The CPU malloceth, and the CPU freeeth, according to the divine Program. And lo, the virtuous array shall enter into the ofstream and be saved, while the wicked shall be dereferenced for ever.

I’d expand on your last thought to say that all art is a compression tool for meaning. Got an idea in your head you want to communicate? You’ve got your body and your environment to work with, good luck. Words, images, dance, sculpture, they’re all noisy channels we use to try and get information from one brain to another.

I think if we’re ever going to find an answer to “Why does the universe exist?” I think one of the steps along the way will be providing a concrete answer to the simulation hypothesis. Obviously if the answer is “yes, it’s a simulation and we can demonstrate as much” then the next question becomes “OK so who or what is running the simulation and why does that exist?” which, great, now we know a little bit more about the multiverse and can keep on learning new stuff about it.

Alternatively, if the answer is “no, this universe and the rules that govern it are the foundational elements of reality” then… well, why this? why did the big bang happen? why does it keep expanding like that? Maybe we will find explanations for all of that that preclude a higher-level simulation, and if we do, great, now we know a little bit more about the universe and can keep on learning new stuff about it.

Yes, kind of, but I don’t think that’s necessarily a point against it. “Why are we here? / Why is the universe here?” is one of the big interesting questions that still doesn’t have a good answer, and I think thinking about possible answers to the big questions is one of the ways we push the envelope of what we do know. This particular paper seems like a not-that-interesting result using our current known-to-be-incomplete understanding of quantum gravity, and the claim that it somehow “disproves” the simulation hypothesis is some rank unscientific nonsense that IMO really shouldn’t have been accepted by a scientific journal, but I think the question it poorly attempts to answer is an interesting one.

Thanks! it’s probably not the best tool, but it’s one I’m familiar with. I love diving into commit histories and reading what developers say in their commits (especially giant corporate private projects where they’re so sure no one will ever read them… I read them 👻) and I really wish I could look at, to pick one at random, Tolkien’s commit history and see how the work evolved over time. Of course we have his diaries but there’s something very specific and personal about seeing a specific change to a line, or a word, that I’ve seen in code and wish I could see in other written media. That’s what I want to capture with my writing. If I ever do publish a book of poetry or short fiction (or a novel, assuming I ever finish one 😓) I imagine I’ll cut a release branch for posterity and keep editing them if I so desire, but that decision feels like a long way off.

Long-term, I want to write a tool for collaborative storytelling that incorporates a VCS like git but in a way that’s a lot more accessible to writers who aren’t also developers. git is a cool tool but it’s intimidating for non-devs and with good reason. Part of what I’m doing is figuring out a workflow that works for me, and then maybe I’ll build an editor that makes that workflow easier.

I want to give Obsidian a real try. I have seen it around but never used it, because it seems really complicated to operate and I haven’t felt like I have the brainpower to really get my head around it, but it looks interesting. Do you use the concept graph and all the other stuff or do you use it more as a plain old editor?

the realpolitik is in Corrections

IME:

I like using commit messages as a a little built-in editor’s log; I’m hopeful that in time I’ll be able to review the history on a particular poem and see something interesting about the types of edits or editorial choices I make over time. I have a really hard time writing good commit messages for poetry as opposed to code, a lot of the times it’s “changed word choice in XXX” or something like that but I want to improve on that. Not really sure what a “good” poetry commit message is but I figure I’ll know it when I see it. Or maybe I’ll just see a natural trend as my writing matures. But now that the poems are in git, git is part of the medium and the commits are part of the art, and I want to be thoughtful about them. I’ve always wanted to see the commit history for novels I’ve read and, if I ever publish my own work (and if I’m brave enough) I want to publish my git repo alongside the finished work.

Do you use the LibreOffice GUI to edit the documents? if so can you diff in the editor or do you use something else? LO feels heavy for what I’m doing but if it has an easy path to diff the current text with the current commit and/or review the document’s git history… that would be cool.

I have yet to ascend to the plane of full-time CLI editor use, at least for writing natural language I’m still hooked on the GUI for two reasons: one, I’m still faster at using the mouse to seek to where I want to start an edit, and two, I like visually diffing the current section of whatever I’m editing with previous versions. The former I know I could be faster if I practiced at it because I’ve seen people blaze through edits in vim, the latter I’m not sure how I would accomplish in vim.

That’s fair. I’m generally in favor of automating cars given how horrifically bad humans are at operating them, I just don’t trust the free market to decide how low the odds need to be before the button can be put on the market.

Someone offers you a button. If you push it, you get a driverless taxi ride for $20 but there’s a small chance that a random person in your city dies. Do you push the button?

I haven’t used Sublime in years, might give it another go. my source is all .md files even though hardly any of them have any markdown formatting besides the occasional bulleted list, but I like having the option to do some light formatting if I want. I think what I’ll most likely do is find (or in the most dire case, make) plugins for whatever editor I land on to make writing easier. The problem I tend to face is that most editors have too many features and options and they are built for a slightly different purpose (writing code vs writing prose) which makes them just different enough to be irritating.

That’s exactly the sentence that made me pause. I could hook up an implementation of Conway’s Game of Life to a Geiger counter near a radioisotope that randomly flipped squares based on detection events, and I think I’d have a non-algorithmic simulated universe. And I doubt any observer in that universe would be able to construct a coherent theory about why some squares seemingly randomly flip using only their own observations; you’d need to understand the underlying mechanics of the universe’s implementation, how radioactive decay works for one, and those just wouldn’t be available in-universe, the concept itself is inaccessible.

Makes me question the editors if the abstract can get away with that kind of claim. I’ve never heard of the Journal of Holography Applications in Physics, maybe they’re just eager for splashy papers.

Ah, so the differing spin (and mass) of the merging black holes they just detected indicate that at least one of them was already a second generation black hole, and is evidence for multi-generation hierarchical mergers. That makes sense.

I’m so puzzled by this insistence that all who analyze religious history must be religious nutcases. Even if you write off all the scholars who are religious, religion still exists as a concept in the world, and in the same way you don’t have to be a virus to study virology, you don’t have to be religious to study religion. There are plenty of atheists who are deeply interested in religion, if for no other reason than the massive impact it has on all our lives.

I went to catholic school, most of the students’ families had at least tuition money. I was one of the “need-based scholarship” kids so my tuition was less, and I had a job so I had some income, which I used mostly for gas to get to and from my job and most of the rest went to tuition. Fines were added to the tuition bill, and if you hadn’t settled up by the beginning of the next year / graduation, you couldn’t re-enroll / graduate.

I guess. In high school I had a job, so I was very careful not to get fined because it would be coming out of my pocket. Still got busted for uniform violations a couple of times but I learned quick how not to get caught. If I didn’t have money I would have had to ask my parents, which in its own way was more costly than just paying it myself.

A poor architect blames their tools. Serverless is an option among many, and it’s good for occasional atomic workloads. And, like many hot new things, it’s built with huge customers in mind and sold to everyone else who wants to be the next huge customer. It’s the architect’s job to determine whether functions are fit for their purposes. Also,

Here’s the fundamental problem with serverless: it forces you into a request-response model that most real applications outgrew years ago.

IDK what they consider a “real” application but plenty of software still operates this way and it works just fine. If you need a lot of background work, or low latency responses, or scheduled tasks or whatever then use something else that suits your needs, it doesn’t all have to be functions all the time.

And if you have a higher-up that got stars in their eyes and mandated a switch to serverless, you have my pity. But if you run a dairy and you switch from cows to horses, don’t blame the horses when you can’t get milk.