xor

Without downloading any new pics, where's your mental health?

@binarybits @kevinroose Source code is an (optional) intermediate step between the programmer's intentions and the sparse machine-language instructions that the computer will execute. Hence, for whomever is responsible for maintaining the software, legible code is beautiful code.

This is related to @kevinroose's point here. Most code is never seen by the end user so there's not much upside to writing beautiful code rather than average code. But if you're hacking the Linux kernel you really want to get it right! x.com/kevinroose/sta…

I think this is comparing apples to oranges. Lots of writers are happy to use AI to generate writing — for example ad copy or technical manuals. It's specifically writers at the top of the food chain who don't think LLMs improve their work.

When a boolean algebra meets a boolean ring..

@TXMCtrades @TheGoldenDays Same here. I've kept a copy of my old scripts.ini to remind me.

@TheGoldenDays Where I first learned about coding

Are you this old?

You don't "get it" and then do the work. You do the work until your brain has no choice but to "get it" to save energy.

Not just money. I loved designing and testing industrial hardware, but (as in software) most of the actual job is spent in the maintenance phase of the lifecycle, which I found dreadfully boring (BOM management). In software, I'm consistently engaged day-to-day.

37/8拍子だけど聴き続けるとだんだんノれるようになる（？）、フィンランドの呪術的トラッドバンド Värttinä - “Kivutar” の変拍子を可視化してみた

"And then the third guy is like, 'Yeah, I see what that guy\'s probably thinking'."

Do Re Mi things, Next Level😆🎶

@MattPirkowski > In other words, survival requires wisdom with respect to combinatoric novelty. If so, does this mean that humanity has just been really lucky so far, or that the superorganism indeed has wisdom? (Or something else not in the excluded-middle scriptures?)

Contrastive categories, while useful, can also prove existentially terminal. Take, for example, David Deutsch's characterization of "static" vs "dynamic" societies. He scapegoats every cultural facet earmarked for criticism by "Enlightenment" thinkers as "static"––any "dogma" that acts to suppress local rationality, any tradition that promotes the way things have been merely because they've previously been that way, any meme that up-regulates "conformity". He then praises "dynamic" cultures such as Athens and the post-Enlightenment West for their capacity to produce ongoing knowledge creation and unbounded "progress". Such is the nature of those who worship at the altar of the excluded middle. You're either in the dynamic boat to Infinity Island, or you're rotting alongside your equally backward compatriots––enemies of rational explanation all. But when dealing with questions of adaptive capacity, or trying to model population-scale navigation of a reflexive adaptive landscape, such frameworks frequently lead to sub-optimal––even invariably terminal––outcomes. Why? Because the *rate of exploration matters*. Most trajectories accessible from any location in possibility space prove short-run terminal––that is, they amount to death over fairly short time horizons. Essentially, combinatoric novelty implies existential risk, and we must factor those risks into decisions concerning how fast and along how many dimensions we explore at any given time. Unfortunately, Enlightenment Progressivism frames all moves into the unknown as a priori desirable, which begs a question that only exploration itself can answer over time. Obtaining meaningful answers concerning the value of exploration requires that we observe their consequences unfold, for better or worse, before deciding whether the exploration resulted in any net benefit. And that's no free lunch. Beyond the cost in time, it's also costly to defend against the negative externalities of exploration-induced novelty. Even integrating model updates due to exploration places a significant refactoring burden upon a society that can't immediately digest such updates––which is why the "future is here, just unevenly distributed". This is to say that there exist more downsides to exploration than are assumed by the average Enlightenment Progressive, and even upside integration comes at significant cost to the societal superorganism. Instead of "gold beyond every unknown door", it's more accurate to view novelty-seeking exploration as a game of Minesweeper in high dimension, where the vast majority of moves lead to locations at which all next available moves lead to mines. Sure, one can just-move-around.jpg, but the extreme rarity of sustainable paths requires a great deal of skill in order to survive, even given high-dimensional degrees of freedom. In other words, survival requires wisdom with respect to combinatoric novelty. Cross-cultural wisdom traditions repeatedly inform us that haste and fear amount to enemies of wisdom, yet we increasingly ignore and denigrate these inherited cultural constraints as outdated or overly "static". Deutsch's memetics increase our risk of self-termination: they offer a false dichotomy that ultimately frames all forms of cultural restraint as maladaptive. Paired with the natural human tendency toward tribal polarization, we end up with memetic tribes that argue for no exploration-mediated change whatsoever, or for the removal of all exploration-related brakes. This hyperpolarized cultural paradigm amounts to navigating a race track with either the brake or the accelerator fully depressed for the duration of the race. Imagine what would happen. Either you'd lose the race (against entropy) because you haven't moved, or you'd crash into a race barrier at full speed upon encountering the course's first sharp turn. You need the gas, brake, steering wheel, and an experienced–but-not-yet-degenerate driver. These requirements seem obvious when discussing relatively simple systems that we don't live within. But they become nearly impossible to discuss, let along agree upon, within a world of committed Brake and Accelerator worshippers. Apparently the idea of Staying On Track just doesn't tickle one's amygdala in quite the same way. Still, I believe our best bet lies with spreading forms of wisdom that will allow (at least some of) us to Stay On Track long enough to further improve our driving capacity. Because existential exposure to the consequences of the Accelerator Cult is far less likely to look like Grey Goo for all, and far more likely to look like an accumulation of risky bets blowing up in the faces of those who too tightly coupled their lives to the exploratory systems involved.

