stochastictrebuchet @ lemon @sh.itjust.works

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2 yr. ago

Word to the wise: stay away from productivity bro YouTube. You’ll learn a hundred systems for optimizing your obsidian-logseq-roam-notion hybrid gsd-kanban workflow with bidirectional zettl references and interstitial notes organized into a beautiful para system with more systems on systems and queryable data views and more fancy shit than you could ever dream of, and when everything is done and set up the way you think will work for you (which it won’t)…

… you’ll realize you haven’t actually accomplished what you were meant to.

(Source: myself, who’s fallen into the rabbit hole once or twice before)

I sometimes wonder what I would do or who I would be if I had a fraction of these individuals’ courage.

Having regained my freedom, I would leave. Hong Kong, it seems, is a lost cause – which saddens me to no end because I spent 6 years there as a kid. It was completely different than mainland China, which I moved to after. It was a beautiful mix of western and Chinese culture. It was its own thing.

Well-deserved win! Watched this in the cinema a few weeks back. What immediately struck me about the beautiful art style is that it felt more like what you’d expect from a labor-of-love indie game than from a dreamworks/pixar studio – and it was incredibly refreshing! Also, for a movie where water plays a big role, the fluid rendering was absolutely breathtaking. I could almost smell the warm plastic air of a GPU giving its all.

I’ll have you know I intend to keep using Covid as an excuse for bad decisions well into 2040

https://minilanguage.com/ is an interesting one to look at. There are exactly 1000 words in the total vocabulary. That’s Mini Mundo though. A second, smaller variant also exists: Mini Kore, with 100 words.

I started learning it too soon after learning Toki Pona and lost steam. But I agree with the design principles. They stem from the observation that Toki Pona, as fun as it is, is just too damn ambiguous for anything non-superficial. All too often speakers need to clarify what they said by switching to a natural language. Even my own Toki notes become indecipherable after a few days.

Toki Pona: fun, therapeutic mental exercise, made even better with sitelen pona. Feels like writing poetry. Never meant to be a useful language. Easy to learn, hard to use.

Mini: useful as a language for general purpose communication. Small, primarily latinate vocabulary. Harder to learn, easier to use.

Kalama Sin podcast is a good one for listening comprehension. No new episodes since July though

Final graphic shows why the far-right hates education. I’m probably jumping to conclusions, but I wonder if their relatively low popularity among higher-educated voters is due to:

1. Voters being more aware of their history (a “… doomed to repeat it” sort of thing)
2. Better at spotting populist lies (I don’t know enough about German politics to know how populist the Left Party is)
3. Leading more comfortable lives, thus less inclined to reach for extremes.

It’s an undemocratic thought, but sometimes I wish there were some sort of aptitude test right before casting a vote. Or at the very least, a quick quiz to confirm you’re aware of the party’s key program points. Obviously, both options are ripe for abuse.

And they’ve got an entire diagnostics team working on a single patient multiple days in a row, breaking into their house, running lab tests, and doing basically every single task a hospital has an entire staff for.

Would love to see the hospital bill

So long as we’re not just singling out Meta. They’ve all done it.

At least Meta, with its Llama model family, has enabled the open source LLM space to flourish (along with Mistral, AI2, Alibaba, Eleuther, and many others).

What-aboutism. I know. I’m okay with what’s happening here in the sense that in return we’ve gotten magical (compared to the SoTA five years ago) models with seemingly emergent reasoning capabilities and expertise in basically every domain. That’s huge, even if it’s started to feel normal.

The issue, of course, is creatives whose content was stolen now losing out on opportunities or revenue that they relied on, meaning fewer creatives in the future and more AI slop.

Not seeding is hilariously on-brand for Meta though. Maybe it’s the ‘possession < distribution’ defence?

To the extent that the billboard never existed while the image implies it did – sure.

I love the term ‘slop’. It’s one of my favorite new words along with ‘nontent’.

But this, to me, isn’t that. I think of slop as ‘unrequested, unconvincing, lazy, and lifeless’. In short, ineffective and unwelcome.

I feel like this meme gets the message across. It’s not great, but it’s not terrible. The AI tells are subtle enough: the multi lane pileup in the background and some poor small size text rendering.

Not sure why I felt the need to write this. Guess I’m of the opinion that just because something is AI-generated doesn’t mean it should be discounted immediately, unless it really feels like zero effort went into it. Have a nice day!

Ya better werk 🫰

Betrayed by the global clipboard

Another happy Kitty user here!

I use my terminal as an IDE. Kitty makes it (relatively) easy to write custom interactive applets (aka kittens) that open in new panes or communicate between panes. The ssh integration is also really useful: whenever I ssh into my remote work station my fish and helix config gets copied over.

Judging by the code (a mix of C, python, and go) and the fast release rate, the core maintainer seems to be an utter mad genius – which unfortunately is sometimes reflected in his notoriously abrasive communication style.

Only thing I’m lacking is persistent remote sessions. The maintainer is not quiet about his dislike of tmux and other multiplexers. It’s wildly inefficient to process every byte twice, he argues. Convincing but Kitty doesn’t currently offer an alternative for remote sessions, which is where I do most of my work. Wezterm has something for this in beta, but misses many of the niceties of Kitty. So I’m still using tmux for everything in Kitty, because it trips me up to have one way of working with panes locally and another way when working remotely.

I tried Ghostty, if only because the maintainer is an excellent communicator. I found it polished but simple. I couldn’t figure out how to page up the scrollback or search it. I couldn’t rename tab titles. The config format seemed under-documented. I’ll give it another go in a month or so.

Task failed successfully

GenAI coding assistants are only as good as the data they are trained on. Less-used proglangs make up a tiny fraction of the available data, or may even be completely absent. There is a reason coding assistants give convincing results with Python and JS/TS, but underperform even on relatively up-and-coming langs like Rust.

It’s a play on ‘citation needed’ Because cetacean (sih-TAY-shun) sounds like citation (sigh-TAY-shun)

Why Denmark

So, according to wikipedia there is a small shared border.

Real answer though: I’m an idiot. I remembered driving from Belgium to Denmark through the Netherlands and completely forgot passing through Germany along the way.

Still think those Danes should consider a wall.

In anticipation of this I propose both Belgium and Denmark start building a wall along the border and revise their building codes so that all doorways must be made inconveniently low.

Eh, I get it. There’s an overwhelming abundance of choice that’s growing faster than the average time it takes to form a connection with any one game. Why deal with the FOMO and misbuys if you know what works for you.

That doesn’t stop me from purchasing way too many (non-refundable) indie titles on the Switch, though. And I’m glad to say some of those feel like they’ll keep me hooked for a good while.

Still, nothing can ever top my love for one classic game in particular: AOE 1 (definitive edition). Why? (It’s unfair to the rest.) Years ago I used to play against my dad over LAN. It’s some of the most fun we had together. Standing outside while he took a smoke break mid-game, I’d explain how I was about to wipe his whole civilization off the map in ways he couldn’t possibly imagine. Sometimes when I miss him, firing up AOE lets me feel closer to him again.

All this to say, nostalgia is a tough bar for any new game to beat.

Anything for my princeaesss