Any conversation

taking a week off to stave off burnout, catch up on some reading and writing and small projects, and finish Ocarina of Time. also will make soup

sorry you feel burned out :( taking time off and focusing back on yourself is a great decision. hope you feel better!

Thank you!

I needed to process 20,000 json files & 20,000 JXL files. I'm pulling together a website from them all. Anyway, started with emacs elisp to handle it all, just because I've not done that before. Went kinda ok, and I'm gonna use org-mode to export it all to a website (done that bit loads of times before). In the end, I ended up breaking out my C programming skills (late 80s->nowish). It was a delight. Nothing more refreshing than writing raw code, that doesn't rely on 3rd party code/libs.

It's not clear, based on personal experience, how long - if it all - the software development field will value devs who actually enjoy the work. Most people I know are producing mostly AI work and there's an obvious skill decline that's resulted from it. 1/?

But does it matter if your boss doesn't care? Or if their boss doesn't care? If the paychecks keep coming who cares? What's the point of choosing the mountain if the "joy" just means more hours on screen that could have been spent elsewhere? 2/?

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I got into doing dev work, because I thought it was fun to learn and do and I genuinely enjoyed hanging out with others who felt the same. Now, more than ever, I realize how few people feel the same. And, now - more than ever, I realize that no on cares if I feel that way. 3/?

Bosses and their bosses care more about tickets moved and LoC written than quality or knowledgeable employees. 4/4

It never did. Before AI people did webslop in node.js, before that people were slopping in Java. AI changes surprisingly little.

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Only if you buy into the narrative that AI is "just another layer of abstraction." Which of course, it isn't.

No, it obviously isn't that. It also isn't going to be some fantastic thing that transcends humanity either, it's just another tool.

Why did the programmer quit his job? revealBecause he didn’t get arrays.

The mental shape of a programming language resurfaces, and my mind craves writing programs in it. Array languages, concatenative, Lisps, Smalltalks.

looking at the German public railway system (DB), I always wonder if the stereotypes of timeliness and precision were ever actually true. Surely someone must've figured out by now how off they are? These trains are always late and / or broken.

Why do so many tools have JSON config files‽ Commenting why options have been set the way they have is just such a basic thing to want to do… Why do tech people have such an aversion to writing things down⁇

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TOML is a better format for configuration files IMO, if not for many reasons, primarily because TOML accepts comments. However, one annoying thing for TOML was the lack of schema, and the reliance on JSON Schema for that. Which I decided to tackle years ago when I started the TOML Schema project. In the past few months I leveraged code agents to take to the finish line and got something compelling: tomlschema.org

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that is so nice

That’s really cool. I suppose it would allow people to verify their config file is valid without having to pass it to in the intended program, which might be running in production or infeasible to run locally — very interesting

Exactly! The schema also enables tools to have rich editors to config files without having to know about the config file format upfront. There is an editor for TOML Schema as an example, on the website.

I don't know:  
  They should be using YAML:
    - That's for sure

I think more than 50% of our economy's businesses, are cosplaying. Not in it for customers or profit; in it for investors and investments. "Looking like a business", as your real line of work.

Like a very elaborate pump and dump but with an intellect and capital entry barrier

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Influencing, OnlyFans, sports betting, prediction markets. Gambling is fast becoming the American way of life.

"Financial nihilism" is the keyword

I've never thought of something like OF as gambling. But I guess your point is that young adults are pushed to a lot of "you have a 0.1% chance of hitting it big and a 99.9% chance of getting no online traction at all" types of careers?

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Yeah, no point in investing in yourself or a real sustainable long-term future, just gamble the little you have for a shot at life above the line. Barbell economy.

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I know many small business owners, and a clear majority do have investors, whether spouse, parents, or a small business loan. Easily more than 50% never make a profit. I know a woman who ran a clothing retail store for over a decade, who was never able to pay herself a dime. When the pandemic hit, everyone closed, but the ones who actually needed the business to pay their bills opened up as soon as it was allowed or shortly thereafter. Many took years. They are cosplaying.

a business loan is not an investment, it is debt financing that pays back with interest. An investment means putting money into a company to gain ownership or a share of future profits. to me it feels like youre arguing against cosplaying, showing small businesses struggle and arent just playing boss for the funzies.

This fruit is rotten. It looks so ripe and juicy but if you bite it you will see: this fruit is rotten.

Tweaking the algorithm. Really want posts like i.e genuinely long discussions, stay longer instead of getting burried away by newer posts.

I think it works now better.

Follow me if you want me to email you a pizza roll

for those new here, this is my other project, online ! come for a dance! ~~~~~> <~~~~~

Be there in a bit. Hanging out with .

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Seeing Hallucinate brought to mind . 😅

Yes! I was thinking of doing the same, see .

and it's all

故事的开头总是这样，适逢其会，猝不及防。故事的结局总是这样，花开两朵，天各一方。（by 张嘉佳《从你的全世界路过》）

Stories always begin this way: a chance encounter, completely unexpected. Stories always end this way: two flowers bloom, then drift apart. (by Zhang Jiajia, I Belonged to You)

what are some of you favorite teas?

hey guys ☺️

Hi lacie

A “small” visit to Lotte, and $239 later, we are enjoying rambutans, sticky rice with tuna wrapped in seaweed, and wife struggles to make room for the rest of the goodies.

I'm doing experiments with short attention-span students and code. Starting with python, and, oddly, now working in BASIC. As a C programmer of 40+ years, I find this aesthetically and pedagogically displeasing, but I am delighted to see them getting fully absorbed in writing 130 PRINT "You have been eaten by a bear!" : GOTO 900. Yes there is spaghetti, but it's their spaghetti and they seem to take delight in debugging it. Python will come later.

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I was talking about this with some alumni students, specifically their experience learning python with us a few years earlier (these are college students who are not really using python any more). What it seems to boil down to is that with python you have the feeling that there is this huge forest of solutions to any problem you are having -- but you will never know the whole forest. BASIC feels like you "know" it after a day or two of playing around, evidently.