Any conversation

work has been dreadful recently. spending so much time on processes and in meetings :(

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.

hey textlog! first few days of a new online community always feel magical. hope the magic persists here for a long time

hi ! welcome :) it does feel magical, i hope it persists as well. Thank you for the wishes.

this will be the platform that fixes me

With each passing workday I spend agentsitting, my ability to program in isolation atrophies. This might be dismissed as needless self-serving anxiety, but perhaps irrationally, I can't let it go.

Judgement, taste and quality were always precious skills. In the world of , I have become more aware of the fact that it is often hard to put in words why something is good, great or amazing - or just looks good, but is average. A lot of the professional content I see feels like most Netflix series. They have all the elements - but the overall experience is still meh. Quality is still hard to achieve.

Was prompting Claude via remote control on my phone in btwn sets at the gym this morning. I use , so my wife kept hearing a StarCraft SCV periodically reporting "job's finished" from my office 😆

I am so terrified of Claude code. I use the chat and copy paste stuff myself 😭😭😭

Trying to jump back into project work while my kids are still home before school starts on Wednesday 🫠

Anyone like James Michener?

How did all the tech oligarchs seem to go fash so quickly?

I am trying to wrap my head around Traefik (which I have never used; have only used Caddy for most of my needs) to plan a migration for things I now run on "bare metal” to containers, and then use Traefik as entry point. If you know some good guides, send the link my way, please.

对于整个互联网历史，我可说基本上是一个旁观者，我一直在消费内容，但是没有生产过什么内容，互联网上没有我的痕迹，这是意外后果，因为中国的身份和内容政策

Regarding the entire history of the internet, I can say I've been largely an observer. I've always consumed content, but I haven't produced any. There's no trace of me on the internet, which is an unforeseen consequence due to China's identity and content policies.

我不太明白中国的“防火长城”是怎么运作的。比如说，你到底是怎么访问这个网站的？（我是在通过翻译软件和你交流。）

I don't quite understand how China's "Great Firewall" works. For example, how exactly did you access this website? (I'm communicating with you through translation software.)

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Hmm, its a ticking time bomb then.... what do you need to say and need help with?

If anyone can give me a ProtonMail or Tutanota email account, I would be extremely grateful. I have no way to receive verification codes.

You can send it to the temporary email: sl5n215ahf@lnovic.com, thanks

I've received it. Unfortunately, I'm in China and can't access ProtonMail, but I still want to say thank you very much.

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As a homeless person without an ID, I don't have any way to pay for a VPN. Also, using a VPN to access the internet in China without government permission is illegal.

Bad people are working together to enrich themselves and slave others into rat races. Good people need to start working together too.

Good people are always more, if more affraid of things. Bad people, unfortunately, is more willing to make harm, hence why they keep the upper hand. To support eachother is the minimum we need to move forward, and so long this doesn't happen things will remain the same. A revolution, as they say, doesn't happen with a single person, we need the mayority to join.

"we need the majority to join" - this is a very interesting point; actually we only need 3,5% 👌 Erica Chenoweth from Harvard found this from their research with Maria J. Stephan, and wrote the book "Why Civil Resistance Works". They also found that nonviolent resistance is more often successful than the violent ones. Very interesting stuff.

Anyone here using NixOS? How long did it take for you to learn it and completely set it up? My current distro is Arch (btw)

What's happening

Happiness is having just enough hot water in my espresso to extend the experience without diluting it overmuch.

Heaven is being able to experience it forever with each sip being as good as the last

Applied to an L5 software engineering role via e-mail and without any other contact I received back a bunch of questions that clearly look like they're aimed at L6 or even L7. Not sure what to do with that so I withdrew. Briefly considered answering them but was weirded out.

Do you code in silence or do you listen to music? If so, what kind of music do you prefer? Personally, I prefer Synthwave, vaporwave or the occasional country.

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good videogame music is often my coding sweet spot--no lyrics, something familiar

Occasionally silence if I forget to turn on music. Otherwise, death grips and a curated EDM playlist are on rotate. It keeps me moving fast. But also Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians albums go hard for long session, distraction-free music

Often silence, for me. I could create a (narrow) bell curve of problems where I listen to music. If I'm doing light enough work then I don't tend to listen to music, probably just out of habit - but as I approach problems of a certain complexity then I do prefer music. I just find that complexity band is narrow and past it I need to turn off the music. I would like to widen my music band. My preference is usually ambient - I like Gaussian curve and Hiroshi Yoshimura

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Depends a bit, occasionally silence, normally punk rock.