@kev · textlog

Textlog for me is a meditation to slow down. It somehow nudges me towards working on my penmanship.

Only images of handwriting allowed? I share this sentiment about textlog entirely. All my other social feeds are so "information" dense and distracting.

playtested my game at an event last night. so much fun to see people curiously prod at mysteries i constructed, and stubbornly battle its challenges. oh no i might actually have to finish this one

Awesome! I'm reading right now and you've captured the vibe.

ah nice, i’ll have to check that one out is it a fun read?

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I’m enjoying it. tbh I never played the game, but his journal entries are a fun view into the mind, insecurities and all, of someone building something they’re excited about.

anybody got some recent software recommendations that you cant live without anymore?

uBlock Origin on Mozilla Firefox

as well as rethink DNS on mobile

zed; macOS's freeform (surprisingly)

I’m not supposed to take that literally of course, but I don’t think software has such an important role in our lives, for most of us. Water, food, air. Those you can’t live without. When it comes to software, I spend most of my workdays in the shell (vim, git, grep,…) and if $place allows in mutt+weechat (although that’s mostly outlook and teams). Nothing particularly new!

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Nextcloud with Files, Talk, Calendar, Memories and more is damn useful for family life though 🙂

mise-en-place

not devenv with nix?

Personally, mise is more "try in hurry" compatible. So it stuck. I have tried devenv as it seems to greatly simplify the setup. However, I had to get something done in a hurry. Tried devenv (which I installed around the time they launched) and got stuck with a load of outdated nix IIRC. So I also gave a quick try with mise, got started with fnox and it was considerably easier to get going.

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considering the replies, i think the "recent" flag got overlooked

Which do you think is ?

Microservices. Not really programming, as this is more on the architectural level. Microservices is a valid approach when you need to address massive scale. The thing is, I have seen it applied to things that could realistically serve its audience in a handful of modest servers with a less fashionable approach. It was done under the guise of simplification; each individual microservice was in fact very small. But this at the cost of absolute spaghetti architecture.

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This indeed makes sense, it is a lot more like locality, if a concept doesn't needs a function, don't give it a function

Private variables.

Clean Code

I had so much pointless discussions about this ... but when you say "Clean Code" , do you mean the book or the general idea that such a thing exists?

The book, but actually ideas, like tiny functions and names. Aposd is much deeper book. Hilarious read

I assume this is not original at all at this point - but (extreme) DRY is not a good practice. My experience is that a bit of copying yourself and your colleagues in the code base often make maintenance of the code base easier.

Many have adopted the term WET (write everything twice)

Getters and setters for everything. Certainly, if you want an object to be doing more than just getting and setting a value right now, get them in there! Planning to add functionality later without breaking code? Stop it! That should break code! If I'm consuming a library and have been using this setter method for 2 years, I don't want it to suddenly introduce brand new validation, caching, or logging behavior!

Are getters and setters on everything even considered a good practice? To me it screams junior developer who hasn’t yet fully understood encapsulation and abstraction — if you’re just exposing getters and setters as the interface then what is the class/module/etc providing beyond what a standard variable does…?

created a poll:

Can you learn programming by building with AI?

Better than before5%

About the same0%

Worse than before55%

Depends how you use it40%

20 voted

If programming is the typing of characters into a text file, it is way worse. I think the key to learning is still doing it rather than reading it. If the question is about system design I think you can, but only if you curious and it becomes a problem that needs to be solved. Asking "What do you think" is one of my favorite questions to learn at the moment.

I do think there will be what were hard earned lessons about system design, code smell, designing data structures for the hardware you're running on, concurrency golden paths, etc., which are now with agentic dev even harder to learn and internalize. But also if you have an excellent teacher in the form of an actually-good model pair programming with you always, maybe not? Maybe a pair programming AI programming tutor would be a good Zed/vscode extension. Or product.

work week is finally over. time to over this long (US) weekend

What you playing? My recent was Mina the Hollower—intricate, dense, demanding. Bangers on the soundtrack. Good stuff.

ive been making my way through monster hunter world's iceborne expansion. lots of fun mina the hollower is near the top of my list to play soon, have fun!

