alwaysbeconsing

This is good, yes, but it requires that the team culture does not treat minor deviation from the Figma document as a bug or a failure of the developer. That mindset isn't always present, and it's not usually up to the product engineers themselves. It requires buy-in from the designers, product people, and managers.

I get this and it's a fair point but Discord is also a completely different interaction model from Reddit, so it's hard to see how the groups will make the transition. Discord is chat-stream oriented; a subreddit is much more forum-like, with separated topics. Even if you're camped on the Reddit page watching for replies to your comment it still doesn't feel real-time. I think this is going to dramatically change the character of groups that try to migrate. I don't say it'll be objectively worse necessarily, but it will not be the same kind of participation.

I have been satisfied with Anchor-Hocking. They have a different kind of glass than borosilicate but it is still specially made for resisting heat. https://www.anchorhocking.com/why-choose-glass/

I've been curious about this; is rotation or segregated accounts more complicated when operating in the Fediverse? It seems like you're meant to have a single identity across everything.

Maybe Wren? It has classes and method syntax too but it's mostly C like: curly-braced blocks, operators are pretty much the same, slash and slash-asterisk comments, if/while/for with parens, ... Statements are not terminated by semicolons, though.

https://wren.io/syntax.html

> A dictator might just have terrible ideas.

If they're all terrible, then the language won't appeal to anyone and will die off naturally.

On the other hand if everyone gets to add their favorite terrible idea, there may still be enough non-terrible parts to appeal to enough people to keep momentum.

I said this elsewhere in the thread too, but the ban was always meant to be temporary: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/421831/temporary-po... The moderators recognize it's inevitable and wanted to find a way to helpfully integrate AI. The strike is not about making the ban permanent; it's about being suddenly overruled in secret, cutting off the possibility for dialogue to find a good solution.

> For example, you don't get dumber because you read children's books, you just get better at understanding what makes a good children's book.

I don't think this is an accurate analogy. It's not books for children -- well-written material at a lower educational/cognitive level -- it's more like books by children -- which is necessarily lacking skill and background context (connection to reality). Think about how children constantly pass around misleading, invented, and incorrect stories among themselves -- and they don't do it maliciously, they just don't know any better. Legends like "Candyman"/"Bloody Mary" for example.

They need an outside influence, an adult or a book or website, to nudge them out of that knowledge rut.

(Of course the same thing can happen with a (closed) group of adults, too, but it's more of a "natural state" with children because they simply haven't had time to encounter as much knowledge.)

> is not likely to work for long though.

This is true, and it's why the policy promulgated by the moderators was explicitly temporary. It was a response to an acute problem to give everyone time to figure out how to handle it as a chronic condition: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/421831/temporary-po...

I haven't tried Zig, but "all the things you like about C plus better versions of most/all of the awkward bits" seems like a reasonable value proposition. Especially since the compiler can apparently let you use C painlessly alongside your Zig -- enabling incremental rewriting.

Excellent tip. A lighter form, that I use personally for Reddit, is to not sign in persistently. I always use a "private" browser window when I log in, so the cookie isn't saved, and the next time I want to log in I have to go dig the (unmemorizable) password out of my password manager again and go through the whole flow. For me it creates just enough friction.

> I find that the CLI is directly useful for end users to perform queries on their code

That's interesting; what do they use the results for?

> I have found that the grammars are relatively hard to make small modifications or extensions to

Definitely true. I think this may be an inherent problem of the system and the parser generation, though. I am not sure it's solvable by the grammar authors.

Indeed; this is called Kernighan's Law:

> Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Brian_Kernighan

Point taken about the developer documentation. But the query language is only user-facing if the tool you're using exposes it. And the CLI only if you need to build your own grammars; I expect that to be less and less common as time goes on.

There's not much end-user documentation the Tree-sitter project can really provide. It's a programming interface. The stuff that an Emacs, NeoVim, ... user is actually interacting with depends on the integration in the editor. So it's up to those docs to explain what features they expose based on Tree-sitter.

