Pay money to go to a university that's almost entirely run by AI--AI teachers, AI grading--and then use AI to do your assignments. In the end, it's just paying money for a degree, and then the degree is a signal that helps you get a well paid position where you can use AI to do your job.
Period (.) ends the sentence, comma (,) breaks up the sentence. If the next sentence is closely related, end the sentence with a semi-colon (;). For every other type of break--especially those that resemble the natural and chaotic shifts of thought we all have--use an em-dash. (Oh, and put text you want to be optionally skipped in parenthesis.)
Em-dash is probably the most natural punctuation; it best matches the kinds of shifts our brain does when thinking.
It may be due to AI proliferation, or the culturural bias I have, but I increasingly find em-dashes jarring.
As you point out, authors use them for the "natural and chaotic shifts of thought we all have" and when there are lots of these shifts it feels like I have to keep track of multiple conversations at once.
For example, in the article we have:
If your goal is to have other people read—and hopefully enjoy—your writing, you should make an effort to edit your thoughts.
When I read this I instinctively pause the 'main' thought/voice, read the aside, then re-establish my train of thought. In my opinion the sentence reads just as well without the aside:
If your goal is to have other people read and enjoy your writing you should make an effort to edit your thoughts.
[edit - putting comma back in to break up the long sentence]
If your goal is to have other people read and enjoy your writing, you should make an effort to edit your thoughts.
I think this is the only aside formatted like this in the article. The other em-dashes take the place of pauses in sentences, places I would normally use a comma or semicolon, or are used to introduce a list where I would typically use a colon.
Again this is probably a cultural thing, maybe a reaction to AI as well, but I find the em-dash a lot more though-interrupting than the other punctuation choices and I wonder if it's something I'll get used to or not.
I think I took out an extra comma too, which hurts readability.
Personally I write with too many asides, normally done with commas and parentheses. It's a comforting habit to fall into, and makes getting your thoughts out so much easier, at the expense of interrupting the reader's train of thought.
I don't normally notice when I'm writing with asides so the jarring em-dashes were a good reminder to try and edit them out where I can.
There are subjects which naturally lend themselves to “shifts” inter-sentence. Not really technical matters if the technical matter is just a list of specifications: here is how this works by default and if this and that then this happens. More like subjects relating to social issues and philosophy.
A person may have no preconceived notions about what the frobricator does. So you just list it out. But they may have plenty of preconceived notions about some more abstract-but-relatable subject. The writer anticipates that. And they have to navigate this subject at many levels at the same time, either inter-sentence or inter-paragraph; now I am talking about X, but not the X you think [the writer anticipates] but the X in itself. And not the X that group A considers, nor the one that B considers...
These subjects are more common in the “humanities”.
Certainly some authors overdo it and just seem to produce sentences with multiple semicolons and em-dashes because it’s their style/they are showing off. They are not writing clearly.
(Here I am using """""smart quotes""""".[1] Why is no one arresting me for that?)
I think we have seen a rise in the use of more intricate prose among technologists concurrent with the rise of AI penmanship. There’s more “flavor” now. Less of, either, straightforward prose or just boring and stodgy prose. More supposed personality.
Whatever the cause, this could be an emergent property of authors competing for readership by writing on the same subject but in a more supposedly engaging and personal way. And if an author who doesn’t like writing prose but wants to promote something regardless could get help from a program which happens to be literate in English as well? Well. Now it is easier to ramp up the word count.
> > If your goal is to have other people read and enjoy your writing you should make an effort to edit your thoughts.
Now the sentence says something different. The original said: If your goal is to get people to read ... And hopefully also enjoy.
Just getting people to read has the primacy in the original.
> > If your goal is to have other people read and enjoy your writing, you should make an effort to edit your thoughts.
This is certainly how I expect a programmer to write.
> Again this is probably a cultural thing, maybe a reaction to AI as well, but I find the em-dash a lot more though-interrupting than the other punctuation choices and I wonder if it's something I'll get used to or not.
Some groups of people ponder the great questions of life.[2] Programmers ponder if there is really a categorical difference, in principle, between their own consciousness and that of their smart fridge. And whether em-dash users are bots.
The only multiplayer game I currently play is Beyond All Reason (a RTS game).
It's a free and open-source game, so creating a cheat client would be especially easy. But I've never encountered cheating.
I think there's a few reasons for this:
1) The playerbase is small and there is no auto-matchmaking, just a traditional list of servers. This results in the same group of people always playing together. People don't want to cheat when they're playing with acquaintances they see frequently.
2) Spectators are allowed in every game. The top-ranked games usually have several spectators.
You might think this would result in even more cheating, but in practice the spectators would prefer to watch a sneak attacks succeed, because it's funny. It's boring to be whispering the enemy secrets to you buddy on a private Discord, it's more fun to watch your buddy die in a surprising and funny way.
Also, the spectators can spot if a player does something that suspiciously well timed or lucky. The spectators see all, so they have the information needed to spot suspicious behavior.
3) Official servers create an official record of what happened in every game. The entire community has access to all the recordings. If someone thinks cheating is happening they can link to the official game recording on Reddit (or whatever) and everyone can see what happened.
