Midnight Pub

~inquiry


tetris

I've seen you write intricate poetry, as well as held long coherent conversations with you, where you described coding as one of your skills.

So I have to ask: this is just auto generated GPT-3 text that you're testing on us, right?

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inquiry

Nopers. We're talking super old school. When I want something formatted like that, I typically type some text into a vim session, then leverage the unix/linux "fmt" command a la:

:%!fmt -60

and then try the same with different numeric values until the alignment is at least close to appealing, then tinker with synonyms (of different length, of course) until I'm liking how it looks in a fixed-width font.

(':%!' being vim-speak for "pass all lines of vim buffer content to the stdin of a program)

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tetris

Oh fair enough haha - I usually read your stuff 2-3 times before the meaning sinks in, and I guess I never quite grokked it this time (other than the theme "old mcdonald") :-)

In Emacs, to do the same, you set the "fill-column" value to a desired column number, and then hit Alt-Q as often as you please.

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inquiry
Oh fair enough haha - I usually read your stuff 2-3
times before the meaning sinks in, and I guess I never
quite grokked it this time (other than the theme "old
mcdonald") :-)

As I've already whined abundantly, I'm not sure we ever know when we've *really* grokked others' words. That's not to say we're not often convinced we have. But surely there's essentially infinite conflict of interest in our evaluation. ;-)

I'm vaguely remembering someone responding to one of my 1990s newsgroup posts with something like "Do ya *have* to be so effing enigmatic?"

But, see, it wasn't that I was going out of my way to be enigmatic. It was more an unscientific approach to seeing who would make extra grokking effort as sort of gauge of who I'd want to correspond with.

Of late, that attitude is tempered (although sometimes it feels more like annihilated..) by having realized that I've been following/studying the stuff that "really does it for me" for on the order of over four *decades*, and so it's unreasonable to expect anyone who hasn't could just suddenly "get it" in a sufficiently "sympathetically vibratory" way.

In Emacs, to do the same, you set the "fill-column" value
to a desired column number, and then hit Alt-Q as often
as you please.

Heh. You've got me remembering back to what I believe was the early 1990s agonizing over whether to go all in on emacs or vi. I loved the emacs lisp aspect. But I concluded I'd likely not use it as much as I imagined, or could at least accomplish the same in less - oh what the hell - enigmatic :-) ways in perl through vi stdin/stdout mechanisms. And vi felt like less - or at least less gnarly - keystrokes, and I've definitely a dominant minimalism chromosome.

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tetris
I'm vaguely remembering someone responding to one of my 1990s newsgroup posts with something like "Do ya *have* to be so effing enigmatic?"
But, see, it wasn't that I was going out of my way to be enigmatic. It was more an unscientific approach to seeing who would make extra grokking effort as sort of gauge of who I'd want to correspond with.

This I understand. It's one of the main problems I have with the more prevalent social media services, where you feel pressurized into asking the more popular questions instead of what you actually want to say, which will into more interesting discussions

I loved the emacs lisp aspect. But I concluded I'd likely not use it as much as I imagined, or could at least accomplish the same in less - oh what the hell - enigmatic :-) ways in perl through vi stdin/stdout mechanisms. And vi felt like less - or at least less gnarly - keystrokes, and I've definitely a dominant minimalism chromosome

I have a hidden jealousy for vi, in the sense that it still feels like you're interacting directly with the terminal, making pipelining operations feel more native than they do in emacs.... but, well, I've already sunk too many years into emacs to go back now!

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inquiry
> This I understand. It's one of the main problems I have
> with the more prevalent social media services, where you
> feel pressurized into asking the more popular questions
> instead of what you actually want to say, which will into
> more interesting discussions

It's lonely at the swap?

(of verbiage)

> I have a hidden jealousy for vi, in the sense that it still
> feels like you're interacting directly with the terminal,
> making pipelining operations feel more native than they do
> in emacs.... but, well, I've already sunk too many years into
> emacs to go back now!

Hear ya.

But oh.. my.. gosh how I once again enjoyed my hitting the backslash key in my vi session, formatting the above paragraphs due to this in my .vimrc:

map \ !}fmt -64<CR>}

and then keying this:

:14,18!q

to "'>' quote" lines 14 through 18 by way of my own trivial $HOME/bin/q script.

<mental note to add flag to enclose such in triple-backticks lines>

I can't tell you how much I love shit like that.

Never mind the added felicity of slapping the 'vimium' extension on the Chrome browser to get lotsa vi keystrokes in my browser sessions!

Holy illimitable orgasmic keystroke joy, Bat<your favorite gender>!

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tetris

Ah yeah, I love vimium in the browser. At first it was overwhelming with the link jumping options, but I got used to it.

"Banish the Rodent!" is the motto, although the rodent has been said to be much faster compared to keybinding operations, though keybinders are said to believe that the keyboard is faster.

From a 1989 Apple study:

> We've done a cool $50 million of R & D on the Apple Human Interface. We discovered, among other things, two pertinent facts:
> 
> * Test subjects consistently report that keyboarding is faster than mousing.
> * The stopwatch consistently proves mousing is faster than keyboarding.

source: https://www.asktog.com/TOI/toi06KeyboardVMouse1.html

and this was later backed up by a 2010 paper on hierarchical menu items:

http://facweb.cs.depaul.edu/sjost/csc423/examples/anova/efficiency.pdf

(see Figure1)

Regardless, I try to use key-bindings for everything if I can. It just looks cooler ;-)

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inquiry
> "Banish the Rodent!" is the motto, although therodent
> has been said to be much faster compared tokeybinding
> operations, though keybinders are saidto believe
> that the keyboard is faster.

I don't care so much about speed as I do about (1) minimalism of effort and (2) not feeling like a "ninny" for being slavishly obedient to The Religion of Point and Click, which feels so demeaning to me... so "but that's what people that don't know shit about what leveraging a computer really means do"....

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