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You Are in a Box

jyn.dev

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Re: You Are in a Box

#51

Post by chao- »

LorenDB wrote: post #9

Am I the only one who finds the Sam Altman-esque 'all lowercase except for proper nouns like Linux but not including the pronoun i' writing style unbearable to read?

I waste brain cycles correcting the author's formatting mistakes while simultaneously trying to understand the meaning. Thus I read slower, but not the productive kind of slow reading—I am not contemplating the concepts more deeply. I am slowed down by a lazy lack of editing, for no gain.

Not sure what it has to do with Sam Altman though.

Re: You Are in a Box

#52

Post by AlexandrB »

soulofmischief wrote: post #38
LorenDB wrote: post #9

Am I the only one who finds the Sam Altman-esque 'all lowercase except for proper nouns like Linux but not including the pronoun i' writing style unbearable to read?

I do it a lot, do me a favor and don't attribute it to Sam Altman since some of us have been doing this for a long time. If you don't like it, you don't have to read it, but you also don't need to be patronizing and close-minded about how others choose to express themselves.

I think writing like this is disrespectful to your audience since they have to put in extra effort to parse your text. If you choose to express yourself like that, fine, but it's not patronizing to point this out.

Re: You Are in a Box

#53

Post by rekrsiv »

drcongo wrote: post #36
LorenDB wrote: post #9

Am I the only one who finds the Sam Altman-esque 'all lowercase except for proper nouns like Linux but not including the pronoun i' writing style unbearable to read?

I'd closed the tab by the end of the first sentence. If the author can't be bothered, then neither can I. I tend to find people who do this have a superiority complex, they think they're so much better than everyone else that they're justified in offloading their own tiny cognitive load on to everybody else.

The author put a lot of effort into actually writing the thing, and correctly capitalized quotes, which clearly indicates a stylistic choice. You aren't willing to read text that isn't written in your preferred style, but you believe it's the author who has a superiority complex?

Re: You Are in a Box

#54

Post by viccis »

LorenDB wrote: post #9

Am I the only one who finds the Sam Altman-esque 'all lowercase except for proper nouns like Linux but not including the pronoun i' writing style unbearable to read?

Tell me you didn't grow up on IRC and AIM without telling me you didn't grow up on IRC and AIM

Re: You Are in a Box

#55

Post by quilombodigital »

CGMthrowaway wrote: post #16
quilombodigital wrote: post #11

This really reminds me of what Plan 9 was aiming for — breaking out of the 'box' by making everything a file, using per-process namespaces, and cleanly exposing system and network resources with proper permissions. It had that same idea: your environment shouldn't be a prison, it should be a flexible, composable space. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs ) ( https://fqa.9front.org/fqa0.html )

Cool idea. Seems like it would require an entirely new philosophy vs our present one on security.

Yes, you would eventually be capable of sharing GPU power, devices, audio, anything. Imagine all your machine´s idle power available to others. Right now your GPU is barely being used.

Re: You Are in a Box

#56

Post by fellowniusmonk »

jhoechtl wrote: post #8

> Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can. —Zawinski's Law of Software Envelopment Its THE Zawinski of XEmacs so maybe not the best example.

Emacs has it right though, more right than wrong, they just, as a community, hate humans.

Data and data collections should have app-tributes, apps shouldn't have data.

The problem with most operating systems is that they need to model space time and minds as first class but they don't.

I've been using my own personal OS for years now that I call imtropy, once your abstraction maps to reality everything becomes easier to reason about.

The simple fact is most people and programmers are stuck in logic and rationality when they should think a layer deeper, coherence is all that matters.

Re: You Are in a Box

#57

Post by card_zero »

staticshock wrote: post #35
LorenDB wrote: post #9

Am I the only one who finds the Sam Altman-esque 'all lowercase except for proper nouns like Linux but not including the pronoun i' writing style unbearable to read?

i tend to draft everything lowercase, and then go back and uppercase things depending on how much of a formal vibe i'm going for. capitalization rarely helps me formulate an idea, and so my writing often splits into phases: (1) formulation, (2) polish. also, it's worth noting that proper capitalization does not automatically yield text worth reading. from that perspective, i like lower case text as a form of rebellio…

CAPITALS AT LAST

https://archive.org/details/livestimesofarch0000marq/page/20...

Re: You Are in a Box

#58

Post by BwackNinja »

Zawinski's Law, when taken literally, argues that programs all eventually need to be communicated with by people and other programs using a generic protocol and without using program-specific or domain-specific libraries to do so.

Unix shells (local), I'll add in HTTP (remote), and Email (remote and asynchronous) are the only forms that are ubiquitous, precisely because they enforce no structure for the payload. The structured alternatives are only popular in specific domains because they create their own ecosystem. As long as input can clearly be parsed, which goes hand in hand with being human-readable as long as you're not trying to be too efficient, you get schema implicitly transmitted out of band (by having output that you can visually inspect) and interoperability for anything that can read and write text.

I'd be interested in other directions this might go, but I remain skeptical of anything that will introduce and enforce a new paradigm that requires adding complexity to programs to accommodate it.

Re: You Are in a Box

#59

Post by Forgeties79 »

happytoexplain wrote: post #43
Forgeties79 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess is it’s meant to come off as more authentic and conversational, like an informal chat.

Yeah, I suspect that's the intention. There's a definitely a cultural break. To me, lowercase creates a casual tone in texts/chat. But in long form, especially published (i.e. purposefully displayed to an audience), it sends me a tone of disinterest or laziness at worst; or at best, simple innocent ignorance/mistakenness (like misspelling). Clearly neither is the case here though.

oh yeah i definitely agree! the tone communication can be useful but in longform writing it gets very grating and confusing/distracting. it's also just more social engineering to pretend to be authentic when one is clearly not.

i prefer this type of writing for comedy generally

Re: You Are in a Box

#60

Post by packetlost »

CGMthrowaway wrote: post #16
quilombodigital wrote: post #11

This really reminds me of what Plan 9 was aiming for — breaking out of the 'box' by making everything a file, using per-process namespaces, and cleanly exposing system and network resources with proper permissions. It had that same idea: your environment shouldn't be a prison, it should be a flexible, composable space. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs ) ( https://fqa.9front.org/fqa0.html )

Cool idea. Seems like it would require an entirely new philosophy vs our present one on security.

Yes, but it also removes a lot of footguns. Access to resources (ie. paths mostly) is controlled almost entirely by the parent process, which makes access controls highly pluggable and flexible.

The real problem is Plan9 never really had a lot of attention put on the things that make having a sane security policy good. Factotum seems, at best, to be bolted on after the fact.

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