fool @fool@mastodon.technology

I hereby declare myself this instance's foremost Star Wars Prequel Defender.

Being a programmer is turning me into an anarchist: I always seem to want to eliminate state.

All code is a liability, even good code. Try to use it sparingly, only when it would result in a disproportionate benefit.

Good code is itself something of an enigma. Although you can often recognize bad code quickly, it's impossible to positively identify good code until the time comes to change it. Only then will you know whether its authors predicted the future correctly, and wrote it in a way that would be suitable for the maintainers' needs.

I tell ya though, the perceptual time warp we're living in as a result of the many serious problems that have plunged the whole world into a chaotic state really makes waiting for announcements of new Smash Bros DLC fighters excruciating

About how many times in a typical week do you find yourself thinking "Of all the songs to be stuck in my head, why THIS one?"

People are taught from a young age to evaluate the correctness of others' gender performance.

To stop that, someone might figure that the powerful apparatus cultures use to regulate members' behavior isn't worth deploying for gender. Or they might build up a more nuanced understanding of gender, incorporating the experiences of those who weren't accounted for in the old model.

People doing these in different proportion will characterize more discourse in the future.

using the word "space" as a generic intensifier

Sometimes I think about how the same two guys have been making basically all the music for every Kirby game for 30 years.

Other works don't, and leave themselves more open to interpretation.

If the artist is trying to make a point, the possibility of being misunderstood is surely a daunting prospect. Because the author is dead, there's no chance of clarifying if the audiences takes it the wrong way - and, worse, they might hold it against you.

But too much emphasis on preempting hostile readings can easily result in an aesthetically compromised work. So art, too, demands courage.

Lately been thinking about the notion that art can have a certain sort of defensiveness.

In addition to elements which can be straightforwardly interpreted as supporting a particular viewpoint, a work might also contain some minor points which stymie interpretations leading to a differing viewpoint that might otherwise be consistent with the main thrust.

That is to say, some art tries to protect itself against hostile readings, especially readings that could vindicate the artist's political opponents.

The idea of working even one minute longer today can go piss up a rope. It's the weekend now

wight supremacist

Problems amenable to design and engineering belong to one of two categories: problems that the user wants to have solved for them, and problems that the user wants to solve themselves.

If you fail to distinguish between them, you'll either end up making the user study something that they don't care about, or piling so many isolated solutions into it that it becomes unwieldy and fragile.

Either way, you've increased rather than decreased the problems in their life. Shame on you.

Good commonplace tools do their one thing while representing a reduction of (especially cognitive) effort compared to doing it manually.

Good specialist tools require their operator to creatively apply that versatile main function to an arbitrarily complex task, with an expert's understanding of both.

And a good designer needs to know whether they're making a commonplace tool to reduce a distraction from the things people care about, or a specialist tool to help directly with the things they care about.

But then there are the really sophisticated tools. They are still designed for a specific purpose, but that purpose is abstract and flexible. A lathe is "only" good for spinning things, but it turns out that there are many powerful ways to combine that one function with others. Yes, it's true: spinning IS a good trick.

And of course you can stick extra features on top to make it better, or sometimes worse, but it's only useful because the operator understands the applications of the main function.

Most software is tools, and most software tools are analogous to something like a can crusher:

- made to improve the efficiency of a specific known task
- about a thousand different ways to build one and it rarely matters which one you choose, even if you choose a bad one
- rarely good for much beyond the intended use case
- easy to break

Then you've got your unix-y combinable command-line tools, which are versatile like a wrench. but more specifically like an allen wrench, the worst kind of wrench.

Peasant of Fighters

pulling a leftover take out of the fridge and eating it cold

Well, it's a day that ends in Y, so I'm detecting discourse, but no sign of an explanation of what it's about or how it started. Would someone please be so kind as to catch me up?

Gosh of War

I think I'm experiencing some kind of regional internet disruption. downforeveryoneorjustme.com is down for me