sonata_green: a cross of four angular teal "leaves" with greenish and bluish lighting/shading, in front of an angular brass ring (Default)
...but that didn't prepare me for the experience of noticing my mind automatically generating excuses – with no apparent motivation – to dismiss a particular issue. It didn't even feel like there were strong emotions involved. It was like my mind was just sliding off it. I'd suspect magical mind control, if that were a thing that existed.

(No, I'm not going to say what the issue was. It is in fact enough of a live wire that I don't want to be seen near it in public.)

sonata_green: a cross of four angular teal "leaves" with greenish and bluish lighting/shading, in front of an angular brass ring (Default)

Many of the entities participating in the human RP have been writing unrealistic or unlikely characters, opinions, and events. I'd like to run down a few reminders about the setting.

The "Overton window" severely constrains which opinions and policy positions your character can hold. Most humans will socially censure anyone who looks like they might believe or support any of the following.

  • mandatory cryonics
  • banning computers
  • treating posting images of one's children on social media as child abuse (even among radical youth-advocates, which there are not that many of)
  • selective breeding of humans
  • Rapture insurance
  • inventing new religions
  • whitelisting "legitimate" religions (even single-religion whitelists ("theocracy") are very rare)
  • mandatory organ donation, especially from live donors
  • introducing occult practices as a core subject in public schools
  • genetically modifying humans to be r-selected
  • mandatory euthanasia, even on the basis of age
  • banning individually-owned civilian motor vehicles

Your character should not be involved in the plot. Almost no humans think about the following issues, and most aren't even aware of them.

  • youth emancipation
  • frog hybridization
  • AI safety
  • deproliferation of imprecatory prayer
  • colony collapse disorder
  • corvid personhood
  • EMP weapons
  • comparative emic oceanography
  • leveraged corporate buyouts

sonata_green: a cross of four angular teal "leaves" with greenish and bluish lighting/shading, in front of an angular brass ring (Default)

Crossposted from Mastodon, since this turned out longer than I expected.


Unix, and consequently every modern OS, is stringly typed, i.e., data is passed between programs as strings and nothing else. JSON is an attempt to improve the situation, but it's not enough. A real cure to this would be a deep-rooted overhaul of how we think about computer systems.

Rule of thumb: if you're doing it right, a programming language shouldn't have a "syntax". It should have IDEs that write typed ASTs. There's no reason for source code to be text1 files.

If you want to create an SVG image, you use Inkscape, not $EDITOR2. Even though SVG is ultimately XML. Inkscape doesn't even show you the XML, nor should it.

Apply that thinking to everything. On the back end, that means static typing. On the front end, that means a real usecase-native editor rather than a generic text (string) editor.

Maybe you can make a semigeneric "object editor" with plugins, like Emacs with major modes, but for editing typed data where Emacs only handles text (strings).

And no, JSON is not typed data. Not even slightly. At best it's a string representation of typed data. But it's still a string.

If you have to "serialize" data to pass data to another program, or "parse" it to receive it, something has gone horribly wrong.


1. Whenever you hear "text", you should always mentally substitute "string(s)". A text file is a single huge string.

2. Note how we always say $EDITOR, never $TEXTEDITOR, because obviously the only thing you would ever want to edit is strings, right?

sonata_green: a cross of four angular teal "leaves" with greenish and bluish lighting/shading, in front of an angular brass ring (Default)

There seems to be no way to list all of the posts you've saved as memorable. You can list all the tags you've assigned to classify your memories, and you can list all the posts under a given tag, but there's no single direct unfiltered view.

My current workaround is to assign the "memory" tag to every post. The drawback is that if I ever forget to do that, it'll be hard to notice that the post in question is missing.

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