Neon Vagabond
⚠️ UNRELIABLE PROPHECIES WARNING ⚠️
THIS PROPHET'S FORETELLING MAY OR MAY NOT BE ACCURATE. NO REFUNDS WILL BE OFFERED FOR INACCURATE PROPHECIES.
WOULD YOU DESTROY A BETTER WORLD TO SAVE THIS ONE?
TO GO STILL FURTHER ... IN THE MOVEMENT OF THE MARKET ... FOR PERHAPS THE FLOWS ARE NOT YET DETERRITORIALIZED ENOUGH, NOT DECODED ENOUGH ... NOT TO WITHDRAW FROM THE PROCESS, BUT TO GO FURTHER, TO "ACCELERATE THE PROCESS" ... THE TRUTH IS THAT WE HAVEN'T SEEN ANYTHING YET.
I SWEAR BY MY LIFE AND MY LOVE OF IT THAT I WILL NEVER LIVE FOR THE SAKE OF ANOTHER MAN, NOR ASK ANOTHER MAN TO LIVE FOR MINE.
EVERY MAN IS FREE TO DO THAT WHICH HE WILLS, PROVIDED HE INFRINGES NOT THE EQUAL LIBERTY OF ANY OTHER MAN.
IN ITS COLDER VARIANTS, WHICH ARE THOSE THAT WIN OUT, ACCELERATIONISM TENDS TO LAUGH.
WE WILL ENJOY OUR ALIENATION
DARKLY • AESTHETICIZE • WHAT'S • COMING
Index
To briefly explain the structure of this blog: this is a nearly direct export of my Zettelkasten knowledge system. I call the hypertext nodes here thoughts instead of "posts," because they can be changed, rewritten, and edited over time — to erase mistakes or represent my changing views — but can also remain stagnant and unedited as I move on to thinking more actively about other things — whether unrelated, or specific related subtopics — and my views change but I haven't had time to go back and edit them.
Thus, if you want to get a more complete and up to date understanding of my views on a topic, look at a whole thought page, not just an individual thought: like any brain, my public second brain is a constantly changing, evolving web of beliefs which is moved forward precisely by the tensions between various parts of it, forcing it to move in one direction or another.
Recent Updates
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Reconsidering Go
I've had an entire arc with respect to Go. I went from despising the design of it, and peremptorily refusing to use it, on the basis of the famous Rob Pike quotes and Amos's inflammatory articles about it (one, two), to absolutely loving Go as a language. Here are some random thoughts as to what I like about it now, and how my feelings have changed. The first shift, the one that got me to try Go out at all, was thanks to the new affordances made possible by AI coding agents when it comes to the ... -
Do we really need macros much?
I've kind of fallen out of love with macros to a certain degree. Now that we don't just have snippets, but also AI, to help deal with boilerplate and refactoring, to a certain degree, yeah --- but there's more to it than that. Ultimately, it's because the vast majority --- like 99% --- of things you do with macros in Lisp, are just basic textual compression, basically. You get rid of boilerplate, but the resulting DSL is completely isomorphic to the structures and control flow of the underlying ... -
The only thing Lisp fails at
There's this post by Loper OS, "Where Lisp Fails". The general point of it is that less powerful languages are popular among management because it lowers the technical knowledge and skill bar for being able to use the language, meaning programmers are more replaceable and easier to hire, and it also vastly decreases the leverage any individual programmer can have, because the language is just so verbose and unproductive that it takes a lot of time and effort to get anything done. The idea is tha... -
The failure of tree-sitter for structural editing
I love text editing in Lisp. The clean beauty, efficiency, and confidence of the structural transformations you can do on S-expressions is just unbeaten. I have long wished that tree-sitter would provide a way for structural editing of that caliber to come to other languages. However, more and more, I think that while tree-sitter can offer a some new extremely useful tools for text editing in other languages, it will never truly get to that level of power and polish. While I used to have hope fo... -
I prefer letting agents write code, instead of editing text
I think this is one of the divides between people who like AI and people who don't: I love programming in the sense of thinking through algorithms, architectures, data structures, data flow, concurrency, control flow, parallelism, time and space complexity, error handling, tests --- but I don't care for text editing. I've used Vim (Evil mode) and then Emacs (god-mode) for years, and I spent a lot of time trying to learn how to use their most advanced features in an attempt to make text editing e...