smores's recent activity
-
Comment on Pharrell Williams, Michel Gondry scrap their movie musical at Universal in postproduction in ~movies
-
Comment on Why I rebuilt ProseMirror’s renderer in React in ~comp
smores Just updated the post with some error boundaries, so the whole page doesn't crash when the demo breaks. Thanks for calling that out!Just updated the post with some error boundaries, so the whole page doesn't crash when the demo breaks. Thanks for calling that out!
-
Comment on Why I rebuilt ProseMirror’s renderer in React in ~comp
smores Good call on the crashing demos, I should wrap those in error boundaries, so the whole page doesn't break. They crash for the same reason as the rest of the buggy behavior in those demos! Hahaha...Good call on the crashing demos, I should wrap those in error boundaries, so the whole page doesn't break. They crash for the same reason as the rest of the buggy behavior in those demos!
Hahaha yeah, it was the right move here, though I tried very hard to avoid it! It's a pretty complex rendering system, and translating it to React was a doozy.
-
Comment on Why I rebuilt ProseMirror’s renderer in React in ~comp
smores Wild to meet a fellow media CMS developer!! Yeah, don't you worry, there was plenty of jQuery (and Backbone and Marionette, too!) at the Times haha. Thank you for the kind words, though, I'm...Wild to meet a fellow media CMS developer!! Yeah, don't you worry, there was plenty of jQuery (and Backbone and Marionette, too!) at the Times haha. Thank you for the kind words, though, I'm really glad you enjoyed it!! I had a lot of fun (and only a little bit of frustration) building out all of the snippets and demos.
Well, I'd love to have some more folks working with me on Storyteller, if that seems at all interesting to you? It's a self-hosted platform for automatically aligning audiobooks and ebooks. It covers quite a lot of domains, so there are lots of places to plug in — there's a frontend app written with Next.js, a backend Typescript system with some fun distance computation and DOM manipulation algorithms, and a React Native app (with some native Swift and Kotlin code to boot!)
-
Comment on Why I rebuilt ProseMirror’s renderer in React in ~comp
smores Howdy folks. This is a somewhat long (… sorry!) deep dive into several years’ worth of work that started when I was a staff engineer at The New York Times and has followed me into open source...Howdy folks. This is a somewhat long (… sorry!) deep dive into several years’ worth of work that started when I was a staff engineer at The New York Times and has followed me into open source development in the years since I left to do my own thing! In it, I break down the issues we’ve faced while attempting to integrate React and ProseMirror — there are loads of code snippets and live demos in there. I hope that at least one other person finds this interesting!
-
Why I rebuilt ProseMirror’s renderer in React
10 votes -
Comment on DeepComputing launches early access program for DC-ROMA RISC-V Mainboard for Framework Laptop 13 in ~comp
smores It turns out, this is actually more interesting (and maybe less annoying?) than you (and I!) suspected. From Framework’s earlier announcement about the DeepComputing partnership: This is the kind...It turns out, this is actually more interesting (and maybe less annoying?) than you (and I!) suspected. From Framework’s earlier announcement about the DeepComputing partnership:
The DeepComputing RISC-V Mainboard uses a JH7110 processor from StarFive which has four U74 RISC-V cores from SiFive. SiFive is the company that developed CPU cores using the RISC-V ISA, StarFive is the processor designer that integrated those CPU cores with other peripherals, DeepComputing created a Mainboard leveraging that processor, and Framework makes laptops that can use the Mainboard.
This is the kind of thing that we don’t see because it’s really only possible with an open ISA. So… that’s cool I think!
-
Comment on Donation drive: Lambda Legal in ~lgbt
smores ❤️ it looks like my match has been met, if I’m reading the post description right, so here’s my matching donation!- Exemplary
❤️ it looks like my match has been met, if I’m reading the post description right, so here’s my matching donation!
-
Comment on Donation drive: Lambda Legal in ~lgbt
smores Thank you for organizing this @kfwyre, you rock. I would like to add another $1000 to the matching fund!Thank you for organizing this @kfwyre, you rock. I would like to add another $1000 to the matching fund!
-
Comment on Bookshop.org’s ebook store is a local-first competitor to Amazon in ~books
smores There’s also a command line tool called knock that gets taken down from GitHub constantly, but there are mirrors in various places. That doesn’t require any Adobe accounts or devices to work.There’s also a command line tool called knock that gets taken down from GitHub constantly, but there are mirrors in various places. That doesn’t require any Adobe accounts or devices to work.
