kej's recent activity

  1. Comment on Nvim 0.12 released in ~comp

    kej
    Link Parent
    Whether they'll ever reach it is an open question, but there are plans for a Neovim 1.0 release.

    Whether they'll ever reach it is an open question, but there are plans for a Neovim 1.0 release.

    2 votes

  2. Comment on TV series suggestions in ~tv

    kej
    Link
    My wife and I have both enjoyed Only Murders in the Building and A Man on the Inside lately.

    My wife and I have both enjoyed Only Murders in the Building and A Man on the Inside lately.

    6 votes

  3. Comment on Does anyone have experience exchanging actual letters with a pen pal? in ~talk

    kej
    Link
    As a teenager in an AOL chat room I met someone who claimed to be a girl from California and actually turned out to be a girl from California. We would chat online almost daily, and then when I...

    As a teenager in an AOL chat room I met someone who claimed to be a girl from California and actually turned out to be a girl from California. We would chat online almost daily, and then when I was leaving to work at summer camp I gave her the camp address in case she wanted to write, and ended up exchanging a bunch of letters back and forth. We became pretty good friends, as far as online things go, over the next few years. She lamented her unrequited love for a male friend of hers, I told her about my unrequited love for a female friend of mine. We were pretty high on each other's list of people to tell about any major life events, both good and bad.

    Eventually we kind of drifted apart, and the mass exodus from AOL didn't help with that. We talked once a few years later, and she told me that the night before her wedding she had sent me a long email, but it had gone to my old and unchecked AOL address and I never saw it, nor did she tell me what it had said. I looked her up on Facebook recently and sent a friend request, but after the initial "what have you been up to?" chat there hasn't really been a reason to keep the conversation going. I guess sometimes the past is supposed to stay in the past.

    13 votes

  4. Comment on Zachtronics returns from retirement to release an add-on for Opus Magnum in ~games

    kej
    Link Parent
    Exactly, that's a great example.

    Exactly, that's a great example.

  5. Comment on Zachtronics returns from retirement to release an add-on for Opus Magnum in ~games

    kej
    Link Parent
    Sort of tangential, but there's a great talk by Guy Steele (co-creator of the Scheme programming language who went on to do a lot of work on Java) called Growing a Language, and his point is that...

    Sort of tangential, but there's a great talk by Guy Steele (co-creator of the Scheme programming language who went on to do a lot of work on Java) called Growing a Language, and his point is that a good programming language starts small but makes it easy to add things as complexity grows. (It starts slowly, but watch the whole thing and you'll understand why. It's a really good presentation.)

    I think that ability to add things is what is missing from a lot of the Zachtronics games and the zach-like genre as a whole. Instead of solving a small problem and then being able to use that solution in the more complex ones, you end up having to repeat the small solution and add the larger solution at the same time, which makes it a lot harder to keep all the complexity in your head.

    6 votes

  6. Comment on Let's talk about tropes! in ~books

    kej
    Link Parent
    I'm just going to invite myself into this branch of the conversation to say that I would like to hear more about the distinction.

    I was mostly using "trope" and "cliche" as synonyms, but there is a distinction. It wasn't my goal to hash that out, but we could if that interests you

    I'm just going to invite myself into this branch of the conversation to say that I would like to hear more about the distinction.

    1 vote

  7. Comment on Let's talk about tropes! in ~books

    kej
    Link
    My pet peeve is clumsy exposition, and the worst is when a character explains something to another character who should already know the thing. Give me a fake encyclopedia entry at the start of...

    My pet peeve is clumsy exposition, and the worst is when a character explains something to another character who should already know the thing. Give me a fake encyclopedia entry at the start of the chapter or a legitimately ignorant character who actually does need the explanation.

    2 votes

  8. Comment on A hobby of collecting hobbies in ~hobbies

    kej
    Link Parent
    I love when inanimate objects tell a story like that. You've also reminded me of a thought I've often had when reading history or historical fiction, where they will reference some old coins and I...

    I love when inanimate objects tell a story like that.

    You've also reminded me of a thought I've often had when reading history or historical fiction, where they will reference some old coins and I struggle to contextualize it. If a sailor threw a silver 8 reales coin on the tavern counter, is that enough to buy himself a drink, enough to buy a round for all his friends, or enough to buy the whole tavern? So, my question is if you know of any good resources for comparing the value of historical coins to the present (in the sense of what they would have been worth when in use, not their present collector value)?

    1 vote

  9. Comment on A hobby of collecting hobbies in ~hobbies

    kej
    Link Parent
    This is completely off-topic and please don't take it personally because everyone does it, but a silly linguistic thing I enjoy is when people have a typo or swap homophones but the sentence still...

