To the author (and to the poster!): Thank you. I couldn't have found this at a better time. I'm right now (privately) writing about things of a very similar nature and this has made me indescribably inspired and grateful. I know a lot of depressed people feel the same, but I have to repeat the cliché that it's as if he's writing about my life.
> That's why I love writing- it feels like I'm talking to someone who gets me.
Beautifully said. I keep ignoring this lesson for long stretches of time until my mind is in such a messy state that I sort of instinctively can't do anything else but write and write and write, which I've been doing for a few days now, nonstop, after months (years?) of self-neglect. The contents are usually very similar, repetitive, self-deprecating and apparently unproductive, but more often than not I come out of it reinvigorated and more hopeful about the future, and sometimes with slightly less messy thoughts as a bonus.
I've wanted to start a blog since I was a teenager and be as open about my thoughts and feelings as the author of this post is, but I still haven't gotten over the fear of judgment about letting my existence, let alone my boring, dumb, coward, pathetically self-loathing self, be available to an unboundedly large audience of complete and potentially hostile strangers. The voices in my head are right now telling me: “Almost no one cares about what you have to say. Of those who do, many will care only to the extent that they can use it to ridicule you, or worse; and, if people like that ever find you, it's all over.”
I guess this comment is, if anything, a gesture of appreciation for this person's courage to be vulnerable. But it's also a painful challenge against these voices.
They're now begging me not to post this comment, or to delete it as soon as possible. They're screaming, telling me I know I will regret posting this.
Looks pretty cool. Have you looked into Pathom (a Clojure library)? Its creator seems to share your vision of connecting APIs from different sources. Last 5 minutes of this video:
> nobody uses them because you'll never be able to use anybody else's keyboard
I doubt that's the main reason, and it may be unwarranted as I say below. Personally, I thought it would take too long for me to be able to type as fast as in QWERTY. Fortunately, I was wrong about that too.
I learned the QGMLW optimized layout from Carpalx (linked above) about a year ago. I trained on https://keybr.com and then on https://typeracer.com for a few days and in less than a week I reached 70wpm. I stopped training shortly after and now I can usually reach 90-100wpm. Not particularly fast, but I'm not any faster in QWERTY, and I believe I could get faster if I trained more.
Even though I almost never type in QWERTY anymore, when I do I'm still just as fast as I used to be. I never learned to type in QWERTY "the right way", though, and I suppose this is actually what keeps me from confusing the two "modes". Whenever I try to keep my fingers on their "appropriate" keys (like a properly trained typist would), it's like my brain switches to "Carpalx mode" (since I did make an effort to use the right finger positioning to learn it). It's kinda like switching between thinking in my native language and English - I can think in both, but it doesn't "feel" the same, and I'm more likely to confuse the two where they overlap more. Pretty interesting, really.
Yeah I did the same thing but I learned colemak. I never learned to touch-type qwerty, when I learned touch-typing I switched to colemak. I feel like it made things easier as I didn't have bad habits to fall back on.
I can still type qwerty but I'm not very fast at it (I never was).
Awesome! Would you mind talking some more about your experience with it? I just got started with Clojure and Fulcro[1] (a full-stack framework) and I'm really, really excited about the possibilities. Have you heard about it?
Here are some features off the top of my head (at least that's what they claim):
- Well-integrated stack, so very little friction
- “Datomic on the front end”: Client-side time-traveling database with automatic normalization, querying via EQL (kinda like GraphQL but more idiomatic and supposedly more powerful), “co-locating” queries in the UI.
- React bindings and a Semantic UI library
- Lets you swap anything you “outgrow”
- Lots of learning material (but still lacking in some areas from a cursory look). The author seems to be very active on Slack (Clojurians #fulcro).
- Fulcro RAD[2] (currently alpha) looks like it's going to reduce friction even further.
There's probably more cool stuff I don't remember now.
The two things I'm still insecure about with Clojure are its dynamically typed nature (but I'd be glad to hear about how that isn't a problem) and that the ecosystem doesn't seem to hold your hand too much (again, I'd like to hear another point of view).
I'm making this same journey (I'm on video 5), and I'm making some notes for each video in Roam and teaching/learning each video every week via Google Meet on Bristol's Clojure Meetup
I recommend using clj-kondo to catch the kinds of silly mistakes a type system is usually good for, yesterday we discovered that the react component interop is really good, we decided to try using https://chakra-ui.com/ over semantic ui and it's really straight forward to use React components that have no awareness of Fulcro or CLJS
I think in terms of hand holding Fulcro does a really good job once you get into the weeds because it has an opinion and documentation for many problems, if you want to join us we're #bristol-clojurians on slack
Oh hey! I've been to Bristol's Clojure Meetup last year! Or was it two years ago? Anyways, happy to hear about it. I'm not in the UK anymore, but I'll drop by next time I visit.
