bambataa

I dream of creating “the thinking player’s Stronghold” with more complex defences and economy, but articles like this confirm that it will only ever be a dream. Hell, perhaps DF is already 80% of what I want.

I do find it interesting that people hate on crypto for its energy consumption but ignore all the other wasteful computation.

I studied modern languages in undergraduate and later taught myself programming. Apart from a general “learning how to learn” and maybe a familiarity with language manipulation, it wasn’t a very useful precursor to programming.

With that said, the points listed at the bottom resonated with me. So few working developers seem to have an interest in the history of their craft. Even when talking solely about those who spend their spare time learning about programming and CS.

I love projects like The Daily Paper or Ideas That Created the Future because they give this context.

We operate pretty much exclusively in this sort of bow wave of current best practice and tooling. This is why eg JavaScript works continually reinvents the wheel.

In literature this would be inconceivable because you study the major authors who define the context in which more modern authors write (whether they accept it or not).

Am I expecting too much from working devs (again I mean the motivated ones)? Do computer science degrees usually cover the history well? Maybe CS is just too young to have a canon?

Does anyone know how Basecamp is doing since it had its moment in the news?

I think people use different terms imbued by their own value system to describe the same thing.

Sometimes people talk about code being “beautiful”. I’ve never felt beauty from code, but I’ve felt pleasant satisfaction with well-designed code. Maybe just the same thing?

I never knew why semantic HTML stuck so closely to the print metaphor and didn’t better reflect how websites are used. It always seemed to involve shoehorning an interactive website design into print concepts, so losing much of the meaning anyway.

They’re in a simulator, aren’t they?

I think I know what you mean. He has quite an arrogant streak and is amusingly dismissive of large swathes of people (“the Basques are so dour!”). It’s worth persevering with, imo.

I have gone from activism to some kind of cynical acceptance. Fundamentally people don’t really care so you might as well go on that cruise or fly out to see the coral reefs before they die.

Try to account for possible scenarios when deciding where to live. Not too far south, on high ground.

I do find it hard to get used to the idea that everything will (probably) keep getting harder. More frequent pride spikes, weird weather, more instability. But even within that I think you can carry on happily if you only focus on what you can control. Possibly this attitude is what helped get us into this mess in the first place.

Recent research argued that the loss of the Greenland ice sheet is now inevitable: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/29/major-se...

Given the lag in the climate, isn’t 1.5C warming more or less unavoidable now? We would need extremely steep emissions reductions that aren’t happening.

I enjoyed ‘Under a Green Sky’, which combines a brief history of palaeontology (and amusing academic point settling) with the prediction that warming will eventually cause huge releases of hydrogen sulphide.

We are perhaps entering a negative feedback loop where disruption makes countries less keen to work together on emissions reductions as metaphorical bridges get pulled up (is Russia going to bother even pretending to care any more?).

I find this an interesting idea. Normally the response is “the whole point of a hereditary monarchy is that you don’t get to choose” and obviously Charles has been champing at the bit for years.

However, there is also the historical idea of the monarch needing to be a good one and keep up their end of the bargain. Interesting times ahead!

I’m not sure I agree, because people might put in the hard work without the psychedelic and not experience the benefit.

Michael Pollan’s “How to change your mind” talks about psychedelic studies where the more effective, longer lasting changes are seen by the people who had more “mystic” experiences.

It’s not just about good intentions, or just taking psychedelics, but seemingly priming your mind to use the psychedelics to (temporarily) change fundamental thought patterns.

There are some psychedelics (maybe 2CB, 4-Ho-Met too?) that give trippy visuals but are known for being less “in your head”.

Popular with ravers because they’re easier to handle on the dance floor.

It would be interesting to identify drugs that behave in this way and use them as comparators.

What are you talking about?

Shazam as a product feels a bit odd. Almost as if they’ve never quite outgrown their slightly sketchy “advertised on MTV2 alongside the Crazy Frog” origins.

