We recently open sourced Inkling [1] (which is a spiritual successor to Crosscut) and the iPad Wrapper [2] app we used to prototype Crosscut, Inkling, and other projects. We're also going to share some more similarly-interesting non-essay output from our research in the near future.
and appreciate anything which could be shared which might be helpful or inform development.
I will note that if you would try either Android or a Windows tablet w/ a Wacom EMR stylus you should be able to get the sort of input you want --- or maybe on a Mac w/ a Wacom One Gen 2 13 inch or Movink 13 or Cintiq w/ Touch display?
I've felt since I was young that I'd like to choose when and how I will die. I'm perfectly comfortable with the thought. I'm in my 30s and have a lovely life and family. I'm in no rush to end things. But when I'm old and the scales tip, I'd like to be the one to decide that it's time. I might not ever get there, but I want the option.
Amen. I want the option to leave gracefully and in peace, if a time comes where I cannot perform my basic needs by myself. I never chose when and how I would be brought into this world, so I think it's fair that I can choose when and how to leave.
Will I actually do it? That's irrelevant. I may decide to live and fight as much as possible, and that's fine, but I want the option.
I've been hearing young and healthy people say this for my entire, fairly long, life. But I have never personally known an elderly or disabled person to kill themselves over it. If you find life worth living despite its hardships now, it's likely that you always will even as those hardships increase.
At some point it may be more than just hardship. 80+, paralyzed from the waist down, bedridden, bed sores, muscles atrophying, all of your enjoyments gone, your friends dead, dying, or lost most of their mental facilities, and you're completely miserable.
They have a link to a source for that claim... and the source says 300 to 400 milliseconds. So whoever wrote and edited the OP article just messed this up.
Yes that's the point. Tried it on a lark, and it created weird feelings so I leaned into it. This is my personal website, and I've been trying to make it more deeply personal lately.
I like it. I mean, I like the why. It's not so offensive as to make me turn and run from your site, but it's definitely odd. To me, it actually makes it feel as if the text is askew.
One of my eyes sees things kind of slanted when I'm not wearing my glasses - I felt like I was seeing that when I was on the mastodon thread and trying to observe the change the server admin suggested...
> Metroidvania game where you lose abilities as you progress
This is brilliant. It solves the inherent tension of metroidvanias wanting both ever-increasing power and ever-increasing challenge. Rather than unlocking new areas, each time you lose abilities, it changes your relationship to existing areas. But the knowledge you gain — room layouts, enemy placement, hazards, short cuts, etc — becomes way more helpful when you can't just fly (perhaps literally) across the map.
Nice! Have you explored showing live values flowing through the nodes? This seems like a good use of animation.
I'll also take a moment to plug my Visual Programming Codex[1], which collects VPLs as though they're butterflies. I'm adding Flyde to the backlog of projects to document, but I'd also suggest looking around there for ideas. There are a ton of valuable new things you can do once you start visualizing programming, especially if you're visualizing the execution behaviour. I'd love to see you push this further.
Thanks! And yes, definately something I am considering exploring. It's right after auto-layout, and "zoom to view grouped nodes internals" (a-la https://xai-primer.com/tool/)
And I was planning to submit a PR for your codex soon! I've visited your codex dozens of times in the last couple of years. Big fan :)
I use it in "Top 20" mode. It helps me keep up with the bigger stories just by checking in once a day. Loads super fast, has worked great for many years now.
I'm curious to read more of your thoughts on podcasting as a medium. I bet my goals & tastes in creating podcasts differ wildly from your goals & tastes in listening to them. And if I can be so bold: why give our show the time of day, but not something more tightly produced (which, perhaps, stands a better chance of offering high signal-to-noise)?
In any event, Jimmy and I appreciated your post. We're thrilled whenever someone digs in to a paper we've covered and finds it meaningful.
I usually find it very hard to remain deeply engaged with a podcast. I'll be focused for a few minutes, then my focus will shift and only later will I realise that I've been passively listening - absorbing it as a form of ambience but not properly engaging with what's being said. I think this is probably true for most listeners, especially because podcasts are often used as a soundtrack for doing some other task.
When we are not fully engaged with audio I think just go along with whatever's being said. We ignore logical leaps, and then pick up the thread later. But we do, I think, remain aware of the presenter's affect towards whatever topic is being discussed.
So a lot of the time I think when we listen to a podcast all we are really taking away is “what the topic was” and a sense of whether that's a thing we should feel positive or negative about. We don't critically engage with what's being said and whether the conclusions being reached are valid.
That's a lot of waffling, but the point that I'm really trying to get to is that podcasts seem to be more a medium for transmitting vibes than for transmitting complex thought.
This would be fine if podcasts were all entertainment, but when a lot of them are about world affairs, or psychology, or whatever, then I think it leads to people listening to podcasts believing they are educating themselves but actually just absorbing memes (in the mgs2 sense) from the presenters.
So mostly I think that podcasts are just a way for people to start believing things without understanding why they believe them. The more “Produced” a podcast is, the worse this effect probably is. And people listen to them ALL THE TIME. There's probably never been a better medium for spreading disinformation. lol
ANYWAY
I really liked your podcast, and it does some things that I think alleviate the issues I have.
* It's complex enough that if I become disengaged I can't pick up the thread, so I end up just pausing / rewinding.
* It's a conversation, and you as hosts don't agree a lot the time. You do some of the work of critical thinking for the listener.
* The editing is very funny.
I originally gave your podcast the time of day because I was considering going to a future of coding meetup in London, and wanted to know what the vibe would be. The meetup sold out while I was listening :)
Sorry for the slow reply — I was ill. I appreciate your thoughts, and they largely capture how I feel about the medium too, though I'd argue that television is definitely the bigger thought-polluting opiate of the masses.
It's funny that you say "transmitting vibes" almost as though that's a bad thing. At least, I think the vibes are necessary, but not sufficient. I also, personally, think that "entertainment" gets short shrift, though nailing down why would take us on a tour through the sort of define art and the point of a game is to be fun, right? morass of culture literacy / criticism, and HN is definitely not the venue for that.
In any event, thank you for the blog post. It made for some spirited opening banter on our latest bonus episode. And hopefully you'll make it out to the next meetup. I don't live anywhere near London sadly, but I've seen the videos and some of the demos people show are delightful. I need scissors, 61.
[1] https://github.com/inkandswitch/inkling
[2] https://github.com/inkandswitch/wrapper