parentheses.

11:10 p.m. Jan 07, 2022, UTC-8

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Why don’t we slow down and make software that works?

4:07 p.m. Jan 07, 2022, UTC-8

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There’s like no cyan on the About page, it’s kind of lame.

3:27 p.m. Jan 07, 2022, UTC-8

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Ah

3:26 p.m. Jan 07, 2022, UTC-8

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Just learned about vim easy mode (`-y`). All the people are Hacker News are just being mean, but I'm about to fricking us it as my default

editor. After I configure some iTerm key re-mappings so I can use command instead of control.

6:55 a.m. Jan 07, 2022, UTC-8

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I feel guilty and stressed and sick and unhappy and I don’t know why.

6:41 a.m. Jan 07, 2022, UTC-8

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My brain has decided it is time to be awake.

6:04 a.m. Jan 07, 2022, UTC-8

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After the Dragonwatch 2 twist I protested Mull for a couple of days, but I can’t last long. I have an addiction, you see. I just got to the

Hunter reveal in the third Five Kingdoms. It happens way later in the book than I expected (still not at the very end like in Dragonwatch, though *glare*.)

10:14 p.m. Jan 06, 2022, UTC-8

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Thinking about HvZ again.

6:33 p.m. Jan 06, 2022, UTC-8

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This is “camels, microscopes, yams, hydrogen, coral reefs, mannequins, poems, comets, mousetraps, sarcasm, cacti, labyrinths”

“Contains less than 2% uranium, cyanide, cobwebs, magma, polio.”

6:14 p.m. Jan 06, 2022, UTC-8

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Official Blaseball Discord server banning MEE6 5 seconds after MEE6 teased NFTs. Iconic.

4:45 p.m. Jan 06, 2022, UTC-8

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"I would fight a duel for a trifle, for an insult, for a blow;"

understand me, I would fight a duel for a trifle, for an insult, for a blow; and the more so that, thanks to my skill in all bodily exercises, and the indifference to danger I have gradually acquired, I should be almost certain to kill my man. Oh, I would fight for such a cause; but in return for a slow, profound, eternal torture, I would give back the same, were it possible; an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, as the Orientalists say,—our masters in everything,—those favored creatures who have formed for themselves a life of dreams and a paradise of realities.

-The Count of Monte Cristo

2:37 p.m. Jan 06, 2022, UTC-8

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Okay this is authorization attempt number 3.

I got rid of the code referenced in my second ever Thought.

https://thoughts.learnerpages.com/?show=d90ad16e-df3a-437f-b4fc-be2c9539b9d2

12:10 p.m. Jan 06, 2022, UTC-8

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I shouldn't have technical debt on this website; it's like 500 lines of Python. And yet, when I rewrite the 10 lines that control

authentication, suddenly I can't render UTF-8 characters. \*sigh*

gemini://thoughts.learnerpages.com/media/169f01f5-325a-483b-af89-8fa5c8db491b.png

11:43 a.m. Jan 06, 2022, UTC-8

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"Damn kids. They're all alike."

11:27 a.m. Jan 06, 2022, UTC-8

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• And we're back!*

Bit of downtime there, I got frustrated. I tried to move the login page to HTTP Basic auth, and it worked locally, but on the server didn't authenticate me, without any error messages. So I took the website down for a bit out of frustration. I've reverted to a working state.

Why the fricking hell is logging with Apache so fricking bad! So me the fricking error log!? What the frick?              18:33
 Sorry for the downtime. I'm not smart enough to make a website I guess. Sorry.                                           18:33
 AAADAHWDUAHDAHAHAHAHAHAHHHHHHHAHAHHHHHHHH                                                                                21:18
 If you have an endpoint that returns 401 Unauthorized and a Basic Auth prompt, Firefox doesn't log it in the network console.         21:24
"You need a plot. What you wanna witness with this life you got?"                                                        11:14

11:24 a.m. Jan 06, 2022, UTC-8

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I'm so fricking glad Gemini doesn't have forms. No-JS forms are such a pain.

4:43 p.m. Jan 05, 2022, UTC-8

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I really wish Lite or Lite XL was good. The problem is that they start by building the UI/rendering from scratch, and it's just not polished

4:41 p.m. Jan 05, 2022, UTC-8

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I want NOTHING highlighted, VS Code. Unless I select it by dragging my mouse, there should not be any highlighting happening.

I click on a word and VS Code is like 'Oh! Let's make that word a different color! And we can highlight every other instance of that word! And let's highlight the enclosing brackets! And make the indent-guide for the current indentation level a different color! And draw a box around the current line!'

Me: "Please move the cursor and then stop!"

1:02 p.m. Jan 05, 2022, UTC-8

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Turning off every VS Code auto-code writing feature. I need no distractions.

12:57 p.m. Jan 05, 2022, UTC-8

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Screw it I'm installing VS code. It's getting uninstalled the first time it crashes or freezes though.

12:48 p.m. Jan 05, 2022, UTC-8

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I can't build Xi because it's 2022 and it hasn't been updated in 2 years.

12:47 p.m. Jan 05, 2022, UTC-8

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Atom is being so laggy as to be unusable. I'm looking at close to a second of input delay after my keystrokes.

I'm seriously about to switch back to fricking Xi because all I want is syntax highlighting and the ability to type and have my letters show up.

12:38 p.m. Jan 05, 2022, UTC-8

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I hate bedwars but at least it distracts me from how much I hate myself.

12:01 p.m. Jan 05, 2022, UTC-8

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Do you it live in a. Constant state of fear. ?

1:45 a.m. Jan 05, 2022, UTC-8

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I just can't bring myself to advertise. I can't do it. RIP.

1:44 a.m. Jan 05, 2022, UTC-8

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I’m tired. I wish I could go to sleep.

I can’t remember why I can’t go to sleep. Hm.

12:18 a.m. Jan 05, 2022, UTC-8

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One of these days I'm just going to snap and make my own font. It's going to be beautiful.

10:33 p.m. Jan 04, 2022, UTC-8

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Okay so I almost have the post page working without Javascript. But I need to ask the user for the timezone. Hm.

10:25 p.m. Jan 04, 2022, UTC-8

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My computer has broken in more interesting ways now. It really is messed up.

8:01 p.m. Jan 04, 2022, UTC-8

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Me: I just want software to work.

My computer:

gemini://thoughts.learnerpages.com/media/a54cd17a-603d-40be-bbf1-a42b0b0de356.png

7:39 p.m. Jan 04, 2022, UTC-8

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~starbreaker quoting The Count to describe his political beliefs. Iconic. Iconic.

6:11 p.m. Jan 04, 2022, UTC-8

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WiFi really is an underappreciated invention. I'm outside on my computer!

(At least Linux users don't take WiFi for granted.)

4:07 p.m. Jan 04, 2022, UTC-8

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I think about the Pit of Success a lot.

https://blog.codinghorror.com/falling-into-the-pit-of-success/

The idea behind the pit of success is there's some metaphorical "gravity" pulling you down, analogous to doing whatever is easiest, and in some programming languages that pulls you down into traps, and in other languages that pulls you into the best possible scenario.

The Pit of success wasn't meant to be graphed. But I like to graph things, so let's make some tweaks.

Q
u  
a           / - \
l           /      \
i          /       \
t    __/
y
         Effort

Suddenly, instead of a pit of success, we have a hill of success. This way of graphing things makes sense Effort is the dependent variable. "Gravity" is pulling us left, towards as little effort as a possible.

What makes the pit of success really interesting is that you end up in a place where spending more time leads to a worse product. And this way of graphing make this really obvious. Increasing effort, past a certain point, gives an actually worse product.

This might be hard to believe, but it's because we're really good at recognizing when there's not sufficient payoff and not continuing to work in that way. The basic example is re-implementing some library yourself. It takes more time and you likely end up with a worse result, when compared to using a pre-existing library.

The further point to make is that most languages and programming environments don't look like this. They don't have a pit of success. Instead, what you often see is *diminishing results* for increasing Effort. So instead of this nice peak, that gives you a nice stopping point, you end up with a flat area. And this where a lot of projects die. When you get to the point where it doesn't make sense to continue putting in effort.

But! There's an even worse scenario! In the case that an environment is very developer hostile, it looks like a logarithmic graph. There are no local maximums, no nice stopping points. It's always possible to make your product better, but more and more effort is required to do so. This is why creating Minecraft maps is hell.

2:03 p.m. Jan 04, 2022, UTC-8

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This site is awful because I never end up writing blog posts.

1:29 p.m. Jan 04, 2022, UTC-8

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I haven't written a computer program in months. My brain has rotted. I have forgotten how to write code.

I still think about code, of course. I'll never stop thinking about it. But writing it? Oooh, I don't know.

11:58 p.m. Jan 03, 2022, UTC-8

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O, I should watch *Firefly*.

10:39 p.m. Jan 03, 2022, UTC-8

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What was I thinking this looks so ugly. Well. We're riding with it until like March.

5:17 p.m. Jan 03, 2022, UTC-8

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Oh yeah just so it's clear, every time I say "I'm on drugs" I'm joking. I've never done a drug in my life.

4:40 p.m. Jan 03, 2022, UTC-8

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I am on so many drugs, and so to reflect that, I'm updating the color scheme again, to back to the prototype color scheme.

4:38 p.m. Jan 03, 2022, UTC-8

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Uh, here's my reading of the about page.

I'm sure it's garbage and there's a reason I didn't publish it earlier, but I want to do something, you know.

gemini://thoughts.learnerpages.com/media/0d983d61-e76b-4e09-bdc9-985115538dac.mp3

3:20 p.m. Jan 03, 2022, UTC-8

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I just, I feel sick.

1:01 p.m. Jan 03, 2022, UTC-8

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I am so screwed up.

Screw it, I'm giving the second *Dragonwatch* 3 stars out of spite. Please. My characters.

11:30 a.m. Jan 03, 2022, UTC-8

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“Do you fear being shaken by the shoulders like an Etch A Sketch? Being mugged for your memories? I do. They are my first most prized

possession”

10:37 a.m. Jan 03, 2022, UTC-8

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Nope, I’m still traumatized.

9:30 a.m. Jan 03, 2022, UTC-8

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All I'm saying, is that at the end of the fifth *Fablehaven*, when Venessa says, "The only way to be safe from the Sphinx is if he ceases to

exist" maybe someone should have paid attention…aside from making a comment about her appearance. Might have been a good idea…

1:05 a.m. Jan 03, 2022, UTC-8

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Just skimmed a re-read of the first *Dragonwatch*, then finished the second. What the fricking hell?

I was under the impression, for some reason, that *Dragonwatch* targeted the same, younger, demographic that *Fablehaven* does. (Maybe because Mull has said as much multiple times. Honestly, that's part of the reason that I didn't read *Dragonwatch* earlier.)

But I'm getting ahead of myself. The first book is pretty bad. I gave it like 4 stars when I first read it, but 4 stars for Mull is embarrassing. That's like, he's in exactly the genre that I want to read, but he's writing too poorly to get 5 stars. (Everything else by him that I had read was 5 stars.)

What the frick happens in *Beyonders* that this is less scary? I'm terrified of the end of this second *Dragonwatch*. This is a nightmere twist ending. This is like, 'Mull got bored and got Brandon Sanderson to ghost-write' levels of twist ending. Like, I never expect or enjoy brutal twists at the end of books. But I really don't expect it from Mull. Wow.

I guess there are some brutal betrayals and twists in *Fablehaven*, but those feel largely foreshadowed, don't effect the main cast of characters, are largely actionable (the characters can do something about them), and! they don't! happen at the very end of the book! This is honestly feels like Brandon Sanderson. What the hell.

I am *so glad* I didn't buy the second Dragonwatch at publication, because I would have been traumatized.

Still, traumatized is better than bored. Might just be because I've been re-reading, but I did appreciate the increase in action. I'm going to wait until morning to rate it because maybe this isn't actually a horror-story, and I'm just tired. but man!

12:57 a.m. Jan 03, 2022, UTC-8

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Mull just can’t let Patton go. We’re on our 4th time-travel-Patton.

10:55 p.m. Jan 02, 2022, UTC-8

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Quick test post to see if I've fixed a permissions bug.

4:39 p.m. Jan 02, 2022, UTC-8

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I take it back, you can still create an awful website without ads.

gemini://thoughts.learnerpages.com/media/268b023d-0488-44a0-8c21-4ca5aaa17ecd.png

4:21 p.m. Jan 02, 2022, UTC-8

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You don't even know how tempted I am to subscribe to *Consumer Reports* magazine. I can't handle the internet.

4:11 p.m. Jan 02, 2022, UTC-8

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I was like "how on earth can the Dewey Decimal System be homophobic?" but then

"topics relating to homosexuality were first added to the system under 132 (mental derangements)"

Oh.

1:17 p.m. Jan 02, 2022, UTC-8

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"the spacious days of the stately three-volume novel seem very remote indeed…both opportunity and inclination are now lacking for such

extensive indulgence in the printed page."

Me who binge-read 5 *Fablehaven* books in the last 5 days. Uh.

12:20 p.m. Jan 02, 2022, UTC-8

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I want to punch the person who wrote the Translator's Note for the abridged version of *The Count of Monte Cristo* so badly.

Background info, TLDR, there's a "standard abridged version" of The Count and it sucks.

https://abbreviatedmontecristo.blogspot.com/2021/08/section-one-supplement-how-to-identify.html

gemini://thoughts.learnerpages.com/media/28fa022b-6102-4eb3-ae39-e520d90a7818.mp3

12:09 p.m. Jan 02, 2022, UTC-8

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I had a dream that my AirPods Max were a unicycle

9:08 a.m. Jan 02, 2022, UTC-8

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The problem with design is that, by definition, you are creating an experience. And yet, it is impossible for you to control every aspect of

that experience.

The most obvious example in the digital age is screen size. Designing something for multiple screen sizes is next to impossible, and yet, has to be done. How can you do that? Design a piece of art with the knowledge that the user can come along and resize the window to literally any size they want, from 50-pixels wide to 5,000 pixels? You can't. So so often you see webpages or apps that only look good at a certain resolution, and you know, oh, that's how big the designer's screen was.

8:55 a.m. Jan 02, 2022, UTC-8

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I am a sheep in a wolf’s body.

2:28 p.m. Jan 01, 2022, UTC-8

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Is this what you wanted?

I'm bad at knowing what I want.

That's interesting.

Hmm. Is it true?

No one knows.

1:43 p.m. Jan 01, 2022, UTC-8

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Some of the early color-schemes for this site were fricking wild.

Like, this was the original color scheme during my first dev sprint

--background-color: #2E2A39;
--text-color: #E3D096;
--accent-color: #53929B;

1:37 p.m. Jan 01, 2022, UTC-8

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Django has built-in Pagination. Which I didn't know, but I'm glad I didn't use, since it's very different from what I have here.

1:21 p.m. Jan 01, 2022, UTC-8

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Finished the fifth Fablehaven last night at 3am. It's pretty dang good.

Vanessa is one of the best characters from any piece of media. Icon.

1:19 p.m. Jan 01, 2022, UTC-8

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I'm so confused.

1:18 p.m. Jan 01, 2022, UTC-8

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“Vasilis, the Sword of Light and Darkness”

3:01 a.m. Jan 01, 2022, UTC-8

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Are not the shells of men, who disagree with their past selves and the rest of society, as beautiful as humans who are complete?

1:14 a.m. Jan 01, 2022, UTC-8

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Merry Christmas!

12:03 a.m. Jan 01, 2022, UTC-8

▔▔▔

Okay going back to reading Fablehaven now.

9:19 p.m. Dec 31, 2021, UTC-8

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Okay pagination is fixed.

If you're not able to guess, all the issues arise from the fact that we'll be in "Winter 2021" until March, and there were still a couple of places where I was using the year of the last Thought, without adjusting for that 2-month offset.

9:19 p.m. Dec 31, 2021, UTC-8

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Okay, let's do the 2021 music roundup.

(I'm not excited about it. Make anything a requirement and I run from it.)

(Then maybe I'll fix the front page so it doesn't show "Winter 2022.")

• AJR
• Sylvan Esso
• HONEYMOAN
• half•alive
• They Might Be Giants
• The Regrettes
• twenty one pilots
• Jars of Clay
• Saint Motel
• Imagine Dragons

No real surprises here. The first half of the list preforms well on plays/day, releasing hits like "Monday" that I listened to often. The last four artists contribute more of my hours of listen-time, but I rarely seek them out. AJR, of course, is an outlier by both metrics.

9:04 p.m. Dec 31, 2021, UTC-8

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The thing about the shortcuts app is that you can't actually use like a scripting language, because it's so fricking slow. It takes ~1

second to walk through the `for` loop, complete with graphical animation, for every one of my 1000 songs. So like it's not an alternative for cheap scripting in this use-case, or I imagine, any with more than ~100 items, at which point, why not do it by hand.

8:51 p.m. Dec 31, 2021, UTC-8

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Some Technoblade fans are wishing Techno more subscribers. ('Here's to 11 million.') They don't understand. Unless I'm mistaken, if Techno

continues with Youtube, it will be either because of his love of it or for the money. Not for further subscribers. He'll give us the second elbow reveal, but I suspect he'll take a long break after that.

8:14 p.m. Dec 31, 2021, UTC-8

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My love and fear of the unknown grapple with each other. I exist in the space in between them.

8:10 p.m. Dec 31, 2021, UTC-8

▔▔▔

Okay I found it, it's glorious.

https://youtu.be/0xdWpkc9TyY?t=150

From 2017

People laughed at me when I said it four years ago. We're going for ten million. Okay. That's always been the dream. People laughed at me four years ago. They'll probably laugh at me now. I'd laugh at me now. It's a pretty stupid goal to have right now. 'cause you know, I'm at 100 thousand.

Not saying we'll hit it tomorrow, or this year, or the next three years, but possibly the fourth year, if I'm really lucky. The future is bright, who knows. We'll get there eventually.

We've made it. He's there.

7:51 p.m. Dec 31, 2021, UTC-8

▔▔▔

'grats to Techno on 10 million. The man has legitimately aiming for this since he was like 15. He can do anything he sets his mind to.

I want to see if I can find the video where Techno hits 100,000 subscribers and says "only 1% of the way there." But I don't *really* feel like binging all of Techno's Skywars content tonight.

7:27 p.m. Dec 31, 2021, UTC-8

▔▔▔

Homepage is broken. It's not handling the year change well. (Server's time zone is of course UTC, so it's 2022 already, even though I

have another 5 hours.) Ah.

7:21 p.m. Dec 31, 2021, UTC-8

▔▔▔

Finished the third Fablehaven yesterday, and the fourth today. I might finish the fifth tonight, but probably not.

Power was out for a while, most of today.

7:20 p.m. Dec 31, 2021, UTC-8

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It's nice to have this as a kind of journal. For now, I can mostly keep everything in here in my head—there are certain Thoughts that still

echo in my head incessantly, even after I've posted them. But eventually, in the future, I won't be able to remember, and then I'll have this record. I might shift tone slightly, being more factual, instead of cosplaying as an immaterial being like I normally do on here. It also lead to me adding an option to post privately, something that I've avoided, since the whole point of sharing is kind of lost if it's not public. But if this is for, not an audience, but myself in the future, then private Thoughts is a good idea.

7:19 p.m. Dec 31, 2021, UTC-8

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It is I, Matthias.

7:16 p.m. Dec 31, 2021, UTC-8

▔▔▔

Oh yeah I re-read the third Fablehaven. The series exists somewhere between quality and meaninglessness. Like a dry bread.

1:17 a.m. Dec 31, 2021, UTC-8

▔▔▔

.

gemini://thoughts.learnerpages.com/media/44ebf380-38af-4d08-af86-a17785d4ba2a.mp3

1:15 a.m. Dec 31, 2021, UTC-8

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I haven't like really thought about a hard problem in a really long time.

I do tons of thinking, but it's pretty light thinking. Like the difference between re-reading a middle-grade fantasy novel and reading a non-fiction book on the brain. I do lots of the former, thousands and thousands of words a day. But I've been stuck on the same brain-books for a year.

12:03 a.m. Dec 30, 2021, UTC-8

▔▔▔

Re-read the second *Fablehaven* book today. Vanessa is an iconic character.

11:53 p.m. Dec 29, 2021, UTC-8

▔▔▔

I was on top of the world.

11:51 p.m. Dec 29, 2021, UTC-8

▔▔▔

Oh also I started reading *Pawn of Prophecy,* but I don't know if I'm going to be able to force myself through it. It's so fricking slow and

the main character is doing nothing and has no idea what's going on.

It's technically a re-read, I read it when I was probably in middle school, but remember nothing. Then again, that might be because there's nothing to remember.

4:39 p.m. Dec 29, 2021, UTC-8

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(Business card with frustratingly little information) is such a great trope. Iconic.

Might take my phone number off of my business cards so it's just "Matthias Portzel • MatthiasPortzel.com"

4:37 p.m. Dec 29, 2021, UTC-8

▔▔▔

Look at all these writers coming up with original characters lol

4:31 p.m. Dec 29, 2021, UTC-8

▔▔▔

I no longer know who I am supposed to be.

11:55 p.m. Dec 27, 2021, UTC-8

▔▔▔

"Do things that don't scale"

9:20 p.m. Dec 27, 2021, UTC-8

▔▔▔

Adding "Gemini Server" to my resume.

6:02 p.m. Dec 27, 2021, UTC-8

▔▔▔

Culture really is a wild thing. SCP-3999 is one of the primary inspirations for my About page. But to understand SCP-3999 I think it helps

to understand the other SCPs, including series 1, and the 4chan culture that produced them.

And like, that's only one of a dozen bits of culture and media that I reference in the About page.

1:52 p.m. Dec 27, 2021, UTC-8

▔▔▔

I have a YouTube video with 22,000 views and I feel nothing.

1:29 p.m. Dec 27, 2021, UTC-8

▔▔▔

I just want this website to be accessible from every device and it's failing in the experimental browser in my 2012 Kindle.

6:00 p.m. Dec 26, 2021, UTC-8

▔▔▔

The good news is that I'm now less sick, so my brain has enough energy to blame me for all the world's problems. Still not enough energy to

fix them, but maybe we'll get there eventually.

5:56 p.m. Dec 26, 2021, UTC-8

▔▔▔

Do other people not feel the need to fix all of the world's problems? I suppose not. I suppose they blame the problems on other people. Well

the buck has to stop somewhere. It might as well stop with me. It might as well all be my fault. It's probably not, but some of it is my fault. I can't fix all of it, but I can fix all of it, and I need to fix as much as I can. And I can't do that so I guess it's my fault.

5:54 p.m. Dec 26, 2021, UTC-8

▔▔▔

It's like, when I created *The Imperfections* except I can't even bring myself to break down the problems. It's just, the first item on my

TODO list is: "Make every piece of software in the world perfect."

5:47 p.m. Dec 26, 2021, UTC-8

▔▔▔

I can't bring myself to do anything.

5:41 p.m. Dec 26, 2021, UTC-8

▔▔▔

I'm frozen. Paralyzed. I must understand the entire system to interact with any part of it.

5:34 p.m. Dec 26, 2021, UTC-8

▔▔▔

At least, once again, all I need is time.

5:33 p.m. Dec 26, 2021, UTC-8

▔▔▔

Sometimes HN is so good and so proud of citing primary sources, and other times @foone's summary of something someone said on Tumblr makes

it on the front page for some reason?

5:33 p.m. Dec 26, 2021, UTC-8

▔▔▔

I’m the same as I’ve always been.

2:08 p.m. Dec 26, 2021, UTC-8

▔▔▔

Hey Siri, what I want is a friend.

2:08 p.m. Dec 26, 2021, UTC-8

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I wonder why I enjoy reading so much. I wonder if understanding that would help me understand other parts of who I am.