For example, the multiple cursor thing at the end is enabled by having the concrete syntax tree from Tree-sitter's parse, but Tree-sitter has nothing whatsoever to do with the cursors: it just provides locations in the text based on particular queries (like "all `identifier` nodes named 'foo' that are sub-nodes of this other node").

Even the headliner feature, syntax highlighting, isn't provided directly by Tree-sitter. It's up to the client system to inspect the syntax tree and apply attributes to its rendered text -- however it does that rendering.

> As to whether that represents a danger to humans I think it depends on what we do with it and/or what kind of society or environment we embed it within.

Agree, and I think this echoes one of the author's best points, which is to question whether engineers who are convinced their creation will be a sociopath are the most well-equipped people to actually prevent that fate. (Especially, as the author suggests, given the commonness of asocial/antisocial-ity among the builders.)

Okay, thanks for the expansion!

I don't understand what the "Argument From Slavic Pessimism" is arguing against. It seems to be ceding the point that AI could be dangerous and saying that we most like won't be able to prevent it. The conclsion therefore is...we shouldn't try? Seems like a tangent among the other points. It definitely doesn't argue against the possibility of danger.

> We know that minds have to play and learn to interact with the world, before they reach their full mental capacity.

Disagree somewhat with this one. We know that brains need to do this, but granting substrate neutrality all minds might not.

We're still at the very dawn of our computational age, though. There are still humans alive now who were born before digital computers. We have hardly any experience with them. It's very, very difficult to predict what we might be doing with them in a millenium or two.

Side note, I was thinking of Good Omens, by Terry Pratchett + Neil Gaiman, and it was a roadway, not a building:

> In fact, very few people on the face of the planet know that the very shape of the M25 forms the sigil odegra in the language of the Black Priesthood of Ancient Mu, and means "Hail the Great Beast, Devourer of Worlds." The thousands of motorists who daily fume their way around its serpentine lengths have the same effect as water on a prayer wheel, grinding out an endless fog of low-grade evil to pollute the metaphysical atmosphere for scores of miles around.

Magnificent book.

Newark is unquestionably one of the worst airports in the country. It seems to be carefully designed to make people feel unwelcome. It reminds me of the Terry Pratchett book where a building had been constructed in the shape of a demonic rune so that people moving around would activate it as if it were an evil prayer wheel.

It's a regular part of waitstaff sidework to go through the menus and clean the laminated kind or discard messy, crumpled, or otherwise unpresentable paper. Many servers will even notice as they're collecting them from a table and toss the bad ones immediately. Apart from basic pride, messiness reflects badly on the whole restaurant and affects their tips!

That's fair; I am also only using supposition.

While I understand that argument, I imagine most regular readers do not have the down vote privilege and may not for a long time, if ever. (I'm not sure in fact what the threshhold is, but it seems to be high.) To post enough and get upvoted enough to achieve it probably takes years on average.

It's also simpler technologically to have it switched by the vehicle's gear control, same as the lights. Additionally if it was manually controlled by the driver, some of them wouldn't bother activating it some portion of the time, and then that would have to be policed. Personally I'd probably go for that but it does present its own problems.

That's not a very big hurdle to overcome, though:

    print("{")
    contents = ""
    for elem in list:
      contents += '"key":  "value",'
    print(contents[:-1])
    print("}")

It's possible that Apple's new Xcode Cloud service could support this at some point, providing a continuous pipeline from source to release. Though I doubt it is a high priority for them.

There is a fork of pass called "passage" that uses Age for encryption instead: https://github.com/FiloSottile/passage Unfortunately I don't believe any iOS/Android apps exist to work with it so far.

This is definitely reasonable if you like to use readable and easily-typed passwords (like Diceware/"correct horse battery staple"-style). A software password manager has an advantage for long, completely random, absolute gibberish passwords, because you don't even have to know what it is: you can just copy-paste or autofill it.

It is not, at least in the US. Distribution is illegal; possession may or may not be prosecuted; and if you read the code and provably reuse it or make use of trade secrets you could lose a lawsuit. But if you "somehow" have access and don't do anything associated with the code, the basic act of reading it carries no penalties.