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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An inconvenient truth (for Lispers)
There are a lot of sort of semi-mystical reasons that the Lispcommunity has given for the fact that it isn't very successful--- that it doesn't have the huge successful projects, therewrites-in-X, etc that other initially niche languages, likeRust or Go, do. I don't really find any of these reasonscompelling. The claim that Lisp is an isolated environment that cannotinteract with the modern world or be easily deployed istechnically incorrect. Common Lisp’s Foreign Function Interface(FFI) is of... -
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 ... -
Who uses LLMs?
There's this common argument that only those who are bad at coding, or don't care about the craft of it, use AI to code. I think this is pretty clearly false. Let's look at a list, shall we? More iffy ones:This refutes a few arguments that I see a lot of people make, especially in places like lobste. rs:The point isn't to say that you have to use AI, or that it has no downsides or risks, or no reasons to be skeptical, but more to say that at this point it's just not sane or feasible to claim tha... -
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 ... -
I prefer letting agents write code
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 writing code. 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...