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Cogito

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Stephen Hawking has died

bbc.com
6,015 points·by Cogito·il y a 8 ans·436 comments

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Cogito
·il y a 7 mois·discuss
I think I took out an extra comma too, which hurts readability.

Personally I write with too many asides, normally done with commas and parentheses. It's a comforting habit to fall into, and makes getting your thoughts out so much easier, at the expense of interrupting the reader's train of thought.

I don't normally notice when I'm writing with asides so the jarring em-dashes were a good reminder to try and edit them out where I can.
Cogito
·il y a 7 mois·discuss
It may be due to AI proliferation, or the culturural bias I have, but I increasingly find em-dashes jarring.

As you point out, authors use them for the "natural and chaotic shifts of thought we all have" and when there are lots of these shifts it feels like I have to keep track of multiple conversations at once.

For example, in the article we have:

If your goal is to have other people read—and hopefully enjoy—your writing, you should make an effort to edit your thoughts.

When I read this I instinctively pause the 'main' thought/voice, read the aside, then re-establish my train of thought. In my opinion the sentence reads just as well without the aside:

    If your goal is to have other people read and enjoy your writing you should make an effort to edit your thoughts.
[edit - putting comma back in to break up the long sentence]

    If your goal is to have other people read and enjoy your writing, you should make an effort to edit your thoughts.
I think this is the only aside formatted like this in the article. The other em-dashes take the place of pauses in sentences, places I would normally use a comma or semicolon, or are used to introduce a list where I would typically use a colon.

Again this is probably a cultural thing, maybe a reaction to AI as well, but I find the em-dash a lot more though-interrupting than the other punctuation choices and I wonder if it's something I'll get used to or not.
Cogito
·il y a 8 mois·discuss
I've found having yt-dlp available on my iPhone useful, and used Pythonista to achieve that, but haven't figured out how to get the new requirements to work yet. Would love any ideas people have!
Cogito
·il y a 9 mois·discuss
> (I forget how git format-patch handles the case where there are two parents.)

As per [0] merge commits are dropped:

Note that format-patch will omit merge commits from the output, even if they are part of the requested range. A simple "patch" does not include enough information for the receiving end to reproduce the same merge commit.

I originally thought it would use --first-parent (so just diff vs the first parent, which is what I would want) but apparently no! It is possible to get this behaviour using git log as detailed in this great write-up [1].

[0] https://git-scm.com/docs/git-format-patch#_caveats

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2285699/git-how-to-creat...
Cogito
·il y a 9 mois·discuss
Out of interest, what do you think it would look like if communicating was algorithmic?

I know that it doesn't feel like I am doing anything particularly algorithmic when I communicate but I am not the hommunculus inside me shuffling papers around so how would I know?
Cogito
·il y a 10 mois·discuss
They have a MasterClass® class that you might like if you have an account (or if you don't!)

https://www.masterclass.com/classes/penn-and-teller-teach-th...
Cogito
·il y a 10 mois·discuss
No claim was made that it is not open source. The contention was over if it was a free license or not:

> not free software

which it is. As F3nd0 said, it's both.
Cogito
·il y a 7 ans·discuss
Peff, for the people asking in the thread, is there a place where correct alternatives are suggested or demonstrated?

I know there are a few different places that talk about how to use git's internal machinery, but not sure if any are specific to these banned functions.
Cogito
·il y a 8 ans·discuss
One of my most enduring memories is putting on the audio book for "A Brief History of Time" to listen to on a long drive home with my brother.

I'd read and listened to it before, but sitting there watching my brother listen to it for the first time, I realised just how clearly and succinctly Hawking mapped out the ideas and way of thinking I use to try and find my place in the universe.

I'm quite grateful I had the opportunity to read it.