Activity Log
hackers.town: 2024-09-23 Mon 06:59
@thegibson my parsing of this matches my current opinion about Monday.
I may feel better after caffeine.
hackers.town: 2024-09-23 Mon 07:20
A long time ago I wrote a text templating library in Ruby (v1.6). All it had was variables, looping, branching, and drilling into an object. A dozen method aliases for the verbs my brain kept reaching for when using it, but no other meta-programming because I felt that was overkill. I wanted it focused and friendly.
I wrote tests. I shared it.
A while later somebody out there shared a note that my already-forgotten (thank you pre-diagnosis ADHD) Ruby 1.6 library beat a bunch of templating libraries, including C-based, in a benchmark. This shocked me. I couldn’t and still can’t recognize or tell you the best optimization algorithms.
Speed wasn’t a goal. Clarity was.
I still think about that when folks talk about virtues of various language features that are there for authors of code instead of their users. DSLs, meta-programming, heck even types. All very nice and often useful, but less important than staying focused.
An ironic lesson to be coming from this brain.
hackers.town: 2024-09-23 Mon 07:39
oh I fib a little about optimization. I recognized that rebuilding a template a thousand times in Ruby would hurt, so I had an option to cache intermediate state. Kept it optional because I didn’t know if my simplistic solution would break on edge cases. My one test for that was “a few cached runs are faster than a few default runs, yes? Good.”
And to be clear, it won that benchmark with the cache enabled.
hackers.town: 2024-09-23 Mon 09:38
Not actually the point of the article but deep shuddery sigh of acknowledgment at:
“Something about being an avid promoter of note-taking systems seems to distract them from clear, analytical reading.
“And they seem to by and large have shit taste in books. Their examples tend to contain too many Jordan Petersen and Malcolm Gladwell books.”
from @baldur
The promise and distraction of productivity and note-taking systems – Baldur Bjarnason
hackers.town: 2024-09-23 Mon 09:47
@baldur I feel all this. Got really into the technical details of PKM for a bit, until I noticed a) so much dogma about whose techniques to emulate fastidiously; b) the productivity cult aspect drained notes of actual useful context; c) jumping so hard on the latest tool or technique feels a lot like poorly managed ADHD; and d) they really do have shit taste in books.
I still get into the details, but more as an enthusiast of shiny things than a dedicated researcher of knowledge management. Know your limits etc etc
hackers.town: 2024-09-23 Mon 09:48
WHERE DID I PUT MY HEADSET
oh right next to my hand
hackers.town: 2024-09-23 Mon 13:33
infodumping on the poor manager-type person
the neurospicy is muy picante today
hackers.town: 2024-09-23 Mon 13:53
This morning I got basic links between files working.
Probably didn’t need to process all 6,100 schema files in that folder.
At least I had the foresight to put output files in a sandbox folder rather than drop them in my main note repo.
hackers.town: 2024-09-23 Mon 14:02
@wez Sometime this year people started recognizing WezTerm in my screenshots and calling it out by name.
You’ve hit the big time!
hackers.town: 2024-09-23 Mon 14:07
@wez yeah that would be even better
hackers.town: 2024-09-23 Mon 16:12
She made loco moco. Clearly @IamMrsGeek loves me very much.
hackers.town: 2024-09-23 Mon 16:39
@earthshine @thegibson or glue
hackers.town: 2024-09-23 Mon 17:38
@nomad @earthshine @thegibson no that’s opposite expectations, which would still be relevant to expectations, and is thus an invalid response
hackers.town: 2024-09-23 Mon 18:54
Bouncy Dog startled something in the post-sunset bushes and made it run off, which I why I try not to get too punitive with him when he’s all barky bark.
hackers.town: 2024-09-23 Mon 22:11
Did you ever have the feeling
You was being
Watched?
hackers.town: 2024-09-23 Mon 22:50
@seatek that’s why we sleep with the bedroom door closed.
hackers.town: 2024-09-23 Mon 22:54
@spinningthoughts I don’t think I’ll try replicating this exact process in Logseq. A subset maybe, but even Obsidian took several minutes to index all that.