-
Comment on Tildes Book Club discussion - The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson in ~books
smores In a lot of ways, the book was deeply grim (which maybe was the point? I can't really decide). Even though it tries to end on a bittersweet note, I can't help but feel like the overall thesis was...In a lot of ways, the book was deeply grim (which maybe was the point? I can't really decide). Even though it tries to end on a bittersweet note, I can't help but feel like the overall thesis was essentially: "Even if a bunch of impossibly good things happen, like wildly successful geoengineering with no negative consequences and a global socialist revolution, it's gonna be really fucking bad for almost everyone for a really long time". I can feel myself retreating back into just not thinking about it, because, now maybe more than ever, I feel like I have essentially no impact here and have no idea what I could possibly do to have one.
-
Comment on Tildes Book Club discussion - The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson in ~books
smores In the end, I felt like we spent so little time with Mary and Frank that I had trouble caring very much about their character arcs. I'm having trouble figuring out how to express this but: somehow...In the end, I felt like we spent so little time with Mary and Frank that I had trouble caring very much about their character arcs. I'm having trouble figuring out how to express this but: somehow we spent very little time with Mary (given that she was the primary protagonist), and yet it felt like too much of the book was dedicated to her character development? In a book where so much of the narrative content had nothing whatsoever to do with Mary or Frank, quite a lot of time was dedicated to developing them as characters in ways that had similarly little to do with the plot of the book. Maybe it felt like the book was trying to be too many things at once?
-
Comment on Tildes Book Club discussion - The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson in ~books
smores I definitely appreciated the care that went into the audiobook for this. Having a large cast of narrators for an audiobook is an endeavor, and I really enjoyed the end result!I definitely appreciated the care that went into the audiobook for this. Having a large cast of narrators for an audiobook is an endeavor, and I really enjoyed the end result!
-
Comment on Tildes Book Club discussion - The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson in ~books
smores The narration from the inanimate objects were so silly haha. "You think your birth was hard—my mom exploded!" :wince:The narration from the inanimate objects were so silly haha. "You think your birth was hard—my mom exploded!" :wince:
-
Comment on Tildes Book Club discussion - The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson in ~books
smores I also felt frustrated by this. There was also a suggestion that perhaps the heat wave led to Frank's brain tumor which in turn led to his violent behavior? Which would be similarly frustrating....I also felt frustrated by this. There was also a suggestion that perhaps the heat wave led to Frank's brain tumor which in turn led to his violent behavior? Which would be similarly frustrating. This doesn't really make any sense, and maybe it was just meant to be characterization for Mary, but when she first meets him, she has a thought that he must have brain damage from the heat wave, and that's why he's struggling so much. Then, later, it turns out that he does have a physical brain issue, and the doctors don't know what the cause was ("Maybe it's too many bad thoughts. That's what I think."). It felt like a weird coincidence to me.
-
Comment on Tildes Book Club discussion - The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson in ~books
smores (edited )Link ParentI'm glad to see other folks were also thrown by this, because I really struggled with it. There were nearly nonsensical passages like the following: Setting aside that the last sentence in that...- Exemplary
I'm glad to see other folks were also thrown by this, because I really struggled with it. There were nearly nonsensical passages like the following:
Indeed, if the central banks blockchained not just the new carbon coins but all the fiat money that existed, they could probably squeeze parasitic speculators right out of existence. The best defense being a good offense.
Setting aside that the last sentence in that passage doesn't really mean anything/make any sense in context, I find myself just sort of baffled by this. A huge theme in this book was that the central banks essentially run the world and should be taking firmer stances and bigger swings in that role, and this passage is specifically about how they could work together to produce a new carbon coin. There's no need whatsoever for a blockchain in this scheme — the entire idea is that this is fiat money that is managed (very tightly!) by central banks. Blockchains are "useful" for decentralized transaction logs; if you already have a central bank keeping track of everyone's accounts, you just need a regular database.
And as you say, the privacy implications were glossed over in a way that was hard to read. It is not straightforwardly a positive thing to have literally all financial transactions permanently public!
There were a bunch of other AI/software things in this book that were similarly bizarre to me. The idea that a few AI researchers at a UN agency made "open source instruments that mimic the functions of all the big social media sites", and everyone just... dropped Meta and started using them? First of all, to build a social media site that scales to the whole world, you're going to need, like, at least hundreds of engineers, if not thousands. You certainly don't need Janus Athena's five-person AI group. And then you're going to find that you have precisely 0 users, because no one is going to switch. The only reason Twitter users flocked to Bluesky is because (a) Musk actively destroyed Twitter and (b) Twitter was a relatively small social media site with relatively technical users. Facebook? Instagram? WhatsApp? TikTok? Those user groups are essentially generational, people by and large do not leave them, even when a new and better thing shows up.
