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AC10 had an interesting post around this general area earlier today:

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/mysteries-of-ai-generalizat...


Theft was historically very scale-sensitive. In England you'd face execution for "grand larceny" if the goods in question were worth more than twelve pence. This was on the books from the 13th century until 1832 (!).

Jesus Christ on a pogo stick, execution for stealing 12 pence worth of stuff? That's crazy! Adjusting for inflation[1][2], that would be the same as nowadays being executed for stealing £5!

[1] According to https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/education/education-resource..., 12 pence (1 shilling, or 1/20 of a pound)) in the old £sd system is equal to 5 pence (or £0.05) in the later decimal system.

[2] According to https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/in..., £0.05 (decimal) in 1832 would be equivalent to £5.02 in 2026 Aug.


When first introduced it was around the price of a sheep. The homicidal version of bracket creep [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bracket_creep


Damn, sheep were cheap back then.

Plenty of webfiction out there which is exactly this. It does tend to fall into the trap of going on forever though.

Printing is a good constraint against getting too long, both the physical and cost constraints. Though the Harry Potter series in full still managed to reach a million words.

For another comparison, the Bible is around three quarters of a million words, and tends to use special paper (20–40gsm/30–50 micron) so it works in one volume.

Handwriting is also a good idea for encouraging keeping lengths down; typing and dictation make verbosity too easy; and as for LLMs, words are clearly far too cheap there.


There is a lot of web fiction out there that would be better if the authors had written "the end" a few years ago.

I don't think "volubility" means what you think it means. The usual meaning of "voluble" is "talkative" (gesprächig if your username is accurate). I'm not quite sure what you're going for here or in an earlier comment, but suspect it's something more like "ergonomic", i.e. the language being easy/natural to write and not getting in your way.

> I don't think "volubility"

Indeed I got it wrong bc I translated from spanish and it seems to be a false friend. The word I meant is "malleable".


I'd also love to see MS sponsoring Windows support for a modern linker like mold or wild.

lld-link is already a big step up from link.exe. Although the latter has incremental linking, which none of the Unix-like linkers have.

to be fair mold or wild's full link is a few hundred times faster than a link.exe incremental relink

Out of interest, are you doing any dev on the SM? If so, how is it for that?


Only a token test amount so far. The root filesystem is read-only by default, but without the whole Nix ecosystem, which is a little awkward (can't install packages even as root without changing that.) On the other hand, it comes with `distrobox` preinstalled, so it's easy enough to spin up a container and use that (including package installation.)

My raw notes are here: https://github.com/MaulingMonkey/notes/blob/master/programmi...


Beautifully put, and definitely resonated with me as someone who entered mostly-contentedly-frugal retirement a few years back.

One thing you didn't mention is the need to feel useful in some way; would you consider that a weakness too? Is it covered by "rest without guilt"? It's the bit I still have some trouble with.


Not OP, but there's a nuance. In general there's nothing wrong with wanting to be useful, but it is definitely possible to take it too far.

If you get sick and need care, you are typically not "useful". But that doesn't mean you instantly lose all value. I've had colleagues who would feel almost physically ill if they were somehow not able to respond to an incident somewhere, even if they weren't even on call at that point. Almost all of them burned out at some point and were no longer able to respond to anything, even if they'd wanted to. That's not healthy, and it weakens everyone in the long run.

Resting without guilt comes from the realization that you cannot keep the world running all by yourself. Let others pick up the work when you need a rest, so you can shelter them when they are down.


That is quite opposite of weakness. Your entire life is exercising power of your mind. What is left if you take it away? Do the thing you love and you will find your happiness.


Even just asking that question implies self-judgment and a need to “do the right thing”. Perhaps just be, and that is enough.


> Perhaps just be, and that is enough.

Don't be evil tho


Honest question - does anyone aside from the devs actually play PICO-8 games?

I can absolutely see the appeal of simple/constrained platforms from the dev side; I look back fondly on my Amiga days, optimising the living daylights out of an asm routine or endlessly fiddling with programmer art. But I don't know whether there's any appetite now to play the things, and without that there's no real feedback loop.


This was honestly the same thought I had from the quote in the article from the dev who was enthusiastic about developing for a 400x240 monochrome screen. There's nothing wrong with developing something for your own happiness without caring about whether others want to use it, but it felt like it was maybe missing the fact that features like color and higher resolution were probably not introduced in devices with the idea that they were going to make development easier.


“He who would do good to another must do it in minute particulars. General good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer.” -- William Blake


9.336 WGPU Error: Not enough memory left.

This is on a 4GB 1650 Super, latest Firefox, Win10. It's an old card, sure, but it can still play most commercial games; I'm not sure why this thing is so hungry. Lots of big volumetric textures, maybe?


I also get an error:

    Requested allocation size (41967616) is smaller than the image requires (42778624).
    at ImportMemory (../../third_party/dawn/src/dawn/native/vulkan/external_memory/MemoryServiceImplementationOpaqueFD.cpp:132)
using Chromium on an old video card GTX 1070 with 32GB RAM, Fedora 44 KDE Plasma 4.7. Don't know if it matters but monitor scaling is set to 150%


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