Blog post has hit the cult survivor group chat. RMS in shambles.

And on that kind of highly plausible, arguably inevitable bad day, you are going to have to say something like "yeah, I'm a Pythonista, but I'm going to have to read a bunch of C code today" and grow as a person while under time pressure. I have had to do this... quite a few times in my career. You do this stuff long enough, it's not an anomaly, it's a rite of passage. Like bad days more generally, you have to assume this is coming.

So, this is something I took for granted with Prone. It is assumed that 90% of the time you don't need to look at the generated C code, but in the remaining 10%, it should be readable, and possible to cross-reference with the Prone source code that was transformed. No minified webpack soup. I have less control over how easy it is to follow the white rabbit one layer lower into assembly, but that's thankfully documented by other people and a transferable skill. Prone also has great FFI because it's transpiled, so if you need more control, you can write specific parts in C.

5/n

But the thing about the work being done is, as a shoddy rule of thumb, it's all about equally as likely to have a bug that ruins your day. So a language that allows you to do a high work-to-word ratio is also concentrating risk (which you can see in the type systems of some languages, in how many types of exceptions or errors can come out of a deceptively simple function call).

Most of that work is not happening within the line of your app, it's on behalf of that line, right? Like, it's kind of a miracle if the bug is in your own code, although we make that miracle happen by collaborating to polish our upstream deps. Still, some percentage of the time, when things break, the only way to make sense of the breakage is to dive... and dive... and dive.

4/n

Now the double-edged sword of higher-level languages is that they have more going on. Not only more layers (but put a pin in that), you also have *will amplification* as a core reason to use them in the first place.

`conn = db.connect("psql://some-connection-string")`

Think about how much work you ask the computer to do in a line like that. That starts with parsing the connection string into some internal structure. There's probably going to be DNS involved, which itself is caches and a UDP stack and TCP fallback... look, I have a character limit, and you can play this out yourself.

The point is you invoked all that machinery with a pretty concise expression of what you wanted. That simple expression of will was expanded into an enormous fractal of detail, implied asks, on your behalf. That's beautiful and terrifying and productive. High level: You're Welcome! (tm)

3/n

So to have any longevity aspirations higher than fly-by-night Ponzi scheming, you need to internalize that the bad days will happen, and that you need to think about them and prepare for them *before* they happen. Ideally with as much lead time as you can muster. A bad day shouldn't be a last day.

Understanding software becomes REALLY IMPORTANT on a bad day. This is one of the issues with AI, see my thread the other day about the way it sabotages post-mortems, etc. You want to be able to narrow down on the offending code quickly, and easily see why it's doing what it's doing, and how that thing is wrong, even if there are layers and layers of secondary effects meshing poorly with each other as part of the pathology. Not being able to understand a bug that's taking down production is an existential risk. Addressing that up-front isn't optional. That includes the trickiest, most hellish of bugs.

2/n

Since Elon is spitting bad takes about AI again as part of blatant pump-n-dumping (a thing he has practice with after many exes), I'm going to take a second to talk about how the design of #pronelang went the exact opposite direction before it was even controversial.

Let's start with the actual "engineering compassionately" part of things first. In software, there's a lot of stuff you can get away with on a streak of good days. What matters for your long-term fate is how you handle *bad* days.

The most clear example of this is backups. You can have a very successful business, even holding other people's money, with no backups! ... for awhile. No sane person would recommend this approach, because we all understand the weight of that "for awhile."

1/n

I am so annoyed I can't really share screenshots (private info, c'est la vie), but I have future projections sorted out. I leave regions of blank rows in the transaction history between sections, so I can have a copy-pasteable month of expenses ready to go at all times.

This approach works because the core math heavy-lifter in this spreadsheet design is `SUMIF`, either used to get all transaction deltas <= a target date, or = it. Transactions can be spatially in any random order, and the analytical math doesn't care.

Well, today's budgeting was a bit late - didn't wake up early this morning - and I found myself so disgusted by the prospect of maintaining two budget spreadsheets that I just figured out a good workflow and finished my local one. It's entirely caught up. I retroactively know the exact dollar and cent amounts in my accounts on August 1st. I figured out date formatting so it would include the short weekday. I can focus on one account at a time and entirely transcribe history. All of this is going to pay off for incremental updates, too.

I'm still figuring out how best to do future projected expenses, but I have some ideas. Will pursue next.

Related idea, and maybe an alternative metaphor: funerals are for the living. If there's something you want to make sure someone hears from you, you call them and tell them while they're alive.

Oh, while I'm remarking on symbolic mysticism tonight. It was common for many ancient cultures, the Greeks and Romans being easy examples for my own western mind to point to, to try to appease the natural forces of the world with sacrifices and offerings. It is very easy, and incorrect, to laugh at these people for drawing an epistemologically soggy line between burning some grapes on an altar, and your wine fermenting correctly and safety (harder than you'd think without modern sanitation and such! High stakes if it's a lot of your income!).

There are two things to point out. First, that these rituals were often about addressing a feeling of helplessness, and second, that the pain of sacrifice was an important ingredient for the gods (and humans) to take them seriously.

I think about that when I hear about carbon credits or gimmicky eco projects as the planet burns. If Poppy is to be believed, and Gaia says our time is up, these sacrifices are a desperate, symbolic apology to a deaf goddess.

I've really got into rebuilding my physical self in earnest in the last couple months. That's been hard. @arichtman made me laugh recently with a line something like, "life really doesn't let up punching you in the dick, does it?" Because he's not wrong, but neither was my reaction. I'm stubborn. Life will learn the hard way that I kick back.

But that's still a little punishment-coded, I'm realizing. When I finally started really feeling progress, the reason it was so good is I could rely on my body. And I was learning the skill HOW. If you don't know your limits and you overdo things, that feels like broken trust. But listening to your body and growing into its feedback tells you: "this is a feeling I can address by slowing down" or "this is difficult but it's a thing I know I can do." You become your body's teammate. You learn to be trustworthy to each other, and that's incremental.

In February I was in really bad condition. Not my fault, some of you have already heard about how my last apartment poisoned me two different ways, *and* I lost a genetic lottery like a lot of women in my life, which still requires surgery to fix.

I couldn't really trust my body to do things I needed it to. Even after getting out of a literal toxic environment, I had to spend most of my time laying in bed. My capacity to do things came and went unpredictably. I couldn't really make commitments to people.

What really sucks is that your brain is a subset of your body, and I couldn't even keep intellectually busy. I always thought I could Stephen Hawking my way through life in the worst case. In hindsight, that was pretty naïve. So I couldn't even trust my brain, at least in a capacity sense.

Exercise can be really therapeutic. I needed that today. I ate a lot of junk food to cope with some stuff, and I'm not much a believer in exercising to burn off indulgences. That's some symbolic Christian mysticism. The math doesn't work out. But motion helps with symptoms when I eat stuff that isn't good for me, as well as building up my body in ways that it can take better care of me. Punishment is usually a bad reason to do things. Trust, on the other hand, keeps surprising me in its ability to frame and motivate good decisions.

Also, there's always this divide where devs feel pressure to Add! More! Features! For the users!

And as a user, but possibly an atypical one, I tend to gravitate towards simplicity and performance.

So one of the coolest outcomes we might get out of having multiple different viable transformer plugins (at different levels of complexity/feature richness) that can work on the same data schema, is actually getting to see what people prefer when given a genuine choice.

I suspect the answer is going to be some kind of "simplest thing that gets my needs done, but no simpler." Which varies from person to person of course.

Like, I don't think we necessarily have to go all the way back to the 2G-era(??) "plain text and menus" model. I actually think it would be quite cool and useful to support things like LaTeX formulas and images, and you can do that even on the lower-power chips these days, in a way too simple to confuse screen readers (although whether they can keep up with audio synthesis is another question - I remember seeing @freya once rail against ESP32s as an accessibility pothole, and I suspected it was a synthesis performance problem but was too intimidated to ask!).

But like. "Dumb phone made in the last 5 years" is probably a good reference point for an intentionally pruned feature set for basic respectful web browsing. And then other more "behavioral" transformers can vary from simple to advanced to cover a wide range of use cases.

Also, this will probably be the last time I post the link for awhile since I don't want to be spammy, but I just yesterday wrote a blog post about a consent-related topic and then (as Endeavorance would say) STUFF KEEPS HAPPENING. It's probably just the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon.

The more I've thought about this from a specifically consent perspective, the more it irks me. Even JS that doesn't need any funky permissions can still infinite-loop or otherwise burn through someone's phone battery, it raises the bare minimum features a browser needs to support, and the line between what needs a permission from the user vs. not is not just arbitrary - it's heavily influenced by techbro culture (even in the FOSS side) and pressure from companies like Google. And meanwhile, things like Reader Mode in Firefox exist to unfuck the web because people often don't want all this! That actually might be a good starting point for what a pared down formatting model should contain.

https://maddiem4.cc/blog/fuller-stack/0037-the-static-speaks-my-name

My initial read is it probably makes a lot more sense to join the Island One Network than to run my own instance, though both are possible. Heck, maybe I'll do the latter someday. I'm not in an urgent rush to even do the former, I just kinda want to be better informed on my slate of options so it can cook in the back of my brain.

https://codeberg.org/oliphant/pelago

I kinda want to get more into the Pelago stuff at some point. I was reading this article earlier (as posted by @onepict) and thinking "man it would be nice if our idea of social media was carefully scaled up from group chats instead of carefully scaled down from the public-everything model that closed platforms normalized because it served them," and then realized I was talking about something that kind of already existed (and still used ActivityPub as the federated data protocol).

https://thenexusofprivacy.net/consent-for-fediverse-developers/

Between the bike ride and preparing the prickly pears after I got home, I finished The Fragile. I can tell this is going to be an album I listen to regularly - and like, no surprise, it's Nine Inch Nails.

The little troublemaker in me kinda wants to post Starfuckers Inc., which is genuinely a good song. But I'm actually going to highlight Just Like You Imagined. It really stood out to me as I powered up the hill (I wasn't even that winded at the top! I am actually physiologically adapting and getting fit!). Why did it stand out to me? Because the style of bitcrush makes this the most Hex Core sounding song by NIN I've ever heard, and it's kinda wild that no NIN song has ever struck that connection for me before. It's just the Hex Core-est.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqWM-tXtoBU

It's premature to say just yet, but that looks like a monsoon coming, and up the hill at that. I'd stay the heck out of the ditches, kiddos.

No rabbits on this bike ride, but a decent batch of prickly pear, and I'm definitely getting better at telling the ripe ones!