macrael

9 ms·

61.
by macrael 4y ago
I recommend reading these comments! they are so heartwarming
62.
by macrael 4y ago
I love seeing the interplay of story and mechanics, the game started as an idea for a mechanic mostly, with a little bit of story on top. When that mechanic wasn't enough, asking questions about the story led to new mechanics. Obra Din
63.
by macrael 4y ago
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. As far as I can tell, the whole idea of LLM consciousness being a world-wide threat is just something that the hyper-rationalists have convinced each other of. They obviously think it is
64.
by macrael 4y ago
I've found I don't miss the ability to carefully align stuff outside of the initial indentation. I actually use a slightly modified Avenir that prints a wider space if it's the first thing in a line, making the indentation st
65.
by macrael 4y ago
I don't know why this gets me so hot but you really don't need to be using a monospaced font for code anymore. Monospaced fonts are an abomination created because it made programming early terminals easier, we've long since o
66.
by macrael 4y ago
Is there a link to a complete list of images of the paintings? This site only has a few dozen.
67.
by macrael 4y ago
I've been storing some document data in my app in a protobuf in part because I thought protobuf's support for an evolving schema would help with this data aging gracefully over time. But protobufs in js are worse than I thought th
68.
by macrael 4y ago
The trouble with throwing is that the compiler doesn't care if you catch. For any library that throws, I wrap that up in my adaptor layer with try catch and then return an Error upwards. That way in the rest of my domain I've got
69.
by macrael 4y ago
that makes sense, and I like the simplicity of `if (err)`. I'm sure it's uncommon but you still lose the compiler check if the function can return null as a matter of course.
70.
by macrael 4y ago
It's all tradeoffs. For me, not having to deal with passing state past a trailing try/catch clause and not worrying about errors potentially bubbling out of one layer into another are worth the extra "if (res instanceof Error
71.
by macrael 4y ago
It's honestly great. I also have done a fair amount of go (and before that a decent amount of objc) and it feels in the same vein as both of those but with some nice additional compiler helpers.
72.
by macrael 4y ago
But this way you are losing the type checker yelling at you if you try and use response without having handled error. What I like about res = something(): Thing | Error is I have to do if (res instanceof Error) { handle
73.
by macrael 4y ago
yet another reason I try and avoid throwing/rejecting promises in typescript code and just return `Thing | Error` everywhere. I'm sure there's something fancier I could get out of using a full Result type but this gets me a c
74.
by macrael 4y ago
I'm getting nothing but I thought that was the joke
75.
by macrael 4y ago
What makes Temporal a "workflow engine" rather than a background job runner? I think I used Active Job or its like a career ago in rails. The docs on Temporal are showing me retries and storing results of the job. That does seem u
76.
by macrael 4y ago
I highly recommend this old DFW essay about the 79th best tennis player on earth in '95. Big discontinuous jumps in ability exist in many sports. https://www.esquire.com/sports/a5151/the-string-theory-david...
77.
by macrael 4y ago
it's both!
78.
by macrael 4y ago
I would love to see a serious take on a variable width coding font. I have a friend who made some edits to Avenir for me, making the minus as wide as the plus and making spaces that come at the beginning of a line wider to make space-indent
79.
by macrael 4y ago
The one that bugs my friend the most is that the minus is a totally different width from the plus in most variable width fonts. Personally I have not found this to be a big problem. Brackets are visible enough and indentation is the main wa
80.
by macrael 4y ago
Since we read code more than we write code, I highly suggest you try out a variable width font in your editor. I've been using a slightly tweaked Avenir for years and I love it. Fixed width fonts were a hack to make displaying code on
81.
by macrael 4y ago
I did volunteer search and rescue for a bit and people were split on weather dogs were even useful in that context either. Some people thought they were indispensable and some thought they were useless.
82.
by macrael 4y ago
I use alarms instead of timers for most things because of snooze. For stuff like laundry, this is critical to me because I often will turn off a timer's alert thinking "I'll get to this in a minute" but without snooze I
83.
by macrael 4y ago
A beautiful piece, thank you. But this is more about him prioritizing family over his book. It must have been on a podcast I remember him talking about how he kind of had a crisis of faith over running 43folders and stopped doing little &qu
84.
by macrael 4y ago
I can't find an online article where Merlin Mann discusses this but I remember very vividly him talking about why he stopped posting on 43Folders.com a decade ago. 43Folders was a GTD productivity porn site and after while Merlin decid
85.
by macrael 4y ago
So, the progression I like that got me where I am on this, ultimately silly, exercise goes like this: 1. The trolly problem, 5 v 1 with a lever. 2. The roller skater: There's a trolly that's going to run over 5 people. Someone is
86.
by macrael 4y ago
If pulling the lever is going to kill someone, I never pull it. The only hard one is if pulling it will save my own life, I probably would in that case but it would be wrong. Pulling the lever makes you a murderer instead of a bystander.
87.
by macrael 5y ago
Ooh, I'll check that out. I've also experimented with Flotato
88.
by macrael 5y ago
I have never spent much time on Windows machines but I _love_ cmd-` on the Mac. I mean, I have a whole rant about how its ordering behavior changed on Lion for the worse but I love having windows grouped by application and picking the app I
89.
by macrael 5y ago
I would argue that maps are the killer app for phones, this phone having a garbage map app is a death knell.
90.
by macrael 5y ago
Anyone have good examples of proportional width fonts that have coding focused changes, like well differentiated 0/O and I/l and or coding ligatures? I've been really happy just using Avenir for coding for the last 10 years o

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