4) An active moderator team reviews every report of cheating. There are official moderators that do the banning, but also volunteer moderators which can watch the recordings and create a trusted written account of what happened; this makes the official moderators have an easier job.
Hi, one of the BAR devs here. Glad to hear the tall praise for the project and even happier to hear you've been having a great time playing it!
One of the additional safeguards against cheating within BAR is the shared simulation that all machines connected to any given match have to perform. As the entire process is synced between all these machines, any mismatch is immediately picked up by other machines and the server hosting the match itself and results in an automatic booting of that player with the desynced game. If 15 machines can agree on an event happening in the simulation, and 1 can't, why should the 1 be trusted? This includes things like the economy reserves for a given player or the behaviour of their units, not just the physical simulation of the projectiles and their trajectories and hit registers.
Hello, CM for BAR here, nice to see it mentioned :)
As Zephyr says state manipulation cheats are impossible since they would lead to desyncing any online battle.
Since every user technically has access to the whole game state there are user side cheats possible, like LoS hack, but these are easily detectible (as well as spectator cheating) and very active moderator team makes sure anyone using them is perm'ad so it's not worth for people to try them and it's been super rare so far.
Smurfing (using alt accounts with lower ELO to get weaker opponents/avoid moderation) is probably the most prevailent type of "cheating" but there is a lot of active and passive countermeasures implemented so most players will rarely experience issues with that.
Seems more likely that the cause is that RTS isn't a popular genre among gamers and Beyond All Reason is obscure[1] even among RTSes. There's no fame or money to make it worth investing in cheating.
[1] Among the general public, not RTS aficionados. Which is unfortunate; Total Annihilation and its spiritual descendants like BAR deserve more love.
Even as an RTS player I've never heard of it, but I have learned recently that I've missed out on an entire niche scene based off of TA. Been playing RTS's since 1994ish and only recently bought TA to go back and play through it. Never owned it back in the day.
I don't think they're saying cheating doesn't exist for the game, they're saying the popularity/incentive is too low to attract many cheaters compared to esports games.
I'm saying they have their fair share of cheating and they have managed to moderate it well without using any form of anti-cheat software.
Of course a small game is going to have fewer cheaters. They have fewer cheaters, but they also have fewer moderators; it's literally like 4 or 5 people doing it in their free time.
I was excited for avy until I realized its purpose is only to move the cursor to a place visible on the screen. It does nothing a mouse can't do with one click.
(This is my understanding at least; I'm open to correction.)
I'm a lover of Vim bindings, and so I appreciate keyboard controls, but where Vim enables working with files and text in a general and powerful way, avy enables avoiding one click with the mouse. I don't use Vim to avoid the mouse, I use it so I can hack some Vim macros together when I'm editing text on a text-level. Vim (or Emacs) is an eternal tool that can do big things, avy just positions my cursor.
Definitely not it's purpose. Avy can be used to select a word, line, or region. One action is move to it. But it can also, in it's own words, copy, yank, zap to, transpose, teleport, kill, mark, ispell, org-refile, and custom actions.
I've bounced off that blog post in the past, because it makes it appear the first step to doing something in avy is to position all my files and "windows" (a "window" is an editing pane inside Emacs) in some clever way, and after I got all that setup, and the windows are all looking at just the right parts of the files, then I can move a paragraph from one window to another with just a few special keystrokes.
I feel like moving from a large monitor to a small monitor would limit the usefulness of avy; it's weird that the physical size of a monitor would limit a tool like this.
If I can only see 3 lines of text at a time (maybe an accessibility thing), the usefulness of Vim-bindings is not significantly reduced. Is the same true for avy?
Again, I'm willing to learn that I was wrong, but this is the specific issue that ended my enthusiasm for learning avy.
> It does nothing a mouse can't do with one click.
But the you'd need to take the hands off keyboard, also it might be slightly more precise as a typo is less likely than a less-than-perfect mouse movement
Don't underestimate the advantage of being able to move the cursor anywhere in a few clicks without having to take your hands off the keyboard. It is much faster than a mouse. Also, you can save your elbows the pain of constantly reaching over for the mouse.
avy does more than just jump the cursor to a specific place. It also allows you search for, copy and move text round without needing to move your cursor to that text. It is extremely easy to use and very efficient.
It's generally a symbiotic relationship though, as the workers grow their own resume while helping their boss grow theirs (and generally the boss is growing his own while helping his boss grow theirs and so on. Sometimes it goes all the way up where even the founder just wants that lifestyle subsidized by investor money and does not care to actually ever build a profitable product).
This kind of perverse incentive comes up when the rank and file has no meaningful way to profit off the company's success, and so it instead becomes more profitable (in future profits from the inflated resume, or kickbacks/favors from vendors, etc) to act against the company. Just like in security bug bounties, companies should reward their employees more than an external malicious actor would, otherwise they will choose the rational option.
Really sharp reasoning. This can be reversed to define an extra ordinary manager: don't care about your head count and just be a fucking grown up who's emotional state does not depend on his team's performance. IMHO this results in having a high head count and a team performing pretty well. Kinda stoic wisdom. Go and figure...
You mean I shouldn't make a comfortable living off my valuable HN comments? I was about to consider this comment a good days work. Maybe if I put this comment on my own webpage it would be more valuable?