Also "quantum encryption" made me snort out loud.
Speaking of Janus Athena... that was weird, right? I have spent quite a lot of my time working and speaking with software engineers, computer scientists, and even specifically AI researchers. They are, by and large, just people. They use jargon as needed to communicate clearly, and some of them (like all other kinds people) struggle to remember what it was like before they knew the things that they know now, and say things that can be confusing to folks without expertise in their specialty. J-A was not that. They were like... an alien? They seemed to see "normies" like Mary as basically infants, they were the only character that didn't think in relatively coherent, English monologue, and they seemed to insist on using the most verbose, obtuse language whenever possible.
[Mary] said, It's a question which of the two of you are the more inhuman, the computer geek or the economist
Both referents nodded at this. Point of pride, in fact. Trying to out-do each other; attempt to attain Spocklike scientific objectivity a worthy goal, and so on.
This is both a weirdly cruel thing for Mary to say, and a weirdly alien response to have to it.
And Mary's (and... seemingly the author's?) irreconcilable confusion at Janus's gender expression was hard to read. It went on for like an entire page, and included "She wanted to say, J-A, what gender were you assigned at birth, if any?" Like, come on. The whole passage felt like the author saying "I'm a good little boy so I would never treat a nonbinary person like they're a weird alien that doesn't belong in proper society, but we're all thinking it, right?"
-
Comment on "Someone must have figured this out…" — A blog post about building wind chimes! in ~hobbies
smores I’m cackling about the car accident chimes. We also have a set of chimes in our backyard that are just beautifully tuned, and I know exactly what you mean. In the summer I’ll happily sit out in...I’m cackling about the car accident chimes. We also have a set of chimes in our backyard that are just beautifully tuned, and I know exactly what you mean. In the summer I’ll happily sit out in the backyard when it’s breezy just to listen to the chimes.
Something I learned during the project is that you can fine tune how responsive any set of chimes is to the wind by changing the size and mass of the wind sail! If you make a sufficiently large and light wind sail (you may need to adjust the mass of the striker, as well), you can make even fairly large, heavy chimes go off in much milder winds. Not that you want to do that, necessarily — as you well know, there is such a thing as too much chime!
-
Comment on "Someone must have figured this out…" — A blog post about building wind chimes! in ~hobbies
smores It was truly a blast! If you end up giving it a shot, don’t hesitate to reach out if you have questions! Although, that said, I’d be surprised if you had trouble finding answers to just about...It was truly a blast! If you end up giving it a shot, don’t hesitate to reach out if you have questions! Although, that said, I’d be surprised if you had trouble finding answers to just about every possible question on Lee’s website haha. It’s pretty wonderful!
-
Comment on "Someone must have figured this out…" — A blog post about building wind chimes! in ~hobbies
smores Oh, that’s super fun, what a cool project. Yeah, the website I talk about in the post, Lee Hite’s Chime Design and Build, does get into the weeds of the physics involved, too. It's pretty great —...Oh, that’s super fun, what a cool project. Yeah, the website I talk about in the post, Lee Hite’s Chime Design and Build, does get into the weeds of the physics involved, too. It's pretty great — here’s a link to the specific calculations you need to do. The whole section above that, “The Science,” is also fascinating! We experienced the “missing fundamental” issue in our build, for example, with the low G chime. You could only hear the actual G3 note if you were less than a yard away from the chime, and only prominently if you were within 6 inches. Otherwise, that longer chime actually sounded higher in pitch than the rest of the set!
A drill press was the one tool that we didn't have that would have made this whole build quite a lot easier haha. I’d never used a pipe cutter before this, though — about 30x easier than making the equivalent cut with a saw. Would recommend!
-
Comment on "Someone must have figured this out…" — A blog post about building wind chimes! in ~hobbies
smores A few weeks ago, while visiting my sisters-in-law, I helped one of them build a set of wind chimes for their home. It turned into one the most joyful and rewarding things we’d done together, and I...A few weeks ago, while visiting my sisters-in-law, I helped one of them build a set of wind chimes for their home. It turned into one the most joyful and rewarding things we’d done together, and I decided to write about the experience! Has anyone else ever made their own wind chimes? I ended up being pretty surprised by how subtle and complex they can be to construct!
Yup, I’m pretty sure the use of conceit was intentional and correct! On the general theme of copyediting feeling worse nowadays, I think there are a few factors: