It utterly destroys the “quick incremental adjustment” that taps are better for. It makes it more involved to even complete maximal adjustments, which are just press and hold. It makes all adjustments more involved, it’s not merely a matter of locating a physical key, it’s orchestrating movements your eyes and hands have to track together toward a location that can’t be known , through touch detection that can get fussy for any number of reasons.

This is not theoretical. This was my experience with a touchbar MBP. The idea was just wrong for this kind of routine function.

Meanwhile, I can adjust volume blind by feel on a MPB with function keys. I never for a moment when doing this for audio or brightness think “I wish I had a slider” and even if I did I know how to find one for use with the touch interface every MBP ever has had.

I’m discovering a renewed appreciation for libraries — never lost in theory but in practice. I’m lucky my community has a good municipal public library nearby, a good university library not too much farther. Book collection at MPL is mixed but plenty of good to great material in the mix. Periodical collection has journalism superior to most freely available web. Periodical archives at university library are incredible (including stuff like Byte).

The environment encourages a better balance between exploration and focus. There are people to greet or not as you wish. There is no algorithm trying to anger for engagement or crumb out just enough other rewards just often enough that you pull the lever for another hit for as long as possible. Search is a whole different game, both higher effort but also passing through a more scholarly tradition and less of the commercial incentive war.

Online advantages still remain (and evolve). I’m not about to give up the web. But I might want more of myself focused through environments and institutions like libraries.

Haven’t seen the bookstore newsstand for a while though, maybe I should see what that’s like these days too.

Unfortunately many novel library buildings are transitioning to electronic stacks which fetch specific resources quickly and are well suited to large collections but deny the experience of browsing.

There’s also been times when other values more like what the GP implies have driven governance and social direction in the US. There was a side with values like that in the civil war. There was government and there were movements with those values for much of the 20th century especially following periods of national trial when it was clear we needed governing values that truly drove the common welfare.

A lot of us grew up and are still living with the fruits of that. That’s the America we’ve known. We’ve also always known that there are many Americans who never bought in, who had a vision more like the other side of the civil war, or want welfare that’s a bit more unevenly distributed, perhaps not even distributed in some directions at all.

It can still be a bit of a shock to find out that illiberal portion growing with a grip on a growing number of levers of power.

Can the America with a vision of truly common welfare reassert itself? Maybe. Maybe not.

There’s no way. Every proposal is either a bid for capital via moonshot enthusiasm or a stalking horse for something else, and these days I wouldn’t be surprised if it was orbital weapons platforms in disguise.

* Clojure is built different in terms of hot code reloading

* the REPL is its own application process in languages Ruby or Python, but in Clojure it’s sortof a client for the system

Is that right? Is there more to it?

So in a JavaScript server, you might have the database connection set in some config/thing you pass around to request handlers to use, and if you change a request handler, you typically stop the entire application, then start it again. Then the database connection (and the entire config in fact) would need to again connect.

In a Clojure application, first you either start the repl from the server, or start the server from the repl, then you might instead keep the database connection in an "atom" that you keep around for as long as you have the repl/server running. And instead of restarting the process when you change a handler, you'd only change the handler.

And yeah, the libraries and ecosystem at large is built with this (mostly) in mind for everything. The language also supports this by letting you "redefine" basically anything in a running Clojure application, which would be harder in other languages.

I've done some experiments years ago for doing the same in JavaScript, and it kind of works, but every library/framework in the ecosystem is not built with this in mind, so you'll be writing a lot of your own code. Which, now with LLMs, maybe is feasible, but can't say it was at the time exactly.

The fun way to get a feel for lisp machines is emacs, it's so easy to fall of a language and especially hand-coding in a language if you don't have to.

Can you describe what you think is awful (beyond rhetorical choices that have become LLM markers)?

I'm assuming you're the original author: the problem is the LLM markers.

But its bigger than you're thinking, I think, otherwise you wouldn't have done what you did.

No matter the discipline, painting, code, etc., people appreciate things that are unique and require unique effort.

You can see this over and over again in art history, and the products / code we appreciate are things share that property.

LLMs are great tools, you should use them. Problem was when it turned into (I'm guessing, because this is what I do) "I wrote too much...god I hate my writing...LLM, do your magic...LGTM! So much shorter and cleaner!"

The failure mode I'm seeing with people posting obvious slop who otherwise wouldn't want to is, the editing makes things shorter but it also tends to make everything repetitive, both locally and across across the essay.

Locally, to the person operating the LLM, it looks like "its so much more approachable!", to a reader, it reads as "the author things I am very dumb and takes 3 sentences to saying something that was 4 words"

Please don't take it personally, btw. We're between a rock & a hard place right now and it's important to tease things like this out over time. I'd rather have an extended dialogue about it, but...in practice, people absorb microsignals about what's appropriate over time. Better to say "It's awful writing" then write an extended essay empathizing via guessing what was in your head and what you actually did.

I enjoyed the essay and it's an interesting idea and right up my alley. It's just a pitch perfect example of something going bad, "I had problem X, it was solved via boxes and stickers" has to be 600 words, tops. And you probably sensed that when you were done, I'm assuming. Just needed to go farther rather than lean into sense of relief.

But I appreciate the elaboration. I don't generally use LLMs for writing, but I'm interested in what people perceive as good and the gap between that LLM output among other things. I actually liked this piece, and could outline some things that I thought were effective about it as is, but being curious about what other people dislike seemed more likely to be educational.

I especially appreciate the criticism of repetition in this piece and LLM output in general. That's a great one to think about because repetition has a place in rhetoric, especially with some audiences, but probably less so with other audiences (perhaps especially an engineering minded audience). And for any audience there will be a point of diminishing returns. All things LLMs may be poorly positioned to dial in.

> Better to say "It's awful writing" then write an extended essay empathizing via guessing what was in your head and what you actually did.

But you did! Thank you. And FWIW the extended criticism that you eventually provided including attempting to guess at the author's perspective boosts signal for me. When someone does that, it gives me particulars to learn from and makes it seem less likely they're just cranky or grinding an unknown axe. Though of course no one has time for essay responses all the time (and the pay usually isn't great).

* someone has to write language specifying a program, natural language or programming.

* a programming langugage is a handle with specific properties at a specific level of abstraction. Whether it’s a popular handle won’t change that it’s far more than a toy.