clwk

"Most believe themselves 'above average' at most things."

Yep, Bukowski's 1975 'My Old Man': https://genius.com/Charles-bukowski-my-old-man-annotated.

It’s more that the former book sets a very high bar I don’t think he clears in the attempt to make the topic more accessible.

I couldn't get through Pinker's book. He cites 'Clear and Simple as the Truth' as inspiration, but his acorn falls so far from the tree.

I think we have Hemingway to blame for this meme. I wonder why so very many authors feel the need to explicitly write these 'simple ode to simplicity' pieces — where each sentence in the exhortation has itself been optimized iteratively until no waste remains, so no lexical pixel has gone to waste. Sentences like 'Simple writing also lasts better,' are the unfortunate artifacts of this process. These are like the Teslas of brevity-pornographers: a mere five words attesting to hours of careful whittling; a praise-worthy awkwardness that could never have been produced on a native-speaker's first try.

> with the exception of New Hampshire, which does not have a law requiring people over age 18 to wear a seat belt

In fairness, the state motto is 'Live free or die.'

And https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here_is_one_hand.

Bravo.

Thank you for writing this.

Thank you.

Sorry has enough decisions for children to discover that it’s not just luck, though. You certainly can play to lose if you want to, for example. Discovering that there is strategy within what seems mostly luck is actually useful for learners.

Thanks for the response. It's valuable that they gave you detailed feedback. The post would be strengthened by enough specifics grounded in that actual feedback to have preempted my response. In any case, I appreciate the conversation.

My comment here should not be read as a personal judgment. It's more of a literary critique of your article as instance of a genre—with an extra helping of editorial critique of that genre.

This reads as an extended justification for how the author could possibly have failed. He writes as though it must be as simple as 'just should have asked a question'. It's an odd conclusion which communicates its own set of assumptions. It reminds me of people who claim, in all seriousness, that they can always spot X intangible characteristic — without any justification for how they determine their false positive/negative rate in that judgment. This undoubtedly reflects my bias, but I find many (bordering or even definitely including most) 'humble' blog posts to do this; and that is perhaps a further riff on the kind of canned advice we see here. They tend to read, to me, like answers to the interview questions, "Tell me about a time you failed," or, "What is your greatest weakness?" In this case, all the author really reports is that he did extremely poorly relative to his expectations — but he manages to spin it into a maxim. If even someone as qualified as he could be unseated by this tactical error, it surely bears memorializing as advice worth living by.

Fuckin' Moloch.

BASIC = Beginner's All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code (not Language).

A quick plug for LFE and its very simple premise: in mortal fear of Rails, I embraced the potential of Elixir (with 100% more Phoenix); I had a wonderful test case for macros (can't even remember what it was anymore); I spent hours trying to craft it and fought, fought, fought the AST/syntax/complexity; finally, in anger remembered the mere existence of LFE and its promise of DEFMACRO.

I wrote my first vaguely non-trivial LFE program as a macro in the REPL as a guess, and it worked on the first try.

If I need a lisp in BEAM, I would run with LFE on that alone.

Assuming you eliminated sshd…

The version of this I first heard in school was:

He knows not and knows not that he knows not is fool. Shun him.

He who knows not and knows that he knows not is a student. Teach him.

He who knows and knows not that he knows is asleep. Wake him.

He who knows and knows that he knows is wise. Follow him.

I found the answer: https://github.com/PaulBatchelor/Sporth/issues/23

Since you're here… This looks really cool. I installed, but running the demo produced no sound (but a pause). Any thoughts? I did seemingly install the dev branch of SoundPipe first. Please feel free to redirect me to a more appropriate support channel if available.

I got this: Poλλλote.

There’s help available, if not for you, for your children: https://books.google.com/books?id=R6E0AAAAMAAJ&pg=PA74&lpg=P...

Duly noted.

Maybe it is a circular list.

Duly noted.

How dangerous is this app? I mean how much time does it give me? Is the danger that my document will be lost, or that in attempting not to let that happen I will write too much. I will write the wrong thing. I will go down paths which are meant not to be followed, ordinarily edited out of existence. This is the danger, I suspect. But the other is also. It is a double danger. This double danger models a double danger in other areas. It is perhaps a fundamental mode of danger. Dangerness. The fear of a thing which both prevents or enables, complementarily. How does that work? What are examples? Can we name a time the fear has positively (we posit) prevented manifestation? Certainly. In general, it is socially unacceptable to analyze or look too deeply past the constructs which supposedly shield prying eyes from the conclusions which would be evident if the components were scrutinized. China Miéville explores this exquisitely in The City and The City. There citizens of two nearly colocated cities 'unsee' the other by law. Likewise, we ordinarily must unsee what is meant to be unseen. The danger then is that our unseeing be threatened by the possiblity that we lose sight altogether. Backed into a corner and forced to confront complete unsight, we restrain the restrainer. We disassemble the governor so we do not accidentally edit ourselves out of existence. Through abolition of constraint we cross over into conceptual indecency.

How about not using 'pick a random number from 1-10' as the source of entropy? For example, have everyone (from a group of some size) select a natural language sentence of 5 words or more, sum the ASCII values of the upcased alphabetical characters of everyone's sentences, and take the last digit (then add one).

I think you mean 'intersection'.

That’s it, yes. Thank you.