RoddaWallPro

One of the more hilarious takes I've seen. "There are no papers for this, and I choose to disregard the countless number of people who say it is much easier for them to read if the line lengths are constrained as they are in a book or scroll or every other form of human writing ever put on this earth, so I will not make my site easier to read. F you."

I've a cousin who does something similar, and also (according to him) makes in the high hundred-thousands/low million range. In theory, it sounds like easy money, but I personally would probably break down in tears from boredom if I had to work on drop-shipping widgets, even if I was raking in the cash.

I think I might have misphrased what I meant. It is a truism that "people in the past find new technological advances in that past to be amazing, which we now view as trifles". It's more the fact that we now have AI programs which are crazy advanced compared to ELIZA, and yet we probably have very similar reactions now to ChatGPT, Dalle-2, etc, as those people in the 1960s did to ELIZA. And yet, in 60 years, barring civilizational collapse, people will look at ChatGPT and think "How quaint! How hilarious to think of that ludicrously primitive program as an AI!".

I guess that too is also a truism - "People in the future will look at our current technology and laugh", but somehow this one makes me feel things. The idea that what we have now is like a blunt 2x4 compared to the surgeon's scalpel that we might have in 60 years. (Or might not - who knows!)

ELIZA is mentioned in passing in Cormac McCarthy's latest novel, Stella Maris (which is a companion/coda to his novel that came out one month prior: The Passenger). I didn't know what ELIZA was when it was mentioned, and looked it up and that kicked off a long rabbithole of learning about early AI researchers. I thought it was funny that people in the 60s attributed human-like qualities to ELIZA, which we now view as a ridiculously primitive program. Perhaps the humans of 2073 will look back on ChatGPT/etc very similarly to the way we now look at ELIZA. Relevant quote from wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA):

"Some of ELIZA's responses were so convincing that Weizenbaum and several others have anecdotes of users becoming emotionally attached to the program, occasionally forgetting that they were conversing with a computer.[3] Weizenbaum's own secretary reportedly asked Weizenbaum to leave the room so that she and ELIZA could have a real conversation. Weizenbaum was surprised by this, later writing: "I had not realized ... that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people."

Wikipedia states that a version of ELIZA is still available in emacs under m-x doctor or something similar. Not being an emacs user, I haven't verified that, but I thought it was interesting.

I _llooovveee_ these end of year lists of yours and read them every year, thanks for posting them!!

EDIT: And to anyone else who might consider writing one, especially if it has a Books or long-form article list, do it!

That is _not_ exactly what you are talking about: food prices do not normally go up 24% a year. Rent prices do not normally go up 10-15% a year.

If their number is cherry-picked, give a real number yourself. Anecdotally, my grocery bills are easily 30%+ from what they were last year, and the same is true for many people I've asked.

My opinion is that the standard library of JS is so underwhelming that a high % of installs on NPM are for things that the standard library _should_ give you, but doesn't. Date/time, currency, csv, arbitrary precision decimals, int/bigint math, the entirety of lodash, etc. Give JS a fitting standard library, and I'd bet you see the dependency trees shrink by a factor of 10.

Agreed. They use the word "problematic". Any time I see someone using that word, I close the tab instantly to avoid the brain damage that would result from me reading the rest of the piece. The word is meaningless and cowardly. Say what you think. Quit tap dancing around the conversation.

I've wanted to build something pretty distantly adjacent to this for real-world spaced repetition cards. Have a deck of 3x5 cards, with qr codes at one corner. Dump the deck into your scanner (like a money counter) and it splits the deck, giving you a pile of the cards you should review today. Then you switch the scanner into "trying to remember" mode, and you put the cards you successfully recalled into one slot, and the ones you failed into another. The scanner reads their QR codes, notes that you succeeded/failed, so it can updated spacing windows for the next run.

You haven't said anything real here. Everyone agrees you should have to do at least some extra paperwork to get the tax breaks. The point of contention is how much paperwork. Is it 1 page? Is it 100 pages? Is it 10,000 pages? A day of extra paperwork or 5 years of extra paperwork? How many hurdles exactly are needed? That's what the discussion is. Many people think that what this Twitter thread is describing is too many hurdles. Are you saying you think this seems like a perfectly correct amount of hurdles?

Never a better time to be vendoring your npm deps & reviewing the updates to packages. Not too difficult to pull in the new version, then git diff the changes in the `lib` directory of that package.

I read a Murakami novel in high school, 1Q84. The protagonist is a math teacher who talked about math in a way that I had never seen before. I'd been told I was "good at math" beforehand(for whatever that means, I'm not a fields medalist or anything), but for ~6 months after reading that book, I was _really good_. Like, suddenly I did not have to do any homework in my sr. year calculus class. I loved sitting in class and watching my teacher work through problems, and it seemingly imprinted directly into my brain, because while doing no homework I could still ace the exams while writing with a pen (no erasing and re-do'ing with a pencil). All because of the way this fictional teacher from 1Q84 talked about math.

