All the ones where the idea was to “just start something, grow grow grow, then figure out monetization later” is wild to me.

E.g. reddit. It worked. CEO is rich, site is still online. Somehow they got investors probably, presumably.

I get not having profit. I get not having income, if it’s in some prototype phase. But having no plan or idea whatsoever for how to monetize and still getting VC? Wild.

I had a phase as a teen when I was constantly swearing. My parents told me that, it can’t be that bad and it’s really annoying.

And it’s mostly an impulse reaction and we’re kind of above that.

It doesn’t mean that you can’t express pain or anger. You’re just not insulting people’s ears if you scream “Aaaaah” when you bang your toe against a table leg or something. And your environment really doesn’t deserve it. Most people are somewhat compassionate and you’re just swearing while they try to help… that’s not a pleasant environment for them to be in. It makes it harder to help you.

No to both questions. I just made a change and that was it. And it has never stopped me from expressing anything.

If anything, it lends more weight to the regular words.

A _______ criminal? Or a criminal?

You can still put the same emotion into the words, they’re just not swear words. :)

Having an easy on the eyes markdown that is also easy to parse would be cool.

But YAML does these things:

https://ruudvanasseldonk.com/2023/01/11/the-yaml-document-from-hell

which are not excusable, for any reason.

I’m not sure now that I think about it, but I find this more explicit and somehow more free than json. Which can’t be true, since you can just

{"anything you want":{...}}

But still, this:

<my_custom_tag>
<this> 
<that>
<roflmao>
...

is all valid.

You can more closely approximate the logical structure of whatever you’re doing without leaving the internal logic of the… syntax?

<car>
<tyre> air, <valve>closed</valve>  </tyre>
<tyre> air, <valve>closed</valve>  </tyre>
<tyre>      <valve>open</valve>  </tyre>
<tyre> air, <valve>closed</valve>  </tyre>
</car>

Maybe I just like the idea of a closing tag being very specific about what it is that is being closed (?). I guess I’m really not sure, but it does feel nicer to my brain to have starting and closing tags and distinguishing between what is structure, what is data, what is inside where.

My peeve with json is that… it doesn’t properly distinguish between strings that happen to be a number and “numbers” resulting in:

myinput = {"1":"Hello",1:"Hello"}
tempjson = json.dumps(myinput)
output = json.loads(tempjson)
print(output)
>>>{'1': 'Hello'}

in python.

I actually don’t like the attributes in xml, I think it would be better if it was mandatory that they were also just more tagged elements inside the others, and that the “validity” of a piece of xml being a certain object would depend entirely on parsing correctly or not.

I particularly hate the idea of attributes in svg, and even more particularly the way they defined paths.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/SVG/Tutorial/Paths#curve_commands

It works, but I consider that truly ugly. And also I don’t understand because it would have been trivial to do something like this:

<path><element>data</element><element>data</element></path>

YAML

To each their own indeed.

;)

It is very cool, specifically as a human readable mark down / data format.

The fact that you can make anything a tag and it’s going to be valid and you can nest stuff, is amazing.

But with a niche use case.

Clearly the tags waste space if you’re actually saving them all the time.

Good format to compress though…

Glockness Monster *teleports behind you*

“nothing personal, kid”

No.

You know how boxers don’t beat up their trainers?

This is like that.

A bit, but not really. The key is to understand that it can be applied to very small scale and very simple processes as well. But that it’s still the same concept.

E.g.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Governor_(device)

Or not getting enough sleep by noticing you’re tired and changing your daily routine to change it.

People have tried to run economies with it and that… failed. I think it could be interesting to try it again now that we have seriously wide spread internet access and fast, cheap communication. But forcing it on everyone is probably a bad idea and it’s not even necessary. For example, if the data is just easy to access, big companies should do it themselves. That’s their entire purpose. We’re just hindering efforts that way, because the data interfaces are usually not designed to make it this easy. Like, we don’t have a common standard to order material online, or to watch those prices.

So when a fast food chain orders potatoes for their fries and steel mill orders coal and iron, they’re using different systems that have to be maintained.

And the reason I’m writing it here, is that people don’t know about it. Therefore they don’t demand it from their democratic leaders or unions and therefore we don’t have it.

I’m not saying anything new.

It’s the same kind of voting, negotiation, discussion system we already use everyday. Those just look different when they are the same thing. We are 95% there, we’re just missing one or two last steps.

Yeah, except I’m on your side, and that kind of protest is obviously not getting it done.

Because it’s what has been tried for decades and the problem is still there.

Having this problem can also be managed by going through the loop. If you original goal was “calculate stuff to prevent bad things”, and you can’t do it because you’re choosing too much accuracy, you can experiment with the accuracy until you find a good middle ground.

We can use super detailed FEM, CFD what not sophisticated science, but sometimes the stuff from the 1800s is just fine.

We have figured out how to run everything, absolutely everything, in the 1950s.

The original computer “AI” craze was started by “cybernetic systems” and for good reason. You probably only know of the bastardizations of “cyber-” that don’t have anything in common with the original concept.

The original concept goes like this:

1. set a goal
2. perform an action
3. measure how much impact that had, did it get you closer to your goal or not?
4. If you are at your goal, you’re done,
5. otherwise adjust your actions, got to 2. (This is “feedback” and the reason that word is now so common. People at the time knew)

The faster you go through the loop, the faster you will figure out what works.

You can measure anything you want, as vague is you want. Happiness, money, productivity. It’s the way democracy is designed to work, in which case the feedback is vague and the cycle time is measured in years. It runs your thermostats, in your home, big national power grid power plants. It’s how autopilots autopilot.

The idea that “nobody could have predicted…” or “nobody responsible” is a myth. We have the science. We know how it works.

Every failure we still experience is a failure we allow to happen. Because of profit, politics, or whatever.

Didn’t catch something “going on for years”, maybe someone should check more often. “Crazy single individual causing a tragedy”? No, that’s a person at risk, probably with social or mental problems you didn’t take care of before, didn’t flag, and didn’t stop in time.

“Nobody wants to work on our open source project” Really, how is your onboarding? Do people take a look at the docs/culture and run away screaming? Yeah?

Your joke, but as a short video by joel haver: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnUpTyKSjag

The boring part. Making sure that there are holes in the walls for sockets, enough capacity in the cable trays. Planning the routing, but I didn’t have access to algorithm of the software.

Collecting the ever changing inputs from people who want devices with cables in rooms and spaces. :)

I helped design large-ish electrical grids. 30-100k cables

Without the actual calculation bits, unfortunately.

Not very interesting. Bad software. Management didn’t really care about the problem. I was there so the problem was “managed” from their point of view.

Mastodon has very nice keyword based filter system.

For example, I have the filter “idiot did a thing”, and the keywords are a number of names of… popular people that news don’t get tired of talking about, even though the thing isn’t actually newsworthy.

So if I’m in the mood, I can check out what they did that day, and if I’m not in the mood, I’m aware that they did something again, but I don’t have to get angry over the specifics.

Same for other “ongoing” hot topics, that I already am informed about, where I don’t need the 24/7 doomscroll effect shoving negativity into my face.