i had a salesman say he noticed i had a lot of spiders around outside. he asked who i currently use for pest control. i said, "the spiders." he excused himself and left.

maybe they don't make great decorations, but the spiders generally stay in their webs and don't bother me. i once watched one defeat a wasp twice its size. i might feel differently if we had any dangerous spiders around here (just black widows, and they stay in dark hidey holes), but i'm happy to trade a little space for their services.

> maybe they don't make great decorations

Some of ours are decorative enough, eg this orb weaver I exchange greetings with most mornings: https://www.pasteboard.co/07o5TWpFLUY8.png

Truly gorgeous, thanks for sharing.

Whenever I see a spider indoors I try to remind myself that for every spider I see I am probably seeing 10 less of other bugs. And if the spider is unsuccessful in catching other bugs it will leave on its own

Indeed I live somewhere that has both black widow and brown recluse and they are about the only two spiders I will actually exterminate. Even the fast scary hunter and wolf spiders get a pass

i came across a manuscript once that had a bunch of inky paw prints across a page. the scribe clearly tried to blot one of them, merely smudging it, then decided to let the rest be. it was in a very beautiful hand, and the full page must've taken hours to write. that scribe's exasperation echoes through the ages. i wish i could find that MS again.

to be fair, the page was probably arranged in a nice sunny spot at the time of the incident.

An example of a pawprint manuscript:

https://art.thewalters.org/object/W.305/

awesome, thank you! i'm not surprised there are more of these. i may be a little surprised i don't see them more often ;)

"deck" is the fairly normal word throughout the EDA industry. i reckon it's because such things used to be literal decks of punchcards, but i know less about EDA history than programming history.

"Good prices, no rats! That's the Fairsley Difference™!"

i liked this a lot. real Gene Wolfe vibes.

as a writer, i have found AI editing tools to be woefully unhelpful. they tend to focus on specific usage guidelines (think Strunk & White) and have little to offer for other, far more important aspects of writing.

i wrote a 5 page essay in November. the AI editor had sixty-something recommendations, and i accepted exactly one of them. it was a suggestion to hyphenate the adjectival phrase "25-year-old". i doubt that it had any measurable impact on the effectiveness of the essay.

thing is, i know all the elements of style. i know proper grammar and accepted orthographic conventions. i have read and followed many different style guides. i could best any English teacher at that game. when i violate the principles (and i do it often), i do so deliberately and intentionally. i spent a lot of time going through suggestions that would only genericize my writing. it was a huge waste of my time.

i asked a friend to read it and got some very excellent suggestions: remove a digressive paragraph, rephrase a few things for persuasive effect, and clarify a sentence. i took all of these suggestions, and the essay was markedly improved. i'm skeptical that an LLM will ever have such a grasp of the emotional and persuasive strength of a text to make recommendations like that.

Thanks!

That makes a lot of sense, but right now, the editing seems to be completely absent, and, I suspect, most writers aren’t at your level (I am sure that I’m not).

It may be better than nothing.

the anxiety that i might fry my monitor by setting the wrong scan rate haunts me to this day

The squealing noise of a monitor in the wrong rate is a memorable noise etched in my brain.

cf. yak shaving :)

The Lua-C API is also really consistent and straightforward. Bindings can be generated mechanically, of course, but it's really easy to embed by hand, and the documentation is superb.

And LLM's should be proficient in Lua and the bindings by now. That will help with velocity.

Lua has lambdas. They too suffer from verbosity, of course, but they're there.

    function(x) return x; end

There are patches for this so the above can be expressed with something like this:

  [ (x) | x ]

http://lua-users.org/files/wiki_insecure/power_patches/5.4/l...

And for Lua 5.1:

http://lua-users.org/files/wiki_insecure/power_patches/5.1/l...

(I personally don’t use patches like this because “Lua 5.1” is something pretty standardized with a bunch of different implementations; e.g. I wrote my Lua book with a C# developer who was using the moonsharp Lua implementation)

That's what I meant and didn't communicate well. I'm wishing for short-form syntax of lambdas, to be clear.