tikhonj

Yes. I've been abusing em-dashes over a decade and like them too much to give them up now :)

They're pretty easy to type on Android keyboards and on macOS (option + shift + -). You can set up a similar compose key thing on Linux.

Not necessarily. Language models can do stuff—well, figure out or determine stuff—purely through inference. Give them the input on their context window and look at the output, no need to generate or run any programs.

You can take it further with a reasoning model and let it generate + consume a bunch of additional tokens before getting your output. Still not writing or running any programs.

To my understanding, that's how the examples of determining which game a small neutral net was trained to play. The weights of the neural net for into the context window, and then Astra was able to analyze them purely by reasoning rather than running external tools.

Writing safer C is a matter of skill.

Writing safe C is a matter of either radically different (much, much slower) process or better tooling or both. Skill is not sufficient.

I like to tell people that consumer OSes are just Emacs hypervisors. And it's pretty clear which are better or worse :)

Proton is the shim for backwards compatibility with a messy legacy system. We've all been there.

And we've also seen how legacy systems refuse to die :(

or, maybe more hopefully, Windows as a whole becomes a legacy platform soon :)

There are lots of "gaming" monitors that advertise on high refresh rates and low latency. We're talking like 4–5ms input latency and pixel response times <2ms.

Point being, outside competitive games, I do not expect monitor hardware to be anywhere near the bottleneck for latency and response times.

Oh man, there's a real hit of nostalgia. I played BZFlag a whole bunch back in middle school and high school, and it was one of the first places where I got involved in the community at all (mostly hanging around some phpbb forums!)

Good times.

I don't remember too much of what I did, but I made a couple of maps one of which was hosted on a server for a week or something. It wasn't especially good, but it was a pretty amazing experience that somebody else thought something I made was good enough to try out, and that I could log into a "real" server and see it in action :P

I remember object-oriented programming being on the same pedestal when I was younger and first learning programming—a lot of OOP folks and mainstream programmers were definitely hostile to other schools of thought like functional or procedural programming.

Hell, I've worked with programmers who, entirely honestly, treated "object oriented programming" as a synecdoche for good programming...

Yes. Which is why it's so much cheaper to live in Manhattan than in the suburbs.

You also have to believe that population growth is fully exponential. But in practice it looks more like a logistic curve, and the factors that slow it down are a lot less dramatic than resource starvation or violence.

Using today's AI models make games is more like doing a Unity Asset Store flip than a higher-level abstraction. I mean, in a sense, just gluing together bought assets is operating at a "higher level of abstraction", but in a categorically different way compared to using a higher-level language or game engine.

There's a pretty big difference between embedded devices and high-end, general-purpose devices. Apple is very much the latter. Outside specific areas (like cell signal/etc) they are not constrained by hardware to the point that it inevitably impacts software quality—and the complaints people have are not about the parts of the software that are constrained! As far as I know, everybody is actually totally happy with Apple's wireless stack, power management and so on.

Now, is it possible that Apple's software issues are proximally caused by production pressure? Absolutely. That's almost definitely a major contributor. But the production pressure is not inherent to their device business; it's a choice the organization, collectively, makes.

Eh, I live in Berkeley, a lot of the neighborhoods here are amazing, and there are almost no HOAs (besides the kind that keep condo buildings running). It's nicer than the bast majority of American suburbs I've seen. If anything, the amazing yards and cozy houses are only viable because there is no HOA pushing down arbitrary top-down rules on aesthetics. Forcing people to have traditional lawns would have totally killed the place.

I find it very annoying. But not annoying enough to make me stop using Steam.

The upsides of having a de facto monopoly, I suppose—lamentably common story in tech.

You can't rely on Python's type hints for serious verification, but it can be great for expressing abstractions and giving people (and, today, agents) better affordances for using them. Even static errors that will not always fire can still help a lot for using a library correctly and for noticing mismatches in your codebase as it evolves over time.

