tinkelenberg

Emacs saved my novel. Org mode gave it a home. For that, I’m forever grateful.

The key to enjoying novels is to read them in long enough sittings to get into the flow state. If you only read a couple pages at a time between doomscrolling sessions, it will feel like a chore. Anything would.

OpenBSD seems to have this stance.

Source: https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=177425035627562&w=2

Don’t worry, once LLMs poison the well enough by disincentivizing sharing content online, programming books will thrive again.

Reminds me of Succession when the next CEO of Waystar Royco was described as a “pain sponge.”

Another option I like: organic.

A lot of what appeals to people about the past isn’t so much about returning to a golden age but recapturing authenticity. We rarely get the real thing nowadays.

Fixed it for you.

It was a great time. Social media’s reached beyond that though. Grandma wasn’t online back then.

Every blog is a niche blog because blogging is a niche. It never was and never will be mainstream. Social media began as an attempt to make the spirit of blogging a low lift for the noobs.

Today, you’re talking to an audience that is online, willing to venture outside social media, and opting to actively read content rather than passively listen or watch. That’s far from everyone and that’s okay.

Another way to describe it is mystique. There is an absence of mystique when everything is explained and optimized to the nth degree.

Websites used to be delightfully weird. Now, they’re truncated into templates with hamburger menus. That tension can be cultivated once again.

This is the best explanation I’ve come across. I enjoy dithering as a playful way to compress file size when it makes sense.

BSDs are known for a simple, monolithic OS design, a commitment to long-term stability, and permissive licensing.

Thank you. I will try again soon. BSD is too compelling from a philosophical standpoint to set aside completely.

I recently looked into the BSDs for a desktop project before going back to Debian. I love the philosophy but they’re for the initiated.

The onboarding rails just aren’t there these days. Everyone says the BSD documentation is superb, but the man pages are more of a reference than an onboarding guide.

One major challenge is LLMs have a hard time with BSD-related prompts. They’re trained on so much more Linux content, and there’s just enough overlap between both systems that hallucination rates are extremely high in my experience.

A teacher told me once that editing poetry is like trying to open a glass jar. Eventually, you have to set it down or you’ll break the thing.

One way to look it is to approach it as a creative practice. A good part of any practice is devoted to developing technique.

Some are just fine with a standardized but unoptimized tool while others are fascinated by building their own high-flying TUI. The journey is the destination. If all you create is a config file, it still counts.

I’m exploring a similar implementation and am honestly torn between NixOS and a more monolithic experience like Debian or OpenBSD.

As much as I love the idea of declarative builds, I’m struggling to justify the investment of learning and maintaining Nix for an individual setup. I’ve dabbled with it and mostly encountered footguns.

Whatever makes a nice, clean slab is what I’m after.

Definitely not. That said, sitting in front of a typewriter was probably the healthiest thing some of these people did.

Writing is an isolating profession, and its demons compound when you introduce other vices.

It goes to show that for how much we mythologize the lifestyles of 20th century writers, their lives weren’t necessarily healthy ones.

I like the term “organic literature.” A significant amount of readers have no interest whatsoever in generated prose, so there is definitely a viable market in human provenance.

An independent certification body is quite an old-world solution for a problem like this, but I’m not sure this is something that can be done mathematically. A web of trust may be all we have.

I struggled with a complex manuscript for years and tried all sorts of tools from Word to Scrivener in the process with no luck.

Emacs w/org mode was the only program that helped me make sense of the mess and finish the darn thing. I have never seen a program so elegant and yet so powerful, and I am forever grateful it exists if only as a counterweight to the modern tech paradigm.

I love seeing a Vonnegut writeup on HN. He’s my favorite author and his work had a major influence on me in my 20s. I guess we’ll see what I do when I’m old, whenever that is.