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jp57 commented on The immortality of Microsoft Word   theredline.versionstory.c... · Posted by u/jpbryan
jp57 · a day ago
"git doesn't really work ... because docx is a binary blob."

Well, yes, but the binary blob is a zip archive of a directory of text XML files, and one could imagine tooling that wraps the git interaction in an unzip/zip bracket.

The real problem is that lawyers, like basically all other non-programmers, neither know nor care about the sequence of bytes that makes a file in the minds of programmers. In their minds the file IS what they see when they open it in word: a sequence of white rectangles with text laid out on it in specific ways, including tables with borders, etc. The fact that a lot of really complicated stuff goes on inside the file to get the WYSIWYG rendering is not only irrelevant to them, it's unknown.

Maybe the answer here will be along the lines of Karpathy's musings about making LLMs work directly with pixels (images of text), instead of encoded text and tokenizers [1]. An AI tool would take the document visually-standard legal document form, and read it, and produce output with edits, redlines, etc as directed by the user.

[1] https://x.com/karpathy/status/1980397031542989305

jp57 commented on Bring bathroom doors back to hotels   bringbackdoors.com/... · Posted by u/bariumbitmap
tasuki · 23 days ago
If someone cares about this so much to make a website, why not include an explanation? There's mention of dignity. I don't feel my dignity lessened when my bathroom has no door. Perhaps the door is useful to keep the heat and the steam inside the bathroom?
jp57 · 23 days ago
If you only stay in hotels alone, it probables doesn’t matter that much to you. Quite apart from questions of dignity, when sharing a hotel room, there are practical conveniences: it’s nice to keep odors contained, and to be able to turn on the bathroom light at night without waking anyone up.
jp57 commented on Fighting the New York Times' invasion of user privacy   openai.com/index/fighting... · Posted by u/meetpateltech
jp57 · a month ago
Wish they'd give a bulk delete interface that lets me choose which chats to keep and which to delete. (i.e. not "Delete All" scorched earth).
jp57 commented on Synesthesia helps me find four-leaf clovers (2023)   matthewjamestaylor.com/sy... · Posted by u/iansteyn
jp57 · a month ago
I, too, experience some synethesia with letters and numbers (two is green, three is yellow, 4 is blue), but when I look at a field of clover, I don't experience a field of numbers representing the number of leaves on the individual clover stalks. In fact that seems like a weird way of perceiving nature. When I see a bird flying with its two wings outstretched, I'm not experiencing the number 2, and thus I get no sense of green.

Dead Comment

jp57 commented on I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars   rameerez.com/send-this-ar... · Posted by u/sebnun
jp57 · 2 months ago
The article is hugged to death. Maybe it wasn't hosted in the cloud?
jp57 commented on Nim 2.2.6   nim-lang.org//blog/2025/1... · Posted by u/xz18r
miguel_martin · 2 months ago
If your really want to use the keyword def instead of proc: you can do that with sed.

In all serious-ness, don't do that. I've used Python a lot, but Nim is a different language. Writing the proc keyword helps condition your brain to realize you are writing Nim, not Python.

jp57 · 2 months ago
Nim is indeed a different language, which was the point of my comment, for those who got past the first sentence. However, if folks are going to tout its “python-like” syntax as a selling point, it’s not really fair to then turn around and say, “no, it’s a different language”, when a Python programmer points out that it’s not really all that python-like after all, and maybe it could be more so.

If one is going to take pains to point out that there are good reasons why it is different from Python, then we can carry that as far as we like. There’s no particular reason to use indentation to denote blocks. BEGIN and END worked just fine, after all, and would be more true to Nim’s intellectual heritage. Or maybe just END, and continue to open the block with a colon.

jp57 commented on Attention lapses due to sleep deprivation due to flushing fluid from brain   news.mit.edu/2025/your-br... · Posted by u/gmays
bzmrgonz · 2 months ago
hmm.. this is interesting... the article says "spinal fluid exits the cerebrospinal fluid (csf) flows out of the brain... I wonder where it discharges these waste products. I ask because it is believed we have a sort of chimney on our backs. I think I read this on the article of the Irish lady who could detect alzheimers years before any modern medical detection systems. But maybe it is discharged in the gut? via the mesentery, the new organ they finally named fo rthe stuff that holds our intestines together. If anyone knows where it is discharged, please comment, I'm interested in this, because I do prolong waterfasts every 3 months, and I strongly believe the brain drains waste into my mouth during that time, because the taste in my mouth is godawful, but if there are other exit points the brain discharges waste, we probably need to know about them.
jp57 · 2 months ago
Why do you think that the taste in your mouth is waste draining from your brain and not the result of some metabolic changes in your body from the fast? Ketosis is known to cause a metallic taste in the mouth, for example.
jp57 commented on Nim 2.2.6   nim-lang.org//blog/2025/1... · Posted by u/xz18r
jp57 · 2 months ago
Nim has a python-like syntax, but I wish they'd gone farther, using `def` instead of `proc` and a `print` function instead of the `echo` statement. Though even if they did those things, I'm not sure it would really feel like programming Python.

As a long-time Python programmer, I was drawn to trying the language partly because of the syntax, but as soon as I tried to write something substantial, Nim's heritage in languages like Pascal, Modula, and Ada starts to show. Syntax notwithstanding, programming in it really felt more like programming in Pascal/Modula.

I in fact did not know anything about Nim's history or design choices when I started using it, but I'm old enough to have written a fair amount of Pascal, and I was not long into using Nim when I started thinking, "this feels weirdly familiar." `type` and `var` blocks, ordinal types, array indexing with enums, etc.

jp57 commented on Chess engines didn't replace Magnus Carlsen, and AI won't replace you   coding-with-ai.dev/posts/... · Posted by u/codeclimber
jp57 · 2 months ago
AI won't replace you ... if you are the Magnus Carlsen of your field.

How you will get experience to grow into the Magnus Carlsen of your field is an open question, however.

u/jp57

KarmaCake day2885April 26, 2016View Original