12:58 a.m. Dec 26, 2021, UTC-8

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At this rate, I’m going to end up reading sappy romance novels by the end of 2022.

12:48 a.m. Dec 26, 2021, UTC-8

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My problem is that I do not have a Santa hat.

4:00 p.m. Dec 25, 2021, UTC-8

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"2022 will be the year of Linux on the desktop"

Like 3 levels of irony.

2:53 p.m. Dec 25, 2021, UTC-8

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Merry Christmas to everyone who is still alive.

10:10 a.m. Dec 25, 2021, UTC-8

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Mull really is a good writer. The Five Kingdoms books weren't perfect like I remembered them bing, but they were still easily 5 starts

compared to other books. Makes me want to Rereead Beyonders honestly. to see how good those were.

11:17 p.m. Dec 24, 2021, UTC-8

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This sure is something.

11:16 p.m. Dec 24, 2021, UTC-8

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I am Matthias. My mind is awake but asleep. Or, sleepy. Or insane.

11:16 p.m. Dec 24, 2021, UTC-8

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Thinking about it, I also just had a Tylenol, so that might be effecting my typing ability.

11:15 p.m. Dec 24, 2021, UTC-8

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I finsihed the first two Five Kingdoms books. I realized I had 4/5 of them so I decided to re-read the series. I was orignally going ot skip

the third since I don't rememeber particularly likin it but I think the Hunter reveal happens in it and I'm kind of lookin gforward to that. The Hunter was mentioned a couple of times in the second biook, whihc I cdon't know if I picked up on my first time through. SDo now I have to decide if I'm finding a copy of the third book or skipping it or just giving up on re-reasing the series since tommorrow is christmax. Also I'm still sick so you don't get any spellchecking sorry.

11:13 p.m. Dec 24, 2021, UTC-8

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The End Of The Age.

9:53 p.m. Dec 23, 2021, UTC-8

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“I’m sick like Chucky was sick.”

9:51 p.m. Dec 23, 2021, UTC-8

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Sorry about the triple-post last night. Had a bug with the search index.

9:51 p.m. Dec 23, 2021, UTC-8

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Added a search page at /search. Still needs some polishing.

11:50 p.m. Dec 22, 2021, UTC-8

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Added a search page at /search. Still needs some polishing.

11:48 p.m. Dec 22, 2021, UTC-8

▔▔▔

Added a search page at /search. Still needs some polishing.

11:35 p.m. Dec 22, 2021, UTC-8

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"How do I explain that the power to imagine a future is essential to creating it"

10:11 p.m. Dec 22, 2021, UTC-8

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I really like Watsky's music. It's a shame he's so explicit.

3:24 p.m. Dec 22, 2021, UTC-8

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I forgot how many times I've changed the colors of this site. Both the light and dark themes have gone through 2 major revisions and at

least a couple minor tweaks.

1:16 p.m. Dec 22, 2021, UTC-8

▔▔▔

Based on a million different things at once.

1:08 p.m. Dec 22, 2021, UTC-8

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Vivaldi just crashed. Please I just want software that works.

There's no crash report.

At least my screen is fixed.

12:20 a.m. Dec 22, 2021, UTC-8

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"I urge you, in view of God’s mercy: offer your body as a living sacrifice. This is your true and proper worship."

- Romans 12:1, paraphrased

11:53 p.m. Dec 21, 2021, UTC-8

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I still know who I want to be but I don't know who I am.

Is there perfection? Is there imperfection? Is it minimalism?

11:49 p.m. Dec 21, 2021, UTC-8

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This is the perfection of a new age.

11:09 p.m. Dec 21, 2021, UTC-8

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Thinking about the hubris with which Gaiman and Pratchett declared Pestilence dead.

7:33 p.m. Dec 21, 2021, UTC-8

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It's so nice to have my keyboard back. I'm going to end up writing a fricking novel.

4:40 p.m. Dec 21, 2021, UTC-8

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Okay, one more Thought on *Fat Vampire*, Adam Rex, before I stop posting about it.

A lot of the times when I read a bad book, I start thinking about ways to improve it. But the premise of *Fat Vampire* is so problematic that there's just so little you can do with it. The premise is basically: "sucking blood from someone is sexual. Wouldn't it be screwed up if someone who doesn't have sex, like a 15-year-old nerd boy, got turned into a vampire?" And the problem is that you end up with this incel-like prompt where sex is basically required for this 15-year-old to live. (He can suck blood from animals, and does for a while, but it leaves him very weak, not able to live a normal life. Now you might be thinking, "is sucking the blood from animals not-sexual." And of course it is. He's unwilling to suck blood from a pig, but enjoys sucking blood from a deer a lot because a deer is sexy.) I can't do a logical breakdown of this book. Every person and thing that he sucks blood from throughout the book is problematic. There's no good way out.

Honestly, screw it, the one thing you needed to change was to make these adults. He would still be a jerk and the characters would all still be dumb, but like at least then it's an adult abusing his girlfriend. Instead of a 15-year-old abusing another 15-year-old.

I don't know what Rex was going for.

Okay okay. The inside flap calls it "satirical." Maybe it's a fine book and I'm just operating on a level far beneath it. I guess? Like, maybe the point is that the main-character is a jerk and you should use him as role model as how not to live your life. And it's a satire of incel-culture. In which case I'm having exactly the reaction I'm supposed to. But there's nothing in there that implies that the author disagrees with it. It's not overboard enough to imply to me that it's clearly all a joke. This is seriously the best I can do. The best way to fix this book is to make it worse so you can justify the satire label. Maybe it's a satire of *Twilight* and I haven't read *Twilight*.

Aging up the characters also would have helped my expectations a lot. It's described as Young Adult, but it has a *lot* more language and other adult themes than most stuff in that category.

I just read a couple of Goodread reviews. Most of them agree with me that it's bad, but one or two mention the "second level" that I missed. That is to say, the book tees up to be about a nerdy, awkward, boy gaining confidence and getting a girl. And it fails if you expect that. But there's another view that the main character is an unreliable narrator, and the story is actually about how he goes from being a weird jerk to be a bully. Which is certainly an interesting perspective. But I think Rex lays it on too thick, and it comes off as "nice boy is suddenly being mean to everyone for no reason."

Honestly, I don't think Rex knew what he wanted to do with it. I think it's like at half a layer of irony. He's kind of aware that what he's describing is weird, but he's not willing to commit to it being a weird book. So it all just comes off as awkward. It's like he thought that by writing a bad vampire book he could attract both people who liked vampire books and people who didn't.

4:40 p.m. Dec 21, 2021, UTC-8

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Guess who got their computer back, baybe‽ It's me. I now have a computer.

3:50 p.m. Dec 21, 2021, UTC-8

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Finished the book. I’m giving it 2/5 but I’m looking for reasons to give it less. Like, it’s not that bad. It’s 2/5 in all categories, but

there’s also nothing good. There are a few funny jokes. There are other books that I’ve given 2 stars to because they only get 2 stars on the things that I care about. But normally those books have something else going for them. I don’t enjoy tragedies, so when I’m rating books I don’t take into account how good of a tragedy it is. And *Fat Vampire* (Adam Rex) is a tragedy so it gets rated the same as other tragedies, but it’s bad. It’s a bad tragedy.

Also, somehow the ending is more homophobic than the rest of the book. Which is kind of impressive.

It is one of the worst books I’ve ever read. The first half is bad and funny, so at least I had things to say about it. But the second half is bad and not funny.

I don’t read books this bad unless there are unusual circumstances.

I don’t understand how Rex turns it around and writes one of the best books I’ve ever read 3 years later. I guess this is a romance and a tragedy strung along by jokes. And Cold Cereal is an adventure and a comedy. And Rex is a lot better at one of those things than the other.

I don’t think this book would have been published if it wasn’t in the middle of the Twilight movies coming out.

10:19 a.m. Dec 21, 2021, UTC-8

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Sometimes you can write broken characters in such a way that their brokenness compliments each other.

Rex is not doing that in this book. He does in some of his other books, but in this book everyone is screwed up and they’re only hurting each other.

9:32 a.m. Dec 21, 2021, UTC-8

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I have no idea what Rex is doing at this point. I don’t see a way for him to salvage this.

11:50 p.m. Dec 20, 2021, UTC-8

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I can’t keep summarizing this book. I can’t take it.

There’s a whole paragraph in here about how he’s not homophobic he just thinks there are too many gay characters in comic books these days.

This is the main character, ostensibly a 15-year-old in 2010. Who used the f-slur to describe umbrellas earlier in the book.

To Rex’s credit, we made it half way through the book before there was a “lesbian porn” joke, so that’s better than some things. I just. I thought this was supposed to be about vampires why are the characters debating the quality of Neil Gaiman’s comics?

11:20 p.m. Dec 20, 2021, UTC-8

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Maybe I’m just not a theater kid. Maybe I just don’t get it.

Sorry for spam-posting. I’m just trying to cope with this book. I’m not even half-way through. I might just go to bed.

9:02 p.m. Dec 20, 2021, UTC-8

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Help, we are on page 4 of Rex describing the characters in the theater watching *The Rocky Horror Picture Show.*

If someone later in the book pulls out LSD, I think the score goes negative, wraps around, and becomes a 5-star book, for the meme.

8:56 p.m. Dec 20, 2021, UTC-8

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If you ever need help installing Linux, ladies, just let me know.

8:39 p.m. Dec 20, 2021, UTC-8

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Girl in the book just asked for help installing Linux. The year is 2010.

I’m howling. I’m now reading to see how bad this can get.

The insane thing is that Rex did characters well in Cold Cereal Saga. Two years later and he can write characters super well. But in 2010 he thinks normal flirting is asking for help with Linux. (This is not like an especially nerdy girl. The guy is established as a nerd. But the girl is described as a theater girl. Maybe 2010 was just a different time.)

There’s a lot more I could say I’m not getting into everything. I’m so bored of the book at this point, nothing has happened. But I don’t have my computer and I kind of want to finish it now so that I can rate it, because it’s on track for like 2 stars.

8:35 p.m. Dec 20, 2021, UTC-8

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Okay the thing is I haven’t finished it and it’s quite possible that the story arc is actually about him coming out as gay, but like, is

that better? The main character’s attempts at flirting are so bad that the best case outcome is that he comes out as gay.

7:42 p.m. Dec 20, 2021, UTC-8

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I feel like Rex would delete *Fat Vampire* if he could. I’m kind of glad you can’t delete books.

7:39 p.m. Dec 20, 2021, UTC-8

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I’m sorry Rex but this is bad.

I still don’t understand where he’s going with it, but like, what?

Bare minimum context: I’m reading *Fat Vampire* by Adam Rex. The central conflict of the book is that the main character, a vampire, needs blood. But for unexplained reasons sucking the blood from someone is a sex act and the main character is very homophobic.

7:35 p.m. Dec 20, 2021, UTC-8

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I honestly cannot tell if Rex spent a lot of time on Tumblr in 2008 or if he’s never used Tumblr.

7:16 p.m. Dec 20, 2021, UTC-8

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Still can’t handle Adam Rex. My word.

He introduces 5 characters in 60 pages and all of them are insane.

7:05 p.m. Dec 20, 2021, UTC-8

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In like 2 years I’m going to end up with a switch and a copy of SMO and 880 it.

10:31 a.m. Dec 20, 2021, UTC-8

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Do you not frequently think about topology?

9:45 a.m. Dec 20, 2021, UTC-8

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It is muffin time!

9:45 a.m. Dec 20, 2021, UTC-8

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Good morning.

9:45 a.m. Dec 20, 2021, UTC-8

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I wish “I hear voices in my head that sound like radio commercials” had made it into the About page here. It’s a good quote.

12:20 a.m. Dec 20, 2021, UTC-8

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I’m again amazed that someone else writes in that style.

That post is long, but the rest of their posts are short. Someone else creating a Thoughts page.

Although they may fall outside of a standard deviation of the mean.

12:18 a.m. Dec 20, 2021, UTC-8

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https://write.as/lighthouseartistry/there-is-a-consciousness-that-exists-among-all-consciousness-it-is-like-a

Freedom is a concept. Freedom from wanting to be free.

Freedom to experience. Freedom to experience confinement.

Freedom from the concept of freedom.

The rain sings songs of longing as it hurls itself towards the hard rock asphalt. The heat from the road evaporates blissfully with each drop of moisture. Each drop of molecule, a world within itself, experiencing the bliss of being a drop of water, embracing the the heat of beingness.

12:13 a.m. Dec 20, 2021, UTC-8

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Using `more` because `less` complains about my terminal.

My computer is in the shop so I'm using a web terminal on a computer that I can't install things on.

1:36 p.m. Dec 19, 2021, UTC-8

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Trying to edit a file in the terminal :|

gemini://thoughts.learnerpages.com/media/8acd9a3e-5f27-4b22-af9c-768bfe1011b4.png

1:20 p.m. Dec 19, 2021, UTC-8

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On a wide monitor, this page is super off-center. Hm. Might need to move that.

12:34 p.m. Dec 19, 2021, UTC-8

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Aaahhahhaa!

My problems are inside my own head

10:38 a.m. Dec 19, 2021, UTC-8

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Just finished *Code Name Verity*, which I had previously read half of and given up on. It gets better in the second half, so it could

scrape 4 stars. Probably 3 though. Very good as far as books go, just not my style.

4:56 p.m. Dec 18, 2021, UTC-8

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Thinking a lot about the Tumblr post, ‘we basically live in a gasoline-punk society, where nuclear energy has been available for decades’

10:27 p.m. Dec 17, 2021, UTC-8

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I used to say that I think in code. But that's not accurate anymore. As I learned more about code I understand that code is an analogue for

my thought, and not the other way around.

8:14 p.m. Dec 17, 2021, UTC-8

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Joey T Badger is the type of person that I want to know IRL

7:40 p.m. Dec 17, 2021, UTC-8

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Twitter systematically ratio-ing every celebrity who shills for NFTs is something else.

4:05 p.m. Dec 17, 2021, UTC-8

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What if instead of Reddit or similar, where you have a parent and then replies, you have something more like a forum, with a topic and posts

, but nested infinitely. So you see the headline on Reddit or HN, but clicking comments shows another list of headers ("Jokes", "Off topic", "Refutations", "Context", etc). (And then maybe you click a joke and it has sub-threads for "more jokes" or "anecdotes.") The obvious con being that most posts don't have enough to say about them for that to make sense. But it would theoretically help me navigate the conversation in the direction I want, and avoid some of the frustration that comes as a result of the comment section taking the conversation a completely different direction than I want.

4:04 p.m. Dec 17, 2021, UTC-8

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Does a perfect Gemini site mirror its content to HTTP? does it respond to HTTP at all? Does it serve different content to Gemini and HTTP?

3:40 p.m. Dec 17, 2021, UTC-8

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I just can't imagine myself being not insane. (How do I denote a screech? It's not "Aaaahhh" but like "Eeecheexxxe". Yeah that's how I feel)

1:18 p.m. Dec 17, 2021, UTC-8

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I wish I had a blank wall I could stare at. My ceiling has a 4-bladed fan.

12:28 p.m. Dec 17, 2021, UTC-8

▔▔▔

One of the hand-waves that Gemini does is assuming that the other side of the pit of success doesn't exist.

12:27 p.m. Dec 17, 2021, UTC-8

▔▔▔

I have no doubts that I would not have these problems if I was a different person, but I do not want to be a different person.

12:07 p.m. Dec 17, 2021, UTC-8

▔▔▔

There is the potential for uncountably infinite ideas inside my head.

11:51 a.m. Dec 17, 2021, UTC-8

▔▔▔

I am still insane.

11:42 a.m. Dec 17, 2021, UTC-8

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One of the interesting things about learning toki pona, since I don't know it yet, is that since it's vague, it's easy for me to justify

a translation making sense.

11:42 a.m. Dec 17, 2021, UTC-8

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Last night I made an appointment at the Apple store to get my screen fixed because it has been showing these black bars of dead pixels.

And today I open my computer and it's working fine, no issues with the screen. No joke I have lived without a tenth of my screen for 3 months, and as soon as I make an appointment it fixes itself. It'll probably break again in a minute.

10:59 a.m. Dec 17, 2021, UTC-8

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So roughly 1/2 the reason I want to learn toki pona is jan Misali, of course. And part of the reason is jan pona Alex.

But a part is jan Tepo, who is apparently active in the toki pona kulupu (community), but who I on follow on Twitter because of their work on iSH (an emulated Linux terminal device for iOS).

9:11 p.m. Dec 16, 2021, UTC-8

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So Misali uploaded a toki pona lesson and since I'm subbed to them I guess that means I'm learning toki pona now.

My brain hurts so much and I've learned like "pona" and "sona." Here, let me try to say, "I'm learning toki pona": "mi sona toki pona." Woohoo! I'm so good.

Edit (Apr 10, 2022): That translation is wrong, it should be "mi sona e toki pona"

8:57 p.m. Dec 16, 2021, UTC-8

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Did things use to be better? Did the web used to have fewer bugs? Am I just hypersensitive?

I'm typing this from Firefox. But like nothing fixes the fact that my screen is physically broken. I feel like I'm surrounded on all sides by pain and bugs.

7:06 p.m. Dec 16, 2021, UTC-8

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Quizlet has 500 employees and they can't make a website that loads.

7:00 p.m. Dec 16, 2021, UTC-8

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Yeah, so if you don't have an adblocker Quizlet just loads ads infinitely, throttled by your internet or CPU. I'm at 100+ MB of ads.

I hate the web.

Quizlet is literally unusable without an adblocker. I don't get it. How is that good for business? Is it that hard to load a single ad?

6:46 p.m. Dec 16, 2021, UTC-8

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Girl Quizlet in Safari is so laggy as to be unable.

6:26 p.m. Dec 16, 2021, UTC-8

▔▔▔

Like I paid thousands of dollars for this computer and I would pay thousands more if it didn't have any bugs.

6:10 p.m. Dec 16, 2021, UTC-8

▔▔▔

I would switch to Linux if it was better but it's just not.

I'm leaning more and more towards making my own OS.

I think not having the ability to support any "normal" software and expecting everything to be designed as an integrated part would actually be really interesting. That's what Apple software is supposed to be but in practicality that advantage is lost by the time you're using Vivaldi and and Atom and Python.

In particular, what leads to 95% of bugs in software is the exponential number of configurations. Every setting increases the number of possible combinations of settings exponentially. So if I didn't have any settings and only had to support one configuration—my configuration. I think I could eliminate a large number of bugs. Of course, it's next to impossible to get there, but that's a different point.

4:12 p.m. Dec 16, 2021, UTC-8

▔▔▔

UTC-8 is a drug. My mind is a drug. Insanity is a drug.

4:04 p.m. Dec 16, 2021, UTC-8

▔▔▔

Screw it, I'm switching back to Safari as a default browser. I can't take this. I just want perfection.

4:04 p.m. Dec 16, 2021, UTC-8

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I think it's impossible to do anything.

The Orion people are like, 'let's make a web browser that's exactly like Safari.' And it's like, so buggy. I'm not trying to diss them here. I think that's a great goal and I think that that should be achievable. But it's really not.

Like, what is this? Why is there a black bar here?

gemini://thoughts.learnerpages.com/media/7b67f03a-6e31-4719-a919-fb44471df280.png

3:53 p.m. Dec 16, 2021, UTC-8

▔▔▔

I feel for people that like listen to community feedback about their products.

It just looks painful. This guy's like 'I think this app should look like the Notes app did in OS X Lion.' Okay. No one else agrees with you, I'm sorry.

3:47 p.m. Dec 16, 2021, UTC-8

▔▔▔

I miss the Blaseball wiki.

I wonder if there's something like wiki but with a better or different interface.

9:52 p.m. Dec 15, 2021, UTC-8

▔▔▔

So one of the things that I want to add here is search. And it was originally supposed to happen before pagination. But search is

suprisingly difficult. I want to be indexed, right, for that sweet, sweet O(log n). And there like theoretically are libraries to do it for you. But I search for “GEB” and get posts about “Algebra.” And I have to figure out how to update the index when I make a new post and it’s kind of a mess.

I might just throw away the index and say O(2000) is fine. Because it would be. But the binary search!

8:59 a.m. Dec 15, 2021, UTC-8

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I almost forgot about that time everyone used 🅱️ in their memes for like months until the mods of /r/dankmemes got sick of it and banned it

Instantly 🅱️illed the meme.

6:54 a.m. Dec 15, 2021, UTC-5

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I lost my hat in the past 2 days. No idea where it is.

5:31 a.m. Dec 15, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I have been trying to start packing since 8p. I can’t function as a normal person.

1:45 a.m. Dec 15, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

The more I think about it, the more I want to find a way to dump all of my old Tweets on to this website. Because while they were certainly

posted in a different context, most of them came out of the same mindset that led to this site (quick meaningless thoughts). And it would be nice to have them all in one place.

12:22 a.m. Dec 15, 2021, UTC-5

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Even in the areas where I may not be an order of magnitude off of society's expectations, I'm an order of magnitude off of my own.

12:20 a.m. Dec 15, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

In high school, I would make myself get up and drive to school and be there by 7:15, even if my first class wasn't until the afternoon. And

people would ask me, "Matthias, why do you get here so early." And would reply to the effect of "because otherwise I would always be late." And I was right. Routine really was the only thing keeping me on the tracks.

12:20 a.m. Dec 15, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I don’t have any brain cells. Please help me.

12:15 a.m. Dec 15, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

This is a circle in which a robot spins.

This is the attack of the bees.

Oh yeah, I made a Rigby post earlier today with something I had

posted here.

10:50 p.m. Dec 14, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I am on anti-drugs.

It turns out, if you go too long without consuming any drugs, your brain just pretends like it's on drugs anyways.

10:49 p.m. Dec 14, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Creating software (or even hardware) that works is one thing. But to create anything that is "ergonomic, natural, intuitive, and user

friendly" is hard. Really hard. And like, that's the criteria. For whether your software actually gets used.

5:26 p.m. Dec 14, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I have made lots of bad decisions. But! I have made some good decisions. I don't remember them, actually, but um, they should be there.

12:07 a.m. Dec 14, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Commenters on Hacker News defending W3Schools. Look at this

https://www.w3schools.com/jsref/jsref_eval.asp

I quote:

No NOT use eval()

Executing JavaScript from a string is an BIG security risk.

With eval(), malicious code can run inside your application without permission.

With eval(), third-party code can see the scope of your application, whitch can lead to possible attacks.

Okay; so, I try to avoid mocking English-second-language speakers on here, it's one of my off-limits topics. And I don't know the context of the person who wrote that. But read that excerpt again out loud. Yeah.

And this is published content acting as an authority on the subject. I expect better from this page than from a random person or internet comment.

The MDN's page is a little long-winded, I'll admit. There are some phrases in the middle of the MDN's description that could be misleading. But there's so much more useful information in there. Performance, comparisons to `JSON.parse` and `new Function`, the behavior when `eval` is given a non-string object. Etc.

Like, I don't know how to respond to people on HN that are just wrong.

[W3Schools is] criticized by the vocal newbies who are chasing the newest and shiniest.

Really? Then why is there an open letter from 2011 saying that "their faulty information is a detriment to the web"?

https://web.archive.org/web/20110412103745/http://w3fools.com/

Which has since been rescinded because W3School has improved on the addressed issues.

https://w3fools.com

(They went from not mentioning that eval could be harmful to "No NOT use eval()".)

I don't get it.

11:45 p.m. Dec 13, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

"We flip the switch, and it releases the bees. *Not the bees!* Yes the bees."

https://youtu.be/u6WV6z6KPD8?t=774

10:23 p.m. Dec 13, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I am on five levels of irony. You don’t even know.