They must have loads of data on songs people actually want to know yet never really managed to turn themselves into anything more sophisticated.

Text does feel like a really slow way to work sometimes.

A while ago in a React app I needed to keep some state around so lifted it from component state hooks to a context. Very mechanical work. It feels like we should be to say “move these to a context consumed by A, B, C” and just have it all done automatically.

Is there anything inherent to React/JS that stops something like IntelliJ implementing that?

The whole grey windows thing is so odd. I can see the argument that white uPVC can actually look out of place, but the grey makes no sense and will look dated very soon imo. We were house hunting in 2020 and saw so many houses with it.

I was in a team like that. One person in particular would pick ambitious tasks, do a completely inadequate implementation, reject all feedback and then leave everyone else to deal with the production outages.

Unfortunately management only saw the “picks ambitious tasks” and were blind to everything else.

You can’t really blame people for responding to absurd incentives in absurd ways.

It is however true that the boomer generation has held the electoral power during the years that mattered most and refused to do enough. I don’t think it’s chance that their most popular papers were all the most strident climate deniers.

Younger people should vote more but tbh by the time I was old enough to vote it was already too late to avert what’s happening.

I don’t see any sentiment of “whoops we got it wrong, let’s do what we can now!”. (Or any gratitude for the sacrifices younger people made during lockdowns, but I digress…)

When climate change was far away enough that we could have solved it with incremental changes, skeptics in the media mocked and denied it.

Now things have got bad enough that we would need more radical changes to keep to 1.5-2 degrees. But radical changes are just the kind of thing that swing voters don’t like, so we probably won’t do them.

I doubt we will come together and implement radical economic changes or geo-engineering solutions. More likely in my opinion is every country for itself, the rise of new, authoritarian governments and 3+ degrees of heating. I would take some kind of corporate tech bro dystopia.

Did you have an onion tied to your belt?

What kind of feeds are you talking about? Surely the problem is that there are many things implied by the feeds and only a fraction of them come to pass?

It’s interesting though that JS never picked up a Rails alternative.

If there is awareness that perceives the ego, are any of these models meaningfully aware? Do they have an awareness of self?

I don’t know anything about AI but I understood that some symbolic AI systems had a symbol referring to themselves (correct me if wrong).

Yes, from Making Money onwards I think. I haven’t actually read the most recent few because of that. It’s a shame to hear that but still, what a body of work to leave.

Discworld was a real joy of mine in my early teens. I think some of my early computing forays including a Discworld mailing list I found on a webring via Yahoo or somewhere. I had the Discworld official map on my wall and used to love getting the editions printed as tiny hardbacks.

Probably my favourite sub-series was the Witches and Nanny Ogg. As I caught up to the newer books I found myself enjoying them less because it felt like there was more and more philosophising. Probably what happened was that they got a bit more sophisticated and I was too immature to understand many of the themes and allusions.

Time to start working through them all then! I recently reread Colour of Magic and it was enjoyable but also clearly had far too much going on.

Either Pyramids or Moving Pictures was the only one that I really struggled to enjoy for some reason.

It serves a niche but I hope it doesn’t become the standard for everyone.

Stadia was great for me because I wanted to play RDR2 but didn’t want to buy a TV or console.

In my experience, big but boring companies seem to more amenable to this. E.g. in the UK high street banks, supermarkets made quite a thing out of their flexible working when I was looking. I guess they know people aren’t “passionate about the product” so they focus on the working environment. Anywhere with a history of unions helps too.

I know that JPM are trying to compete with the likes of Citadel, so perhaps IBs are increasing their offers for new tech people.

You're right, that's the way to look at it. If you can be transactional, it's ok and maybe you can get away with a 10hr week.

But it's still tiring to see code being merged and thinking "that's going to make X, Y and Z harder for me to do". Or being asked/told to make bad changes. Or being the one who has to do the emergency fix for the non-null assertions causing runtime exceptions in prod (which you had flagged in review and been told "the compiler is wrong, we know they can't be null").