☕

'One can Fourier transform anything—often meaningfully.' -- John Tukey

The future of Software Engineering isn't syntax, but what was always the real work: turning ambiguity into clarity, designing context that makes good outcomes inevitable, and judging what truly matters. "The entire history of software engineering is one of rising levels of abstraction" - @Grady_Booch

Here's what I think happened. Prior to the Baby Boomers, people had lots of kids because there was no birth control. As such, the dominant culture (primarily religion) explained why children were worth the inevitable toil, but also encouraged parents to make it easy on themselves with such patent irrationalities as "children should be seen and not heard" and "because I said so." Then, the Boomers were hit with a bunch of new narratives. First, they had birth control, so free love became part of the rebellion against static old-world vibes. Second, their reaction against their parents included getting free of the burdens of a big family living in cramped conditions, no privacy, no ability to rock out or smoke weed or just be your own person. Third, they got hit with the population and environmental doomerism, and they got hit hard. Rachel Carson, Paul Ehrlich, Jane Goodall, Club of Rome, etc etc. All of these created a dominant cultural narrative that lots of kids is bad. Have two at max, to replace yourselves, and otherwise think about preserving the Earth. In the process, a key piece of cultural knowledge was lost, or perhaps overlooked, and that is the joy of having lots of kids. I have five, and I can't tell you how amazing it is. That's part of the problem, it's hard to put it in words. Yesterday morning I had a peak experience, probably the happiest I've ever been. My parents and my brother's family were visiting, and the 7 grandkids were playing, and I was chatting with my brother and my wife in the other room, and I just couldn't get over how happy I was. I think part of it is that, without a lot of kids, one tends to focus on hobbies, or career, or other pursuits to fill out life. There's nothing wrong with this, except that it often falls flat. Or, there's lots of down time. If fishing is your passion, you still spend lots of time not fishing. If you fancy yourself a writer, every moment is an opportunity to feel guilty for not writing. But with lots of kids, even if you're getting nothing done, you are bearing witness to constant growth that is all your doing. And you constantly have amazing things to do - play a game of chess with the 6 year old and he gets familiar with how the knight moves, and then he can play with his grandfather who's been dying to be able to beat someone. And then the 2 year old comes and hugs your leg while you're making waffles for the 4 year old. I mean, these little moments are nearly ceaseless. Now, in the before times, I'm sure there were ceaseless little joys like this. But the context was quite different, and I bet the joys were muted. Kids got sick, often desperately so, and even if they weren't dying, you could never be completely at ease. Today, childhood diseases are vastly safer. There wasn't always abundant food, heat, clothes. There were constant discomforts. You couldn't order same-day delivery of diapers. And of course, women were expected to shoulder the burden without having an outlet for other interests. But today, we have Amazon, the nation of China willing to make cheap toys and baby wipes, vaccines, minivans, drive through French fries, iPads, etc. Having lots of kids has never been easier. "But it's too expensive!" No, it's not. It's too expensive if you want to maintain your post-college lifestyle of eating out, going to craft breweries, vacationing, and living in Brooklyn. But if you prioritize the joy of having lots of kids, you can support them by living in the suburbs, getting a reliable job, not eating out, not spending money on your lifestyle. It's absolutely possible, it just takes a serious rearranging of your priorities. Which takes me back to my point about cultural narratives - if the benefits of having lots of kids was more prominent, people would more commonly aspire to it, would get a real major in college (or maybe skip it altogether), get a reliable, high-paying job in their early 20s, look for a life-partner early instead of a dating partner, save, and strive for making a big family instead of climbing various career or status ladders. And, AND - the basic stuff begins to really matter. You gotta figure out how to get along with your wife, cause you're both in deep. You gotta sand off your rough edges and figure out how to make it work. And you can't be diddling around with insignificant stuff because your life is on serious mode, not demo mode. And you gotta be liked and trusted by your kids so they can help you out as they get older, or at least not try to actively make your life miserable. I don't know how to change the cultural narrative. And I'm sure many people might hate having lots of kids. Maybe I'm wrong. But my personal experience is one of surprise at never being told by anyone when I was growing up that having a lot of kids is a recipe for a great life. It seems so obvious to me now, and yet whenever ppl find out I have five kids, they make some kind of face or say some kind of thing that essentially amounts to "Ugh." Many are genuinely surprised that I think the future is worth living. (Unbelievable, but true. Imagine if our distant ancestors thought the plagues and famines just made life not worth living.) I get the idea that we need to revive religion as it is quite an effective pro-human, pro-child narrative that considers people to be the very standard of what is valuable. Despite my deep atheism, I feel more aligned with religious families. But I can't stomach ignoring the God stuff. But also, I can't stomach the Godless religion, that's just phony nonsense. At least the God-fearing are serious.

Most can’t tell you if a sequence of uncommon words make coherent sense within a domain beyond their own knowledge, and so prefer to believe that jargon (i.e. domain-specific semantic compression) confers no functional value. It’s no different than the tendency to chuckle awkwardly when confronted by any other blind spot in one’s knowledge. Unfortunately for us all, we’ve allowed for the cancerous growth of myriad “humanities” (i.e. the Marxist lens factory) that use jargon primarily as ideological shibboleth and cultural prion, as opposed to functional compression. So we’re left with an overfit social immune response whereby those sick of Marxists’ subversive bullshit have become—beyond normatively insecure—deeply suspicious of and hostile to all jargon. Which sucks for those of us who appreciate the English language’s capacity for high fidelity semantic compression, and thus try to avoid using it to twist minds toward ideological ends.

What’s your favourite five-star video game?

Spaces in file names are lawful evil.

Quite the transform

OH: "One is the only-est number."

Elmer Fudd is walking down the street when he happens upon a homeless woman, who cups her hands and begs, "Would you please help a weeping widow?" Elmer waits expectantly for a few seconds and finally asks, "A weeping wittle what?"