Pimpus

> One thing that is true in all successful organizations over time is that for any given person, no amount of genius will make up for being an asshole.

All successful organizations? Really? Definitely not hyperbole.

Even here it's clear that Linus hasn't been a net negative, not even close.

Only a Sith deals in absolutes.

Personally I take the anti-jerk sentiment with a grain of salt. People like you were probably just manhandled by one like ten years ago and still haven't let it go.

I would venture to say that you're just out of touch.

The fact that this discussion ALWAYS comes up when talking about Lua, with people saying they won't even try the language, should clue you in how terrible these design decisions are.

Heh, you don't even try to justify it, just point out prior art in some irrelevant "languages". Yeah, definitely not easy to defend such choices. Even the fact that this turns off potential Lua programmers such as myself makes it do more harm than any potential good (and I am hard pressed to find a single good thing about these asinine choices).

I wasn't aware that cats were political.

What a silly argument.

I agree with you. Bringing up politics in the workplace is rarely appropriate, and the way Google does it here is not only inappropriate but very offensive. I definitely wouldn't want to hear mud slinging about my political views in a corporate environment. This whole meeting is simultaneously childish and deeply disturbing.

> The syntax in question isn't just used by Lua, either, and it usually tells me that a developer can't respect differences between languages.

Actually, the two examples you bring up are paragons of asinine design. I can't imagine it being easy to justify such design decisions, your attempt to do so was wholly unconvincing.

This wouldn't work for me - my to-do list only grows bigger, not smaller :-)

Anyway, I've had a lot of success with Cold Turkey for blocking distracting websites and applications. I even bought a license for the extra features since it is so good. So yeah, I recommend it. Not affiliated.

> “I ought to be able to generalize this,” I say.

lol, it's no wonder he never finishes a program. But this isn't a problem limited to Haskell - one can start generalizing unnecessarily in any language.

To be fair though, the Haskell ecosystem as described in this article (and from my experience) is quite frustrating, and it makes me appreciate my current language Rust that much more.

Awesome. I would love to start bodyweight training, but your routine requires things like gymnastics rings and pull-up bars and I'm traveling at the moment. Are these absolutely necessary?

It's inaccurate because people tend to be biased towards under-counting their own calories. However, calorie counting is very effective -- knowing the absolute number of calories you consume is not that important, as long as the reported amount consistently decreases over time.

When you are a digital addict, it is no surprise that you cannot sustain focus and attention. "Deep reading" is going to seem like a chore when your brain is craving the dopamine hits it's used to. I've had a lot of success using apps to limit my computer usage, like Cold Turkey (no affiliation). I can block specific sites, apps, or freeze my whole computer on a schedule. Would recommend it, let me know if anyone knows of a libre alternative though.

> Also, I can see the email address of everyone who's viewed this document, along with their name.

Not mine. Thanks, Multi-Account Containers!

Well, I've gotten a lot sharper over the past year. And comparing myself to five years ago, the difference is night and day.

Hmm, I see I got downvoted. Whatever.

Getting sharper takes practice. I like to unwind on forums too but it's not pushing you to think faster. Also, getting your thoughts, actions, and words all in alignment will help, as there will be less hesitation on each front.

Please post your OS and Emacs version.

Magit hasnt been slow for me since I upgraded to Emacs 26. Older versions of Emacs were not optimized for spawning processes on OSX and it was causing a 10x slowdown for some operations.

He has a point. Why complain about Emacs when the problem is Windows?

To be fair, I am known to use all three OS's from time to time. I just have conditional guards to prevent loading packages that break on Windows. Mostly everything works the same. In fact, I originally learned Emacs on Windows back when I was a younger and noobier programmer.

Yeah, I gave up on DDG recently. The results were often useless and I was typing "!g <query>" 90% of the time. I decided to just save myself the trouble and set Google back as my default search.

With the placement of the Control key on most keyboards, your pinkie is doing a straight downwards motion which is much less straining than going sideways, even if it is a bit of a long stretch. Most keyboards (maybe not on laptops though) also have two Control keys so the load is distributed over two pinkies instead of one and neither hand makes any crazy stretches. Personally, I think Caps Lock as Control is categorically terrible advice. I'm sure your intentions were good, but I wouldn't be surprised if this classic trick wasn't originally some vile Vim scheme designed to undermine Emacs users.

Ideal would be to use a keyboard and OS (MacBooks have both) where you can map Control to the keys immediately next to the spacebar. Using the strongest finger (thumb) instead of the weakest finger and the strongest movement (thumb curl) rather than the weakest is a true upgrade.

It seems like a deliberate action to drive people to the Google browser. Other companies should not have to continually implement deprecated APIs just to play catch-up. It's a clear abuse of market dominance.

> Another rather interesting aspect to note is that Polymer's latest versions support both Shadow DOM v0 and v1 APIs, but for some reason, Google still uses Polymer 1.0 with the deprecated API.