Hitting a workout streak. I started using ladder app and have been consistent for the last two weeks. Three years ago I was 75 lbs heavier. Now trying to build muscle. Sitting and staring at a screen all day… I did that a bit too much ;)

Nice work! Working out, once I got into it, was always the fun part. Eating healthy remains a challenge...

Thanks . I find cooking myself to be the biggest help. And not buying those sweeeeeets

This message was hidden with a possible self harm warn banner. (Better safe than sorry, I guess). Cheers on the positive change BTW!

Congrats! New habits are tough to form, wishing you success in keeping bad weight off and putting some muscle on!

Thanks

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good work

I need to start working out, I’m so weak sigh!

At a philosophical level, can we have nice things?

in before 101 takes: are "nice" things only nice in contrast? can "we" have them equitably without energy abundance? in a universe with heat death? can we "have" things at all?

I want this expanded and enacted by one of those guys doing Jordan Peterson impersonations :D

And kermit the frog sardonically

I think yes, but precisely NOT "at a philosophical level". You can have it only if you get your hands dirty and build it yourself. I think already proved this, just as a close example.

entropy says no

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If speaking on a philosophical level, then first we have to ask: what’s “nice” and what’s “to have” 👀

If you consider what you have nice, you can have nice things. If your expectations to your surroundings are very very low, you will be amazed with all the nice things you get from people you meet through your day. My personal approach.

Writing. I want to do it, very badly. I just don't want to be bad at it. You have to be bad at it in order to get good at it. But... Catch 22 isn't it?

I think reading helps quite a bit, especially writing about what you’ve read, even to yourself, just so you can go through the process of having to explain something that you’re only recently familiar with. There’s something about that process that seems to be helpful, at least to me.

Same. The way I consume information influences how I think. Short form content makes my thinking fragmented without a clear structure. I feel that fragmented thinking won't lead to convincing writing. And I'm trying to regain some of that lost control.

Very interesting! I think something along those lines might be happening for me too. Another aspect, always cooking in the back of my mind, "if you can't explain it well, don't explain it at all."

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The fear of being bad at it is the only thing holding you back. I experienced something like that with playing music with others. Perhaps you could learn to lay down your critical brain during the creation process and that good/bad isn't a useful distinction until later when you're editing your work.

Yeah, this is pretty much what I can't do. My critical brain has a lot of power. It's very evolved at this point :/

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.

The vast majority of the time I prefer silence. Unlike , my gets distracted with music. When I do listen to music, it has to be no vocals. I find , like Jonn Serrie, Brian Eno, and Steve Roach best for me.

I've never heard the term Space music but I am intrigued. I'll definitely check it out

Awesome! Let me know what you think!

Man this was so up my alley. Thank you for these recommendations, several of these tunes have gone straight in on my "WUBRG Goodstuff" playlist

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

I can recommend rainwave.cc if you want an online radio for video game music. I tend to hang around there quite often and listen to their chiptune station.

listening to a lot of Tunic soundtrack atm

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depends on my mood and inner state sometimes just silence sometimes background from mynoise .net sometimes a punk rock web radio sometimes my music collection (I stream myself, that's right). mostly punk rock again. very occasional let YouTube run starting from something I like

been using blanket recently, storm+wind

Waiting for an original thought to pass me by.

I've been waiting for 40 years.

Many pass by me. All combined aren’t worth $0.02. 😅

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They only come when you're not waiting for them!

Nourish your heaf with creative thoughts and originality will happen on it's own. And don't be too hard on yourself, there's hardly anything new under the sun, the joy is in discovering things yourself :)

What is your favorite way to brew?

94c water, pour over, generous amounts of beans, a little warmed milk. For me it's the best flavor!

Brikka. Someone on HN mentioned it as great design. I looked it up and bought it after a while. It's been such a delight. Even the occasional brew gone wrong adds to the experience. v60 is also nice when I need it to slow down or be the experience a bit meditative. But Chinese tea is the best for that.

AeroPress, though my deafault is an Americano from our espresso machine. Unfortunately, we lose the nuances from each bean.

French press or pourover v60

Cafetière.

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i just get lazier and lazier over time. now it is a portafilter espresso machine, DeLonghi Dedicated, along with a separate grinder, Baratza Encore. what I love is try out regional types of coffee, but this then always outside, and on travels.

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