getaaron

• Call 1-800-829-1040
• Press 1 for English (or other language as desired)
• Press 2 for personal tax
• Press 1 for form / tax history
• Press 3 for other
• Press 2 for other
• Ignore 2 SSN prompts till you get secret other menu
• Press 2 for personal tax
• Press 3 for other
• Wait for agent!

ivan

#!/usr/bin/env zsh
# We use zsh instead of bash so that decimals work in $(( ))

set -eu -o pipefail

ha="http://192.168.10.2:8123"

# Expires 2034
token="..."

schacon

#!/bin/bash

# Colors
RED='\033[0;31m'
GREEN='\033[0;32m'
NO_COLOR='\033[0m'
BLUE='\033[0;34m'
YELLOW='\033[0;33m'
NO_COLOR='\033[0m'

ivan

Things I might read in 2024.

• Will Larson - the starred posts on https://lethain.com/
• Stefan Baumgartner - TypeScript Cookbook: Real World Type-Level Programming
• Markus Triska - The Power of Prolog (via)
• Daniel P. Friedman, William E. Byrd, Oleg Kiselyov, Jason Hemann - The Reasoned Schemer
• Peter Flach - Simply Logical
• Scryer Prolog
• Jamie Brandon - Reflections of a decade of coding
• Kevin Mullet, Darrell Sano - Designing Visual Interfaces: Communication Oriented Techniques

ivan

It has been interesting to witness the rise of a kind of perma-ignorant peanut gallery both on Twitter and Hacker News - a new class of user who seems to only weakly (meaningfully) interact with the legacy users who desired to not look like fools all the time. They do not appear to read or look things up when confused, exuding a desire for spoonfeeding: "but you're wrong because you haven't explained this to me". Prior to 2023 there would of course be a lot of ignorant posting, but it was less likely to go unchecked. Some hypotheses as to why this might be happening:

• a more universal demand for profilicity, in text form, even from people who are not any good at it
• a decreased demand for profilicity from the old posters who have mostly exhausted its possibilities
• increased information hoarding in the post-ZIRP economy; reduced desire to correct the ignorance of apparent outsiders
• reduced resources to moderate posts in the post-ZIRP e

ivan

ivan

html {
	background-color:
		var(--LIGHT, #eee)
		var(--DARK, #111);
	color:
		var(--LIGHT, #000)
		var(--DARK, #ccc);
}

html {

ivan

Someone made the product worse, but not so much that it has become a priority for me to do something about it.

The corollary is that if you make something a little worse, people won't necessarily be moved to expend their time and social capital to tell you about it. You largely have to critique your own work and notice your own little regressions.

ivan

If you see someone teaching something online properly, save the irrational gift from the gods while you can, before they realize their time is better spent doing anything but being an educator in public. These kinds of surpluses come and go.

ivan

1. Is this something you can save and look up later when your work context makes it more salient? You'll get a lot more out of it then.

2. Does random sampling of the text or its conclusions suggest that this is worth your time? Generally, things are either fractally good or fractally bad.

3. Can you get 50% of the value in 1% of the time? Sometimes you can, if what you needed was just a reference to something you didn't know about.

4. Is this information more general and useful, or are you in some backwater of meaning? Gossip, ephemera, personalities and memoirs, half-baked ideas.

5. Did you arrive at this information through your own attentional mechanisms? Consuming the feed can be fun but costly in time. How much more interesting is it, really, than the information that is relevant to your goals? Are you prioritizing momentary pleasure over information hygiene and attentional control?