2:46 p.m. Dec 13, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

It is once again time for one of the best Youtube videos of all time.

https://youtu.be/ywWBy6J5gz8

1:58 p.m. Dec 13, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I would win a skipping race.

11:08 a.m. Dec 13, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I may not be as smart as Hofstadter but hell I’m close.

11:08 a.m. Dec 13, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Apparently what I and Thu call "single-instantiated-types" are actually called singletons.

7:37 p.m. Dec 12, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I am inside the jaws of the lion.

5:52 p.m. Dec 12, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I'm frozen. I'm numb.

5:44 p.m. Dec 12, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

People get so fricking ticked-off about Safari on iOS only kind-of allowing you to side load apps. And they compare it to IE. And it's like

you clearly have never designed a website for an IE version before 9.

Oh no! Safari's IndexDB implementation isn't spec-compliant (as of 2016). I have to use a library to store large amounts of data persistently on my user's devices. My website can't send phone users background notifications! What ever will I do‽

And Firefox gets a pass because they invented tabs 10 years ago.

3:25 p.m. Dec 12, 2021, UTC-5

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This is why I love anecdotes about the past. You read documentation or people connected to the matter, and they're talking about random

stuff, feature support or some weird bug or something. But the anecdotes give you gold like:

[Firefox] was quick, it was simple, it was much more standard-compliant, and absolutely none of that mattered.

No, Firefox really got a foothold because it had tabs. IE 6 did not have tabs; if you wanted to open a second webpage, you opened another window…

Firefox wasn’t the first tabbed browser, of course; the full Mozilla Suite’s browser had them, and the obscure (but scrappy!) Opera had had them for ages. But it was Firefox that took off, for various reasons, not least of which was that it didn’t have a giant [censored] ad bar at the top like Opera did.

In 2021, talking about why Firefox is losing marketshare, no one points out that the reason it gained market share in the first place was tabs. Like. That's very interesting to me.

https://eev.ee/blog/2020/02/01/old-css-new-css/

2:50 p.m. Dec 12, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Every time. Every time I think I have a handle on how broken the web is, something comes up that's worse.

https://eev.ee/blog/2020/02/01/old-css-new-css/

2:41 p.m. Dec 12, 2021, UTC-5

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I still hold irrationally strong feelings about characters from Brandon Mull’s Five Kingdoms.

I’m almost angry at the AO3 authors paring Mira/Jace. You’re wrong and you do not understand the characters the way I do. Mira/Cole is still my OTP.

12:45 a.m. Dec 12, 2021, UTC-5

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Finished *Without Bloodshed*.

He does a *lot* with the worldbuilding. I don't love Sci-fi, so I don't love it. I think he either should have toned it down a bit (e.g. cut a lot of the pure sci-fi: AIs, maglev's, etc. that don't effect plot), or else put it on a planet that's not Earth. Because half the worldbuilding is technological, but there's also a cultural element to the worldbuilding. And the culture of the people in the book really is not the same as Earth today. So it might have been helpful to separate that. Like, there was some big event, "Nationfall" that pushed their society to the way that it is. But Nationfall is never discussed, he's too busy discussing other elements of the worldbuilding. Yeah. There was an apocalyptic event that happened during the lifetime of some of the characters in the book and it's only ever alluded to. He's too busy talking about the history of the band or the symptoms of being a cat-person. Luckily for him, weird worldbuilding doesn't effect my enjoyment of the book.

I actually really like the pacing of the book. The characters are always under a little bit of tension, but still find to stop and chill. And that has a lot to do with writing style. The book takes place over a couple days, and most books with that timeframe are too fast-paced for me. But he does a good job of varying which character is under stress, for example. Or making short interludes time-wise, feel longer for the reader.

I'm neutral on the characters. Which is really the shame. He tried so hard, and I kind of see what he was going for. But like, 3/5 characters. All the characters except Morgan feel shallow. And he does a good job of developing Morgan over the course of the book, but it almost happens too quick for me to appreciate. I feel like we needed an extra bit at the start to introduce Morgan to me before Morgan starts to question everything.

Plot is fine. No complaints really. He tees a sequel pretty aggressively, which I don't love because I don't think I'll read a sequel. But he ties up enough for me to feel satisfied.

Oh, he does this interesting thing with a bunch of "string-pull" characters. They don't add anything. Doing string-pull characters is really hard because kind of by definition they aren't interacting directly with anything. And because of that it's hard for me to care about them, even when they're interacting with the story indirectly, or else interacting with each other. Like you could have cut all of the parts from the perspective of the devas and just told it from Morgan's perspective and I think it would have been fine. But that's the part that I think is just setting up the next books.

I think some of these points, where like I don't appreciate the characters or the world in the way that the author does, is a result of this being the second book written. But the website requests that I start here and not with *Starbreaker* so that's where I am.

Overall, 4/5. Weakest bit is the characters. Which again is a shame because I love the characters, but the book just doesn't use them very well. (Matthias's book rating scale reflects *only* my enjoyment of the book, not my evaluation of the book's quality.)

8:44 p.m. Dec 11, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I just don’t see any way out except straight forward and I don’t know if I can keep doing it.

7:15 p.m. Dec 11, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I won’t allow myself to talk to anyone unless they’re perfect.

7:15 p.m. Dec 11, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I don’t see any way that I’m not lonely for the rest of my life.

7:12 p.m. Dec 11, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Oh my word. Not-resonant voice Tom Scott is something else. I can hear it. My word.

https://youtu.be/2QKPQ6JYVhU?t=265

11:17 a.m. Dec 11, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Waiting for Rigby posts.

11:00 a.m. Dec 11, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Had a nightmare about time travel. Watching *Primer* was a mistake.

2:42 a.m. Dec 11, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

The world is just so big.

I’m hiding under my bed again.

10:26 p.m. Dec 10, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I still don't understand myself.

10:17 p.m. Dec 10, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

My obsession with social media and internet communication is really just a result of loneliness.

9:54 p.m. Dec 10, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

“I miss people. The human interaction. Seeing the emotion in their face.”

9:48 p.m. Dec 10, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

It's not fun to troll anymore

6:21 p.m. Dec 10, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Inside I'm crying.

3:54 p.m. Dec 10, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Creating lists in React: `key={Math.random()}`

3:27 p.m. Dec 10, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

It is my impression that this has profound implications in our understanding of machine learning.

https://www.unite.ai/training-computer-vision-models-on-random-noise-instead-of-real-images/

3:05 p.m. Dec 10, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Is it not cold outside?

2:22 p.m. Dec 10, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Oh yeah I was reminded of that because Wesley is on the first page of Hacker News. This is what I mean by infinite connections.

1:49 a.m. Dec 10, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Wesley never replied to my email.

I still check thoughts.page. They seem like they’re doing well.

1:48 a.m. Dec 10, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I just finished a 2 pound container of trail mix that I bought on the 7th.

1:24 a.m. Dec 10, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I just watched *Primer*. I think the XKCD describes it better than I could. Wow.

10:35 p.m. Dec 09, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Gemini needs the web.

10:35 p.m. Dec 09, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

"Pointers are far too slow."

7:33 p.m. Dec 09, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Microsoft is in a weird position because they own a lot of random things that I tangentially interact with, but like, if they tried to get

any money from me I'd run in the other direction. I own Minecraft from before Microsoft bought it. I use Atom as one of my main editors. They own Electron, of course, which I can't escape from. And of course, Github. But I would stop using any of those if Microsoft tried to make a penny off of me.

5:57 p.m. Dec 09, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

It's fricking wild to me that Vim is the best editor in 2021. I mean, that's subjective obviously. But like, I use Vim. In 2021. And I don't

particularly like it.

But if you look at time to start, cross-platform availability, and syntax highlighting in a variety languages, Vim has Atom beat by a factor of 2 it feels like. And those are the only constraints I care about. Vim does lose major points for not supporting normal Mac keyboard shortcuts. Maybe I'll make a list of Matthias' Requirements for the Perfect Text Editor.

5:55 p.m. Dec 09, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

If there is a God, I am not Him.

5:50 p.m. Dec 09, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

There are no sad people or happy people. There are no people. This is an anomaly.

2:21 p.m. Dec 09, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Hot take: You should be able to fit your program into a single file.

2:00 p.m. Dec 09, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Jon Bois has single-handedly made Google Earth one of the greatest mediums.

12:08 p.m. Dec 09, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

At a high level JS is just so wickedly flexible. IIFEs are still like magic to me.

11:32 a.m. Dec 09, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Why isn’t this open source yet?

Oh yeah the About page is in the source. Hm. Might just do it.

I don’t know, like this site is where I want it to be for myself, but if I want someone else to run, or it I was going to run it for somewhere else, I’d target a different set of features. Like, not add additional features but remove features like Gemini support or tweak settings. Maybe I’ll open-source it as is, with a heck ton of disclaimers, so people can take inspiration from it but like, I’m not giving you setup instructions because you should make your own site.

3:19 a.m. Dec 09, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Oh shoot someone remind me to post the reading of the about page or I’ll never get around to it.

3:16 a.m. Dec 09, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Why does *The E.N.D.* bop?

3:10 a.m. Dec 09, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I’m going to finish *Without Bloodshed* because I can’t stop myself. I’m addicted to content consumption.

Not tonight though. I’m about 2/3 through it, just got to chapter 19.

2:38 a.m. Dec 09, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I might have to stop reading *Without Bloodshed* because it’s like this libertarian cyberpunk fantasy.

I’m like halfway through the book. Don’t get me wrong, it’s great. But it’s like so unrealistic that it is breaking my immersion. Like full on, hacker girl protected by an international online anonymous decentralized organization. Private organization that makes money selling sex drugs which it uses to finance city operations so that they can be spared from the theft of taxation.

But it’s not like he intro’s with that. The world building is very good. You’re like a quarter of the way through before he describes “congenital pseudofeline morphological disorder” and you have to realize, wait. This is just an excuse to introduce cat-girls.

1:15 a.m. Dec 09, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

You know it's serious because I'm double-`.bind`ing a function, once to bind its `this` and once to pass a property.

Did you know that `func.bind(null, a)` doesn't set the `this` value to `null` if the function already has a bound `this` value; it won't overwrite it.

10:59 p.m. Dec 08, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I really need to play around with non-linearity on here. Clouds and networks of Thoughts.

10:41 p.m. Dec 08, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Moon big.

10:26 p.m. Dec 08, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Oh my word I've consumed so much content that I can't enjoy consuming anymore but I can't stop.

Reading an /r/WritingPrompts thread that alludes to fricking Roko's Basilisk. And I'm cursed in that I know what that is. And I know that Elon Musk and Grimes met because of it. And I can't take this.

My mind is a network of ideas and all I do is run this O(n^2) operation to look for links between them and it gets harder and harder. But I'm also more and more likely to find links which makes it so much more satisfying. I'm addicted.

7:11 p.m. Dec 08, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Nano also has mouse support off by default. Invoke it with `nano -m` or add `set mouse` to `~/.nanorc`. I'm extremely disappointed.

I get it, you think you're a terminal-based editor. Here's the thing. The single biggest frustration for me getting used to the terminal was that the mouse did nothing. And in 2021, terminals support mice. For `vim`, sure, there's some random backward compatible reason. But Neovim and Nano aren't supposed to be bogged down in that. Your system will have a POSIX compatible `vi`. If someone's opening Nano it's because they want a better experience than that. I'm extremely disappointed.

5:19 p.m. Dec 08, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Vim tip! In 2021, Vim and neovim come with mouse support disabled by default. Run `:set mouse=a` to turn it on!

Add `set mouse=a` to your "~/.vimrc" for vim, or to "~/.config/nvim/init.vim" for neovim to persist this setting.

I cannot comprehend why this is off by default.

They have support! It's compiled in most of the time? Why not turn it on?

Also! If your "vim for beginners" tutorial starts with "use hjkl to move around" instead of "use `set mouse=a` to turn on the mouse," you need to make sure that you are very clearly disclaiming that you are teaching a harder way of doing things in exchange for incredibly small productivity gains that will be realized years in the future, if ever.

5:13 p.m. Dec 08, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I cannot take this. I am addicted to content consumption. I cannot stop myself from opening Youtube.

4:12 p.m. Dec 08, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

So I like was bored a bit ago and impulse-read the first third of *Without Bloodshed*. But now I need to decide if I'm invested enough to

force myself to finish it.

It's fine, the problem is that I was reading it online on my phone. Not exactly the best experience.

1:36 p.m. Dec 08, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

One of the subelties that I missed in my post on a block-based language earlier is that `while` statements in C-languages are weird.

Here, what if you wanted to create an infinite loop if x was less than 5, and not run your code if x was greater than or equal to five. `while (x < 5) {…}` You couldn't do that in one line, you would need to store the result of `x < 5` into a variable outside the loop. There's no way to tell the language, "evaluate this expression once, please." In that sense, `while` loops are a kind of macro in that they define a syntax that doesn't exist anywhere else in the language. (And mean, they're not a "macro", that's just a language feature, but it's still interesting.)

1:23 p.m. Dec 08, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Oh my word I just fricking love words.

1:13 p.m. Dec 08, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

“Welcome to the future.”

gemini://thoughts.learnerpages.com/media/07582af5-bab3-40a2-95e0-a91ef2e3def0.mp3

12:57 a.m. Dec 08, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Bored but not sarcastic, sincere but not enthusiastic.

12:53 a.m. Dec 08, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I am addicted to content consumption.

4:41 p.m. Dec 07, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Still wish I had pants made of light cotton or silk. Like material bedsheets are made out of, but pants. So that don’t have to wrap a

bedsheet around my waist and confuse my roommates.

11:58 a.m. Dec 07, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I have a new theory for the origin of my insanity.

To skip the explanation: the world is too large and I’m not going to read anything that

doesn’t directly pertain to me, for a couple of days at least. No more Twitter, HN, Reddit, Blaseball. I’m never bored anymore.

11:41 a.m. Dec 07, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Hacker News comment comparing Tilde users to the unabomber. Not even sure if it’s intended as an insult.

7:33 a.m. Dec 07, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

If there is a God, I am not him.

7:32 a.m. Dec 07, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Maybe I just want to be a horse girl.

11:56 p.m. Dec 06, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

The thing to recognize about web3 is that the transactions require transactions fees. Because of the way that the networks currently work,

the price of bitcoin or ETH increasing means that transactions are more expensive. This is also inherit in all systems—more transactions means more computing power needed. So as the price of bitcoin or ETH increases, moving small amounts of cryptocurrency is disproportionately discouraged.

This creates a conflict of interest where an increase in web3 users is not always a bad thing. Most of the time, an increase in popularity is good for crypto people, but there is a downside.

The thing to watch out for is Crypto becoming a luxury product. In practical terms, this will look like when an asset (that is legitimately "valuable", by some definition of that term) is locked behind a crypto transaction fee that is prohibitively expensive. This is one success pathway for web3. But it's really hard to do that and also prey on people with less money.

In order for web3 to succeed in the other sense, where it becomes used more popularly than the web, then the price of ETH and BTC need to go down* so that normal people can actually afford to interact with it.

• Of course, people are trying to come up with other solutions, like side-chains or just super low transaction fees, but like, it's basically impossible to avoid richer-people having more control in your decentralized system, which ends up hurting poor people in one way or another. I feel like I'm not explaining myself very well because I'm relying on implicit assumptions that I'm not stating. Hm.

10:37 p.m. Dec 06, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Why do all Podcasts have fire intros?

10:25 p.m. Dec 06, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

The year is 2021 and we have a dedicated podcasts app on Mac

everybody.

10:24 p.m. Dec 06, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

"Do tape recorders ring a bell?"

9:42 p.m. Dec 06, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I can't believe Biden is president. What is this?

9:15 p.m. Dec 06, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Also possible current tensions resolve themselves economically instead of politically, in which case we end up with a stock market crash in

the summer of 2038. Down 24%.

7:42 p.m. Dec 06, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

2024: Democrat

2028: Democrat

2032: Republican

2036: Democrat

2040: Republican

2041: War

Welcome to, Matthias makes unsubstantiated long term predictions about the future.

2041 seems pretty soon, but that's the way the elections shake out. I feel like it might be closer to 2040: 3rd party, 2044: Republican, 2048: Democrat, 2052: Republican, 2053: War. But that's way too long.

Also unclear if it will be a civil war or a world war.

I don't think it will last very long. In the case of a world war, 6 years, civil war could be 2 years though.

7:38 p.m. Dec 06, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Pure components and React state. OR

Storing state in a global Iterator that is called every time the component is rendered.

Update: I can confirm that the second one doesn't work.

2:29 p.m. Dec 06, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Slept for 12 hours last night. AAaaaahh

1:39 p.m. Dec 06, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

That’s what’s so weird, is that there’s not a catalyst. I wish I had something to blame but for myself.

12:30 a.m. Dec 06, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Oh yeah, Blaseball is back by the way baybe

12:28 a.m. Dec 06, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Huh. I wonder if drugs are just a placebo.

12:26 a.m. Dec 06, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I’m just wasting my life.

12:21 a.m. Dec 06, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I’m like someone who is climbing a flight of stairs. And stops and stands up still on one step.

12:20 a.m. Dec 06, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I’m just so weak. My mind is so weak.

12:19 a.m. Dec 06, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I didn’t go to church today lol who would’ve guessed.

12:18 a.m. Dec 06, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I’m afraid that I’m actually going insane this time. My desire to form coherent English sentences is deteriorating.

12:17 a.m. Dec 06, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Okay, let me see if I can string together I am home. I am home. String else is outside. If there is a who’d I am not him okay that looks

like it’s going to be a know baby her sheep. Wow. Okay. So this is where we are. My brain is a network of ideas and connections between them. 12 is a number but is perhaps not the number that it appears to be. Oh my word. Uh

12:16 a.m. Dec 06, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I wish there was like a pay-per-post option for online news sites. Because paywalling your content doesn't make sense when I've clicked a

single link from Reddit or Hacker News. I want to read that one article, not sign up for a re-occurring monthly subscription.

The issue is that in order to do this, you also have to offer me a good user experience. You can't open a full-screen popup after I've scrolled half-way down the page. It needs to be more pleasant than reading the site with ads (because ads are the other option for monetizing drive-by users.)

The thing news companies need to recognize is that they can't do content curation anymore. Like, the music industry did an amazing job in letting Apple sell individual songs for the iPod. We're skipping that for some reason, and trying to jump straight from "buying physical collections" (records, or newspapers) to fragmented subscription marketplaces.

Apple Music/Spotify works because a, both platforms have all music, and b, people already know what artists/songs they want to listen to. The news industry right now looks like if the free tier was Pandora with ads, and every record label has their own subscription service.

Unfortunately, this is also how streaming video platforms look right now. So I don't have a lot of hope that news will figure out how to fix it.

11:11 p.m. Dec 05, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

My butt is so sore from the unicycling I did earlier.

12:29 a.m. Dec 05, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Maybe nothing matters.

If nothing mattered, if I were an atheist and a nihilist, I think I would build a tower. Or maybe a tree house. I'd run into the woods somewhere and build a tree house. And I might die but that would be okay because nothing would matter.

11:43 p.m. Dec 04, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

One of these days I'm going to go on a walk and I'm not going to come back.

11:35 p.m. Dec 04, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

The floor is uploading Conlang Critic

10:49 p.m. Dec 04, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

In the Python REPL. "inconsistent use of tabs and spaces in indentation" Oh No. What a fricking bad language.

9:58 p.m. Dec 04, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Every so often I re-invent Haskell.

9:52 p.m. Dec 04, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Ooooohhhh cursed language idea. Okay so you know how JS has Instantaneously Evaluated Function Expressions? I like them because they offer a

nice mix of encapsulation without having to create a dedicated value. What if you had "blocks" as one of the only first-class language constructs.

Okay I'm thinking about it more and I think what I'm describing is just a function with scope. But let's re-invent it anyways.

So a block defines any variables it needs at the top, and then runs a bunch of code after that. Like counting to 5 would look like

{int i; //other variable declarations up here somewhere

  while (i < 5) {
    i ++;
  }
}

No C-style for loops. Obviously this is weird because what is the {} brackets after the while if not a block? Maybe that is a block with scope?

I think we need to be weirder, more fundamental, I don't think the while loop works as-is. But we need some fundamental constructs. How do we call a function? There are no functions, only blocks. Blocks can be nested. Blocks can be nested by name. Oh this gets good. Blocks have a return value. The only 2 types of expressions in the language. Creating blocks and inserting blocks. Blocks can be inserted literally (ie nested) or by name (think, calling a function, but merely referencing a block's name executes its code and returns its value). Blocks have a return value. Variables are nothing but blocks that only return their value.

Wait a minute, all variables are functions? Functions are called without parentheses? This is just Haskell.

Wait! Ok so the question at this point is just, are blocks values? That is, can I pass a block by value to be executed later in time? Well, that's assuming that blocks are actually functions and that they can take values. Uh. The alternative is saying that there are special `macro` blocks. And what this would do, is that, for example,

//option 1, blocks are a 1st-class type:
while {x < 5} {
   console.log x;
   x = (x + 1);
}

//option 2, there are special macro blocks
while {x < 5} {
  console.log {x}
  x = {x + 1};
}

So to clarify, in option 2, `{}` are used just like grouping. You can nest them without any consequences. `x = x + {1}` creates a block that returns 1, executes it, takes the value, and adds it to x. For something `while {x < 5}`, `while` is defined as a macro, so the language knows not to execute `x < 5`.

In option 1, `{x + 1}` creates a block, always, and only executes it if it is the first thing on the line. So for example `x = {x + 1}` would break, since it would create a block, and then assign x to the block. That is to say, it would be equivalent to the JS `x = (_ => x + 1);`

This sounds like LISP. Hm. Hmmmmmm.

So the question, really, is when are blocks evaluated. Because in normal languages (JS), functions are values, and they're evaluated when you parens after them. And what I'm trying to do here is hand-wave something, to make these blocks sound like they're not functions, and a lot of that is that you don't put parens after them. So we have to decide when to evaluate a function based on other things. I think option 1 is the way to go. So that a given snippet is unambiguous. Because in option 2, you have to know whether `while` is defined as a macro or not to know how it will evaluate.

So to "implement" an example, let's write a Fibonacci generator.

(Oh yeah, this should go without saying. If not mentioned (e.g. no functions), assume JS. So we have native lists, objects, strings, booleans, etc.)

while = block (conditionBlock, execBlock) {…native code...}
if = block (conditionBlock, execBlock) {…native code...}
console.log = block (value) {…native code...}
etc.

values = [0, 1];

while {true} {
    // Could values.push (values[-1] + values[-2]) in a single line
    {  //Define variables as the first thing in the block
        lastValue = values[values.length-1];
        secondLastValue = values[values.length-2];

        values.push lastValue + secondLastValue
    }
    console.log values[values.length-1]
}

This is kind of a boring example because everything just works.

The key thing to recognize, that makes this radically different from JS, is that the first block on each line in implicitly executed. And that's the only way to execute blocks. Which makes this language literally unusable because there's no way to get the return value of a block. (e.g. `.push {add a b}` would push an unevaluated block on to the end of the list.). So I'll need to go back to the drawing board, but not tonight.

9:48 p.m. Dec 04, 2021, UTC-5

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On Hytale: "it's dropping in like 200 years I'm so hyped"

Honestly same

9:00 p.m. Dec 04, 2021, UTC-5

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Imagine a world here.

3:00 p.m. Dec 04, 2021, UTC-5

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There's no way around this popup. I can't finish exporting my documents from Craft without first restarting it. What if I was in the middle

of writing a sentence? I don't think it would care.

gemini://thoughts.learnerpages.com/media/0bb860b0-81e1-43a5-bf46-2b572e34629f.png

12:51 a.m. Dec 04, 2021, UTC-5

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I love talking to people after 9pm because I can use “I’m going to bed” to end the conversation. Normally I hate ending conversations.

