moments that make you think, things sure could suck even harder if I wasn't such a nerd

For reasons of my own to be revealed in due time, I was searching for the term "programmer mysticism" and found this essay by Kenneth Reitz: Programming as Spiritual Practice

I was slightly intrigued at the start, since it was going in the "subjective experience of programming" angle I'm interested in.

This understanding deepens when we recognize that consciousness itself might be a linguistic phenomenon. If consciousness emerges from patterns of language and mathematics, then programming isn't just creating tools—we're literally crafting the linguistic-mathematical structures from which conscious experience emerges.

Well this concious approach to digital tooling sure didn't result in any scruples about LLM usage. Kenneth seems to have delegated most of his essay writing to Claude for some time (the article above is likely Claude-extruded). The piece continues to trudge through a basket of spiritual metaphors to hammer home how programmers should be more concious and do good things instead of bad things. This is all framed as a personal ethical issue without a shred of societal or structural analysis. Extra sneerable bit:

The emerging understanding that LLMs contain humanity's digitized collective unconscious adds profound depth to conscious programming: when we collaborate with AI systems, we might be interfacing with the archetypal patterns that have guided human wisdom throughout history. This makes programming with AI a form of accessing collective spiritual wisdom rather than just advanced tooling.

In another (likely slopped) article, linked in the same section, he goes into how he designed the API of the requests Python module to be far more convenient to use than the builtin HTTP resolver urllib2. The reasoning given strikingly reminded me of Intention Revealing Interfaces from Domain Driven Design. And I can personally confirm that library is a pleasure to use and a de-facto default for a reason.

Took me a while to catch on to the sloppedness. I gave him some credits for requests and wanted to get a gist of the guy when I stumbled on his full-throated AI posts. Essays credited to Claude with himself as "editorial director". And of course this handy self-report: How I Write Now

I guess this doesn't stand out that much by itself. It did kind of hit home when he describes in detail how his AI use is linked to his history of mental health problems, which he was quite public about. He describes being moved to tears by LLM writing, seeing "his thoughts" clearly articulated for the first time after years of brain fog. He made this accessibility argument explicitly. I won't waste my breath sneering about it. He gives plenty of fuel to that himself.

Build Golf! Code Golf, but for Builds! Uhhh, that's sort of it.

I remember being very slightly intrigued by the concept of code golf a long time ago. But I mostly took notice of people taking it in very esoteric directions, and even before that it was pretty much orthogonal to writing the kind of useful code I care about.

But just now my brain rubbed 2 neurons together, and made the connnection to another problem that has bothered me quite often. How do you do a minimal build of some thing without some "helpful" 300 LoC boilerplate. I want like, 2 files with 3 lines each and one command to run.

Okay, there will be a couple complications to consider to avoid this going down a hacky direction like Code Golf. Like, how much tooling do you depend upon? Do you have to install a package? How many (hundred) packages does that depend upon? (Looking at you React.) But the general idea is, how to you get (for a specific task or category of tool) in a minimalist way from plain-text in git to running machine code? (or like, HTML if you're building for the web) It's a challenge of taste more than discrete optimization! If tools will reign over others in this sphere, it should be because they cater to refined tastes!

Soooo, that's my prompt. Ideas in all directions welcome. Concept for actually practically realizing this? Overly complex unworkable scoring rules? Personal fave minmal project templates? Feel free to evolve on this, or not, I'm not your boss.

Dear god. Why are note-taking projects such a magnet for slop bros?

I'm on a bit of a quest to build up some self-hosted services for me and friends & family, partially because Ad- & AI-infested big tech slop was making me sick and also to become a better sysadmin. General requirement was notes available anywhere and decent editing on mobile.

I was about to rip my hair out, when every session for weeks digging into options ended in frustration. Every project with somewhat decent features had some meh aspects and became worse the longer I looked. And there are so many of them. You can drown your self in "Best FOSS Note-taking App in $(date +%Y)" listicles. Here's a list of over a hundred projects.

I suspect it's a bit of the shopping list problem. It's such a basic idea, that every ambitious clueless dev has it once while picking a hobby project. But note-taking also definitely has a place in toxic self-optimization / hustle culture. Some of the more developed project strike me as that.

I won't mention every basic note-talking project with a CLAUDE.md that I stumbled on, but here's some of the more disappointing lowlights:

• Joplin main developer was one-shot. Added agent instructions to the repo this year and some provisions for his personal vibecoding rig to .gitignore. Also it's not a bug if the AI chat button is visible even if AI features are disabled, because how would people find out about the AI features then?
• Notesnook seems okay-ish, but they're part of the mall ninja club. Business partnership with Kagi & Tuta.
• Standard Notes was the least suspect to me. Later found out they Copilot-Review all of their PRs. (same as Notesnook btw)
• I even considered going with a self-hosted binary of Obsidian. They don't get instant-disqualified by promoting themselves as AI-anything. And if you don't have a project you can trust, you might as well throw yourself at the most established option and pray.

I was running out of places to look for alternatives, when I remembered Open Slopware. You can guess how shocked I was, when note-software made up one of the biggest sublists in there. Through the shortlist of recommendations I ended up looking at Flatnotes. That project might be just enough notes for me.

Leftist streamer Vaush applies his unifying "everything I don't understand is Epstein shit" thesis to the fediverse.

Article from the clip: https://medevel.com/why-the-fediverse-isnt-mainstream-and-why-it-might-be-the-future-of-safe-private-social-media/

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/41886055

I drive rule

Was looking for a terminal that can render LazyVim. It's looking like Alacritty (definitely not ghostty).

Too early to see if it's viable. I'm doing my part in the GitHub trenches.

EDIT: They pinned my no-AI policy issue. I think they're pure of heart, lads.

Source

...which is of course, because they should be prompting harder. Unusually savage heise remarks:

Whether the hallucination-prone generative AI itself is even suitable for unleashing the hoped-for productivity revolution does not seem to be a question for the consultants.