νδπ @ndpi@merveilles.town

“We strive to make the Disqus experience as personalized and relevant as possible for all users. In doing so, we collect non-personally identifiable interest information to deliver targeted content and advertising on websites that use Disqus as well as other websites you may visit.”

Wtf does that even mean? In what world is that consistent?

Imagining a goal regression planning system built on Org Mode which helps to figure out what to work on each day. Extend it with mental contexts and calendar awareness to minimize context switching; load balancing to avoid burdening you with too many items at once by rescheduling tasks as needed; and a preference function to let you encode “ideal days” as archetypes it tries to mimic.

🎶 Rip and destroy! Rip and destroy!
I’m a dog, I want to rip and destroyyyyy 🎶

“[O]nce a program has built in enough implicit and explicit dependencies, it has passed the event horizon, and it can no longer escape (because it would be easier to rewrite the program from scratch).”

https://www.gwern.net/Holy-wars#bitcreep

Fun seeing the reactions to my suggestion that instead of building a bloated, fragile web app we build a lean TUI program and serve it over SSH. It seems a lot of people have an idea of “how software is done” which cuts many approaches to solving problems.

I wonder: If we required all programmers to use a slower device than their target for development would we see improved software? Limitations do breed creativity, after all.

I think the reflexive thought "but this solution must work in every imaginable case" that most engineers have when confronted with a problem is the cause of a ton of unneeded complexity.

My dad used to have to tell the engineers working on his projects "it doesn't need to go to the moon" — the inherent complexity is enough, don't add more.

Zoning out in bed thinking about peer-to-peer tech when it occurred to me that my P2P agile coffee tool prototype could be rebuilt pretty easily as an interactive SSH service. I think I’d like to try that out.

If you can manage it, learning new things for their own sake and not for any expected utility is both more fun and more enlightening. It encourages a deeper exploration of a topic than you might otherwise perform, and opens up new pathways in your mind that were previously hidden to you.

“Even though Donald Knuth himself has suggested a few areas in which TeX could have been improved, he indicated that he firmly believes that having an unchanged system that will produce the same output now and in the future is more important than introducing new features. For this reason, he has stated that the "absolutely final change (to be made after my death)" will be to change the version number to π, at which point all remaining bugs will become features.”

We should aspire to stability.

Thinking of ways to index physical items using QR codes printed on stickers. The stickers would point to some location on your computer where information about that object is stored: project logs, inventory sheets, book lending records, etc.

One thing I’m wondering about is how to make the looks stable, so if you move around the digital side then the physical side remains valid. Perhaps having a little intermediary which records both sides of the link is a valid approach here.

“Chapter 0 uses induction, and whenever Chapter n−1 uses induction, so does Chapter n.“