12:14 a.m. Dec 04, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I had a thought. Something about oh yeah

12:14 a.m. Dec 04, 2021, UTC-5

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The instrumental intro to White Flag, Gorillaz is fricking amazing.

12:13 a.m. Dec 04, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Hello. My name is Matthias.

12:12 a.m. Dec 04, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Does anyone else read this website?

(This is a parody of awful "does anyone else" questions.)

9:55 p.m. Dec 03, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I have a complicated relationship with Vim.

7:18 p.m. Dec 03, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I think about the success of Flappy Bird a lot.

2:31 p.m. Dec 03, 2021, UTC-5

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Hacker News comment defending that goats are less than 2 feet tall.

Because if you Google “goat height,” it gives you the Wikipedia page for Pygmy goat. Googling “duck height” gives you the height of the tallest ever duck, 30 inches. And now since Google is an authority, people are using and defending those numbers. I’m having none of it. Pygmy Goat height and Indian Runner Duck height is completely irrelevant to the conversation. I mean a normal duck and a normal goat. And if you think my definition of a duck is wrong, you can argue with me, but don’t pull in Google’s Wikipedia scraping algorithms to do it.

11:58 p.m. Dec 02, 2021, UTC-5

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Why are there so many mountain emoji? 🗻🏔⛰ 🌋 🌄🏞 And no muffin emoji?

11:43 p.m. Dec 02, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I am metaphorically on so many drugs.

11:38 p.m. Dec 02, 2021, UTC-5

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Perhaps no one else warns about the dangers of Universalism because no one except me has embraced it.

When I say Universalism, I mean attempting to bifurcate the word into things that are true and untrue, in the philosophical sense, but also in a more practical sense. I think about things that are "popular" or "unpopular" or "known" or "unknown" or "good" or "bad" or "meaningful" or "meaningless," by some objective, universal criteria. Like, maybe the formula for determining whether someone is a good person is lenient.

But it's hard. Because I want to be a "good" person in some un-arguable way. And I really want my life to be "meaningful" in some objective sense.

11:23 p.m. Dec 02, 2021, UTC-5

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I feel like GEB would be extremely cringy, like unbearably awkward, if you were smarter than Hofstadter. Luckily, none of us mere mortals

have to worry about that.

10:44 p.m. Dec 02, 2021, UTC-5

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HackerNews is fricking brutal. You call these 2000 pixels Waldo and the comment is "[you've] misidentified Wanda as Waldo."

gemini://thoughts.learnerpages.com/media/a3c7435b-a4e5-40e5-8a5c-dc9744b4f378.png

5:04 p.m. Dec 02, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

How much do I have to pay you for a computer that works?

3:17 p.m. Dec 02, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

"Say something"

3:08 p.m. Dec 02, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I have not yet seen many denounce universalism.

3:03 p.m. Dec 02, 2021, UTC-5

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I love Hacker News because the people are like 'this is all obvious because of the concept of reincarnation.'

And the reply is 'what scientific evidence is there for reincarnation?'

2:20 p.m. Dec 02, 2021, UTC-5

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Libertarians using Libertarian as an insult is so iconic.

2:05 p.m. Dec 02, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I miss sub-pixel antialiasing.

8:48 a.m. Dec 02, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

This website is an entry in the Beauty Pageant of Life.

1:23 a.m. Dec 02, 2021, UTC-5

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Did a reading of the About page. Took over 11 minutes my word.

I stand by that length, the About page, like this website in general, is supposed to be a little awkwardly long. But man, it is awkward to read.

1:14 a.m. Dec 02, 2021, UTC-5

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Titles are for those with the huburis to think that they know what they are going to say before they have said it

Life is a finite cube.

I am a red pulsing box.

The end of the age may come soon, but probably will not.

There is only doom.

12:53 a.m. Dec 02, 2021, UTC-5

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One of these days I'm going to get my screen fixed.

9:06 p.m. Dec 01, 2021, UTC-5

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I'm ready for another leap year.

8:58 p.m. Dec 01, 2021, UTC-5

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"Hands Down" by Brandyn Burnette et al. is fricking good.

You'll be glad to know I consulted Merriam-Webster for the correct usage of `et al.` there.

8:12 p.m. Dec 01, 2021, UTC-5

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People talk about how little functional programming is used in the "real-world," but I don't think they realize just how functional React is

Like there's the first-level, obvious things, like React being declarative instead of imperative, and emphasizing pure components, but Facebook recommends avoiding any class inheritance, and straight up defines functions that return components. Wait a minute, functions that return other functions are a hallmark of functional programming. What the heck.

8:07 p.m. Dec 01, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

This is code

5:34 p.m. Dec 01, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

"The Energy Never Dies"

5:27 p.m. Dec 01, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I'm going to hold off on posting my 2021 music roundup for another week or two. I don't think it will change much, but it's possible.

5:21 p.m. Dec 01, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I am being attacked from all sides simultaneously.

4:47 p.m. Dec 01, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I think I should think more about local maximums. Quality is rarely monotonic.

2:17 p.m. Dec 01, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I have hours

2:14 p.m. Dec 01, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Oh you know I did test it. But it uses UTC times so I think it’s extremely difficult to change. Call it intended, it’s December in London.

8:30 p.m. Nov 30, 2021, UTC-5

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I still have not found a situation where it makes more sense to use a `switch` statement than a bunch of `if`s.

• Maybe* in Java if you can switch on the values of an Enum, that's kind of nice.

And of course I love pattern matching in functional languages. But C-style switch statements are ugly. (I think they're only there because some instruction sets have assembly instructions for switching, but I hope you'd never have to worry about that.)

7:36 p.m. Nov 30, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

`w /= 4`

Readable code.

7:36 p.m. Nov 30, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

“I can pivot on a dream.”

9:36 a.m. Nov 30, 2021, UTC-5

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I finally found a good, relatively concise, example of why I can't handle GEB.

So he's talking about similarities between the number-pairing used in Gödel's Theorem and the base-pairing used in DNA. If you don't remember, A (adenine) pairs with thymine (T), and guanine (G) pairs with cytosine (C), as described by F. Crick.

And at the end of the list where he talks about the conceptual similarities between numbers and DNA sequences, he points out that G (Gödel) pairs with C (Crick), and A (Arithmetization, a step in Gödel's proof) pairs with T (Translation, the step in interpretation of DNA).

And I'm like, what the hell. Is this a coincidence? Why point this out? Is this a joke, a pun? Did Hofstadter attribute the discovery of molecular biology to Crick, (as opposed to either of Crick's co-Nobel winners) for this joke? When Hofstadter coined the term "Arithmetization" 200 pages ago did he intentionally make it start with an A for this line? (Because the answer has to be yes, right?)

And there are bits like this throughout the entire book, every couple of pages, where Hofstadter just does an intellectual backflip because he can.

He creates a map of the Central Dogma of Molecular Biology and he calls it the "Central Dogmap."

He's like: "strand" backwards is DNA RTS, which could stand for "DNA rapid transit service" which is basically what RNA is.

But it's the "Arithmetization" that really gets me. Because he literally coined that term half a book ago.

12:08 a.m. Nov 30, 2021, UTC-5

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"Live where you stay forever"

11:43 p.m. Nov 29, 2021, UTC-5

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Oh my fricking word I don't actually understand React. I've never made a "good" React app with cascading state.

2:24 p.m. Nov 29, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Unfollowing DY because he went down the web3 rabbit-hole. He could have been an artist.

1:43 p.m. Nov 29, 2021, UTC-5

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I'm only at 2,066 total posts here. (A total of 59,508 words.) Still haven't overtaken my 5,000+ Tweets.

11:23 a.m. Nov 29, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Updated per-season numbers. Unless I post like 10 times tomorrow, which I might, who knows, this is representative of the end of Fall 2021.

>>> [(p.formatted_name, p.get_all_entries().count()) for p in pagination.get_all_pages()]
[('Fall 2021', 379), ('Summer 2021', 375), ('Spring 2021', 317), ('Winter 2020', 410), ('Fall 2020', 584)]

10:41 a.m. Nov 29, 2021, UTC-5

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How hard is it, really, to create a good natural language processing system? It seems like it shouldn't be that hard to create a parse tree

out of an English sentence, and then derive meaning from it.

10:35 a.m. Nov 29, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

So originally, I was planning on turning off pagination before Dec 1, when we start "Winter 2020." But I'm lazy and still long for change,

so I think we'll just roll with it. A fresh start, if you will.

10:33 a.m. Nov 29, 2021, UTC-5

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I still kind of can't believe this website exists. Like, I just made it? And now it's here? Wild.

10:31 a.m. Nov 29, 2021, UTC-5

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https://github.com///////////OurJSEditor/OurJSEditor/

Is a working address.

Please.

9:29 p.m. Nov 28, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I suspect that there is overlap between people who program in assembly and speakers of toki pona.

4:59 p.m. Nov 28, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

@nateruessmusic’s background image on Twitter is a crop of the conspiracy theory pyramid, edited to include himself.

4:54 p.m. Nov 28, 2021, UTC-5

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We’ve come a long way since 2006.

http://blogs.tedneward.com/post/the-vietnam-of-computer-science/

This post is bad. I don’t want to be rude here, because it’s well written. And I don’t know what this guy’s credentials are. And I don’t know what the ORM scene in 2006 looked like. But come on:

On top of this, we have a more subtle problem, that of the reliance on developers' dicipline: both the table name ("PERSON") and the column name in the criteria ("PERSON.LAST_NAME") are standard strings, taken as-is and fed to the system at runtime with no sort of validity-checking until then. This presents a classic problem in programming, that of the “fat-finger” error, where a developer doesn’t actually query the “PERSON” table, but the “PRESON” table instead.

How is this relevant to the claim that “Object-relation mapping is the Vietnam of computer science.” I guess there weren’t any scripting languages at the time and the thought of not having a compiler to validate your terms was awful. Like, I’ve only ever used an ORM in JS and Python. I don’t except compile-time SQL errors. And that’s only one claim. Other “problems” include ‘what if you have two copies of the process running and one of them is paused by the OS and suspended to disk and the other process runs a database migration. Will your ORM save you then??’ Is there any solution to that problem? What the heck?

All of the issues are issues either with strict OOP (which is why I don’t write Java) or issues with having a database.

I almost forgot the part where he goes on about how the DB “instead is owned by another group within the company, typically the database administration (DBA) group.” And he acknowledges that this isn’t inherently an issue with the ORM, but still seems to think it’s relevant.

1:10 p.m. Nov 27, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Apparently I have a Roblox account.

6:34 p.m. Nov 26, 2021, UTC-5

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Reading, uh, *Without Bloodshed* I think, by ~starbreaker but not *Star Breaker*.

Anyways, he’s got this private army of vigilantes, obsessed with protecting people’s rights. It’s wild world-building. This person was arrested without being read their rights and the Adversaries broke them out of prison. But like, they also act as police sometimes.

Adversaries talk a good game about due process, but if you hold office or wear a badge, their idea of proper procedure is to put a second round through your head―just to make sure.

1:45 p.m. Nov 26, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

For some reason, it’s easier for people to be passionate about content consumption than it is for them to be about content creation.

7:17 a.m. Nov 25, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Speaking of “Monday”, it’s amazing. It reminds of something, like a 2009ish sound.

10:23 p.m. Nov 24, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I don’t know what radio station I’m listening to but it just went from “Monday”, The Regrettes, to “We Are Young”, Fun. 10/10

5:23 p.m. Nov 24, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Are paradox and parody the same word?

2:42 p.m. Nov 24, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Okay here's a spicy hot take:

The 40+ hour workweek worked fine decades ago because women largely didn't have jobs. Thanks to feminism and capitalism, there's now an expectation that both parents work full-time, which is not sustainable. The recent push for work-from-home is a result of this shift.

(I recognize that this is a simplification almost to absurdum. I may, to quote the About page, "immediately discard [this theory] as clearly worthless.")

11:39 p.m. Nov 23, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

This is a narrative.

3:49 p.m. Nov 23, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

If AoT ends without controversy, I'll try to watch it.

3:45 p.m. Nov 23, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I'm hiding under my bed in an attempt to appease my anxiety.

3:38 p.m. Nov 23, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Is freedom a good thing?

12:39 a.m. Nov 23, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I'm smarter than some people and not as smart as some people. And that's about the only interpersonal comparison to be made.

12:05 a.m. Nov 23, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Communicating over public social media is boring. I want to talk through shared private Google docs and private Twitter accounts and IRC and

mailing lists and iMessage and Gemini.

12:02 a.m. Nov 23, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Kind of jamming with my new AirPods Max. I'd never really used over-the-ear noise-cancelling headphones before.

11:53 p.m. Nov 22, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I want to do something different, something new, every day.

11:40 p.m. Nov 22, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I really want to float. It feels like everyone else is content to walk or sit.

11:13 p.m. Nov 22, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

We need something more comfortable than a desk but cooler than a bed.

10:12 p.m. Nov 22, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Bill Wurtz's Questions is honestly one of the most beautiful websites on the internet, in my opinion.

9:34 p.m. Nov 22, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

• This Light*

"Common space continued to dissolve into private property, and our attention was pulled towards the monetized distraction of streaming content in solitude."

2:47 p.m. Nov 22, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Oh my fricking word, people

2:22 p.m. Nov 22, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Escaping the mentality of OOP requires one stronger than I.

12:43 p.m. Nov 22, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Stop mentioning me on Slack I don't know.

12:06 p.m. Nov 22, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Is cocaine a drug?

12:46 p.m. Nov 21, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Freaked out by the number of beetle species again.

8:29 p.m. Nov 20, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

All the fricking "just use a subset of HTML" people do not understand how hard parsing HTML is.

You basically would have to say "any attribute is not allowed" and then allow clients to throw/abort on anything that had element attributes. I kind of want to try this now, and write a minimalistic HTML spec page, satirically. Like just make it 50,000 words listing all the things you're not allowed to do.

You would have to aim for "miniwebsites" that could be accessed by Chrome. But I really do not think you could design the spec in such a way that miniweb-browsers would be able to read any HTML pages that weren't designed for the miniweb. You couldn't have that as a design priority.

Wait frick HTML links are `a` elements that require an `href` attribute. So now you have to support attributes. Like show me a regular expression that can hope to parse a single HTML element.

Okay, okay, you probably don't follow. For an example, given `<a href="..." tabindex=0>Click me</a>` is pretty common. See the problem? Even if we can parse attributes, a naive attribute parsing approach assumes the attribute is surrounded by quotes. But quotes are optional. And if you don't have quotes, it's hellish to find where the attribute parameter ends. Oh not to mention a lot of the time you don't have an `=` at all.

I've said before, I still don't understand the rules by which HTML collapses whitespace.

HTML and Gemtext are just not in the same galaxy. It's like walking into a conversation about markdown and saying "why not just use HTML". Except that HTML is still HTML and Gemtext is about an order of magnitude easier to parse than Markdown. Like, no one knows how to parse Markdown.

If you asked me to write a Gemtext parser in assembly, I'd be like, 'yeah sure why not.' If you asked me to write a parser for a *subset* of HTML in assembly, I'd tell you it wasn't possible. Like, okay, you'd have to say that you're not allowed to nest elements. (Because otherwise I have to come up with dynamic memory structures to store my theoretically infinite nested parse tree...) No attributes except for `href`, no elements except for `a`, `h1…6`, `pre`, `block quote`, wait! But if we have bulleted lists, then we have to nest elements. That's awful.

Like, imagine you have a feature-set, say, the stuff gemtext supports. And you want to be able to store and parse those features. Option 1, is all of the complexity of parsing HTML. Option 2 is literally designed to be as simple as possible to parse while support the needed features.

I haven't even gotten to servers. Chrome sends so fricking many headers, you'd need a dynamic memory system in order to handle an arbitrary number of headers. Modern browser could add more headers at any time. Firefox just invented the DNT header and started sending it. There's no way around the complexity and extensibility of the web.

Gemini is designed for non-extensibility. So you can write a server in assembly and allocate 1024 bytes for the URL and know that you'll never need more than that. Fun weekend project, Gemini server in assembly. It would be better than Astronomical Theater.

6:53 p.m. Nov 20, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

That New Car Smell

5:56 p.m. Nov 20, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Some people just love making shared drives, huh.

5:38 p.m. Nov 20, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Mailing the Gemini mailing list at 2 am. I've never interacted with a mailing list before. What could go wrong?

2:37 a.m. Nov 20, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I wish I had a Snackin' Waffle right now.

11:44 p.m. Nov 19, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Just woke up. Let's go.

11:27 p.m. Nov 19, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Hacker News comments are so bad. I’m going to stop commenting there, I’m done.

German PHD student describes a thought experiment in which you have infinite money and are incapable of telling if you’re sick. If you have 2 doctors, who can tell if you’re sick, but don’t care about your personal well-being, how do you pay them? (Ex. Pay them both only if they agree; pay one for diagnosis, one for treatment; etc.) It’s a game theory problem, with implications for negotiating with hyper-intelligent AI or aliens.

The comments:

‘Only pay the doctors if you’re healthy’

‘I am a doctor and I just want to help people’

‘Move to a country with a great healthcare system like Sweden’

‘I’m not going to read the article, the premise is flawed’

Honestly these comments are so bad. Comments that understand that this is a metaphor and not a commentary on US Healthcare are the minority. This is Tumblr levels of reading comprehension.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29269973

7:01 p.m. Nov 19, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

It is cursed code time!

4:52 p.m. Nov 19, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Darn, @nateruessmusic went private

9:47 a.m. Nov 19, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

It’s amazing how hard it can be to find truth.

12:34 a.m. Nov 19, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

gemini://thoughts.learnerpages.com/media/0c9aa2aa-e252-4fc6-a2f2-1facc5fb9166.png

11:15 p.m. Nov 18, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

CLI tools auto-opening applications, including other shells, is extremely annoying.

The react native CLI will open Terminal.app in order to run a build service server, before then opening the iOS simulator.

Also throwback to the last time I used React Native.

gemini://thoughts.learnerpages.com/media/64159995-a0e5-481f-a7de-fbd09fbc5f8b.png

11:13 p.m. Nov 18, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I fixed it. I had set $EDITOR to `vim` so zsh of course stopped answering to emacs keybindings.

10:55 p.m. Nov 18, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

My zsh has stopped interpreting ^A as move to the beginning of the line. I don't know why.

10:20 p.m. Nov 18, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

OOoooohhh my word.

I don't trust anyone.

I don't want to see a therapist because I'm afraid.

I'm conflicted and I don't want to unravel my feelings because I'm afraid. I don't know what I'm afraid of. Rejection, I guess. Being known? Any of it? The unknown? People.

Maybe there's nothing there to untangle and I actually just have an irrational social anxiety that I just need to ignore, not understand.

I suspect that I move in cycles with the weather, but there is an insufficient evidence to prove that.

"How Do You Love?"

10:19 p.m. Nov 18, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I've roughly doubled the length of this page since introducing the season-based pages.

2:51 p.m. Nov 17, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I wish words had meanings.

10:56 a.m. Nov 17, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

A humanoid sheep walks into a dark room.

10:13 a.m. Nov 17, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I got over-ear headphones, that means I am now an unstoppable Hackercoder, right?

8:12 p.m. Nov 16, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

"I know the question that is foremost in your thoughts. Who ate the babies?"

-Synopsis for Latecomers, They Might be Giants

11:31 a.m. Nov 16, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

To elaborate on that last Thought. A ‘normal’ social anxiety would be ‘I have to try to be normal.’ But the second level to recognize is

that there’s an implicit assumption a) that I am different, and b) that’s a bad thing.

And that’s not black and white—it’s a discussion question, not a yes/no question. But it’s important to deal with all of those questions.

12:10 a.m. Nov 16, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I'm afraid of other people. Like, obviously in a superficial way, but also in a deeper way. Where I assume that other people are different.

11:33 p.m. Nov 15, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I think, maybe, I need to be smaller, not bigger.

11:32 p.m. Nov 15, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I didn't go to church Sunday and now I'm regretting it.

The weekend is an important time for me to recover sanity and it's all too easy for me to allow myself to be overcome by insanity over the weekend—since I don't need to be sane over the weekend. But if I do that, then I don't have the sanity to make it through the week.

11:31 p.m. Nov 15, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Narratives.

J

11:25 p.m. Nov 15, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I need someone to punch me.

12:48 p.m. Nov 15, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

.

The sky is shattered like a jigsaw puzzle.

Fragments of it fall between my ears.

Fragments of it float overhead.

The light from the sun shines down.

The leaves fall aimlessly.

Buildings slice the world.

I'm on the ground.

The sky above.

Grass below.

Me.

10:34 a.m. Nov 15, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

My problem with fan fiction is that it doesn’t exist for the media I want. I can search AO3 for anything and all I get is Harry Potter

8:51 a.m. Nov 15, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I've commented before on how great the Vötgil episode [0] of Conlang Critic is [1]. But Misali doesn't let it go and keeps bringing it up as

a bad example in other episodes of Conlang Critic. Episode 4 [2] they roast this 1980s feminist for not being inclusive of non-binary people and then finish the episode with 'but that's not as bad as Vötgil which has no redeeming qualities.'

Also BöpGil [3] is a bop please listen to it.

[0]: See [1]

[1]: https://thoughts.learnerpages.com/?show=b77f1767-6ec4-44b8-aedd-6b75338ce7f4

[2]: I'm too lazy to actually find links, look it up or something.

[3]: https://youtu.be/MNVKuDGX7qY

10:59 p.m. Nov 14, 2021, UTC-5

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“I’m a little bit excited”

6:51 p.m. Nov 14, 2021, UTC-5

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I finished the book. Took me about 10 hours from start to finish. I don’t think I ate dinner. Help

2:22 a.m. Nov 14, 2021, UTC-5

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Reading the *Left-handed Booksellers of London*, by Nix. And he keeps dropping these references. And I miss most of them.

Some of the references are to Tolkien or Lewis or whatever. But then I catch like a line from a Donne poem I memorized once, just as a part of dialogue. Like, the character says "One short sleep past, we wake eternally," and the conversation moves on. That's a direct quote from a poem from over 400 years ago.

The thing that gets me is that there are lots of other lines in the book that I think could be references to something, that go over my head.

One of the characters drops 2 lines of the Major General's patter. Like…

11:37 p.m. Nov 13, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I am, technically, still alive.

11:09 a.m. Nov 13, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I don’t want to do this either. I want to start a revolution.

10:44 p.m. Nov 12, 2021, UTC-5

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I always thought that scene in *Dead Poets Society* where they stand on the desks was symbolic, but I just stood on my desk and the room

actually looks different.

I enjoy playing with space and geometry.

10:03 p.m. Nov 12, 2021, UTC-5

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Is music an addictive drug?

7:49 p.m. Nov 12, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I need variety in my life so the light theme looks like this now.

Color picked from an American Animals (2018) poster. I haven't seen the movie but man that promo art is an aesthetic.

2:55 p.m. Nov 12, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

_____~~~_=~=~===~~~=~=•=•=~=••=~-_.,,,,,.,.,,,_.……._,’,_

2:37 p.m. Nov 12, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Ah, the passage of time.

12:01 a.m. Nov 12, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I love November

6:20 p.m. Nov 11, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Thinking about the time I had "INTJ" in my Khan Academy nickname. Humans like labels.

I think that's one of the reasons I obsess with my name. I introduce myself and describe myself with "I am Matthias" not just as an introduction, but as a descriptor. "Matthias" is by far the most accurate label I have found for myself.

3:22 p.m. Nov 11, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Listening to the Cowboy Bebop soundtrack at the recommendation of someone in the midnight pub.