Target learned the security lesson the hard way, but they definitely learned it. When I was there, security was one of the rare parts of the tech org I found legitimately impressive. (But also: I am not a security guy! Maybe their actual practices were compelling but flawed! But the organization as a whole was legitimately serious about it )

It is already here? I've played a bunch of games in VR and they were great, and great in a way that does not translate outside VR. That's as "here" as I need.

I'm not a lawyer so take this with a grain of salt, but it seems like there is a big gap between speech that is "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action" and just saying that you will do something.

Depending on context saying "I'm going to rob the bank X tomorrow" might also count as a threat?

But, in either case, writing this in a private diary could not be incitement or a threat because you are not communicating with anybody except yourself.

I've definitely left ping running for hundreds or thousands of pings. That's partly how my roommate eventually diagnosed this weird issue where our wifi would drop packets (or have really highly increased latency) on a suspiciously regular cadence. You could easily see the pattern in the pings once the tool ran for a while. It turned out to be a firmware issue with our router, but we would not have thought too look at that if we hadn't seen the pattern of connection issues.

Part of the author's point is that the way the city "feels" is not just part of the game but, for them and for a subset of other players, a key part of the game. We're talking about how to make a city simulator have more verisimilitude with the cities you are simulating!

I've had much better experiences with Haskell (well, mostly PureScript for now) than Python, but that might be because I am very hands-on with the design of the core types and abstractions I'm working with.

Having an effect system so that Claude is not tempted to throw in side-effects everywhere helps a lot too!

What would the alternative be? If you just kept prices lower, you'd have shortages. There would still be the same motivation—if not more!—to spin up competing production.

And to build up a large amount of new capacity yourself, you need to invest a massive amount of capital into something relatively risky.

I guess if you use kagi, you can say "I'll kag it" instead

I mean, they're trading off the time to learn to program for LLM time. Which might make sense! Locally.

But, in my experience, the projects where I have a constant pulse on the core design and abstractions in the code end up moving much faster than the ones where I don't. And I've been working on one of each at work recently, so I have a decent point of comparison.

If my neighbor mows my lawn and ruins my whole garden, I'd definitely complain. (And if I were in the neighbor's shoes, I'd feel awful about it and try to fix things.)

Which is why we also have things like a deferred property tax program! The way to "solve" the problems Prop 13 addresses would be to expand programs like that, but homeowners—disproportionately active middle- and upper-middle-class voters—want to have their cake and eat it too.

Depends on your screen size. On my laptop, I follow pretty much the same pattern you do, so I actually stopped bothering with XMonad.

But on my desktop with two 27" monitors, I find tiling incredibly useful. It's really nice to be able to quickly arrange a mix of Emacs windows, browsers and random other programs to use all that space. If I need to closely read through some documentation while also looking at code, I can quickly open a browser next to the code window. Later, when I want to focus on just code, I can send the browser to the other monitor or to a different workspace altogether. And I can juggle "side" stuff (chat windows, OBS, music, whatever) just as easily.

The key thing is that XMonad with some lightly customized layouts gives me the operations to do all of this quickly without needing to think about it. It only takes a couple of keystrokes to get to the state that I want at any time and, after a pretty short time, those keystrokes became muscle memory. Using a mouse to drag things around is more intuitive and flexible, but it requires shifting my attention far more than just using a single keyboard command. (And thanks to ADHD, that kind of distraction can be a real drag on my mental energy!)

A fee for a specific service (ie using a card vs using cash) is pretty different from unavoidable junk fees. As long as a fee like that is advertised up-front it's totally fine; but fees that everybody has to pay are a qualitatively different thing because they are just a way to get a misleadingly low sticker price for the product.

I wonder if there's any (transparently self-serving) pushback against this on Seattle Nextdoor or the like. It sounds like a straightforward set of rules that's great for everyone... but I've learned that this is never enough, and I'm sure there are some people insisting that this is some massive crime against landlords and, by extension, tenants.