stonewhite (u/stonewhite)

stonewhite commented on I taught my 3-year-old to read like a 9-year-old theintrinsicperspective.c... · Posted by u/sebg

toolslive · 3 months ago

But, why? Now the kid will be bored at primary school. You could have diverted him toward skills you aren't going to learn in school (checkers, chess, music,...)

stonewhite · 3 months ago

If the kid is bright they'll be bored anyway. This is something you cannot avoid, so teaching them to behave in a boring environment is more productive.

stonewhite commented on Shell-ish scripting in Go with ease github.com/bitfield/scrip... · Posted by u/begoon

0xbadcafebee · 7 months ago

  Why shouldn't it be as easy to write system administration programs in Go as it is in a typical shell?

1. Shell scripting offers infinite functionality. You can shell script with any program in any language. All it needs to do is take input and produce output. And if the functionality doesn't exist, you can create it on the fly, without having to follow any of the traditional rules of programming.

2. Shell scripting is a combination of a grammar, operators, a few simple functions, and an extremely loose coupling with generic i/o and logic. I don't know Go well, but it probably doesn't support a similar flexibility. (most languages are very proscriptive about how you can use the language, so you usually can't make things as easy as they are in a different, more tailored language/interface/paradigm. this is why we have DSLs)

3. Programmers don't really understand the concept of productivity [outside of programming itself]. A programmer would solve a problem by taking 6 weeks to design a perfect program to do the thing. A Sysadmin would take 5 minutes with a shitty language and a shitty tool and get way more done in less time. And re-writing everything into a Go library would always be slower than shell scripting, because it requires re-implementing what a shell script would just use as-is.

Scripting is duct-taping the wheel rather than reinventing it. If you want to save yourself a whole lot of time and trouble, just use the duct tape.

(also: don't go templates exist? why isn't that used for scripting)

stonewhite · 7 months ago

Good points. 3rd one reminds me of the Knuth vs McIllroy story about 10+ page pascal vs 6 bash pipes[1]

[1]: https://leancrew.com/all-this/2011/12/more-shell-less-egg/

stonewhite commented on The Retreat to Muskworld niedermeyer.io/2024/10/11... · Posted by u/nabla9

dale_glass · a year ago

I don't understand why Musk/Tesla is so insistent on having cars do self-driving purely on cameras.

Both from the technical and the marketing point of view having a car that can do better than any human ever could, even in the most optimal of conditions would be a great thing.

stonewhite · a year ago

This is a good practice to reduce at least some amount of dependency to outside US. Also this is the definition of innovation; making high tech out of low tech.

stonewhite commented on Brains are not required to think or solve problems – simple cells can do it scientificamerican.com/ar... · Posted by u/anjel

rodrigosetti · 2 years ago

Buddhism claims that our feeling of separation (and thus the multiplicity of subjective experiences) is an illusion. But I never really understood why.

My hunch is that this is related to the question of why we are experiencing this particular moment in time and not another one in the past or in the future, is related. If you believe in the many words interpretation of quantum mechanics, one can also say why I’m experiencing this particular branch.

stonewhite · 2 years ago

VS Ramachandran has an interesting talk about mirror neurons, which is a subset of motor neurons. They activate when you perceive anybody else doing something as opposed to only activating during your actions. This is fundamentally a built-in empathy/group learning mechanism, but it also has some other interesting implications too.

For example, when somebody touches someones hand in your view, your mirror neurons activate just like you yourself have been touched. Then your nerve endings in your hand send a signal to cancel the effect, but sometimes you still get a tingling from the neural confusion depending on the strength of the signal (e.g. watching someone getting kicked in the balls or russian daredevils walking on top of highrises). But, if there is no nerve endings there, there is nothing to cancel the signal, so you do experience another persons feeling of being touched as your own. Therefore, the only thing that separates our consciousness is literally our skin and our nerve endings on it.

stonewhite commented on Archaeologists find intact medieval gauntlet heritagedaily.com/2024/01... · Posted by u/bookofjoe

anon25783 · 2 years ago

You know what's funny? Those tungsten cubes that were a fad recently will be among the most enduring relics of our time, because tungsten is extremely hard and corrosion-resistant. I imagine some archaeologist digging one of those up in a thousand years' time, thinking, "What the hell did they make this thing for?"

stonewhite · 2 years ago

In the same vein, I find it funny to think about the future archaeologists pondering the relation of the Eiffel towers around the world the same way we do about pyramids.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eiffel_Tower_replicas_and_deri...

stonewhite commented on Archaeologists find intact medieval gauntlet heritagedaily.com/2024/01... · Posted by u/bookofjoe

wewtyflakes · 2 years ago

How many gauntlets were not preserved? You are comparing a failure of NASA to the what you are calling the pinnacle of human achievement of the 14th century. Would it then not be fair to compare it to the pinnacle of human achieve of this century, rather than its failures? Also, what have we lost by not being able to recreate multi-century lasting gauntlets? Why is something lasting hundreds of years longer than necessary a quality worth preserving, rather than, something fit for purpose?

stonewhite · 2 years ago

NASA part was for an exaggerated example, and it was not a failing of them also. It was the nature of the business, decommissioning the C&C of their old satellites, presuming it to be dead after its planned obsolescence. Enthusiasts were there to re-establish contact luckily, but that is beside the point.

But for more mundane stuff, even phasing out media storage technology periodically causes a giant loss of knowledge and means even with the help of archiving groups.

I also stated that I'm ambivalent about the worth of such knowledge preservation, whether it is a form of stamp collecting or something more foundational. All I have to compare is the fact that we have an estimated %1 of Ancient Roman literature surviving and I'd prefer to have at least a bit more of it.

I do admit I didn't have a point to make really, or to assign worth to an ancient gauntlet. Rather it was a reflection on losing stuff while finding stuff and the permanence of marks we leave on this world.

stonewhite commented on Archaeologists find intact medieval gauntlet heritagedaily.com/2024/01... · Posted by u/bookofjoe

wewtyflakes · 2 years ago

Isn't this article interesting because it is an outlier (an old preserved gauntlet)? If we want to compare outliers like this to what we build today, it seems impossible to do, since we would need to wait another 700 years to see if any of the things we currently craft last that long.

stonewhite · 2 years ago

I do agree with you on principles, but given those gauntlets being a pinnacle of human achievement for that time, our current pinnacles doesn't seem to last that long and the means are lost as well. Probably for the better, but quite can't tell also.

Maybe it is a creeping anxiety about losing knowledge as we stride forward and forgetting the means of recreating the things we end up with. Kind of like the Dark age of technology in WH40K.

stonewhite commented on Archaeologists find intact medieval gauntlet heritagedaily.com/2024/01... · Posted by u/bookofjoe

stonewhite · 2 years ago

I find it interesting to ponder about crafting something that can withstand 7 centuries, given what we currently craft (as a software engineer) not even lasting 10 years.

Even NASA was unable to establish contact with the IMAGE satellite after 18 years. I do see the false equivalence here, yet it is nonetheless thought provoking, alongside 100+ year old tea shops in Japan.

stonewhite commented on I kind of killed Mercurial at Mozilla glandium.org/blog/?p=4346... · Posted by u/sylvestre

alex_smart · 2 years ago

Essentially, the problem with git is - it is a tool that is simple in its internals, but with a complex/confusing UI. The only way for someone to feel somewhat in comfortable with git is to have a good conceptual model for how it works internally. Once you have that mental model, you feel like a magician with git, but for beginners, it is a source of endless confusion and fear.

stonewhite · 2 years ago

I think the idiosyncratic command names are rooted in the fact that git is designed as a peer to peer distributed system as opposed to how it is generally used right now, the server/client workflow. Github even follows and adds to this tradition with the always weird sounding "pull request", since the pull request is normally a mail to a mailgroup with the description of the changes and an actual request to pull that person's changes to the maintainers local repositories.

I'm not sure what is currently being done at developing git, but adapting/creating some porcelain commands accommodating a more centralized workflow even mainly on a semantic level could help with the UX friction.

Also, the obligatory joke "git gets easier once you get the basic idea that branches are homeomorphic endofunctors mapping submanifolds of a Hilbert space"

stonewhite commented on Get Offended More (2020) ammarmian.substack.com/p/... · Posted by u/lpcrealmadrid

stonewhite · 2 years ago

My motto is "Follow the Dread". If I dread public speaking I should do it, if I dread setting up IPsec VPNs I should do more of it, if I dread working with money and run a business as opposed to working solely as a technical person I should do it, so on and so forth.

"The Dread" is a good north star for discovering what to improve next, since most Dreads are somewhat common/shared among peers, communities and colleagues. Being able to do something nobody likes to do is a good edge against the world.