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Moby Dick Workout (2022)

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Re: Moby Dick Workout (2022)

#21

Post by velcrovan »

BoingBoomTschak wrote: post #19
sam_goody wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can use "20,000 leagues under the sea" instead of Moby Dick. Both were written at the same time, both deal with ocean adventures, and both (IMHO) are much longer than they need to be. Then you can have multiple Jules tests, depending on occasion!

Moby Dick had a much worse ratio of "size of good novel trying to get out / actual size", in my opinion.

Moby Dick has a bad (high) ratio of “people who try to read it like a thriller novel” to “people who read it for what it is”.

Re: Moby Dick Workout (2022)

#22

Post by chucksmash »

timclark wrote: post #16
miiiiiike wrote: post #3

I use "War and Peace" for this.

I used war and peace to explain to a CEO how wasteful a mobile API was; twelve distinct items of data to display but we sent JSON larger than war and peace.

I used to use this as my example for how big a megabyte actually is. I think the entire text is 4 MB uncompressed (a nagging voice in my head says 16 MB, but I think that's just the residual part of me that never really believed how big a MB actually is).

Re: Moby Dick Workout (2022)

#23

Post by miltonlost »

velcrovan wrote: post #21
BoingBoomTschak wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moby Dick had a much worse ratio of "size of good novel trying to get out / actual size", in my opinion.

Moby Dick has a bad (high) ratio of “people who try to read it like a thriller novel” to “people who read it for what it is”.

If they want a short and lean "man fights fish/sea animal", they should stick to "The Old Man and the Sea". I'll stick with the investigation into finding purpose in a purposeless ocean.

Re: Moby Dick Workout (2022)

#24

Post by arjie »

Oh that’s a great test case. I’ve been annoyed by the speed issue too. For a while I had json and Md files bound to Zed because it was faster with highlighting than anything else.

But even that takes seconds to start on my M1 Max from cold. So then I just wrote (avec Claude) a viewer app and it turns out computers are so fast you can not only open multi GB JSON files instantly you can even pretty print them so fast the user won’t lose attention.

But I just generated those. Moby Dick is a great real-world test case.

Re: Moby Dick Workout (2022)

#25

Post by arjie »

BoingBoomTschak wrote: post #19
sam_goody wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can use "20,000 leagues under the sea" instead of Moby Dick. Both were written at the same time, both deal with ocean adventures, and both (IMHO) are much longer than they need to be. Then you can have multiple Jules tests, depending on occasion!

Moby Dick had a much worse ratio of "size of good novel trying to get out / actual size", in my opinion.

Huh, that’s surprising to me. The beginning details about the whales and whatnot surprised me but once I got going it was just marvelous. I’m not a very good book critic but it just had such a sensation of the sea and being crew on a ship run by an obsessive (that in itself somewhat interesting in that the narrator is just side character to the protagonist). And I loved the characterization of his obsession as a “cruel emperor” and the way men love water (“set a man to walking and he will infallibly lead you to water”).

It’s been a long time since I read the book but it was doubtless one of the most enjoyable I’ve read.

Re: Moby Dick Workout (2022)

#26

Post by [deleted] »

jonplackett wrote: post #8

This reminds me of ‘The Jules Test’. Popularised (hyper locally) by my friend Jules. When renting a flat, simply head straight to the bathroom and flush the toilet. If the toilet flush is good, the flat is fine.

[deleted]

Re: Moby Dick Workout (2022)

#27

Post by black6 »

jonplackett wrote: post #8

This reminds me of ‘The Jules Test’. Popularised (hyper locally) by my friend Jules. When renting a flat, simply head straight to the bathroom and flush the toilet. If the toilet flush is good, the flat is fine.

Turn on the sink before you flush so a sizeable drop in header pressure becomes obvious.

Re: Moby Dick Workout (2022)

#28

Post by jzb »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #7
keiferski wrote: post #5

And here I thought this was going to be, “do a push up every time you have to look up a word in the dictionary while reading Moby Dick.”

Or how to stay fit like an 1800s whaler. Where am I going to find a hook and a 200 pound chunk of whale blubber though?

Could substitute a tractor tire, maybe? Would certainly smell better long term…

Re: Moby Dick Workout (2022)

#29

Post by zipy124 »

arjie wrote: post #24

Oh that’s a great test case. I’ve been annoyed by the speed issue too. For a while I had json and Md files bound to Zed because it was faster with highlighting than anything else. But even that takes seconds to start on my M1 Max from cold. So then I just wrote (avec Claude) a viewer app and it turns out computers are so fast you can not only open multi GB JSON files instantly you can even pretty print them so fast t…

This is why you use Emacs in Daemon mode for instant starts. Does zed perhaps offer something similar?

Re: Moby Dick Workout (2022)

#30

Post by arjie »

zipy124 wrote: post #29
arjie wrote: post #24

Oh that’s a great test case. I’ve been annoyed by the speed issue too. For a while I had json and Md files bound to Zed because it was faster with highlighting than anything else. But even that takes seconds to start on my M1 Max from cold. So then I just wrote (avec Claude) a viewer app and it turns out computers are so fast you can not only open multi GB JSON files instantly you can even pretty print them so fast t…

This is why you use Emacs in Daemon mode for instant starts. Does zed perhaps offer something similar?

One can keep it open without a window on MacOS I think but in the end the vibe-coded solution outperforms it on this specific task (which is not its primary task) at a few orders of magnitude. It is perhaps on the frontier for speed-features but I don’t need the features so when I move backwards along the curve I can extract more speed myself.
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