mntmoss

20 ms·

121.
by mntmoss 7y ago
It's hard to describe what California is now only in terms of the politics. Despite everything, the state has enjoyed a strong economy for many years, and that results in the symptoms of transcience: so many people enter the state to
122.
by mntmoss 7y ago
I do find types helpful in smoke testing greenfield code where it needs to deal with structured data and references. But definitely the more complex approaches to typing have sharply diminishing returns. The static invariants I start carin
123.
by mntmoss 7y ago
I was recently doing some language evaluation for rewriting an existing system in Go to improve its cross-platform compatibility. One of the things I realized in this exercise was that "compiles to C" was a powerful feature - not
124.
by mntmoss 7y ago
I took a storytelling class recently and the book we used as a text, "Storytelling and the art of Imagination" (Nancy Mellon) has some sound advice for using stories for healing purposes. I find it rather powerful as a way of exte
125.
by mntmoss 7y ago
My experience specifically with SFUSD math tracking, a good 15 years back, was that it was rigid and caused as many problems as it solved. Specifically, I had a parent that really, really wanted me to do honors math because my older brother
126.
by mntmoss 7y ago
A strange thought process. If you wanted Unix on not-Apple, a Linux desktop remains the more reasonable option(sub the perpetual caveat of having to vet the hardware for compatability). And my first inclination would be to see how things go
127.
by mntmoss 7y ago
One of the "points" of having kids, if there is any, is that you can impose on them, in some limited degree, the future you want to see. Now, of course, they graduate and move out and then the real world starts repeatedly smacki
128.
by mntmoss 7y ago
I agree with the ironic sentiment. We've pushed up the complexity of a lot of features because we can, not because the value is there. Unicode itself is a great example of such: it's a dumping ground for "everything that rese
129.
by mntmoss 7y ago
I am pretty sure it's a joke played so deadpan that I hate it.
130.
by mntmoss 7y ago
The "generic" one is necessarily a UI to the device, not the actual device, because there's always some kind of special casing or variation in an abstract property like that. Having the UI is of benefit when it serves as a bu
131.
by mntmoss 7y ago
Having fallen into that thinking, at some point a few years back I realized that I was selling myself short by thinking that I should behave "like a normal user". And now I combat it with a secondary mindset of training some actio
132.
by mntmoss 7y ago
The genius of Microsoft is in the long-term thinking. The individual products are easily critiqued. Their planning often mistimes stuff or gets caught out by new developments, and they play a lot of hardball to get where they want to go (wh
133.
by mntmoss 7y ago
I think the main error I see when developers try to create a lot of docs, vs the most common "uniformly underdocument", is to get twisted in a pretzel over what point or detail to include when, eventually splattering all of it in
134.
by mntmoss 7y ago
IRV produces a direct improvement in the politics in that it promotes coalition-building among minor candidates to defeat better-equipped competition: "vote for me and for this guy too". That means that instead of everyone running
135.
by mntmoss 7y ago
I call it the method of creating self-feedback. Everyone starts off by using hunches, "taste", and the opinion of the crowd or authorities. But to get beyond that - and getting beyond playtesting, data-collection and other brute f
136.
by mntmoss 7y ago
With respect to the current US political situation, a good deal of it can be traced back to the last major upheavals of the late 1960's to early 1970's. The preordained approach to and discourse around economics, race/ethnici
137.
by mntmoss 7y ago
The nice part is that, in fact, you can ignore most of it unless you are explicitly aiming to reproduce and capture elements of older works. If you are composing new work, you never really have to learn theory, but a few of the most popular
138.
by mntmoss 7y ago
Also my sentiment. Good fictional storytelling describes the corners and in-betweens of human experience; non-fiction typically describes a mix of technical tools(basically trade skills and weaponizable knowledge) and self-promotion(the bo
139.
by mntmoss 7y ago
I think the essential thing about this era is a gradual cultural rediscovery of ownership. We've just been through a very lengthy race to the bottom for all sorts of information - pretty much anything ephemeral and disposable is free o
140.
by mntmoss 7y ago
The admonitions about giving dogs bones derive from fast eaters tending to choke on them - not the bone's nutrition. (Although it would not surprise me if somehow the idea has gotten corrupted)
141.
by mntmoss 7y ago
A lot of art derives value from craft, but when craft is systematized, it becomes product design and targeted towards consumers instead. Demoscene folks have often crossed over to the industrial side of computer graphics and gaming. A good
142.
by mntmoss 7y ago
Just the other day someone brought their dog in for coworking. Most dogs, if you give them your palm they will sniff and lick at it and it will be cute. But this was a timberwolf-husky breed and he got SO excited at my hand that he quickly
143.
by mntmoss 7y ago
I have to agree. I haven't found major improvements in projects/life goals via higher quantities of data capture, but I have found them through better-tuned filters, queuing and signalling. With respect to stuckness, I have a kin
144.
by mntmoss 7y ago
City of San Francisco is one of the exceptional ones since it secured the best water from Hetch-Hetchy many generations ago, and the worst that is likely to ever happen is bad pipes, and possibly contaminants in the specific areas that saw
145.
by mntmoss 7y ago
"What gets measured gets improved." It's short-termism, which is a common threat to society at large. Think of cities that build in sites vulnerable to earthquakes or floods, for example. After the event hits, everyone says,
146.
by mntmoss 7y ago
There's definitely a multipurpose aspect to a lot of older martial arts styles, where they are no longer tested for their fitness in most practical senses, and so the form gradually degrades into purely being sport or performance. But
147.
by mntmoss 7y ago
Electric improves the flexibility of BRT, for one - you can run buses underground with lower ventilation requirements and without running overhead cables. Extrapolate "better BRT" to whole highways and dedicated streets running a
148.
by mntmoss 7y ago
One of the simplest options is also the cheapest - just get a Casio toy keyboard. You wouldn't get those for the sound quality, but if you opt to run one through a multi-FX pedal you can achieve a pretty sizable lo-fi tonal palette in
149.
by mntmoss 7y ago
I think the trick to getting FM into a better UX would be to apply more computation to it to identify ahead of time which parameters and ranges will produce dramatic variation from a given starting point, and so reduce the programming to a
150.
by mntmoss 7y ago
The semantics matter. A lot of game engines use a mark-and-release per-frame allocation buffer. It is temporary throwaway data for that frame's computation. It does not get tracked or freed piecemeal - it gets blown away. Garbage colle

More ›