12:54 p.m. Nov 11, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I would argue, counter intuitively, that positive feedback hurts an action that is an expectation.

That is to say, if someone is regularly doing something, rewarding them for doing it makes them less likely to continue.

1:03 a.m. Nov 11, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I have unlocked topcolor on Hacker News, it is all over.

12:49 p.m. Nov 10, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I forgot Chance featured Death Cap, I’m crying.

If Ryan Met ever remixed Death Cap I would probably die.

9:17 a.m. Nov 10, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Imagine all the people I could be if I lied.

10:57 p.m. Nov 09, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Posting this one from Arch Linux. With my own keyboard. That's right ladies, we're back in business.

5:12 p.m. Nov 09, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I'm posting this from macOS recovery mode. It could be fun to use Safari in recovery mode as a minimalistic OS.

Althought it seems less performant, not more. And there are some rough edges. Something something simplicity inside a complex system.

10:44 a.m. Nov 09, 2021, UTC-8

▔▔▔

“‘I womansee’ womanreplies the

woman, and womanwalks away…”

- G.E.B.

11:13 p.m. Nov 08, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

So many anti-tropes were already done by Adam Rex’s Cold Cereal Saga. Highly recommend.

10:38 a.m. Nov 08, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

"Ok, so here's the thing"

9:26 a.m. Nov 08, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

dwa kdwmalk jnajwnd kjnjnawk dnjknwjandj nkjnknwadsj

9:26 a.m. Nov 08, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Oh my word throwback to when I made an organ harvesting role play Discord server.

4:04 p.m. Nov 07, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

I'm totally going to end up watching TFC aren't I. He just hit 100k subs, so that's pretty neat.

3:40 p.m. Nov 07, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Have you decided what might become of the Frenchman?

11:02 p.m. Nov 06, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I’m floating. I can’t bring myself to dive back down. I’m afraid not of the water, but of drowning.

10:19 p.m. Nov 06, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Decided I'm not going to shut this site down, since it's cool. But I might have to pivot the content. Might start posting poetry or bits of

story of something.

7:27 p.m. Nov 06, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

The problem with any adaptation of the Count of Monte Cristo's character is that you end up making him more sane.

He's honestly a Joker-level character sometimes.

“Then," continued Chateau-Renaud, "since you have an establishment, a steward, and a hotel in the Champs Elysees, you only want a mistress.”

“I have something better than that," said Monte Cristo; "I have a slave. You procure your mistresses from the opera, the Vaudeville, or the Varietes; I purchased mine at Constantinople; it cost me more, but I have nothing to fear.”

“But you forget," replied Debray, laughing, "that we are Franks by name and franks by nature, as King Charles said, and that the moment she puts her foot in France your slave becomes free.”

“Who will tell her?”

“The first person who sees her.”

“She only speaks Romaic.”

And it's these interactions that end up getting cut in any abridged version or adaptation. Because honestly what the hell.

Although if I remember correctly, I think later the Count tells his slave that she's free, and she chooses to stay with him, and the Count admits that he views her like a daughter and isn't sleeping with her and she speaks French and the Count is actually making 4D chess moves that no one else (including me) understands.

4:44 p.m. Nov 06, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Can't believe we reset the entire league and the Crabs are still going to win.

4:09 p.m. Nov 06, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Thinking about shutting this site down. It's not obvious that it helps me anymore.

Originally, it helped me get rid of intrusive thoughts by posting them here. But now I find myself making an effort to remember things that I would otherwise forget, just in order to post them here.

3:31 p.m. Nov 06, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

What a fricking legend.

https://youtu.be/Yx_8wS-9SM8

3:28 p.m. Nov 06, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

What genre is “Legend” by twenty one pilots? I haven’t heard anything like it.

11:55 a.m. Nov 06, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

My Gemini sites need to move to MD, still. Hopefully I remember to that.

10:27 a.m. Nov 06, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Ahh I want to talk to someone about The Count of Monte Cristo!

10:24 a.m. Nov 06, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Are you a Conlang Critic jan Misali fan, or a “Wario Faces Consequences for His Actions” jan Misali fan?

1:20 a.m. Nov 06, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I’ve decided poetry is dead in part because we value candidness.

12:50 a.m. Nov 06, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Why is poetry dead?

2:57 p.m. Nov 05, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

What is the world but a conspiracy to keep me from sleep?

8:15 a.m. Nov 05, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Just moved all my sites over to Apache Managed Domain from certbot, since I was using a version of certbot from at least 2 years ago.

Certbot had also stopped working for some reason.

Now I just have to figure out how to uninstall certbot. Can't be that hard, right?

1:19 p.m. Nov 04, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I love people who leave 1-2 star Goodread reviews on books I read as a kid. Like, I get it, this piece of children's literature is not up to

your standards. I'm sure your criticisms are valid but it's too late; I already read it and enjoyed it.

"Just reading about how the zeppelins are constructed or how to operate an airship made out of a combination of creatures bored me to death." I'm sorry that you didn't enjoy the description of the giant flying steampunk whale but that is all I want in a book, thank you.

12:53 a.m. Nov 04, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Oh my work, oh my fricking word. I just love reading fiction so much. I just absolutely guzzle fiction, it's incredible.

12:17 a.m. Nov 04, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I'm not quite sure when, but at some point I just learned how to use `git`. Like just through trial-and-error I guess. I just cherry-picked

a commit from one repo onto another. And like, I'm not a git expert. There could have been a better way to do what I wanted. But I managed to do it what I wanted first-try, no errors. Which I'm pretty impressed with.

9:28 p.m. Nov 03, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I wish I had a chair with wheels. Then I might be able to fly.

4:36 p.m. Nov 03, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I wish I had a chair with wheels. Then I might be able to fly.

9:03 a.m. Nov 03, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Thinking about the Count of Monte Cristo again.

Aaahh it’s so good. So many good scenes.

12:28 a.m. Nov 03, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I think maybe time was meant to be linear and things were meant to be ephemeral. Maybe holding on to the past is a mistake.

9:11 p.m. Nov 02, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

It's interesting to me that my bottleneck in being able to post audio samples here is the number of things I think are worth recording, not

my time or willingness to record myself.

9:10 p.m. Nov 02, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

“Who in the world am I?”

9:03 p.m. Nov 02, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I don’t know if I need more or less.

5:35 p.m. Nov 02, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I'm trying to remain sane but it's harder than it looks.

5:29 p.m. Nov 02, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I’m addicted to thinking.

5:19 p.m. Nov 02, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Interestingly, I think I've created some of my best art at times I wasn't trying to. When I was making games on KA, I viewed myself as a

player of games, and set out to make the type of game that I wanted to play. Similarly, some of the books that I've previously started, I began the type of book that I wanted to read. But those mindsets are very different from the artist's mindset. When I set out to create art I get carried away with the creative freedom of it all. And if I succeed in capturing my emotion or my vision, as I did on the About page here for instance, I end up with something that at the very least is so different from other things that no one knows that they want it.

9:41 p.m. Nov 01, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

The internet is a circle.

9:28 p.m. Nov 01, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Abby Ampersand is a fricking quality name.

8:06 p.m. Nov 01, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

“alone” — inquiry

gemini://midnight.pub/posts/687

gemini://thoughts.learnerpages.com/media/fc50a977-3be7-481e-8040-c5c1a58fbcc8.mp3

10:52 p.m. Oct 31, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

There has been a disappointing lack of candy this Halloween.

10:40 p.m. Oct 31, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Oh my word I don’t have a life.

9:07 p.m. Oct 31, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I have created Waffle.

9:58 a.m. Oct 31, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

What isn’t art?

2:19 p.m. Oct 30, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

It’s like my emotions are disconnected from reality.

2:18 p.m. Oct 30, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Speak for yourself, I’m perfect.

1:37 a.m. Oct 30, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Programmers are generally anxious.

I think it’s something about debugging that encourages you to question everything. But it may also be something about the logical nature of programming itself. Anyways, programmers like guarantees, things that don’t change, and rigorously defined behavior. Not only does that structure make us comfortable, the lack of structure scares us.

1:35 a.m. Oct 30, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

My pride in large part staves off depression, etc, but doesn’t do much against the insistence of my social anxiety that no one likes me.

1:28 a.m. Oct 30, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Thinking about whether I can go live with the Amish. Like, do they want me? Or would they kick me out?

Does anyone want me?

1:26 a.m. Oct 30, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

It’s interesting, because I think it’s pretty clear that my current mindset is unsustainable. But I am less willing to reinvent myself,

really, than I was 4.3 years ago when I invited Matthias 2.0. Matthias 1.0 had ambition, and that ambition allowed him to change into Matthias 2.0 in an attempt to better satisfy those ambitions. But somehow the ambition didn’t get carried over, or something. (I’m not currently Matthias 2.0, btw. Matthias 2.0 worked well for a little while, although in retrospect there was foreshadowing of future problems. But somehow it broke down, around 1.7–2.6 years ago, and now we’re here. Also, some numbering schemes start at different places, this Thought defines Matthias 1.0 as starting 11 years ago.)

1:18 a.m. Oct 30, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I realized earlier today that I would rather be around people who insult me than people who compliment me because I can trust that the

former is being honest.

Who hurt me as a kid? I don't trust anyone.

12:56 a.m. Oct 30, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Why am I here? How did I get here?

12:46 a.m. Oct 30, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I don't love the About page, in that it represents a time in my life that has passed. It no longer resinates with me in the way that it did

when I wrote it. But am very happy with it and proud of it because it is a long, and written in a consistent tone, and I think it captures the tone of this site overall.

12:27 a.m. Oct 30, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I was logged into my gmail account watching an English Youtube video, and Google shows me an add for some Pixel phone, in Spanish!

10:22 p.m. Oct 29, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

The grind never stops but sometimes I do.

1:33 p.m. Oct 29, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I wish bread came in more shapes

1:26 p.m. Oct 29, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Every website is broken.

12:30 p.m. Oct 29, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Please give me a “slow start” guide. I have no idea what’s going on but I want to learn.

12:23 p.m. Oct 29, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

And for what?

11:21 a.m. Oct 29, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Only

One of my

Airpods works I am going

Insane

11:06 a.m. Oct 29, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Okay I sleep now

12:55 a.m. Oct 29, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I still plan on open-sourcing this at some point, but I have secret keys in version control and text on the About page.

I’m leaning towards CC0, but I don’t want to public domain my writing.

12:54 a.m. Oct 29, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Was reading through old thoughts. I have some good ones.

12:51 a.m. Oct 29, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

It’s interesting to think about how there are no rules to the content I could post here, except for the minimum enforced by the government

12:51 a.m. Oct 29, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I feel a phantom headband on my head because I’ve been wearing one all day.

12:49 a.m. Oct 29, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Aaahh

12:48 a.m. Oct 29, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I have decided to make pasta.

11:44 p.m. Oct 28, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Thinking about the Tweet Luke deleted where he asked someone to post on Rigby.

7:39 p.m. Oct 28, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I do feel bad though. I feel so bad.

7:03 p.m. Oct 27, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

The more you say the less you say.

2:38 p.m. Oct 27, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

The cookie banner on nature.com is literally larger than the anti-nicotine warning on a vape store. How did we get here?

11:06 a.m. Oct 27, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

"Perhaps 'tis the mental difference between embracing and eschewing moments?"

gemini://thoughts.learnerpages.com/media/99d84a4e-71ad-4058-b146-51caa1ebc97e.mp3

9:15 p.m. Oct 26, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

It's possible TFC just has no fricking idea how big HermitCraft is. Like IRL he could just not know.

5:40 p.m. Oct 26, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

What is the opposite of drugs?

2:47 p.m. Oct 26, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Design is hard. I’m not the only one that’s bad at it.

1:58 p.m. Oct 25, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

There’s a lot you don’t know about me.

10:39 a.m. Oct 25, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I'm tired of society pretending that cursing is perfectly fine. I don't like it.

1:17 a.m. Oct 25, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

All languages should have a `constrain` function somewhere in their standard library.

It's simple enough that I should be able to use it in one line, but `min(max_val, max(min_val, val))` is ugly and unreadable.

12:43 a.m. Oct 25, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Still can't believe pop-bob griefed her own gender. Truly a legend.

11:34 p.m. Oct 24, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Why are people on the internet so dumb?

11:29 p.m. Oct 24, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

This website does not work in SerenityOS browser. I think it doesn't support background color, so the text is all white-on-white.

7:04 p.m. Oct 24, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Accidentally bought small face masks. (I didn't realize face masks came in different sizes.) My head is waaaay to big for this.

4:14 p.m. Oct 24, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

"You're never going to be able to make something safe. You can increase the margin of safety. And as long as you're holding to that, and you

don't suffer the illusion that you have made something safe, then you stay in that mental state that allows you to deal with contingencies, cause they're going to happen."

-Adam Savage

3:57 p.m. Oct 24, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I would like light cotton pants.

9:30 p.m. Oct 23, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Impulse-building SerenityOS

8:42 p.m. Oct 23, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Is there something to say?

8:14 p.m. Oct 23, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Music to Fly to

8:07 p.m. Oct 23, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

.

gemini://thoughts.learnerpages.com/media/a8f864d7-de04-4b28-9e9d-2b14621d10a6.mp3

12:21 a.m. Oct 23, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

There are parts of Reddit that are still good (read: "insane").

11:17 p.m. Oct 22, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

"When it's quiet and I stop thinking, I hear voices in my head that sound like radio commercials."

4:55 p.m. Oct 22, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Always more tweaking to do…

12:53 a.m. Oct 22, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Considering becoming a sovcit for the meme

8:26 p.m. Oct 21, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

"This screwed up stuff is the stuff of dreams"

-The Showman, U2

2:59 p.m. Oct 21, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

"Fall off the Moon"

2:10 p.m. Oct 21, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Today is a good day to sit on the floor.

1:58 p.m. Oct 21, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I wrote some p5.js last night. Takes me back. It's more fun than web stuff.

gemini://thoughts.learnerpages.com/media/862d7003-2792-4497-8293-f5d799ae3478.png

9:33 a.m. Oct 21, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I wish I could climb out my window, but the next best thing is walking out my door.

(My window is very far off of the ground. I totally would if I could, trust me.)

10:06 p.m. Oct 20, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Promises are so fricking opinionated. I can't. Javascript is so un-opinionated and then, Promises

9:49 p.m. Oct 20, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Standing on the shoulders of giants is enslaving yourself.

Do we have a choice?

11:34 a.m. Oct 20, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Oh, Skypack is a thing. Add it to the list…

11:08 a.m. Oct 20, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

The last days of childhood

12:48 a.m. Oct 20, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Just found out that "nickelodeon" was a slang term for a jukebox, from *GEB*. I feel like I've aged 10 years.

12:35 a.m. Oct 20, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Thinking about moving to Tildegit and deno to escape Microsoft. I can't leave Javascript.

12:21 a.m. Oct 20, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Still can't believe Microsoft just bought all of the Javascript code.

12:21 a.m. Oct 20, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

There's just so much code to write!!

12:20 a.m. Oct 20, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

But I can live like this.

9:35 p.m. Oct 17, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I love the smell of the air

9:34 p.m. Oct 17, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I don't like fuzzy finds or command palettes or quick switchers or etc. But I don't know why, because I like the idea and I will use them...

9:14 p.m. Oct 17, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Hofstadter is venturing pretty fricking close to insanity

8:08 p.m. Oct 17, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

It's a miracle any code works.

We are constructing a tower of Babel and God can allow it to stand because it will fall to our own hubris.

This is about the codebase that is shared between my Gemini server and my website.

5:42 p.m. Oct 17, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

There are hundreds of things I could do in this moment and I don't know which ones are important or which ones I want to do.

4:41 p.m. Oct 17, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I get all my music recommendations from Hypixel Bedwars montage Youtube videos.

4:24 p.m. Oct 17, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I really want to put like a dumb CRT-effect overlay over this website but my GPU (or lack thereof) cannot handle it.

12:09 a.m. Oct 17, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I love compiling code.

8:23 p.m. Oct 16, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Some follow-up, I found "The Last Person in America Not Online"

I posted May 15th [here](https://thoughts.learnerpages.com/?show=cf045c64-f54f-423f-b682-52b99c7294d2), “You May Be Looking At The Last Person In America Not Online.” And then on May 30th, [here](https://thoughts.learnerpages.com/?show=4ade4aea-3914-4605-bb6d-40dbfba63b77), I commented that I didn't remember where that had come from. Well, I searched for it again, and this time Google gave me this reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/nd1cbl/just_a_bit_of_dust/, (an image of an AOL disk with a reflective surface under the words.)

Just a bit of closure.

7:57 p.m. Oct 16, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

"For those craving real, human interaction, there is also an IRC channel"

7:40 p.m. Oct 16, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I’ve decided mixing wet and dry ingredients separately is a superstition invented by people with surplus mixing bowls.

6:20 p.m. Oct 16, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Tazal

https://youtu.be/V-6m0jW0X9E?t=1231

1:00 a.m. Oct 16, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

The thing about *Thinking Fast and Slow* that makes it so interesting, is that’s not a list of ways that humans are illogical and tips on

how to be more logical—although it certainly appears to be at times. But what it ends up doing is thoroughly tearing down the myth that humans are rational at all.

7:52 p.m. Oct 15, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

My Twitter data log has every time I've logged into Twitter and the IP address.

Edit: Not accesses, logins, I think

12:52 a.m. Oct 15, 2021, UTC-4

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Re-upholstered my chair.

In like 5 minutes with a T-shirt and duct tape.

11:38 p.m. Oct 14, 2021, UTC-4

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In addition to people, I also hate objects.

8:20 p.m. Oct 14, 2021, UTC-4

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Some have said that society is an illusion. But it is more precise to say that society is a series of illusions stacked on top of each other

4:28 p.m. Oct 14, 2021, UTC-4

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This is pleasure, this is pain.

4:26 p.m. Oct 14, 2021, UTC-4

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Removed markdown from this website. Adding features without removing them is…

1:02 p.m. Oct 14, 2021, UTC-4

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AAAAAaaahhhhhahhahahaaahhhhhhaaaaaahahhhhhahahahahahaaaahhhhhhhh

10:51 a.m. Oct 14, 2021, UTC-4

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'Woah the Matlab `plot` syntax is *exactly* like Matplotlib!'

Where do you think the "mat" in "matplotlib" comes from, exactly??

10:36 a.m. Oct 14, 2021, UTC-4

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I believe I once promised someone, if only myself, that this website would concentrate my insanity and allow me to be more sane elsewhere.

That was a falsehood.

11:30 p.m. Oct 13, 2021, UTC-4

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I would rather do the wrong things than do nothing.

11:29 p.m. Oct 13, 2021, UTC-4

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"Be strong and courageous for the LORD your God goes with you."

-Deuteronomy 31:6, paraphrased

11:22 p.m. Oct 13, 2021, UTC-4

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Has anyone done Programming Language Critic? The show that gets facts wrong about your favorite programming language?

Looks like there are a couple of surprisingly high quality Youtube channels doing esolang reviews. But that's surprisingly high quality given their low popularity, not like, actually good and definitely not at the level of jan Misali.

11:21 p.m. Oct 13, 2021, UTC-4

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Okay back to the seasons, I'm not vibing with them. It feels really disorienting and doesn't really give you a sense of scale. Like, how far

back is this? Is this from 10 years ago or yesterday? I wonder if that's just because I made the site? Because when I'm looking back on Hacker News, for example, it feels almost creepy, like walking through a ghost town or archives, reading comments from years ago. I don't get that same feeling here.

On the other hand, that's probably fine.

The functionality of this site was obviously inspired by Twitter, but a lot of the feel and aesthetic of the this site was inspired by bill wurtz's "questions". https://billwurtz.com/questions/questions.html I just opened "questions" again, and started reading, and was struck by how timeless everything was. I looked at the timestamps, but like I'm tired and I don't want to try to figure out how long ago any of them were posted. And it doesn't matter.

So in that sense, I wouldn't be unhappy if everything here was timeless and you could jump into the middle. (Like you can with XKCD for example.)

Now, I don't want this site to be confusing to navigate, like billwurtz.com. I do want you to be able to come to this site and immediately get a feel for "oh he's posted several times a day for a year…" Maybe numbered pages? e.g. 1-500, 500-1000, etc? I think that works well for XKCD.

11:02 p.m. Oct 13, 2021, UTC-4

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There are a lot of reasons that I don't always want to allow comments on posts here, but one of them is that I extensively use "help" and

rhetorical questions, that I don't mean as genuine. See for example the last post. I'm transcribing the questions that are running through my own head, not asking you these questions.

10:50 p.m. Oct 13, 2021, UTC-4

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I can't.

Okay so you need context probably. I have fancy textboxes on the post page here that get taller when you type in them.

Well, the trigger for them expanding is dependent on whether or not I have a mouse plugged in. I don't want to get into all of it, something something, macOS displays scrollbars, etc. Is this a web problem? Can I blame this on the W3? Or this is a problem with software in general? Should I fix this? Can I fix this? Help.

10:47 p.m. Oct 13, 2021, UTC-4

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I'm trying to post here more often after I did the per-quarter breakdown and realized how much I posted the first season of this site.

10:37 p.m. Oct 13, 2021, UTC-4

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I still haven't solved formatting/markdown. I'm doing client side markdown ! I've been thinking about it for months.

10:36 p.m. Oct 13, 2021, UTC-4

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I'm so glad I left Twitter. I've heard Twitter doesn't let you Tweet the exact same thing twice and it's stressful for me to wonder

"have I posted this before?"

10:36 p.m. Oct 13, 2021, UTC-4

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I don't remember the last time I made a good decision.

10:32 p.m. Oct 13, 2021, UTC-4

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Do you feel it yet?

7:51 p.m. Oct 13, 2021, UTC-4

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There's a bit of Marxist theory that one of the pains of capitalism is that it separates the laborer from the product of their labor.

The concrete example is the assembly line worker that feels no passion for their job, and Marx attributes this to them not being able to take responsibility for the product that rolls off of the assembly line. I think this is only one symptom of a larger phenomena of corporate capitalism. Corporations are, in a sense, magical things because they are more than the sum of their parts. This shows up in other places, but in this example, no one at the corporation is passionate about making whatever product they are making. And yet, the corporation as a whole appears to have motives, which don't align with the motives of any of its members. This can be a good thing, sometimes. The communist commune model of "everyone does what they're passionate about" doesn't work in practice or at scale. But it's interesting to think about.

7:51 p.m. Oct 13, 2021, UTC-4

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Javascript is extremely flexible and I know it very well. It doesn't make much sense for me to do anything but double down on using it.

7:24 p.m. Oct 13, 2021, UTC-4

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I want to do amazing things.

10:29 a.m. Oct 13, 2021, UTC-4

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All people want is an enemy.

10:29 a.m. Oct 13, 2021, UTC-4

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One of the biggest lies I tell myself is that I enjoy empty spaces.

10:28 a.m. Oct 13, 2021, UTC-4

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Is it really code golf, if you don't have an `eval`?

1:03 a.m. Oct 13, 2021, UTC-4

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Here's a Thought from last year that talks about pagination

https://thoughts.learnerpages.com/?show=b3b9020f-edbd-412d-9787-6874b21622d1

1:11 p.m. Oct 12, 2021, UTC-4

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I'm experimenting with pagination. Right now I'm grouping Thoughts by meteorological season. Each page is still absurdly long (good), while

dropping the amount of text transferred to ~1/10 (good). The (bad) is that I now have a row of buttons and multiple pages. Which adds a significant amount of mental complexity.

I'm at 1,842 Thoughts, broken down as (per-season)

[('Fall 2021', 156), ('Summer 2021', 375), ('Spring 2021', 317), ('Winter 2020', 410), ('Fall 2020', 584)]

I think the 300-500 thoughts/page range is about where I want to be, but it looks like I'm still seeing flashes of unformatted content due to JS markdown. Which I was hoping this would fix. I really need to move to server-side rendering.

