I wanted to read this (mentioned here) and ended up thinking about subscribing to WIRED which took me to an article about the WIRED paywall The Next 25 Years of WIRED Start Today and their FAQ. I decided to subscribe to the digital edition and am interested to check out the newsletters and the WIRED Guides.
Category Archives: Chatter
programming is terrible
There’s some fun stuff over here: programming is terrible.
Taking a Stand in the War on General-Purpose Computing
An essay about Taking a Stand in the War on General-Purpose Computing.
Basic schema inference for JSON
Today via lobsters: Shape a TypeScript library for schema inference.
ES2021 Features
Today via r/programming: ES2021 Features.
You can’t tell people anything
This old chestnut via Lobsters today: You can’t tell people anything.
History of Thinking
Quotes
I was referred to a list of notable quotes: http://worrydream.com/quotes/.
I particularly liked this one:
What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around. In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is surrender to them. When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualising you probably hunt about until you find the exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one’s meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations. Afterward one can choose — not simply accept — the phrases that will best cover the meaning, and then switch round and decide what impressions one’s words are likely to make on another person. — George Orwell
How to remember anything forever
See How To Remember Anything Forever-ish. A very cool presentation. Making some spaced-repetition software is on my TODO list!
Safer Bash: avoid nesting
Over on Safer Bash: avoid nesting I learned that extracting complex expressions to a named variable is a good idea so as to help catch error conditions.