    Ive had to reign it in a bit

    This is completely off-topic and please don't take it personally because everyone does it, but a silly linguistic thing I enjoy is when people have a typo or swap homophones but the sentence still kind of makes sense with the other word. If you are getting something under control you would be reining it in, like pulling on a horse's reins, but coins have historically been marked with a reigning person so it still kind of makes sense here.

    Back on topic, what are some of the coolest parts of your collection?

    2 votes

  10. Comment on What radicalized you? in ~talk

    kej
    Link Parent
    It's on my list but I haven't gotten to it yet. Is there a spoiler-free way you can tell me what the red letter connection is in Blue Prince?

    It's on my list but I haven't gotten to it yet. Is there a spoiler-free way you can tell me what the red letter connection is in Blue Prince?

  11. Comment on What radicalized you? in ~talk

    kej
    Link Parent
    I've heard of pastors having their congregants get angry if they preach about the beatitudes. It reminds me of how some people interpreted NPR's reading/tweeting the Declaration of Independence on...

    I've heard of pastors having their congregants get angry if they preach about the beatitudes. It reminds me of how some people interpreted NPR's reading/tweeting the Declaration of Independence on July 4th as an attack on Donald Trump.

    7 votes

  12. Comment on What radicalized you? in ~talk

  13. Comment on What radicalized you? in ~talk

    kej
    Link
    Some of the letters were in red, so they seemed important.

    Some of the letters were in red, so they seemed important.

    8 votes

  14. Comment on What are people using instead of VS Code? in ~comp

    kej
    Link
    There is a very recent fork of Zed that removes the AI features and the telemetry, if those are things you'd rather do without: https://gram.liten.app/docs/mission/

    There is a very recent fork of Zed that removes the AI features and the telemetry, if those are things you'd rather do without: https://gram.liten.app/docs/mission/

    2 votes

  15. Comment on Dox with Grok in ~tech

    kej
    Link
    For an old account of mine, it noticed a similarity in account names with someone else's account on some other website, and then went completely off the rails chasing leads from that other site....

    For an old account of mine, it noticed a similarity in account names with someone else's account on some other website, and then went completely off the rails chasing leads from that other site. It was trying to reconstruct that other person's family tree based on drama in their Mormon church, going so far as to search obituaries to find related names. It would have been impressive in its thoroughness if it hadn't gone down the completely wrong track in the first place. My stupid old posts remain anonymous, at least for now.

    7 votes

  16. Comment on What's an obscure book/series that you've read that you would like to recommend? in ~books

    kej
    Link Parent
    My school library had the first one as a kid in the Denver area, just as another data point for you.

    My school library had the first one as a kid in the Denver area, just as another data point for you.

  17. Comment on What are you reading these days? in ~books

    kej
    Link
    While waiting for the next book in the Pillars of the Earth series (even though I'm pretty sure it will follow the same "guy who can solve any problem takes longer to solve societal problem that...

    While waiting for the next book in the Pillars of the Earth series (even though I'm pretty sure it will follow the same "guy who can solve any problem takes longer to solve societal problem that keeps him from love interest" pattern as the others) I picked up The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson. I'm only a little way in but enjoying it so far.

    1 vote

  18. Comment on What are you reading these days? in ~books

    kej
    Link Parent
    Idle curiosity: which e-reader model did you get?

    Idle curiosity: which e-reader model did you get?

  19. Comment on Tildes Book Club - January 2026 - Fire on the Mountain by Terry Bisson in ~books

    kej
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    I think this would have been better as two (or more) separate books. An epistolary novel about the 1850s through the 1870s would have been amazing, and then I would have happily read the rest of...

    I think this would have been better as two (or more) separate books. An epistolary novel about the 1850s through the 1870s would have been amazing, and then I would have happily read the rest of the series leading up to the 1900s and beyond. Trying to mix them together made both parts feel cluttered, in my opinion.

    2 votes

  20. Comment on Tildes Book Club - January 2026 - Fire on the Mountain by Terry Bisson in ~books

    kej
    Link Parent
    Apologies for dropping in a month late, but I wanted to touch on this: I read this right after To Kill a Mockingbird (which I managed to miss when everyone read it in high school), and it stood...

    Apologies for dropping in a month late, but I wanted to touch on this:

    One thing I kept forgetting was that the (great) great grandfather was writing about when he was twelve years old. I think I repeatedly forgot this because he didn’t sound like a twelve-year-old (because he’s writing as an older man) and because so many of the things he did felt more grown up than twelve. It also wasn’t entirely clear how much time had or hadn’t passed between sections, so sometimes I ended up thinking he was older than he was until I was reminded again of his age.

    I read this right after To Kill a Mockingbird (which I managed to miss when everyone read it in high school), and it stood out how well Harper Lee makes the "reminiscing" style of writing work by having the narration sound like an adult but all of the dialog sound like a child. That same trick would have worked really well here, I think.

    3 votes