The other bad, of course, is that when we roll over to winter in a month, the front page will drop to 0 posts at some point. Which is not exactly the aesthetic that I'm going for.

Also added a permalink button so you can find thoughts buried in the archives, but I'm not super happy with it. It will probably change.

1:11 p.m. Oct 12, 2021, UTC-4

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Since when does Servo support JS?

12:20 p.m. Oct 12, 2021, UTC-4

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Gosh fricking heck dates were a problem and a mistake. Timezone issues with this site, again!

1:07 a.m. Oct 12, 2021, UTC-4

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I once said "I don't have trouble focusing, focusing just feels weird" [1]. I certainly find it a lot easier to switch between tasks every 5

minutes that it is to work on one task for too long.

[1]

12:19 a.m. Oct 12, 2021, UTC-4

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I think it's interesting to keep in mind that any project can be acquired by big corporate at any time. Keybase, NPM, Audacity, etc.

9:45 p.m. Oct 11, 2021, UTC-4

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So I started this website because I got addicted to the dopamine hit associated with someone liking my Tweets, right.

Well, the lack of exposure hasn't made me any better at handling it. I started a one-off Instagram account, and I just got 2 followers, and my heart is racing.

9:35 p.m. Oct 11, 2021, UTC-4

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I want to make this website weirder, but one of things that makes this website so weird right now is its simplicity. If I added some gimmic,

I could lose simplicity, resulting in a net zero change in weirdness and a net negative in website quality.

10:25 a.m. Oct 11, 2021, UTC-4

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"Your generosity so far also matches exactly an adversaries likely plan to entrap me."

(Spoiler, it was actually an adversary entrapping him. Too late.)

Another example of things that actually happened, but would never be believable in fiction.

9:23 p.m. Oct 10, 2021, UTC-4

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You gotta give credit to ElyBeatmaker. He is really good at what he does.

8:53 p.m. Oct 10, 2021, UTC-4

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Absolute musical insanity

RemixMyRemix3 TOP 10

8:53 p.m. Oct 10, 2021, UTC-4

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At some point the Black Lives Matter organization took down their What We Believe page.

4:35 p.m. Oct 10, 2021, UTC-4

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Why are stand mixers $200 when I could buy a bowl and a hand mixer for $40?

4:03 p.m. Oct 10, 2021, UTC-4

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Hello. I am Matthias. I have social anxiety

8:03 p.m. Oct 09, 2021, UTC-4

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The thing that frustrates me about Jekyll is that it forces content into the _data and _posts directories. So if you try to group all of

your content together, then all of your content, everything you regularly change, is in sub-directories with names that start with `_`.

But like, you don't have to do that. Jekyll will also post-process files in a `./posts` directory. And this is the type of thing that gets me about every static site generator (or least Hugo and Jekyll and eleventy). They have these conventions and assumptions about where to put their files, but it's unclear which of them are defaults and which of them are enforced. And how easy it is to overwrite any given default.

2:40 p.m. Oct 09, 2021, UTC-4

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/r/AnarchyChess is sustaining me while Blaseball is on Siesta.

gemini://thoughts.learnerpages.com/media/0bea46dc-2ec7-46dc-a4c8-226316909547.png

1:57 p.m. Oct 09, 2021, UTC-4

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I focus on listening a lot. But if you're looking for information, asking a good question can be as important of a skill as listening.

7:22 p.m. Oct 08, 2021, UTC-4

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The reckless, infinite scope of web browsers

I don't like Drew DeVault. But he recognizes the issues with the web that many people do not.

7:21 p.m. Oct 08, 2021, UTC-4

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What am I running from?

2:24 p.m. Oct 08, 2021, UTC-4

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I love /r/legaladvice: "No, according to OP, the person who committed fraud said that."

8:49 a.m. Oct 08, 2021, UTC-4

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In the past two days, Facebook has gone down, all of Twitch's source was leaked, and all `.club` domains went down. This is anarchy.

4:21 p.m. Oct 07, 2021, UTC-4

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XKCD 267

gemini://thoughts.learnerpages.com/media/ddbaae41-f41c-4d7b-aa3f-e2c9349325f1.mp3

11:08 p.m. Oct 06, 2021, UTC-4

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We had a good run

10:07 p.m. Oct 06, 2021, UTC-4

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Figured out you can move the address bar back to the top of the screen in iOS 15

From the aA, Show Top Tab Bar

8:15 p.m. Oct 06, 2021, UTC-4

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Myyy haaannndsss [voice crack] huuurrrrrttt

6:46 p.m. Oct 06, 2021, UTC-4

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"owning a computer to survive/participate in society is a consequence of capitalism"

Should I stop posting bad socialist takes here? This one is so out there I can't even provide commentary.

9:17 p.m. Oct 05, 2021, UTC-4

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"Courtesy of the Library of Nomad. Knowledge is Freedom."

8:35 p.m. Oct 05, 2021, UTC-4

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I’m running on borrowed time.

5:13 p.m. Oct 05, 2021, UTC-4

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Aaaahhh

2:02 p.m. Oct 05, 2021, UTC-4

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Fell off my bike this morning. Can't catch a break

10:54 a.m. Oct 05, 2021, UTC-4

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I'm such a perfectionist. I sometimes say, if it's worth doing it's worth doing better than anyone else. But even that isn't enough to

satisfy me.

This website is one of the things I'm proud of, that brings my joy to use. But even with this, I have a 25 item to-do list, 3 posts with errors that need editing, and 7 grammar mistakes on the About page. (25 item todo list doesn't sound like a lot, but start thinking about it. How many bugs or missing features can you name for this site? I can name 25.)

This is a cry for help.

11:22 p.m. Oct 04, 2021, UTC-4

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We're going to run out of IPv6 addresses because we're using them to encode data. Facebook's IPv6 address is 2a03:2880:f0fc:c:face:b00c:0:35

"face:b00c"

10:49 p.m. Oct 04, 2021, UTC-4

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It's really a shame that words are linear, isn't it.

10:22 p.m. Oct 04, 2021, UTC-4

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If the pandemic isn't over by, say, 2030, I'm going to stop wearing a mask, tetra variant or no.

I once read an interesting excerpt from *Being Alive*, by Tim Ingold (p. 36). In it he points out the degree to which we constrain the role of our feet, and moreover, how this is regarded as a mark of how civilized we are as a society.

Paradoxically, it seems that with the onward march of civilisation, the foot has been progressively *withdrawn* from the sphere of operation of the intellect, that it has regressed to the status of a merely mechanical apparatus, and moreover that this development is a consequence — not a cause — of technical advance in footwear. Boots and shoes, products of the ever more versatile human hand, imprison the foot, constricting its freedom of movement and blunting its sense of touch.

At the risk of over-extrapolating, I would not be surprised if, in 8 years, it is socially expected that everyone remain masked when possible. Not out of a particular fear, as today, but out of respect. "Mouth-breather" is already an insult, and chewing with your mouth open is already rude. Is it really that much of a jump to expect people to cover their mouths with cloth as often as possible?

This mask-wearing would be used as evidence of the advances of civilization, in the same way that wearing shoes is, but it is unclear whether it would be tangibly beneficial. Eradication of some airborne illness is near the bottom of my goals for human progress, far after eradicating hunger, poverty, space travel etc. Many, however, would take this objection without issue.

Why is this a problem? Because wearing a mask drastically reduces our sense of smell. Smell is one of only 4 senses that can really be used to experience the world around us. (The sense of smell is most important outdoors. It's possible, in a projected future, that masking outside is seen as unnecessary. It's also possible that we develop masks that you can smell through, etc.)

But the sense of smell, in modern civilization, isn't valued. Moving your nose to better smell something is an extremely undignified act. Dogs smell things, humans don't. (We praise dogs for their sense of smell, but dogs are unashamed to put their noses to the ground. I've tried it, you can smell a lot more with your face in the grass. I was also immediately scoffed.)

The sense of smell is often neglected, but it still plays an important role in experiencing the world around us.

The nose and mouth are not significantly valued in western culture today. If they were to be blunted or obscured by a mask, most people would not realize the magnitude of what would be lost. It is important to me that I get the fullest possible experience of the world God created, bar of course urgent public-health crises. If mask wearing is still the social norm in 9 years, I think it reasonable to say at that point that this is not a short-term public heath crisis, and is in fact a cultural and value shift. This value shift would be one that I protest.

10:14 p.m. Oct 04, 2021, UTC-4

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My life is a constant cycle of under and over stimulation.

2:22 p.m. Oct 04, 2021, UTC-4

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Facebook.com is down. 10/10. It is impossible to keep a website online.

1:02 p.m. Oct 04, 2021, UTC-4

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I hate probability. I don't understand it at all.

11:03 a.m. Oct 04, 2021, UTC-4

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I'd pay to see a professional JS/web developer react to code on KA for the first time.

9:45 a.m. Oct 04, 2021, UTC-4

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jan Misali just roasts a language for 10 minutes in the most dry tone. It's amazing.

"It's not very computer friendly, which wouldn't be a problem if it were pen and paper friendly, which it isn't."

https://youtu.be/12bT6wGXESc

I don't even care about conlangs at all. He's been doing this for 5 years.

7:00 p.m. Oct 03, 2021, UTC-4

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I've been using Atom for the past couple weeks. I just opened IntelliJ. It's so painful

The package is called `python-decouple` and is listed in the requirements.txt as such. IntelliJ can't seem to fathom that.

gemini://thoughts.learnerpages.com/media/2bde2f08-1e6c-4815-b1af-41813c72fd73.png

6:18 p.m. Oct 03, 2021, UTC-4

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Made this earlier, inspired by a Reddit comment

(Did you notice this image has `alt` text? Big things are always happening behind the scenes here.)

gemini://thoughts.learnerpages.com/media/5ba92603-eb59-4ab3-9e9b-b71d5e4f15cc.jpeg

6:05 p.m. Oct 03, 2021, UTC-4

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Fixing bugs.

`unsigned int value = -1`

11:44 a.m. Oct 03, 2021, UTC-4

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I watched *October Sky* with some friends yesterday to celebrate the start of October. It's a very good movie.

6:31 p.m. Oct 02, 2021, UTC-4

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I am mentally moving this project (this website) back into an artistic/creative mode.

6:27 p.m. Oct 02, 2021, UTC-4

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Working on a spec for a subset of liquid that can be used as an anti-templating language.

1:56 p.m. Oct 02, 2021, UTC-4

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I am very easily overwhelmed.

This will need revisiting.

1:56 p.m. Oct 02, 2021, UTC-4

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I want to know what the people who make static site generators are thinking. Because I think about static sites a lot. And none of the

static site generators are intuitive to me. They're all weird.

1:39 p.m. Oct 02, 2021, UTC-4

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"autumn is forever 2012"

4:20 p.m. Oct 01, 2021, UTC-4

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I'm tired of popups. If I open the front page of your website, and I get hit with a popup, I'm leaving. I don't care about your cookies or

your newsletter or donating now or anything except the content I came to see.

I don't get it. I have voluntarily opened your website because I want to see your content. Do you know how hard that is? I've given you that hard-to-get initial click, and you respond with a full-screen cookie popup? Please.

11:15 a.m. Oct 01, 2021, UTC-4

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There was something else here.

9:55 a.m. Oct 01, 2021, UTC-4

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Yeah so a bee stung me on the lip this morning while I was biking. I just biked into it face-first and it stung me.

I kind of can't beelieve it happened. My lip still hurts a bit. I got stung by a bee, right on the lip.

I feel like Oscar from VeggieTale's "I Love My Lips." Usta!

9:33 p.m. Sep 30, 2021, UTC-4

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My pain tolerance is so low. I have been completely incapacitated by a bee sting for the last 2 hours.

1:51 p.m. Sep 30, 2021, UTC-4

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Cloudflare's R2 seems super exciting because it's super cheap, but like, I don't even know what I would do with unlimited download.

12:10 a.m. Sep 30, 2021, UTC-4

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I need Blaseball to Return.

11:46 p.m. Sep 29, 2021, UTC-4

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I have done a data crime

gemini://thoughts.learnerpages.com/media/8b81186f-032e-40f3-ab7d-6f14deb249e6.png

1:00 p.m. Sep 29, 2021, UTC-4

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The best is the worst is the first. The last is the pain of the searcher who never finds.

12:31 p.m. Sep 29, 2021, UTC-4

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Good morning America.

9:14 a.m. Sep 29, 2021, UTC-4

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I got mail. It’s a handwritten note from the Democratic Party. I can’t read what it says because it’s in cursive. I hate 2021.

12:34 a.m. Sep 29, 2021, UTC-4

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Okay emojis in Github are overdone.

8:11 p.m. Sep 28, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Okay the nuclear siren ambient noise actually isn't that bad.

https://neal.fun/ambient-chaos/

3:14 p.m. Sep 28, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Using eggs that have a use-by date of Sep 02.

1:58 p.m. Sep 28, 2021, UTC-4

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Good morning. Reddit is so radically left-wing, it’s kind of shocking to me. It’s kind of a cult.

12:21 a.m. Sep 28, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

It's shocking to me how lightweight Debian seems to be, considering that that's not one of the projects stated goals at all.

10:52 a.m. Sep 27, 2021, UTC-4

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A Docker container's lack of persistence really isn't appealing to me, but I do appreciate the super quick start times.

It's really nice to be able to `docker run -it alpine /bin/sh` without having to download or flash Alpine or anything.

10:32 a.m. Sep 27, 2021, UTC-4

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"But the fact is I would not have spent a decade doing this, if I did not believe I was at least tiny bit ridiculously filthy at it"

-Don't Be Nice, Watsky

9:19 p.m. Sep 26, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Will we continue getting exponentially closer to perfection?

7:50 p.m. Sep 26, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

How frequently should a code-base be rewritten in order to be considered healthy and active? Ever?

12:03 p.m. Sep 25, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Addicted to emailing people once and then ghosting them after they reply.

10:50 a.m. Sep 25, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Mobile apps I've started: 6

Mobile apps I've finished: 2

9:18 a.m. Sep 25, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Allow me to propose a security model called, 'don't have anything anyone would want to attack.'

The Gemini protocol is using this model with great success.

8:09 p.m. Sep 24, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

You can run TLS over UDP???

7:36 p.m. Sep 24, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

"Add Equatable Conformance"

7:16 p.m. Sep 24, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Less than a day of using Xcode and I have already had to restart it 3 times.

6:56 p.m. Sep 24, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Swift has all these really cool language features that are like "Woah" but they're kind of solutions without a problem.

Like, they have "trailing closures" so if you have a function `setTimeout(action: () -> Void)` you can call it

setTimeout(action: {
    print("Hello")
})

Or, you can use a trailing closure and call it like

setTimeout() {
    print("hello")
}

Like, would I use that? Absolutely. Would I miss it if it wasn't there? Probably not.

The parens in the second example are optional, you can also `setTimeout { print("hello") }`. Wild.

5:29 p.m. Sep 24, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I'm totally going to end up with a memory leak or something

On a page called "Manual Memory Management"

5:20 p.m. Sep 24, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Help I clicked a button and now Xcode is showing me assembly

5:14 p.m. Sep 24, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Oh my word. Oh my fricking word.

I was just casually browsing the Swift source code, as you do, struggling.

https://github.com/apple/swift-corelibs-foundation/blame/ee856f110177289af602c4040a996507f7d1b3ce/Tests/Foundation/Tests/TestSocketPort.swift#L83

I see the test data `"I cannot weave"`. Some of you know where this is going, but I did not.

I am easily distracted. So I think to myself, 'that's a new test string, it has a nice ring to it.' So I put it into Google.

It is a line from a poem by Sappho.

Now, if this was a SIBR project or something I would be completely unsurprised. But I lost it: this Apple employe (presumably) is just casually writing very official test cases for this programming language and can't resist letting me know, two years later, that she's gay.

3:52 p.m. Sep 24, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Perhaps the greatest tragedy of my life is that computer programming is the best medium I have found for expressing myself.

12:15 a.m. Sep 24, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

"tumblr is for people who lives by culture"

7:56 p.m. Sep 23, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

"(happy :hacking)"

10:23 p.m. Sep 22, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Minimalism implies flexibility.

(As does well-implemented simplicity.)

5:26 p.m. Sep 22, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I want to freeze.

4:34 p.m. Sep 21, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

https://aether.exposed/if-they-were-to-cut-open-my-bloated-corpse-they-would-find-nothing-but-cookies

12:46 p.m. Sep 21, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I hate ordering things online, like I just want them to be here now!

10:13 p.m. Sep 20, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

HackerNews, 2011!

gemini://thoughts.learnerpages.com/media/3334f8fa-d230-46af-9196-65a82e8c7d32.png

8:07 p.m. Sep 20, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Absolutely quality blog post, highly recommend:

https://mango.pdf.zone/finding-former-australian-prime-minister-tony-abbotts-passport-number-on-instagram

5:40 p.m. Sep 20, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

People

12:29 p.m. Sep 20, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I keep mixing up Scala and Scheme. Different programming languages.

9:10 a.m. Sep 20, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Hit 100 karma on Hacker News guys. lul

8:44 a.m. Sep 20, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Just bought business cards. I couldn't sleep so I got up to get water. Supposed to get here in October.

12:17 a.m. Sep 20, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I mean, it doesn't surprise me too much.

gemini://thoughts.learnerpages.com/media/e4d12fec-dbbf-4ff4-9828-035cc7efc448.png

7:58 p.m. Sep 19, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Documentation < cloning the source, running `ag`

7:47 p.m. Sep 19, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

In the Blaseball API, there's a field on a Game object called `secretBaserunner`. I don't know why.

1:52 p.m. Sep 19, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Working on Blaseball Over Gemini again. It's just so cursed I can't take it.

12:25 p.m. Sep 19, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

If I require weekly emails in order to figure out how to use your product, it's a bad product

5:54 p.m. Sep 18, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

People tend to judge artistic mediums on objective grounds. The medium does matter, because an interesting medium attracts or inspires

artists. But that's a subjective quality. One medium is not better than another. The best medium is the most interesting one, and once that medium become boring, it's no longer good, only because it is the same as it used to be.

3:00 p.m. Sep 18, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

When you have an idea what you're doing, a strictly-typed language can help you catch errors. When you have no idea what's going on, type

errors are so much less helpful than runtime errors.

12:06 p.m. Sep 18, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I'm sorry Rust libraries, but auto-generated docs that list the types of your values does not count as documentation. Please please write

some documentation. I want a usage example. Is that too much to ask?

(This goes for every other strictly typed language. TypeScript, Java, you don't have documentation either.)

12:06 p.m. Sep 18, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Sometimes, when I have no idea what's going on, I wish that the programming language, would give me a runtime error.

Instead, Rust insists on forcing me to catch every possible error in order to sure that it cannot panic. Well, my code doesn't panic. Instead, it just stops running, exiting silently.

I think what I'm doing is equivalent to wrapping all my code in a `try…catch`. But if I don't do that, I can't compile, because Rust doesn't want me to face any runtime errors.

Ok, I finally got a panic. It contains useful information! `InvalidColumnType(3, "visit_count", Integer)'`.

11:49 a.m. Sep 18, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I've switch sqlite3 libraries 3 times in the last hour, heck you Rust.

11:06 a.m. Sep 18, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

All I want in my life are bookends. Bookends are one of the greatest inventions of humanity and I don't have any of them.

11:05 a.m. Sep 18, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Goodbye Robert

gemini://thoughts.learnerpages.com/media/6229f755-bfae-4d67-bda2-c226c9125d22.png

8:24 p.m. Sep 17, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Man, I wish I had a brain

7:37 p.m. Sep 17, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I am addicted to nothing. That is, to being addicted to nothing, to minimalism, to being free.

11:44 p.m. Sep 16, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Gemini competes less with the web and more with real life.

11:25 p.m. Sep 16, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Gopher: everything is a link and you can't link to HTTP

9:28 p.m. Sep 16, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Why has it gotten harder to focus as I've gotten older?

9:18 p.m. Sep 16, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

"I (resident of North America) rarely see kangaroos."

-Some commenter

What does this mean? I think they're trying to make a point, I don't know.

3:12 p.m. Sep 16, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I made bread

1:03 a.m. Sep 16, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

11ty is like 'oh yes we're extremely flexible.' I have some React generated pages and some Gemtext generated pages. 11ty does not support

adding custom template languages. So I can't generate either of them. 11ty is super flexible if you're working with liquid and markdown and js.

11:23 p.m. Sep 15, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

`rsync . DEST` and `rsync $(pwd) DEST` behave very differently :/

4:56 p.m. Sep 15, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

• I went insane back in '09*

To the tune of AJR's "Joe"

10:32 a.m. Sep 15, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Someone created a thoughts page almost exactly like this one, Apr 7th, 2020. I created this page Sep 5th, 2020.

https://wesleyac.thoughts.page

The feature parity here is honestly horrifying. I think the biggest difference is probably that they don't have what I call extended text (that's this here). They seem to not have a length limit. I limit to 140 characters in the first line.

I have 1,731 Thoughts, they have 408 thoughts. So I'm clearly better, don't worry. /s

9:52 a.m. Sep 15, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Hello people from Hacker News. Check out the About page understand what's going on here.

lolololololol

9:19 a.m. Sep 15, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

People spend a lot of time talking about economic growth, but frequently leave out the context of population growth, which I think would be

relevant. This isn't a thesis yet, merely an observation.

6:02 p.m. Sep 14, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I picked up a newspaper today. It was pretty bad.

4:13 p.m. Sep 14, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

You cannot embedded simplicity inside a complex system.

You cannot embedded a simple system inside a complex system. Your system is only as simple as the most complex part.

3:32 p.m. Sep 14, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I’m easily distracted

10:21 a.m. Sep 14, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I create a lot, but that doesn't stop me from living in fear that what I've created isn't enough.

12:09 a.m. Sep 14, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

If you're not ready for the small internet, you should probably get ready.

11:00 p.m. Sep 13, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

"The Plan 9 renaissance"

10:59 p.m. Sep 13, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Am I the only one who thinks node.js is a mess? I guess no one is using node.js? Or something? I don't get it.

10:57 p.m. Sep 13, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

"but it needs a little something more."

11:51 p.m. Sep 12, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I feel like I get more perfectionistic the more tired I get. Like most people get tired and stop caring, but I get tired and lose my ability

to look past things.

11:26 p.m. Sep 12, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I think it is logical to extended the axiom that you shouldn't trust a computer you can't throw out a window to cloud hosting.

If I can't see the computer, I shouldn't trust it.

10:59 p.m. Sep 12, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I'm just so tired.

I want to use Atom. But Microsoft bought Atom so that I would use Visual Studio Code.

8:17 p.m. Sep 12, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I flew into the sky and landed on a cloud. An angel asked me, “are you a real person?” To which I replied, “does the set of all sets contain

itself?”

I fell down through hoops, rings of gold held aloft by eagles. There are few eagles left now. When I rejoined with the earth it was warm. It spread out in all directions. The flea on my monitor cannot hear but can perceive the vast force that oversees all things.

A yellow plane slices through all things. A panic attack overtakes an elder in a small town in a flyover state. The whole world holds its breath for a moment, acknowledging, then moves on with the same pace.

12:35 a.m. Sep 12, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Most people are tired.

11:14 p.m. Sep 11, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

"This is the end of desktop applications. There’s nowhere but JavaScript."

1:23 p.m. Sep 11, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

The web is so fricking bad.

I want a 140 character textarea here. Easy, check `.length` client-side; check `len()` server-side. Right?

Wrong!

JS-side `.length` treats new-lines as 1 character, but per some spec, lines in form-encoded requests are `\r\n` delimitated. So Python's `len()` sees two characters.