> Showing users how much data a given extension sends to a backend and ideally making that data transparent would be enough to stop most of these practices
Exactly! I find it abhorrent that not even Firefox has something straightforward like that as a “first-class” feature. Most of the extensions I use shouldn't need to communicate with any server at all to begin with, so having to just trust the author's words or manually audit the code on every update (or stop them altogether) and maybe fork the project (if that's even possible)... Doesn't make sense.
The one thing I'm aware of that these extensions could do to sidestep such a mechanism is to inject scripts on pages that then exfiltrate your data, but injection could also be blocked, and as a last resort I trust uMatrix would have me covered ;)
Indeed, ProseMirror is highly regarded by its code quality, just as its older sibling, CodeMirror. It even raised quite a bit of money on Indiegogo.
Are you planning on open-sourcing your editor? I'd love to use something like this on a project of mine. (I currently use the much less ambitious EasyMDE [1], which is based on CodeMirror.)
Yes, that's the plan! I've long lamented that editors like Typora and Roam are closed-source, preventing users like me from tweaking them to my specific use-case. So I'm hoping to build something that others can modify if they need to.
My priorities are math support, citations/wikilinks and the ability to define custom document structure (theorems, etc.). I basically want users to be able to specify a ProseMirror schema with CSS to go along with it.
Can I ask about your specific use case? Any features you've been really missing? No promises they'll make it in, but I'm curious :)
There's a lot of discussion about that in the "classic" pixel art circles. More generally, if you look at it from this angle, pixel art itself is "from the wrong era" of digital art since it is literally self-imposing constraints that maybe used to be there by external imposition but don't need to be anymore.
I've come to the conclusion that whatever we call "pixel art" is just a range of subjective preferences that may be more biased towards aesthetics, or techniques, or tradition, or even "pseudo-tradition". Nowadays the trend seems to be aesthetics with disregard to technique, but there are still many people who consider it "cheating" if you use the "wrong" tools, there are those who want to emulate the exact specs of certain machines, and there are those still who have a mashup of rules that aren't fully justified if not historically (the best example I know is Pixel Joint, but in the end their restrictions have created a community that has flourished and produced awesome art anyway).
To me it’s probably just the multiple meanings that are confusing.
Reading the replies in this thread I realize that to a lot of people it seems to mean a certain aesthetic (I.E. blocky pseudo-retro game graphics). Nothing wrong with that.
I guess I fall into the traditionalist camp. Pixel art to me is about working against fixed limitations to create an illusion of more colours, higher resolution etc.
> you have to have a constrained palette, which more-or-less precludes any sort of antialiasing
> I have only ever seen one piece of antialised pixelart
You haven't seen a lot of pixel art then. Just visit Pixel Joint [1] (a well-known community) and on the homepage (which is updated all the time) you'll already see a few. One of the most distinguished members even has a popular "tutorial" [2] that discusses this and other techniques.
If you're interested, there's also Pixelation [3], a community where people discuss techniques in depth.
In short, anti-aliasing can be done by hand and using a low color count. There's also "index painting", something that many "hardcore" pixel artists consider cheating, but which creates the style without manual work [4].
The point others make is true, though: The sharpness of newer screens ultimately reduces their visual appeal (although there are people who actually prefer them).
> That's why I love writing- it feels like I'm talking to someone who gets me.
Beautifully said. I keep ignoring this lesson for long stretches of time until my mind is in such a messy state that I sort of instinctively can't do anything else but write and write and write, which I've been doing for a few days now, nonstop, after months (years?) of self-neglect. The contents are usually very similar, repetitive, self-deprecating and apparently unproductive, but more often than not I come out of it reinvigorated and more hopeful about the future, and sometimes with slightly less messy thoughts as a bonus.
I've wanted to start a blog since I was a teenager and be as open about my thoughts and feelings as the author of this post is, but I still haven't gotten over the fear of judgment about letting my existence, let alone my boring, dumb, coward, pathetically self-loathing self, be available to an unboundedly large audience of complete and potentially hostile strangers. The voices in my head are right now telling me: “Almost no one cares about what you have to say. Of those who do, many will care only to the extent that they can use it to ridicule you, or worse; and, if people like that ever find you, it's all over.”
I guess this comment is, if anything, a gesture of appreciation for this person's courage to be vulnerable. But it's also a painful challenge against these voices.
They're now begging me not to post this comment, or to delete it as soon as possible. They're screaming, telling me I know I will regret posting this.
But I won't be listening to them today.