Viewing profile — sswatson

I’ve never used magit but my impression is that it’s similar to jj in the sense that it smooths out git’s rough edges in an elegant way and in the sense that it’s hard to properly …

Not trying to tell you how to live your life, obviously, but I think “changes for the sake of changes” overstates it. For example, `jj undo` is a pure ergonomics win. It’s been sai…

What does jjui have on lazyjj? Sincere question; I tried it, and I want to get it, and so far I don’t.

Good on you for spelling out this reasoning, but it is manifestly unsound. For a wide variety of values of X, people a few years ago had no reason to expect that LLMs would be capa…

I don't agree. Many 3b1b videos provide a rigorous mathematical argument in the usual sense (i.e., they don't contain every conceivable detail — math papers don't do that either — …

You're conflating two points: (1) learning math requires work, not just watching videos, and (2) learning math requires proofs, not just intuition and analogies. Both are true but …

I find this kind of advice to be a more scathing indictment of an interface than a critic could ever muster: asking users to forego available functionality so that some sense of or…

No system is perfect, but there's nothing wrong with `jj edit` and `jj new`. Both commands are completely reasonable and do what you think they would do.

The linked article makes a specific carveout for Java, on the grounds that its SufficientlySmartCompiler is real, not hypothetical.

It’s well known and also wrong. Delta’s airplanes also require a great deal of maintenance, and I’m sure they strive to have no more than are necessary for their objectives. But if…

Neither of those assertions means anything. For many years, people have been using them to make confident predictions about what AI systems will never be able to accomplish. Those …

1. Because no one knows how to do it. 2. Consider (a) a tool that can apply precise methods when they exist, and (b) a tool that can do that and can also imperfectly solve problems…

The author has exclusive claim to their own aesthetic sensibilities, of course, but the language in the piece suggests some degree of universality. Whereas in fact, effectively no …

As the name indicates, a demo is used for demonstration purposes. A personal tool is not a demo. I've seen a handful of folks assert this definition, and it seems like a very stran…

Recently I've used Claude Code to build a couple TUIs that I've wanted for a long time but couldn't justify the time investment to write myself. My experience is that I think of a …

In this case, overuse of re-assigning is the sloppy thing to do, and immutability by default is the craftsman's move. Reducing your program's memory footprint by re-assigning varia…

In the vast majority of cases, developer ergonomics are much more important than freeing memory a little earlier. In other scenarios, e.g., when dealing with large data frames, the…

This is a textbook example of damning with faint praise. If your VCS's interface is so bad that it motivates you to scale back your use of any nontrivial version-control features a…

The author lists that as a separate benefit, though. My interpretation is that jj makes certain useful operations convenient to use that would be so complex in git as to be complet…

> but others have been pretty much fawning… This is not relevant. An observer who deceives for purposes of “balancing” other perceived deceptions is as untrustworthy and objectiona…

The idea is thoroughly absurd. Our days are filled with unpaid labor. Getting dressed in the morning, collecting the items you want to buy in a grocery store, making your bookings …

My first thought as well. I wonder what Kobo will do in response to this announcement.

Yes. I’m happy to do whatever makes the most sense in any given situation. I have never in my life thought to myself “I could easily help solve this problem and make everyone bette…

No, all governments have the authority to tell people what to do. Some governments operate within a legal framework that limits that authority in many ways, but if an organization …

The phrase "solely one of birthright" suggests the diminishment of the citizenship of certain people. That is not how citizenship works: no one is less of a citizen than anyone els…