10:48 a.m. Sep 11, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

"Why Do I Choose This for a Living"

Chrome is gaslighting me. Git checkout OJSE from last year, it's broken. Like? I'm pretty sure this code worked at some point, please?

8:31 p.m. Sep 10, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Yellow Balloon :)

gemini://thoughts.learnerpages.com/media/5a6644c9-4004-45b4-8510-f1da6ec2eb10.png

4:19 p.m. Sep 10, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

The WHATWG can no more tell me how to make a good website than the government can tell me how to be a good person.

11:40 p.m. Sep 09, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

It’s just me and my Snackin Waffles against the world.

7:58 p.m. Sep 08, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

My mouth hurt like hell this time last year, and it hurts like hell now.

It was really bad a couple of days ago. But I still don’t want to talk to people because it’s painful.

3:06 p.m. Sep 08, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I'm just trying to understand what's going on

9:41 p.m. Sep 07, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

It's 2021 and I am running the iTunes Visualizer.

5:44 p.m. Sep 06, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

People are like, 'docker is so much easier and simpler than a virtual machine.' And then https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/373914

But then again, I cannot for the life of me figure out how to get qemu to do anything, so maybe that's my best bet. (Also going to check out podman…)

2:22 p.m. Sep 06, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

It's easy to complain about the Reddit hive-mind, but what really gets me is that Reddit is not a hive mind.

You can have a bunch of people in a conversation, who are all pro-choice, because it's Reddit. And one will be like 'even if unborn babies are people, the mother's body-autonomy takes precedent over the baby's right to live.' And 3 comments later, someone else is explaining how body-autonomy doesn't apply to anti-vaxers because, and I quote, "vaccines are free. Babies are not."

This is not a single, logical, train of thought. I can't understand it.

Frick every time I start thinking about the abortion issue I just end up laughing at Norma McCorvey's Wikipedia page. "She had quit her job at an abortion clinic and had become an advocate…to make abortion illegal." 100% chaotic neutral energy. And I feel bad for her, because I don't think she wanted to be that way. Truly cursed with an interesting life.

1:08 a.m. Sep 06, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

God is good!

My soul is asleep. Although my mind should probably be sleep as well. But that’s okay, because God is good.

12:14 a.m. Sep 05, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

"I thought my way to greatness, I could claim this, but He gave me the brain" -JT, Jon Bellion

3:28 p.m. Sep 04, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Where have you been all my life, `mod_md`?

2:20 p.m. Sep 04, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Silly me, assuming Apache `Define` variables are scoped to the block they're created in.

1:42 p.m. Sep 04, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Gruber thought Markdown would be good because it was readable, but Markdown's real genius is being writeable.

1:31 p.m. Sep 04, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

My word, KA really sped up time to connect or something.

Maybe my internet changed, but I used to have to wait like 2 seconds before KA would send anything, and then 6 seconds or whatever for the AJAX graphQL to finish. The second part seems about unchanged, but the first is much quicker.

9:36 a.m. Sep 04, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Editing `/etc/apt/sources.list` again

Man, I don't have these kinds of problems on Arch. (That's not true, I totally do.)

9:05 a.m. Sep 04, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I changed the default font in Vivaldi from Times to Helvetica and it makes sites that don't have CSS look much better

12:17 a.m. Sep 04, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I've been using ssh for years and I learned today that it has escape characters.

Enter/return, then `~`, then `?` to list escape sequences.

12:16 a.m. Sep 04, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Editing `/etc/apt/sources.list` again, fun!

10:50 p.m. Sep 03, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Gemini is going to fricking take off. Like, at least among tech people. I'm so hyped

6:21 p.m. Sep 03, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Plant Details

gemini://thoughts.learnerpages.com/media/785da45e-64f2-42a0-88b8-96118e5b6c35.png

11:53 p.m. Sep 02, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

My whole fricking mouth hurts. Eating is pain.

6:49 p.m. Sep 02, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Reachability is not an iOS feature. Reachability is a lifestyle.

12:22 a.m. Sep 02, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

It's so easy to over-complicate Apache config files.

2 ways to do HTTP to HTTPs upgrades

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{SERVER_NAME} =*.ourjseditor.com [OR]
RewriteCond %{SERVER_NAME} =ourjseditor.com
RewriteRule ^ https://%{SERVER_NAME}%{REQUEST_URI} [END,NE,R=perman
RewriteRule ^ https://ourjseditor.com%{REQUEST_URI} [END,NE,R=perm

Or

Redirect permanent / "https://ourjseditor.com/"

I don't even know what I was doing.

8:34 p.m. Sep 01, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

"always happy to cancel a meeting"

8:00 p.m. Sep 01, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

What the Long Now Foundation, and a lot of archivists, miss, is that hardware just can’t survive that long.

I bet the Long Now Foundation’s clock fails in my lifetime lolol.

But more directly, there’s no battery with more than a 30 year shelf life, unused. You can’t design a computer that lasts that long.

The key, then, is that batteries are replaceable. I suspect that modular hardware and software is more maintainable and longer lasting than hardware designed to be long-lasting. Or at least, if you want to optimize for long time scales, you should optimize for repairability.

The issue of course, that you need people interested in repairing your stuff. But if people don’t care, then that’s not exactly a fault of the technology.

10:31 a.m. Sep 01, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

There's a playlist of kids music that I listened to a lot when I was younger because of one my younger cousins, and I still get songs from

it stuck in my head. "my yellow bus is takin' too long, it's takin' too long my yellow bus…"

12:36 a.m. Sep 01, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

The year is 2002

gemini://thoughts.learnerpages.com/media/988ad1bf-48c4-4b85-b2ec-8b9849c41a1e.mp3

12:21 a.m. Sep 01, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Anyways, first Julia program written*. Moving on to other things.

• translated from Matlab. Mostly a copy-paste but with an hour spent reading Julia docs to understand what was going on.

1:12 p.m. Aug 31, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I thought Python was a big language, Julia is fricking huge! Like they just want every feature!

In applying multiple dispatch, the question comes up: to what extent do you try to standardize your function calls? Do you try to ensure that the more specific type comes first? Do you try to only define methods (function implementations) that actually get called? And I after reading more Julia documentation, they don't seem concerned with redundancy or inconsistency. I would guess they would say, "define as many methods as you feel like."

1:08 p.m. Aug 31, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I was totally joking when I said this was a LISP dialect, I didn't know that Julia has real macros. No reference to s-expressions yet…

12:27 p.m. Aug 31, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

"More precisely, the set of all finite-length strings S together with the string concatenation operator * forms a free monoid (S, *)"

-The Julia documentation.

This language really was written by mathematicians

12:21 p.m. Aug 31, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Julia has symbol literals, e.g. `:hello`. I think that makes it a LISP dialect

12:03 p.m. Aug 31, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

"Everything can be achieved and there are no more accidents"

11:46 p.m. Aug 30, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

It is awe-inspiring to think about the enormous amount of code that humans are producing.

11:17 p.m. Aug 30, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Just remembered negative numbers exist.

2:54 p.m. Aug 30, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I need to learn how to cook eggs

8:53 a.m. Aug 30, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I started a list the other called "The Imperfections". It's a list of everything that I want to fix. It's really fricking long. I didn't

realize I was storing ~50 issues/projects in my head, more or less in RAM. Like the data structure that was being stored in my head was a linked-list, where 1 item reminded me of similar problems. I think it's been effecting my productivity (for my entire life). Of course, writing it down helps a little bit. But it's almost worse because now I just want to sit down and start tackling the list. (I wrote a Gemini the 28th because "a perfect Gemini client" was one of The Imperfections. Still working on that one.)

12:12 a.m. Aug 30, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Coming up on 1 year here. Scary.

There are features that I’ve been procrastinating from adding for a year.

Oh yeah code goes open source on September 5, for better or worse.

11:46 p.m. Aug 28, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

• Why?* Is Thu? The *only* language to come up with single-instantiated types?

Oh, you know, Java has that syntax sugar for defining callback functions that technically creates a single-instantiated class with an over-ridden method that is called as the callback. That's exactly what I want.

(Hm, maybe OOP was a bad idea altogether and we should switch on the type of all arguments *cough* multiple dispatch *cough*)

7:17 p.m. Aug 28, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

6 hours into a project, getting burned by JS's type system. Who would've guessed

All I want is multiple dispatch.

7:03 p.m. Aug 28, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Can we talk for a second about how `npm init -y` just licenses your code as open source? Like, ya this code's free for anyone to use, thanks

3:34 p.m. Aug 28, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

What are the JVM people doing?

3:32 p.m. Aug 28, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

The shell is fricking unusable.

1:18 p.m. Aug 28, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

"The percentage of normal users that know how to (and are willing to) setup self-hosted instances of something is definitely far below 1%"

9:39 p.m. Aug 27, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Spiders are so fricking cool. Like they just full on sew whole nets and we're like, 'heh.' Imagine if another animal started making nets!

7:49 p.m. Aug 27, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

“The alphabet, they say, was invented only once. Bread is invented every time, anew. It’s life itself. And life is not for sale.”

https://breadpunk.club/docs/manifesto/

7:09 p.m. Aug 27, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

My local Denny’s has stopped serving breakfast food. Sandwiches and sides only.

6:03 p.m. Aug 27, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Do people actually pay for things? Like, just do what I do and suffer without it.

5:48 p.m. Aug 27, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Horrifyed

4:11 p.m. Aug 27, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Listening to DC Talk from 1989, 4 layers of irony

2:44 p.m. Aug 27, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

How do I live like this?

12:32 p.m. Aug 27, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Fine fine fine fine I'll install docker desktop

12:24 p.m. Aug 27, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

One of my favorite parts of Geminispace is that everyone is linking to code on the web, but like none of it is GitHub. Sourcehut or Gittea

Or NotABug, or TildeGit or etc.

12:03 p.m. Aug 27, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Am I allowed to smell the wind?

10:48 a.m. Aug 27, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Designing a maximum non-viable product

9:11 p.m. Aug 26, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

“Why don’t we do all our chip design in Minecraft?”

7:16 p.m. Aug 26, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I wonder if the human mind is fractal? I wonder if there’s a trick to not go insane?

4:25 p.m. Aug 26, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Matthias? Anti-social? Never!

11:21 a.m. Aug 26, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Why don’t more people sit in elevators? When I am too tired to take the stairs I take the opportunity to rest on the floor of the elevator.

4:38 p.m. Aug 25, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Set an alarm for the future.

12:25 a.m. Aug 25, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Trying and failing to cook corndogs

8:37 p.m. Aug 24, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Just subscribed to a mailing list. AAaahhh!!!

3:19 p.m. Aug 23, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

If my math is right, you can archive all of Geminispace in <8 GB.

11:02 p.m. Aug 22, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I have a set of features that I want in a Gemini server. I am not aware of any servers that support all of those features, although all

features are supported by at least one Gemini server. So of course, I'm tempted to write my own Gemini server. But that Gemini server would then be the most feature complete Gemini server, and I am not ready for that.

8:16 p.m. Aug 22, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

You can’t force organization. Random data inherently defies organization.

10:49 a.m. Aug 21, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

https://thoughts.learnerpages.com/?show=497d0e7b-c3b9-4226-a768-bab2d30d3a77

I found my receipt, I bought 18 AA batteries.

7:15 p.m. Aug 20, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Is this worse than callback hell?

export async function getStaticProps() {
    return {
        props: {
            posts: await Promise.all((await readDir(blogRelative(""))).map(async fileName => ({
                title: await getTitle(await loadFile(blogRelative(fileName))),
                slug: removeExt(fileName)
            }))),
        }
    };
}

2:33 p.m. Aug 20, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

https://thoughts.learnerpages.com/javascript/jquery/jquery.js

now gives Not Found instead of Forbidden

11:04 a.m. Aug 20, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Force quitting iTerm2 because it's 2021 and we still don't know how to make applications that don't hang.

10:18 a.m. Aug 20, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I have been in #linux on libera.chat IRC for about 30 seconds and they're already discussing beating Windows users. (Like, with sticks.)

10:09 a.m. Aug 20, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Memory management in C be like

/* The request_rec pointer is passed in here only to ensure that the
 * filter chain is modified correctly when doing a TLS upgrade.  It
 * must *not* be used otherwise. */

10:01 a.m. Aug 20, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Motivated myself to get out of bed in order to edit my Apache config. I might be a masochist.

9:37 a.m. Aug 20, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

My roommate and I both writing (possibly cursed) Gemtext parsers at the same time. Get on our level.

8:29 p.m. Aug 19, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Me, chillin' at 38 WPM.

8:03 a.m. Aug 19, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I love understanding things. Complexity is to be avoided.

1:44 p.m. Aug 18, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Gemini isn’t a web protocol, Gemini is a lifestyle.

12:05 p.m. Aug 18, 2021, UTC-5

▔▔▔

Only place to go is up.

3:47 p.m. Aug 17, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

"I represent a pinnacle of power that will never be toppled in this country!"

1:42 p.m. Aug 17, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

Norb Hecker

gemini://thoughts.learnerpages.com/media/843743c9-4427-4450-acb2-c672161ae9d4.png

1:27 p.m. Aug 17, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

Uhh yeah my name is uh Norb Hecker

1:24 p.m. Aug 17, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

I hate timezones

10:06 a.m. Aug 17, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

Reading the Infra WhatWG spec and lost a few brain cells. I found the MDN article on the topic and now I understand it and I'm fine.

3:42 p.m. Aug 16, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

The JavaScript ecosystem (i.e. npm) is so screwed up that it's not even worth commenting on anymore. If it bothers you, don't use JS.

1:23 p.m. Aug 16, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

Is creating good?

1:13 p.m. Aug 16, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

Just learned about the Oroville Dam spillway collapse

I recommend looking up it up on youtube, it’s pretty cool.

Before, during, and after pictures of the spillway, that I screenshot from 3 different Youtube videos and hastily combined.

gemini://thoughts.learnerpages.com/media/1c8f3c90-74a9-4c72-b167-231ac271d7c7.png

11:43 a.m. Aug 16, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

Hyper (https://hypercore-protocol.org/) is a p2p protocol that's almost web-like. It's really cool, a lot easier to use/setup than most.

(Golem, BitTorrent, Ceramic, etc are all confusing as hell.) Hyper is super simple, there's a browser called Beaker that lets you open `hyper://` webpages and seed your own content just by giving it a directory.

• There's no fricking content*. I'm in the Discord server with these people and they're posting all these Github links to mirrors and browser and tools and I'm like okay, is there any content currently being served on this protocol? If there is, I cannot find it. My own Hyperdrive is: hyper://dd33a1d922616afa2c94b220fa20c097d15b7be1e2f0db5a71f0f1639999cd3e. No one else has linked to theirs.

(Gemini doesn't have a lot of content. There are maybe a few hundred operational Gemini pages. But there are half a dozen pages that list active Gemini capsules or recommend pages. http://geminiquickst.art doesn't even recommend gemlogs, it recommends sites that curate lists of gemlogs.)

I FOUND ONE! I found a single blog hosted on hyper, here you go: hyper://94f0cab7f60fcc2a711df11c85db5e0594d11e8a3efd04a06f46a3c34d03c418

Wait I found a second. Only this page is being seeded right now: hyper://6900790c2dba488ca132a0ca6d7259180e993b285ede6b29b464b62453cd5c39/blog/the-free-speech-dog-whistle.md

This Thought is now the premier curator of Hyper content.

A small part of it is of course that since it's p2p what people are seeding is limited. But a lot of it is that I can't find addresses. There's got to be a list somewhere, right? Or a way of discovering things?

11:34 a.m. Aug 16, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

Gemini is a multi-level-marketing scheme.

When I say MLM here, I’m referring more broadly to a growth strategy sometimes called “incentivized sharing.” It covers MLM schemes, but also things as basic as ‘get $5 dollar credit to refer a friend.’ Twitch has used it successfully—streamers are incentivized to get viewers onto Twitch. This term/model doesn’t include normal word of mouth recommendations, like Rust evangelism, for example.

Gemini evangelists are rewarded with an expanded Geminispace, and more content that is readable from the comfort of browsers designed to render text documents.

7:07 a.m. Aug 15, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

Got rid of 4 pairs of sunglasses today.

5:03 p.m. Aug 14, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

I only have 7 Khan Academy accounts

2:02 p.m. Aug 14, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

I forgot about triangles.

12:21 p.m. Aug 14, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

One of the most important skills to have as a programmer is the ability to ignore information.

6:37 p.m. Aug 13, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

I’m not in one place, I’m in a million places at once.

3:56 p.m. Aug 13, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

"The young lady in the back with the 'I heart Jamie Grace' shirt on"

-Lights Shine Bright, TobyMac

10:52 p.m. Aug 12, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

Impulse-sending text messages.*

• Interestingly, my definition of "impulse" is just doing something without planning out every step in advance. Some people live their whole lives like that. Both of the text messages I just sent I had thought about sending earlier today.

9:53 p.m. Aug 12, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

‘Stocks have decent ROI, but don’t pay significant dividends. Real estate pays, you can write off expenses/depreciation, and you can do a

1031 exchange when you want to cash out.’

3:12 p.m. Aug 12, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

I'm using named blocks in JavaScript. It feels so wrong and yet so right.

2:02 p.m. Aug 12, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

The art of looking at nothing.

1:12 p.m. Aug 12, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

https://fishdraw.glitch.me

10:20 a.m. Aug 12, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

It would be easy for me to forget about all the time I spent playing gaga ball in middle school.

10:36 p.m. Aug 11, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

I've run multiple `find / -name` commands today, so that's a good indication of how things are going.

5:37 p.m. Aug 11, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

Shell scripting is so fricking. The language is so bad and unwieldy but the promise of unmatched automation is irresistible.

3:49 p.m. Aug 11, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

Writing a React component that renders its Gemtext content. I can't decide if that's beautiful or cursed.

3:55 p.m. Aug 10, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

The cowards who make browsers won't remove <marquee> and so if I use it that's not my problem.

3:25 p.m. Aug 10, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

I stand by the idea that splitting code by type instead of function is a trap that is easy to fall into, but not ultimately helpful.

3:24 p.m. Aug 10, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

I'm going to move forward with the current version of Next.js and consider the 67kb wart a cost of the framework.

If I find I'm not using any features of the framework and -all- my pages are static then I'll switch to Gatsby or roll my own solution with Preact's render to string or something.

1:21 p.m. Aug 10, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

JS devs splitting their 200kb bundled JS file into four 50kb files in order to make 'large js file' warnings go away.

12:14 p.m. Aug 10, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

So I'm working on a website with Next.js, and the beauty of Next.js is that it server-side renders static content. But even with a wholly

static page it includes React and about 63.8kb of JS. And the Next.js people are like, that's not a lot, but it's insane when the page content is a 1kb static html page. Like, I'm going to "switch to Preact" which is insane, because I'm not rendering *anything* on the client side.

9:38 a.m. Aug 10, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

Colors are fricking hard

11:24 p.m. Aug 09, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

RIP e.gg

Honestly, who the frick thought it was a good idea to create an alt social media with "Brought to you by FACEBOOK" in big letters on the front page. Could have been cool other than that

7:01 p.m. Aug 09, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

Oh my word I fricking love this keyboard!

I just got my computer back from the Apple Store. It's one of the last ones made with the butterfly switches. The keyboard gets a lot of hate for its close-to-0 travel and its infamous unreliability. But I love it. It's so fricking nice to type on. (I also haven't typed on any full-sized keyboard in close to 2 weeks. So i'd also probably be happy to type on a Microsoft freebie.) It feels even better than I remember, I wonder if it's actually nicer because it's brand new.

Apple's lack of modularization means that since I was having issues with the display on the Touch Bar, they replace the whole top part of bottom half of the computer, giving me a brand-new TouchBar, keyboard, trackpad, and battery.

Battery Cycle Count: 1

This is why I always pay for AppleCare+. Like-new computer for free for 3 years after purchase.

10:49 a.m. Aug 09, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

I’m such a perfectionist, that I want to be a perfectionist in multiple ways at once.

9:49 a.m. Aug 09, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

Blogs are too big.

6:42 p.m. Aug 08, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I’m glad that we’re finally figuring out that drinking fountains are not a primary transmitter of COVID and can be turned on.

4:13 p.m. Aug 08, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Matthias’s programming language of the day is APL and its dialects like K, J, and Q.

It aims for very concise syntax, and while it might at first glance be mistaken for a code-golf-language, that is not why it was invented. The creator just wanted to remove all fluff, in order to create a language that more accurately reflected thought. It’s an array-oriented language, which, uh. Let’s move on. It makes use of special symbols to denote operations, so you can use as few characters as possible. It also means you never have to worry about your variable names conflicting with the standard library. It also means you have to configure a special keyboard layout and install a font before you can begin. It has been criticized as being unfriendly to beginners. However, I have been assured that this is only because it is different, and that if we had all learned APL as a first programming language, we would find it perfectly intuitive. Here’s an example program which implements the Chinese Remainder Theorem.

crt←{m|⍵+.×⍺(⊣×⊢|∘⊃{0=⍵:1 0 ⋄ (⍵∇⍵|⍺)+.×0 1,⍪1,-⌊⍺÷⍵})¨⍨⍺÷⍨m←×/⍺} ⍝ From APL Cart

More on APL, whether you want to laugh at it or learn it:

https://xpqz.github.io/learnapl/intro.html

9:34 a.m. Aug 07, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

I wish JavaScript had function decorators.

3:19 p.m. Aug 06, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Quality website. You can’t make this stuff up.

gemini://thoughts.learnerpages.com/media/76765997-e46d-414f-a4fe-6ecc870af855.jpeg

10:41 a.m. Aug 05, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

One of my pet peeves is clocks that show the wrong time.

gemini://thoughts.learnerpages.com/media/9d73cb18-d7c6-4acf-ab4d-aa90e9a6eec9.jpeg

6:24 a.m. Aug 05, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

It doesn’t matter at what level/scale you’re working at. The system is imperfect at every level and it’s impossible to make something

perfect at any level. All you can do is make the best thing you can at the level you choose (including trying not to make it more difficult for people at other levels).

(If you don’t see it, this is profound.)

1:08 a.m. Aug 04, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

It’s wild that we’re still feeling the effects of Turing. He invented and then solved computer science.

10:06 p.m. Aug 03, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

Huh. It’s been a couple of days. Possibly the longest I’ve gone without posting. I’m still alive. I’m traveling.

12:17 p.m. Aug 03, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

You are only allowed to move straight or circle. Spiraling doesn’t work.

10:53 p.m. Jul 31, 2021, UTC-4

▔▔▔

One True Troy!

11:56 p.m. Jul 30, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

Just learned `ZZ` is the best way to save and close Vim. I was using `:x` before. `:wq` is for n00bs

11:34 p.m. Jul 30, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

Moving Python 2 code from one computer to another, trying to stop myself from updating it.

10:57 p.m. Jul 30, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

My router uses clock.via.net as a time server. Look at this website. Look at it.

https://via.net

12:02 p.m. Jul 30, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

We give dogs a lot of credit for their sense of smell, but we would probably be able to smell more if we put our nose close to the ground.

11:35 a.m. Jul 30, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

People on Hacker News are like, ‘why would you buy a Playdate for $180 dollars when you could buy a cheap android phone or an old Gameboy?’

(Because those things aren’t a Playdate? IDK)

Another common take is, ‘people are only buying this because it’s made by a popular brand.’ Like, how much brand loyalty do you think Panic has? They make Mac-only developer tools, last I checked. I guess Untitled Goose Game was big but like, Panic didn’t really get publicity from that.

Of course, I’m not even going to consider getting a Playdate myself until Panic can actually manufacture them, which is apparently a lot to ask.

