I clicked through hoping you were wrong, saw the first page, and thought, ah, this is legible... then I got to the code blocks and was completely blinded.
I'm not sure what to tell authors of such pages...
Yes, copied it in to my scratch buffer to read it, not readable in the browser at all with a dark background. It did then make all the elisp nice to look at.
I got the idea from an old post on here called Story of Mel[0] where OP talks about the beauty of Mel's intricate machine code on a RPC-4000.
This is the part that always stuck with me:
I have often felt that programming is an art form,
whose real value can only be appreciated
by another versed in the same arcane art;
there are lovely gems and brilliant coups
hidden from human view and admiration, sometimes forever,
by the very nature of the process.
You can learn a lot about an individual
just by reading through his code,
even in hexadecimal.
Mel was, I think, an unsung genius.
Thank you for sharing that story. Mel seems virtuousic, but is that really art? Optimizing pattern positioning on a drum for maximum efficiency. Is that expression?
If it wasn't expression everyone would get the same result. But no one else at Royal McBee did things the way Mel Kaye did things.
Kaye had a strong artistic vision for how things should be done; he didn't want to use the ergonomic features of the RPC-4000 because they didn't align with his vision. I think he found the idea of rigging the blackjack program offensive in part for the same reason.
Speaking for myself, I have always found the story and "pessimal" instructions beautiful. It's my favorite piece of folklore of all time. Kaye and Nather are both artists to me.
Tangentially, Kaye is standing on the far right in this photo.
If you consider engineering the art of the possible. (Yes, I know it's a politician's phrase, that's because politics is the art of the plausible ... )
I would argue it makes you a better citizen by not falling prey to the emotional manipulation that all of the news sources blast us with non-stop. There is enough hate and anger in the world and the constant stoking of those flames is doing us no good. And unless you're actually going to take action and do something about it (and I'd argue that posting rants on social media does not qualify), then what is the point of absorbing that anger.
I know people on both sides who have fallen prey to this and are no longer pleasant to be around.
And design too. I shouldn’t be able to tell Claude designed your site/app, but it is too often the case. Good taste still remains an advantage thankfully.
This is a tangent, but man the world of traditional news sites must be really suffering. I've been noticing more and more that have this model where you can't see anything until you pay up. I have to assume they've tested it and found this approach works best, but I'm not signing up for your newspaper before I can even see the quality of the journalism. Back with print newspapers you could just buy a copy before getting a subscription. Now to get a taste you've got to pay for the $1 trial which will auto-convert into a $75/mo subscription. And I wouldn't be surprised to learn that to cancel that trial requires a phone call to a service rep.
When people talk of life extension and us eventually achieving immortality, it is always "relative immortality" though. Maybe we develop the technology to regenerate our bodies and we could live for thousands of years. Maybe we can transfer our consciousness and minds into computers and maybe live for quite a bit longer than that.
But the time scale of the universe is unfathomable. Even if we lived for millions of years, it would be a drop in the bucket. And that time would still come to an end and we'd reach that same state of eternal nothingness and nonexistence.
Who cares what the average person will go through and do though? We’re each responsible for ourselves and how we choose to go about life, even if vastly differs from the general population.
The other is that once a tech choice becomes too niche, it stops being supported:
- Technically anyone can run their own email server but from what I hear if you do, some providers will treat you as spam.
- Niche features get removed from products.
- Some niche usecases depend on legal support. Running programs on a device you own without going through a gatekeeper ("sideloading") may be required in some jurisdictions (EU, any others?) but there's nothing stopping the almost-monopolies from making it impossible elsewhere.
Ironically, if your setup is too niche (e.g. browsing privacy configuration) you can be easily tracked, though no one will bother, but captcha's will certainly not miss you.
This is the rub, tech is able to track you based on your browser, viewport size, os, location (a vpn still has a location if you aren’t rotating) and more. I use Firefox for privacy and just that measure alone rules out 97% of internet traffic and zeros down who I am within 3%. How private am I if I default to that 3%. 1440p monitor and a half screen Firefox viewport? Now we’re building an advertising profile!
If targeted advertising is your main threat, then you are lucky to _currently_ live in a country whose government _currently_ does not consider you an enemy or potential enemy. Many people are not that lucky and many people will become unlucky despite not changing anything about themselves.
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