I see how one might believe that “the purpose of a system is what it does”, and I see how one might believe that the “spirit of the law” is a coherent concept that everyone understands, but I have to say I don’t see how one could believe both at once.
TIL that “lorem ipsum” is the corruption of pain itself.
Lorem ipsum is typically a corrupted version of De finibus bonorum et malorum, a 1st-century BC text by the Roman statesman and philosopher Cicero, with words altered, added, and removed to make it nonsensical and improper Latin. The first two words themselves are a truncation of dolorem ipsum (“pain itself”).
Coordinated Lunar Time
Wednesday, June 19, 2024
In April, the White House released a memo on a standard for lunar time (PDF). I hope it is not too late to save the country from a terrible mistake: abbreviating this standard as “LTC”.
“LTC” is a jumbled initialism for Coordinated Lunar Time, patterned after “UTC” as a jumbled initialism for Coordinated Universal Time. But why jumble the initialisms? The UTC Wikipedia page quotes a paper which says:
In 1967 the CCIR adopted the names Coordinated Universal Time and Temps Universel Coordonné for the English and French names with the acronym UTC to be used in both languages. The name “Coordinated Universal Time (UTC)” was approved by a resolution of IAU Commissions 4 and 31 at the 13th General Assembly in 1967 (Trans. IAU, 1968).
It’s bad enough that Earth’s coordinated time is abbreviated in a cut-the-baby compromise with the French, but at least the French are actually on Earth. Lunar time should be decided in a symposium on the moon itself. If you want your voice heard, you should have to land there.
Quoting, Raymond Chen
Tuesday, June 18, 2024
A colleague told a story of how he once broke the entire Office division’s ability to check in code because he accidentally checked in a syntax error to the script that is used to verify that your proposed change has satisfied all the pre-submit requirements such as passing static analysis and unit testing.
…
The error was caused by smart quotes being used by mistake instead of straight quotes. He doesn’t know how they snuck in, and the two styles of quotation marks were sufficiently similar that it eluded everyone’s notice.
I’ve never worked at Microsoft and can only guess how they might have snuck in… and my guess is that they came in by copying/pasting code from MSDN Blogs, which for years seemed to auto convert straight quotes to smart quotes and double dashes to em dashes.
In that era, only a few MSDN bloggers were nice enough to wrap their code in <pre> tags, and it’s not clear to me that the CMS even supported syntax highlighting. We’ve got it pretty good today, is what I’m trying to say.
Food tracking
Tuesday, June 4, 2024
Perhaps a weird way to put it, but it’s accurate to say that I’ve been enjoying tracking my food intake for the past 6 months. I’ve been tracking exercise for longer, and I started tracking food too when I realized I was mentally reaching for my phone after meals to record the data - I wanted to have a record of how I was doing.
I use MacroFactor, which is thoughtfully designed to do the job and get out of your way. I expected tracking to feel bad, but that mostly hasn’t happened. I set an agreement with myself that I can eat and drink whatever I want as long as I track it accurately, which has been freeing, but also has highlighted food that I wouldn’t have enjoyed enough to be worth its calories.
It has helped to track some positive things too: I’m trying to get a good macro balance of protein/carbs/fat, and in particular eat more protein than I would naturally; I’m not just trying to avoid junk food.
Some things I learned:
- I tend to eat more fat than my targets but often fewer carbs; I expected the reverse
- Alcohol is even higher calorie than I realized, but more insidiously, I am much hungrier on days I drink than days I don’t (I still enjoy a drink most days)
- 100cal of protein feels much more satisfying than 100cal of either carbs or fat when I’m hungry between meals
If you see something strange, say something strange
Just beat my move goal while sitting at a restaurant eating spicy food
Something else I noticed after updating to Sonoma: although I’ve tried many times in the past to extinguish it, the text replacement omw has once again returned, almost like a cicada.
Realized since having a baby why YouTube face is so annoying: it’s an exaggerated face we make for babies. It’s like the baby talk of facial expressions. YouTube face in non-baby contexts is like listening to an obsequious couple in the next booth baby-talking to each other.
Cool thought experiment
Whenever I think about Kerberos I think about the frequent time I spent at Barnes and Noble in high school, sitting on the floor of the computer books section, reading everything I could about Unix, trying hard to understand Kerberos and many other things
I’m not trying to make everyone mad, but I gotta say, an Alpine Linux that used systemd for everything would solve a lot of problems for me.
- Claws: sharpened
- Chitin: waxed
- Splines: reticulated
- Glands: excreting
👹
Patterns
My favorite math scratchpad app Soulver is available on iPhone again - way nicer than a spreadsheet for simple algebra, especially on a phone
I really wish they would like, put a murderous dictator in charge of HDMI (and all) versioning. if you do not stamp the version number on the cables in a way that can be read after it’s been in my garage for 50 years, you get dropped in the piranha tank
Quoting Ryan Tomayko on how many levels of headers you really need in your documents:
Remember that Feynman covered all of physics – heavenly bodies through QED – with only two levels of document hierarchy (The Feynman Lectures on Physics, 1970).
Operating system feature wish: userspace programmable files
Wednesday, July 12, 2023
I frequently find myself wishing for the ability to really treat the filesystem as an API. Imagine a file that:
- returns the current date/time in a certain format when it is read
- transparently download binaries from github and assemble them into .deb/.rpm/.apk packages
- … maybe more
I am aware the FUSE and plan9 exist, however, I’m imagining something easier. Imagine if a file could run a shell script, interpreted program, or compiled binary on read/write! It would be so powerful.
UGC privatization could improve AI models
Monday, July 3, 2023
An off the cuff idea:
AI training on public data is driving privatization of user-generated content (eg Reddit API). This could push users with a real need for the information who today rely on public google search to build private archives. For instance, keeping a copy of the most insightful StackExchange answers that help you do your job.
If that happens, AI companies that figure out how to ingest private archives will have a training advantage, even if doing so is a gray area legally, as training based on sci-hub was for modern models.
It might even mean that the quality of the training goes up even as the amount of publicly available UGC goes down, since the private archives are curated by humans, and curation is a quality signal.
Browsers need better account primitives
Wednesday, June 14, 2023
Michał Sapka notes that PhpBB is a good way to create a small community. I’d like this to be true, but I think this makes the barrier to entry too high for normie participation.
I think part of the reason Reddit has been so successful is that website account creation is such a chore. If every subreddit required a separate account, would they have a tenth of their users? A hundredth? Less?
Currently if you’re a small blog or community and want to provide persistent identity for commenting/forums, you need to allow some subset of account creation with email and integration with identity providers like Apple, Google, Github, etc. But you can’t reasonably offer all of them, because there are too many! It’s a front end design problem: do you want commenting on your blog to require searching through the list of all possible identity providers? Sounds very 2007.
And email as the identity manager is just awful: not only do you have to share a password or use a password manager, but you have wait for the site to send you an email and click a link before your account can be set up.
What if the browser stored a user’s preference for identity provider? Support everyone, let the browser prompt the user to log in with the one they already selected. No overdramatic interstitial “WARNING: THIS WILL ALLOW THE WEBSITE example.com READ ONLY ACCESS TO YOUR: PUBLIC PROFILE” (the user already accepted it), no email link.
It’s also unphishable, as it happens in browser chrome.
I am seeing more and more bad hyphenation recently, this is just so sad :(