> - Even more variety of fresh, healthy fruits, vegetables, and meats than before (especially in winter)

You have more variety, but not of more “fresh” foods. The only fresh food you can eat will always be local, so the variety only went up for foods transported from elsewhere… but fresh food in general is getting harder to acquire in Western society. Most people don’t eat fresh food at all so this point is just wrong. In traditional villages people are not afraid to eat vegetables with bugs and dirt on them -- that's what it means to eat fresh, and they don't need pesticides or preservatives.

> - Lives that are incredibly richer (all of reading, writing, culture, and art)

Our culture is richer, but I'm not sure if the life of the average person is. You do have access to an absolute wealth of rich cultural material, but the majority of people do not utilize it. I’ve lived in traditional villages* and people there have surprisingly rich cultures, even if it was not mass-produced and massively-available, vapid nonsense. Also, contact with nature is more meaningful than most modern time-wasting activities like working in an office, commuting, or checking social media.

*Agricultural societies, but I suspect pre-agricultural cultures were also very rich.

- Vastly lower mortality

Not sure what the data says about mortality rates. As far as health goes, most people in Western society are incredibly unhealthy. The amount of obese people in America is frankly revolting, not to mention the epidemics of hormone imbalances, digestive issues, awful posture, awful skin, etc. and the medicine/supplement regimens of pills that people have become dependent on to function or live, etc. The means to live more healthily are available, but the average person is not healthier than people with traditional lifestyles. We are weaker, more useless and have poorer sex lives.

> (fell from a tree and seriously injured yourself? Thanks to modern medicine, you're not dead)

Thanks to modern medicine, you’re not dead, but you’re bankrupt due to medical fees and addicted to painkillers and your gut flora is destroyed by antibiotics. The modern diet has little gut-promoting effect so you have to buy probiotic pills now. Etc.

It's nice that we have studies to confirm this, but I always thought this was common sense. Just the difference in air quality, compared to a city, is worth being in a pristine location -- every breath becomes pure pleasure. As a remote worker I take advantage of my ability to work anywhere in the world and venture with my laptop into nature as often as possible.

I use Anki but it's insufficient as a sole tool for learning. Being able to memorize e.g. foreign language vocab (or grammar patterns using clozes) is very valuable but you won't become fluent without daily or almost-daily practice communicating using the language.

I still don't see how it can be accurate for tracking calories.

Both the article and the hyperlink on HN are titled greatest solo climber.

For losing weight, diet is much more important than exercise.

Studies have shown that very few people can successfully lose weight through exercise alone, and that dieting is much more effective.

Which is easier, cutting out soda and sweets or running every day? Keep in mind that running one mile burns about 100 calories. Dessert can easily be upwards of 500 calories. https://www.healthline.com/health/fitness-exercise/running-b...

Also, exercise stimulates hunger and you will naturally eat more to compensate for the lost calories.

> A good quality fitness tracker with a built-in heart rate monitor like a Garmin Forerunner will give you a reasonably accurate estimate of calories out.

These aren't accurate at all. How would they be? All they have to work with is height, weight, and BPM.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-fitness-tracker-ac...

I think the problem is that society accepts results like this uncritically. I don't think this study was innately garbage, as waking the animals was the only way they could disturb rem sleep, but there should have been (maybe there were?) big caveats attached.

As a society we need to realize that studies are not "proof". The scientific process is more than just studies.

> While these may seem like trivial issues, they actually negatively impact my typing experience to a high degree.

I don't think these are trivial issues at all. I do the majority of my computing work in a text editor so it's important to me that it's as performant as possible. Imagine if, in real life, there was a slight lag every time you sent a "command" (e.g. pick up coffee). It would drive you crazy. And yet a lot of developers think that lag is acceptable in software. (I say "developers" because a lot of non-developers I meet complain about software being frustrating to use, even if they may not consciously notice it is laggy.)

People think I'm joking when I say this, but I'm so attuned to Emacs, especially when I'm in a flow state, that I can actually feel when the garbage collector kicks in. It totally throws me off. I have a bunch of optimizations set up, like running GC whenever I tab out of Emacs or am idle for 5 seconds, but sometimes I can still feel it. I hope Emacs makes some progress in this area -- I hear there's a Rust rewrite in the works :)

> If VSCode or any other text editor managed to provide a fast yet highly configurable editing experience without draining my laptop battery instantly

This is huge for me. I basically work by grabbing my laptop and sitting, standing, or laying wherever I feel like. I can't stand the idea of having an "office". So I'm acutely aware of when an application is running down my battery. Emacs is awesome in this regard because it has no noticeable energy usage, which boggles the mind when I think about how powerful it is as software. I honestly see no reason whatsoever to use anything else.

I was reading Kafka on the Shore and thinking that the frequent mention of crows must have some symbolic value. Then I visited Japan and I understood: Murakami was just being realistic. Crows are everywhere. It is quite ominous to walk through a quiet Japanese park (and I mean dead quiet) and suddenly see a huge flock of crows appear.