wool_gather

Kudos for your self-awareness. Have a squirt of dopamine^W^W^W upvote. ;)

I have noticed the same reactions myself, and dislike them. I am slowly and gradually learning to be able to deflect that angry defensive reply impulse. Simple awareness seems to be the first step. I don't know yet what to do about the upvote thrill.

The Computational Beauty of Nature (published by MIT) belongs on anyone's list as well. It walks instructively through several different kinds of complex systems, including L systems, agents (Boids), cellular automata, fractals, chaotic attractors...

I have a trick I've adopted recently for nonfiction that has helped me immensely to read more and keep reading.¹ If a portion of a book is unappealing for any reason -- I feel like I already know it, it's irrelevant, it's impenetrable, whatever -- just skip ahead.

It's still there if I need to come back to it. And this preserves the reading as an enjoyable and motivated experience rather than a slog that's easy to procrastinate over. In particular, if a later section turns out to not make sense without the bit that I skipped, I'm now highly motivated to go back and understand it.

If you find yourself hampered by a kind of "completionism" like I do, you might find this very freeing and satisfying.

I used this tactic on a book recently that had a lot of new-to-me gems of information at the beginning and end, but fluff in the middle. Previously I would have lost out on the stuff at the end, because I would have set the book aside at some point and dreaded coming back to it.

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¹ I absolutely didn't invent this, but I'm also not sure where I picked it up.

> a tutorial how to bootstrap a bibliography and an index card system for your research or other professional purposes

Is this related to/inspired from Zettelkasten?

> where did he indicate he was looking for feedback on these features?

I thought it was in the release notes for v5, but I can't find them at this point to verify. I suppose I may be misremembering.

The developer of Dash is very receptive to feedback (in fact I think this change was called out as something that he was interested in hearing opinions on).

Agree; rule #1 of reviewing in my opinion is "trust your colleague whose code you are reviewing".

The point is that it's not generic: there is meaning conveyed by the grouping that can't be expressed as an easy script (which is why there's a human writing the code in the first place).

Absolutely; to tweak the analogy a bit, you wouldn't have much luck with the point-and-nod "interface" if you were trying to do something more abstract or complicated, like getting a loan or hiring a gardener.

Apple's other attempt right now (on iOS) is Shortcuts, which is graphical-programming-y. But it's disadvantaged a bit because it started life (as a third-party app Workflow) outside the system, unlike Applescript.

You make good points, though I'm sympathetic to the parent's point too.

In the very layered federal system we have in the US, it might be possible for us to have it both ways. Non-U.S.-citizens could be given a vote in local/municipal/county matters, but still not for national representation. (And some states might want to try out different levels of statewide enfranchisement.)

A less hell-raising reading experience via Threadreaderapp: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1336890442768547845.html

It is extremely nice, but still feels a bit hemmed in by the "everything is a grid of characters" paradigm. Just a soupçon here and there of actual GUI elements (some kind of popover for LSP highlights, for example) would go a long way for making Emacs even better, IMO.

> It makes sense in some settings, but not in 1st order art.

I'm forced to disagree -- in part -- here. There are plenty of beautiful and stirring (or even just intriguing) generative pictures out there. I agree in part, though: from my own experience, generative music composition is harder than generative imagemaking. Probably because there are many, many more dimensions of choices that need to be made.

Fair, and I definitely get what you're saying, but I would still argue that for (Java)doc-style comments that one useful one outweighs the cost of the repetition.

And the reason is that you're not always just reading the header. When I'm looking at a `setWiz` call site, my IDE can pop up just that one docstring and save me a bunch of aggravation.

Sounds like we agree.

I said "why isn't this a `URL` instead of a string". I know we should "Put that information in your types". The code is written. I can't safely make that change until I know the invariants, and if the person who wrote the code had written a doc comment, I would know them.

Sure; that's a classic useless comment. Counterpoint would be a useful doc, where did the 5 come from?

    // Chosen by fair die roll. Completely random
    const kEschatonThreshhold = 5;

    val a = kEschatonThreshhold;

Sure, if the name, type, and context of a variable can completely encode all the details that I need to know when working on the code, then fine, we can skip the doc comments.

Do you think that's possible for every field in all, or even most, applications and languages? I do not. And so I don't think we should be allergic to a few wasted sentences of prose.

I'd rather my colleagues repeat themselves in their documentation comments than provide none at all. So I think the habit of writing those comments is more important than making sure that every single one has no repetition. I'm working in a codebase now that has a frustrating lack of documentation of important details.

A data field called "imageURL" that's a string -- is that a remote or local URL? Where did it come from/how much can I trust that it's well-formed? (And why isn't it already an actual `ParsedURL` type?) Another datatype has three fields "name", "username", and "id", all strings, with no explanation of their purpose or differences.

This means that I either have to track down the teammate that wrote the code and ask them every single time I run into something like this. Or I have to execute the whole program and reverse engineer the answer. Both are colossal wastes of time compared to a few "useless" or "repetitive" comments.

> her incoherence did add to my, and particularly, my father's (her brother) grief.

I sympathize completely, and I'm sorry for your loss.

I think the situation is almost the inverse of your question, actually. :) The article's author already does almost everything on their iPad; so the use case is as simple as "I want to move that one last thing (coding) off my laptop and onto my main machine (my iPad)".

Cancer is just a bad illness. I too have had the experience of trying to interact with family members in the terminal stages. Neither of them were using marijuana, and they were often not coherent (when they were even awake).

Not to diminish your grief, but your aunt might not have been any more available if she had been using other pain management methods. It's just a terrible, overwhelming thing to happen to the body, and it saps a huge amount of the sufferer's energy.

The article is not even remotely suggesting removing type information. On the contrary, it's talking about some ways to augment a type checker with different grammar or ways of constructing APIs.

FWIW, if you're playing from a computer, there are applications (Rogue Amoeba makes one) that can route the audio from Spotify (or anything) and send it over Airplay. Works great with a HomePod.

Indeed; by John Regehr: https://blog.regehr.org/archives/1180

I don't think it has really been proposed anywhere though, unfortunately.

Tip, instead of amending, it's also straightforward to "uncommit" a temporary commit when you come back to it. `git reset HEAD~` and the state of the commit becomes the state of your working tree instead.

...? `yes` is not part of the C standard library.

Well said. And frankly, this is true even of FOSS -- or why are there so many flavors of Linux?

Even technical users are going to differ in the sets of opinions they hold and are qualified to hold. I care about which Python I have installed. The virtual memory manager? Not so much. Someone else might, though.

> How did we end up in this world where we so utterly rely on 3rd parties for such everyday critical Internet services?

The same way we ended up in a world where we so utterly rely on 3rd parties for such everyday critical services as growing our food and fixing our cars. There's too many things to do for everyone to do them all on their own.