1:10 a.m. Jul 30, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

I think stuff happened in Blaseball but I deleted Twitteriffic, along with like 4 years of other apps.

12:01 a.m. Jul 30, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

I want to run away and live in the woods.

3:45 p.m. Jul 29, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

Nothing makes me happy and everything makes me unhappy. Existence is suffering.

Every piece of criticism I’ve ever received is bouncing around in my brain, 10x louder than the person who said it. I hate myself.

3:43 p.m. Jul 29, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

WHY ARE CAR AIR CONDITIONING SYSTEMS SO BAD!

3:06 p.m. Jul 29, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

How can I possibly ever be known when so much of who I am revolves around my passion for unknown things.

10:37 p.m. Jul 28, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

“How do you describe an emotion?”

-some song I just heard

9:09 p.m. Jul 28, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

Humanity still underestimates the unreasonable efficiency of the binary search.

8:33 p.m. Jul 28, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

“Did .com mess up?”

3:35 p.m. Jul 28, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

About to give up my computer for a week and a half. Kinda nervous.

2:43 p.m. Jul 28, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

Gamer moment.

https://clips.twitch.tv/SlickSeductiveOkapiDogFace-qlqWcCnWJNz84ACQ

12:08 a.m. Jul 28, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

Just deleted 2 thoughts (with incorrect information, nothing important). I used Python's `pickle` to save them to a file first.

5:05 p.m. Jul 27, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

Yeah so Safari doesn't properly* calculate the width of the content of inline-block `pre`s if that content includes other inline elements.

• I haven't read the spec to know what is proper, but Safari doesn't do what I want, and Chrome and Firefox do.

So my solution is to not inline-block code blocks on here and OJSE. Which might look bad on desktop. But I don't know what to do aside from asking you to use Gemini.

3:12 p.m. Jul 27, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

It's amazing how many bugs you can find by just *using* complex software.

12:00 p.m. Jul 27, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

Fundamental browser rendering compatibility issues discovered while developing OurJSEditor: 2.

https://ourjseditor.com/program/CKtLzi

https://ourjseditor.com/program/dCe1Ca

11:59 a.m. Jul 27, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

If you never intend on reading all of *Gödel, Escher, Bach*, I highly recommend finding and reading the dialogue “Contracrostipunctus”.

12:33 a.m. Jul 27, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

I want a phonograph “capable of producing any and all sounds.” I want perfect software.

“If any record player—say Record Player X—is sufficiently high-fidelity, then when it attempts to play the song” designed to produce vibrations which destroy it, “it will create just those vibrations which cause it to break…So it fails to be Perfect. And yet, the only way to get around that trickery, namely for Record Player X to be of lower fidelity, even more directly ensures that it is not Perfect.”

- G.E.B. 77

12:27 a.m. Jul 27, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

It is Tuesday.

12:14 a.m. Jul 27, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

If I could grant immortality to one person, it would be Brandon Sanderson.

4:54 p.m. Jul 26, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

I think we have to cut the past.

Though doing so is like cutting a part of myself.

1:23 p.m. Jul 26, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

Ladies, I'm beginning to think opening the forbidden book was a mistake.

9:50 a.m. Jul 26, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

After driving with bare feet, I have decided that feet are an underutilized input device.

6:47 p.m. Jul 25, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

It is unethical to hurt other people. It is impossible to interact with other people without sometimes hurting them.

1:05 p.m. Jul 25, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

I am ignored. Just constantly.

12:55 p.m. Jul 25, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

I don't want to be insane. I just want to be normal.

12:47 p.m. Jul 25, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

Might learn ASL so that I can cut off my ears. I can't take the noises. The sounds overwhelm me. I wince as the sound of each keyboard

stroke assaults my ears.

12:47 p.m. Jul 25, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

It is unethical to create buggy software. It is impossible to create perfect software. I just suffer.

12:45 p.m. Jul 25, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

I have social anxiety. That makes being around or talking to people incredibly uncomfortable and stressful for me. But. That doesn’t stop me

from becoming lonely if I spend too long without talking to anyone. I can’t win. I just suffer.

12:34 p.m. Jul 25, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

I still check Rigby.

12:47 a.m. Jul 25, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

I want to create an empire. The problem is that I don’t think that’s a realistic life goal.

5:32 p.m. Jul 24, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

I wish I could fly, but the next best thing is not being able to move at all.

7:35 p.m. Jul 23, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

Not things that are possible to use correctly, but things that are impossible to use incorrectly.

Safety.

3:58 p.m. Jul 23, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

Nothing does worldbuilding like books. Even the dedicated worldbuilding people don’t communicate what it feels like to be in their world.

6:17 p.m. Jul 22, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

“Do you walk in the shadow of men who sold their lives to a dream?”

-Glitter & Gold, Barnes Courtney

5:58 p.m. Jul 22, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

Went through my Goodreads read list. Amazing content.

5:21 p.m. Jul 22, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

Still can’t get over the fact that Tumblr was sold for 3 million dollars.

5:20 p.m. Jul 22, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

My sitting in bed with my laptop, Vim open: You need to get to know your code, get intimate with it.

11:19 p.m. Jul 21, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

Somehow I got it in my head that there was this cool new JS framework for dynamically server side rendering React, when like, it was Next.js

I spent like an hour searching for vague terms like "server side rendering javascript framework" before I searched for a specific comment I remember seeing on the Hacker News post I had read about it. I found the comment quickly on a post about Next.js. Funky.

8:53 p.m. Jul 21, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

Pretending to be insane because I don't how to interact with people. (This is about a Khan Academy comment I just made.)

8:50 p.m. Jul 21, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

I still go back to Safari's dev tools sometimes. They're just better.

8:42 p.m. Jul 21, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

"Why is no one cooperating with me?"

"We are cooperating with you. you're just not aware that your goal is learning Haskell"

3:33 p.m. Jul 21, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

I guess I should share this here. Blaseball season calendar for the first year of Blaseball.

gemini://thoughts.learnerpages.com/media/65e4e221-d8f6-4c87-ae69-e5a542d8e9de.jpeg

9:45 p.m. Jul 20, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

Life is not weird enough for me.

Hopefully this isn’t a fault.

9:42 p.m. Jul 20, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

I am newly shorn.

6:05 p.m. Jul 19, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

https://www.blaseball.wiki/w/Bad_Gateway_(Event)

4:30 p.m. Jul 19, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

Not installing `ag` earlier was a mistake. I had a tool that accomplished something similar by running `grep -R` with a long `--exclude-dir`

g () {
        grep -nIr --exclude="*.min.*" --exclude-dir={node_modules,.git,dist,.cache-loader,OurEnv,bower_components,.idea,.wine,.virtualenvs,.local,.gnupg,venv,site-packages} "$@" .
}

But The Silver Searcher's approach of just following `.gitignore` works better most of the time. And has a nicer output format.

2:07 p.m. Jul 19, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

I low-key have HTTP response codes memorized. "I think 405 is Method Not Allowed or something"

2:04 p.m. Jul 19, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

“Have you read James Joyce’s love letters?”

8:14 p.m. Jul 18, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

The problem with the school system is that it is blind to enthusiasm.

In the real world, attitude matters. But we don’t test for it in school.

Maybe this isn’t a problem, but it certainly seems weird now that I’m thinking about it.

8:09 p.m. Jul 18, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

The two genders are left channel audio and right channel audio.

7:32 p.m. Jul 18, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

All install methods are bad. “People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.”

7:31 p.m. Jul 18, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

I love the idea of sinks. Input and output for water, for a variety of purposes. All in one place.

6:45 p.m. Jul 18, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

This is a confession. This is a testimony that I need the grace of the LORD.

5:53 p.m. Jul 18, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

While I am at the center of attention, I hold my breath. I am afraid of drowning.

12:05 a.m. Jul 18, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

I am both lonely and afraid of not being alone.

Why would I be afraid of not being alone? Yet I am.

I hate the awkwardness of conversation. I hate the jarring feeling of isolation that comes when I share what I'm thinking and no one understands. I fear being good at conversation because I fear being popular. I fear people looking at me, expecting something from me, and me not having anything to give. I fear being asked to defend myself. I fear making mistakes, but moreover, I fear being seen making mistakes. I hate having to come up with things to say while someone looks and waits for me because I have nowhere to run if I say the wrong thing.

It's killing me. I haven't seen a friend in person for 2 weeks. There is an expanding balloon in my chest.

12:02 a.m. Jul 18, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

"However, some immensely lazy people can't even be bothered to type these."

-ZSH compinstall

6:44 p.m. Jul 17, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

Become ungovernable

1:36 p.m. Jul 17, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

Considering doing something drastic, like moving this website entirely to Gemini or getting my hair cut.

10:15 p.m. Jul 16, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

Brandon Sanderson is definitely insane.

10:15 p.m. Jul 16, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

I created a plant on Astrobotany

gemini://astrobotany.mozz.us/public/b0b6c327852d4f4690fea43b59a1eee6

8:46 p.m. Jul 16, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

I hate infinite-scroll lists.

5:46 a.m. Jul 16, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

"It's the little things that I can't handle, and we're still in July"

-Life Must Go On, Quinn XCII

5:42 a.m. Jul 16, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

Okay.

I don't exist.

5:41 a.m. Jul 16, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

Last night/this morning was fricking surreal. Like I was a character in a movie. So much happened while I tried to sleep.

10:15 p.m. Jul 15, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

The Internet is a liminal place, between my computer and yours.

10:03 p.m. Jul 15, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

I took a 30 minute power nap on the floor of a changing room today.

5:21 p.m. Jul 15, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

Remind me to come back to this when I have sanity to spare

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSf7Fs5gzrcJDUx_75JkZu6xwyGzJ3N9BfyOm6AzOJtqw4Ae3w/viewform

5:20 p.m. Jul 15, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

“THIS MUST BE THE PLACE”

-a neon sign I passed today

7:07 p.m. Jul 14, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

Cancel culture is not letting your toddler watch Numberblocks because the BBC doesn’t let their journalists attend controversial marches.

I understand being frustrated that the BBC won’t let their news reporters publicly support political issues. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/oct/29/bbc-no-bias-rules-prevent-staff-joining-lgbt-pride-protests

But I don’t understand that conclusion that you should boycott a children’s show that is produced by a connected organization. Like, I’m not going to boycott Phineas and Ferb because someone on ABC said something offensive that I politically disagree with.

But I can’t argue with it. What am I supposed to say? ‘BCC is so big you should ignore them being homophobic sometimes’

I mean, at some point, just boycott the BBC because they are the product of an imperialist empire. Just boycott everything that is produced in England and support business in developing countries.

This is what’s weird about “cancel cultural.” It tries to define everything that’s bad but sets the bar so high that’s easier to define what’s good.

9:00 a.m. Jul 14, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

I’ve started shifting my car into neutral at red lights, just because I can.

2:57 p.m. Jul 13, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

Bucket list item: walk into a Barnes and Noble, pick up a book, read it all the way through without paying for it.

Inspired by https://xkcd.com/294/ obviously, but it wouldn't be that hard to do intentionally. It only takes me like 2 hours to read 100 pages. Take a Saturday, save yourself the cost of the book.

1:29 p.m. Jul 13, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

Writing is hard

12:23 p.m. Jul 13, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

I just finished reading a book. The author biography on the back flap describes her as a founder of Archive of Our Own.

I was not ready for that. I nearly choked.

12:14 a.m. Jul 13, 2021, UTC-7

▔▔▔

Can you imagine? Hosting a website on a calculator and then using Google fonts.

2:42 p.m. Jul 12, 2021, UTC-7

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page 98 of *The Mysterious Benedict Society*

gemini://thoughts.learnerpages.com/media/69936d72-3830-44aa-8d6d-2368312e0ebe.mp3

2:11 p.m. Jul 12, 2021, UTC-7

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Nothing is more pretentious than making fun of Mensa members for being pretentious.

(I am aware of the irony of this Thought.)

5:06 p.m. Jul 11, 2021, UTC-7

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HTTP/HTML/JS’s unnecessary complexity serves primarily to lock control of implementations to a couple of rich corporations.

HTTP is classist. Gemini is the future. This is not satire.

2:46 p.m. Jul 11, 2021, UTC-7

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Why are second floor windows so high off the ground?

9:10 a.m. Jul 11, 2021, UTC-7

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Someone compared me to Dr**m. literally shaking and crying rn

9:20 p.m. Jul 10, 2021, UTC-7

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I can’t get over Gemini. I’m sorry. It’s been close to 3 weeks now, and it’s all I can think about.

8:43 p.m. Jul 09, 2021, UTC-7

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This is the white knight. This is the Free Market Drill. This is why I miss all my friends and I still don’t call.

10:43 a.m. Jul 09, 2021, UTC-7

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“Rationalizing the familiar is easy”

10:26 p.m. Jul 08, 2021, UTC-7

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Don’t worry, I am still alive.

10:26 p.m. Jul 07, 2021, UTC-7

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Did we forget minimalism?

7:26 p.m. Jul 06, 2021, UTC-7

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'In this video-essay, I will explain how the lack of standardization of hangman allows players to cheat by dynamically changing the rules.'

https://youtu.be/le5uGqHKll8

6:21 p.m. Jul 06, 2021, UTC-7

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Someone in #gemini on Libera IRC is informing me that the creator of Gemini's Gemini server isn't in compliance with Gemini.

I'm like, 'I'm having issues'

And they're like, oh yeah, 'that gemini server is noncompliant'

Like, okay. I'm suddenly in way over my head.

3:01 p.m. Jul 06, 2021, UTC-7

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The Lagrange author patches SDL to allow smoother scrolling on Mac trackpads. I love him.

2:39 p.m. Jul 06, 2021, UTC-7

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I can't do this. I want to switch to a remote branch. I don't know how. I'm dumb and alkwndajkdba nw;dkljadna wb

2:19 p.m. Jul 06, 2021, UTC-7

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Way back in November, I came up with 4 things that make the terminal appealing. Gemini satisfies all 4 of them.

https://thoughts.learnerpages.com/?show=23cbc5d5-dab1-4157-abc4-d1f38fc0609b

10:04 a.m. Jul 06, 2021, UTC-7

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If you're writing code that GitHub CoPilot can help you with, you're doing it wrong.

• Writing a Django-Gemini compatibility layer*

9:45 p.m. Jul 05, 2021, UTC-7

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I've been browsing the web for years and I've never once seen a website actually use a parameter.

Okay okay I searched my browser history. In 2020 I visited `https://projecteuler.net/archives;page=14` I'm horrified.

Feb. 2020, a bunch of unaffiliated websites using `PAGE;jsessionid=REACTED?PARAMS`. I wonder where that comes from.

Few more random ones including a Google ads redirect. But mostly auth/sign-in redirects it looks like.

9:42 p.m. Jul 05, 2021, UTC-7

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Example number 83 of Gemini not actually being simple is that it supports the entire URI RFC, so you have to implement fricking url

paramater parsing.

Like.

9:33 p.m. Jul 05, 2021, UTC-7

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I hate the web.

I just learned that there's such a thing as a "URL-parameter" that goes on the end of a URL, proceeded by a semi-colon.

scheme://netloc/path;parameters?query#fragment

From the Python urllib reference.

What did I do to deserve this.

9:32 p.m. Jul 05, 2021, UTC-7

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I'm going to keep all of WhipserMaPhone closed source except for the Gemini inter-op code, which is CC0

/s

9:25 p.m. Jul 05, 2021, UTC-7

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Let's fricking go, ladies, it's an excuse to subclass `HttpRequest`!!!!

class GeminiRequest(HttpRequest):

9:24 p.m. Jul 05, 2021, UTC-7

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Oooof

And this is on an internal page, so you have to have an account in order to see this, it's not people who don't have accounts.

gemini://thoughts.learnerpages.com/media/907970b7-9a99-421c-8b15-daa825b481cd.png

2:29 p.m. Jul 04, 2021, UTC-7

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Ya'll don't know how much work I put into this website. No major changes in months, but I keep tweaking things.

12:58 p.m. Jul 04, 2021, UTC-7

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If your "mobile" website ever has a horizontal scroll bar, just how "mobile" is it?

12:34 p.m. Jul 04, 2021, UTC-7

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Man, I wish AirPower existed. I have like 50 cables on my floor

My phone, watch, second phone, computer, display, and speakers all need power.

Honestly, I don't use the external display or speakers, I should probably get rid of them.

12:16 p.m. Jul 04, 2021, UTC-7

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"Why do you need Gemini? Just write simple HTML??"

Because HTML collapses adjacent white-spaces.

I had a paragraph here about how the way browsers did this was dumb, but I tested it and was wrong. However, I think the fact that it is impossible for me to understand these rules is just as effective an argument as criticizing the rules themselves.

(I think browsers collapse U+0020 and then convert U+00A0 into U+0020, without collapsing. But the question then is, is it possible to get U+00A0 into a browser? I don't know, let me know if you do.)

10:27 a.m. Jul 04, 2021, UTC-7

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What do I need to post-translate my text?

Filters

Need to convert line breaks to `<br>` (without CSS, `white-space: pre-wrap` doesn't work and `pre`s look bad)

Linkify (Otherwise, links need to be copy-pasted, bad UX)

Typographer quotes! (I notice straight quotes and they annoy me) (double and single quotes, exclude code blocks)

Block

Fenced code blocks (Gemini strictness)

Inline

Italics (for MLA titles, or emphasis) (including the ability to escape asterisks)

Inline code (useful for distinguishing between references to programming-specific uses of English words)

Notable omissions:

Bold (Doesn't have any semantic meaning, only stylistic.)

Underline (Ditto)

Block quotes (even Gemini has these!) (Styling these well is very hard.)

Unordered list (again, even Gemini) (It's very easy to parse these wrong. See: https://thoughts.learnerpages.com?show=bc51ad8a-07f5-49bb-9a35-8d636dafc6fa)

Ordered list (CommonMark ordered lists are lame because I can't easily start them at dynamic numbers.)

Headers (On this website, posts are supposed to represent a single thought or a train of thought. If this was a blog, I would include them.)

Unicode ellipses, em dash (I have shortcuts to type these, so it's not really necessary. You could I guess.)

Math blocks (I probably should/would include if I talked about math on here.)

I might have forgotten something, but most things that aren't in "Notable omissions" are just too complicated. Tables? Masked inline links? (Nested lists are awful. They're hellish to parse in the way the author intended them to be.)

10:07 a.m. Jul 04, 2021, UTC-7

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The problem with unordered lists

There are a couple issues with unordered lists in markdown, Gemini, and Apple notes, surrounding how you indicate them.

CommonMark dictates that a list block can be started with no padding and a single item. I've written this intending to source a quotation. I don't want a bullet here. My solution would be to require at least 2 items for a list, but this obviously adds backtracking complexity.

"Hello, world"
 - Matthias

This brings me to the second issue: CommonMark allows for unordered list items to begin with either an asterisk or a hyphen-minus. This is annoying because both get translated into a bullet.

This third one is the big one. If I'm formatting a document in ASCII, i.e. without any markdown, I would like to indicate a list by starting items with " - ", that is, space, hyphen-minus, space. This objectively looks the best since the hyphen-minus has padding on the left, and is vertically centered (where a bullet would floats above the mid-line). This doesn't work in Apple Notes, which disallows a leading space. This doesn't work in Gemini, which requires `* `. And, as mentioned, in CommonMark this is converted into a bullet.

This is a test list:
 - Cookie
 - Bread
 - Apple

This is a test list:

	
Cookie
	
Bread
	
Apple

Looking at this, it's clear that the easy solution here is just for me to stop being different and start my lists with `* `, which works perfectly everywhere except for raw-text. But I have to look at it before post-processing is applied. Sad.

10:00 a.m. Jul 04, 2021, UTC-7

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Ya'll are still sleeping on Make It and Fake It.

9:32 a.m. Jul 04, 2021, UTC-7

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If Luke deleted Gribfile 2, what am I supposed to read at 2am?

I actually didn't get a chance to see it! I'm crying inside.

2:23 a.m. Jul 04, 2021, UTC-7

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The thing about GitHub copilot that no one is talking about, is that it's developed by "GitHub," ostensibly, but is available for VS Code

and not Atom.

I feared the GitHub acquisition would spell the death of Atom, as Microsoft pulled the Atom team to work on VS Code and I'm taking this as confirmation that that has happened.

2:22 a.m. Jul 04, 2021, UTC-7

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@aspiringrobotfm deleting her Tweets is a modern-day tragedy.

Some of my best Tweets are in reply to deleted Quinn Rose Tweets.

2:16 a.m. Jul 04, 2021, UTC-7

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If we're living in a simulation, how do you explain "Jackson Hole Wyoming USA Town Square Live Cam"?

gemini://thoughts.learnerpages.com/media/44c7defb-5b5c-4ce7-a51f-bf6869a90404.png

1:27 a.m. Jul 04, 2021, UTC-7

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It seems like literally nobody is trying to solve the speed+complexity problems that the web has.

There are dozens of people that recognize that the web has complexity problems, but their minimalist (minimalist is not simple) solutions, don't address the speed problem.

And there are dozens of people that recognize the speed issues, but their solutions are so complicated as too be unintelligible to me.

5:44 p.m. Jul 03, 2021, UTC-7

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It is literally impossible for me to keep track of all of these JavaScript frameworks and build tools. It is impossible for me to keep them

all in my brain.

Someone will be like, 'Vite, a fast JS builder' and I'm like, okay, so something that's competing with esbuild. And then, no, Vite and esbuild work together. Thanks a lot.

5:42 p.m. Jul 03, 2021, UTC-7

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“I haven’t found a drop of life”

-Addict with a Pen, Twenty One Pilots

9:31 p.m. Jul 02, 2021, UTC-7

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I am convinced that the only reason that people do not express their hate for me is because they do not see me.

9:18 p.m. Jul 02, 2021, UTC-7

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• The Original Motion Picture Soundtrack* is out!

I just realized, it came out the 25th. I’ve been waiting for it.

10:59 a.m. Jul 02, 2021, UTC-7

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I'm a lonely broken person

7:12 p.m. Jul 01, 2021, UTC-7

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Can you hear me? Can you hear me? Can you hear me? Can you hear me? Can you hear m e? Can you hear me? Can you hear me? Can you hear me? Can

Your hear me ? Can you hear me? Can you here me? Can you hear me? Can your grade me ? Can you hear me? Can you hear mev? Can you hear me? Can you hear me? Can you hear me?

6:16 p.m. Jul 01, 2021, UTC-7

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It's weird to think about transitivity. That one thing might effect another.

2:17 p.m. Jul 01, 2021, UTC-7

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I hate that driving requires my feet right now.

Just because I’ve been walking all day, normally I am in favor of more foot-based interfaces.

8:06 p.m. Jun 30, 2021, UTC-7

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This is a faster horse

10:58 a.m. Jun 30, 2021, UTC-7

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I haven’t even started yet.

10:49 a.m. Jun 30, 2021, UTC-7

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Do you not feel the imperfections in your eyes, in your nose, and in every bone of your body?

10:49 a.m. Jun 30, 2021, UTC-7

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“The time’s always right to fix what’s wrong”

-What’s Wrong, half•alive

10:41 a.m. Jun 30, 2021, UTC-7

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This site uses ES6 JS

I don't know if I made that decision intentionally or not. Because like, I try to support no-JS browsers as best as I can, but I apparently don't try to support older browsers. It's weird.

Hopefully everything moves to server-side rendering soon :tm:

9:36 p.m. Jun 29, 2021, UTC-7

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Just cursed while talking to myself. smh

Sometimes I do think interjections like "frick," but other times I will think curse words, even words that I've never said. These words normally get filtered when I say them out loud, without me having to think about it. In the same way that you don't have to think about the pronunciation of a word, I don't have to think about filtering my words.