Has anyone else had an experience like that? (With math or other things?)

It's laughable to me that with everything you could possibly do in the human universe as a billionaire (or even a run-of-the-mill-person), he's out here wanting to sell virtual clothes to people :facepalm:

This is also how I use Twitter. FYI, it still works for me in incognito mode.

If anyone reading this works at Twitter: WHY are you guys making these changes? I'm far more likely to just never use the service again out of outrage then make an account.

If you grew up in poverty & violence & a terrible environment, then your brain is going to work in different ways than someone who wasn't raised in that env. That's the bad news. The good news is that there are professional counselors (who hopefully as a software developer, you/your insurance can afford) who have dedicated themselves to helping clients understand the sub-optimal ways brains can operate, and work with those clients to figure out better ways of thinking and living.

I started seeing one about 4 months ago, as I also grew up in a fairly physically & emotionally violent environment and finally realized I cannot undo the effects of that upbringing without serious professional help. The info & wisdom my counselor has given me has been like turning on a light bulb in a room that illuminates new colors I didn't even know were there. I'm not sure how else to describe it. I have a much better ability to examine the state of my mind and emotions and body and motivations, in a way I didn't even know was possible 4 months ago. I cannot recommend enough seeing one. You don't know what you don't know.

I hope you find peace & purpose, whatever you end up doing!

This doesn't really move the conversation forward, but an important point to make (I think) is that we as a species have never agreed that we're observing the same universe. Think of all the wildly different beliefs that have co-existed (though certainly not peacefully!) at the same times throughout history. It's a feature of all reality, not a bug of the _current_ reality (I say this because some people seem to think we're in a new & novel time of history where no one agrees on anything because of "the internet" or "misinformation", but I don't think that's the case. Humans have always disagree on what reality is).

I spent 2 hours last Friday trying to wrap my head around what UTF-8 was (https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/10/08/the-absolute-minim is great, but doesn't explain the inner workings like this does) and completely failed, could not understand it. This made it super easy to grok, thank you!

This is great! Thank you for building a more complete reference app.

I went to visit some friends before Christmas and one night we used a website to play poker at a bar without bringing betting chips to the bar (site gives you a unique URL for a room, people can join the room & choose a name, then lets you bet from your chip count & withdraw from the total pool if you win, & displays that info "live" to everyone, super simple & convenient!). The site was cool, but buggy as hell and laggy as hell and didn't really do what I thought it should do to make it easy to play poker, and I'm gonna build one for my friends and I to use that works the way I think it should. Phoenix w/ LiveView (especially running on fly) is the _perfect_ set of tools to use to build it, and this ref app will be really helpful for me. Appreciate it!

Genuine question: How do you differentiate this from full-blown mental illness? Because this sounds 100% like what society traditionally recognizes as schizophrenia/split personality disorder. Or, in more extreme cases & phrased less politely, insanity.

I'm reminded of what I'm going to call a poem, but which isn't a poem, but more of a long saying. I can't remember the exact wording (if someone remembers and has the link, please link it!) but roughly:

If you tested your program, congratulations. Your program is now tested, incorrectly.

If you tested your program, and verified that the tests are correct, congratulations. Your program is now verified to do the wrong thing, correctly.

It has at least two other lines which I can't even think of the paraphrasing for.

Like the sibling commenter here, reactions to this (as I've observed) are indeed very bimodal. If I see any video on YouTube with a face with a strong expression, I will not click it, no matter how interesting the title, because I hate how contrived the thumbnail is.

I think it might be more honest of you to phrase it not as: I have to do this because otherwise I don't get 20% more views. That feels a little bit disingenuous to me. You don't have to do anything. You could probably get a lot more views by colluding with another YouTuber to create drama or apparent "fights", like so many seem to. Aka, go full Kardashian. But you don't. You choose very explicitly what you do. Which does include goofy face thumbnails, but does not include staging YouTube drama.

A more honest phrasing to me might be something like: "Goofy faces get more views, and without them, my YouTube channel has much less income. I'm trying to support myself with YouTube, and so I am doing goofy faces even though I hate it and think it's completely asinine." You get really close to something like this phrasing, & the underlying message can be gathered by your other comments, but you don't outright own it. If you are going to do something asinine for exposure, you might as well own it imo.

So, with that out of the way: This project is really cool and thanks for doing a write-up & video on it :)

I also played CyberNations as a kid and found social solace there. Did you ever play a similar game called LunarWars?

"10MB init config file" - this is the point at which you gotta realize they are being sarcastic.

I think if you took the time to research obesity, heart disease, diabetes, cancer, etc, in America vs. other countries, you would not be spouting this nonsense. Americans have the ability to get in a bad car wreck and live because we have incredible emergency care. That's it. That is not health.