Anecdatum: I confidently told a woman that her son, who was looking for a research opportunity in Berne, Switzerland, was heading for the birthplace of the World Wide Web, which is actually a couple of hours west and south at CERN.
I am not too familiar with Windows development in the 16-bit era, so I do not understand what Raiter means when he writes that he “de-Petzoldized” the code. I thought Petzold’s work on documenting the Windows API was foundational. Was it the style?
Yes, Petzold's examples used a certain style to illustrate the use of the Windows API as clearly as possible. Petzold programs would have a giant switch statement handling WndProc messages, state would be held in tons of global variables, and everything crammed in to one huge file. Great for showing a concept and demonstrating how something works, not so good for developing a maintainable, reliable piece of software.
Yeah same tho, that 5k looks to be pissing in the wind. He even knows for a fact he's not paying the actual costs yet never mentions how he's going to maintain that stack of code if costs per token ever get tightened up.
I've used AI chat for coding, but with the caveat that I need to be able to "manually" edit the results. I like the process and am ready to maybe spend a little money on tokens but am still pretty far from using agents, although I'm starting to peruse peoples claude.mds and spending some hugging face tutorials plus I guess that means python bah
He's really focused on the software factory aspect, and talks about the future and how he's living it but lets see how the code base he's accumulating is maintained, because thats the one question about the future that I rarely see answered.
I don't doubt what you're saying, but I still hack on things mainly for fun tho. In the OPs case, he's even paying below cost, how long is that deal going to go on? On the other hand, his current working code base might be so valuable that he can afford future maintenance help, in whatever form that would be.
But let’s not pretend that the plastic and painterly arts are so much more self-evidently “thick” than literature is. Despite their immediacy, these arts have their own conventions, motifs, and demands that must be understood to “find the treasure in the dark cave.”
I have tried to convince someone I know that an art museum merits more than a one-minute-per-painting, four minutes-max-per-room, pretty/not-pretty approach. She still does not understand why I linger over books or works of art, and I have not the wherewithal to lead her through the techniques, the conventions, or the history that makes this worthwhile for me.
A lot of books that call themselves Roget’s have abandoned the dual structure (classification-index) in favor of a single index structure built like a dictionary, basically constructed for people who want a different word than what they would normally use, as mjd writes, rather than people who are interested in the store-house (thesaurus) of the English language.
A quick trip to Wikipedia says that the Spanish name was Río del Espíritu Santo, River of the Holy Spirit, and the initial French name was fleuve de l'Immaculée Conception, River of the Immaculate Conception, and later the fleuve Colbert or the rivière Saint-Louis.
> The word Mississippi itself comes from Messipi, the French rendering of the Anishinaabe (Ojibwe or Algonquian) name for the river, Misi-ziibi (Great River). [1]
I guess technically it’s the Anglicized French transliteration of the Algonquian name that stuck. Why that happened has more to do with the French-Indian war.
I was interested in astronomy as a six-year-old, which led me to Greek myths, which led me to Greek poetry, all of that in translation, as well as Gene Wolfe’s Latro books as they came out.
I was learning to program at the same time, following along A K Dewdney’s Computer Recreations column. I went into college to learn pre-med but always found myself more interested in the humanities, like my survey of Greek literature, which was supposed to accelerate my prerequisites. Also hung out with friends in the engineering labs on Sun Sparcstations playing netrek and MUDs, which did for me.
Anyway, I pivoted and started taking computer courses, like artificial intelligence, reading from Russell and Norvig, Clocksin and Mellisa, and Paul Graham.
I learned Greek while consulting for companies across the country, programming network performance tests, to have something to do in the hotels.
Fast forward to 2008, 2009, and I see that the Lispy Hackers and Painters guy had a new website. I started an account but lost it. Or did they reset it after disuse? Anyway, that’s me.
Oh, I did take Latin in Catholic high school, but did not really use any of it for reading, just vocabulary, but it did help with the old-style grammar-first Greek texts I learned from.
Many of the things you mention, crossing out, circling, I do not think of as actively engaging with the material, which a quick skim of the underlying research pointed out in the TFA (or maybe an earlier 2017 paper of theirs) requires using the fine motor control of actually writing. Writing marginalia is good for the brain; if you disagree, write out why, if you agree, write your reaction. Highlighting, circling, crossing out are mere consumption and only useful for finding passages later, not engaging your brain.
I love browsing https://www.themarginalian.org whenever I have a few hours to kill. It's a bit like TVTropes, but much more "literary" for lack of a better word.
The author has spent decades building a digital commonplace book of everything she's ever read, and hyperlinked everything together in a way that you can get lost in her notes for hours on end and never surface. It's one of my favorite websites on the internet, and the best example of the power of marginalia and hypertext.
It was presented as an investment, but the $150 million was just the initial payment of a much larger settlement which was not disclosed.
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