Things that are not nice such as:
- Taboola, Outbrain, and other chumbox
- BLOBs
- Europe cookie law
- adhesive inside mobile phones and more generally, planned obsolescence
- Jupyter Notebook
- typographical characters that look like ASCII ones, but are not the ASCII ones, e.g. typographical quotes, em-dash. The non-breaking hyphen is not even whitespace, and by def Why not stick to ASCII when ASCII is good enough?
- excessive encapsulation
- replacement of master and slave terminology from technology
- mailing lists. And to add insult to injury, HTML on mailing list messages instead of plaintext.
- blank lines in code added by people trying to increase clarity, especially when there is already indentation for that. Every blank line must be preceded by a line comment explaining what the following block is about, or removed.
- messaging software that force you to have a mobile phone
- advertisements by telephone/SMS
- "state" such as global variables and object members, long live functional programming?
- mosquitoes, the only intrinsically bad thing about tropical countries
- projects with slow compilation times
- Microsoft Windows
- the 2019 Chinese government
- e-learning websites that only allows verified teachers to write content. Cowards who can't handle ranking algorithms.
- domain-specific language
- a build system without an out-of-tree option
- non-linear Git history: stackoverflow.com/questions/20348629/what-are-advantages-of-keeping-linear-history-in-git
- visual programming languages like Scratch. Waste of time. Text programming languages are already equally as visual due to indentation:Just make good serious gamedev libraries and integrated development environments for those real languages instead.
if x == 0: x = 1 - software that prevents you from running as root. Let me fucking shoot myself in the foot if I want to. It is better than having to deal with your hand holding bullshit, which is done in a different way for every project. E.g.: stackoverflow.com/questions/17466017/how-to-solve-you-must-not-be-root-to-run-crosstool-ng-when-using-ct-ng/53099177#53099177
- Medium
- luxury goods
- euphemism
- closed access academic journals are evil
- websites without OAuth
- shower room without a window to the exterior (mould!!!)
- single programs with their interface split across multiple windows, e.g. GIMP, ZynAddSubFX
- graphical user interfaces
- logograms
- infinitesimals. Just use limit instead, please
- country
- knowledge olympiads
- programming languages without a decent dominating package system
- closed source offline software used by millions
- exams
- security through obscurities
- dots in Gmail address
- things in websites that look like links, and behave like links, but don't let you middle click to open them on a separate tab
- K-pop
- numerical computing language
- fiscal paradises
- when the front-end of an website changes an important permanent state, but the URL does not change
- splash screens: you should show boot messages so that people will know what to Google for when things fail. Do you think computer newbies will be afraid and have nightmares?
- milk chocolate: why would you eat that instead of dark chocolate if you are older than 10?
- to talk about something without giving the real name to not scare off the audience
- mathematical symbol that looks like a Greek letter but isn't. Or perhaps mathematical notation in general
- when more than two people gather to play a board game or video game, and two or more people start chatting on and on about random subjects rather than concentrating on the game
- watching television while eating. Same for reading, or doing basically anything else but eat. The only acceptable activity is talking relaxedly, not about work.
- noises coming out of your bicycle. It is so hard to find where they come to fix them!!!
- code drop
- private cars as opposed to public transport. As a cyclist, you can just see the effect that large roads have on nearby areas, it just destroys nature.
- closed standards
- double consonants that make no difference to sound. Dilema? Dilemma? Dillema? Dillemma? Please!
- social media websites that show stuff from people you don't follow when you don't explicitly want that, including things which are not ads, just random suggestions. Twitter starting being like that cirac a 2022. Facebook got worse around that time. It is a constant fight against those stupid websites.
- socks with short legs that don't protect your ankle/lower calf from cold/scratches/dirt, e.g. liner socks
- Presta valves. Why would such a flimsy tech have become so popular compared to the infinitely superior Schrader!
This section is about functions that operate on numbers such as the integers or real numbers.
First published by Fourier in 1807 to solve the heat equation.
Just say what you mean to say,
If you've been fired, say you been fired, not "let go".
If someone died, say they died, not "passed away".
A more specific type of E-learning website generally run by a specific organization.
A website, usually hosted by an university, that takes what is done in class, and pastes it online. It is already much more rational and efficient, and opens up the way for potential sharing outside of the institution (or by default paywalling as the University of Oxford did.
The fundametnal problem with VLEs is that they tend to not have enough incentives for students to contribute at all to the content. This is basically the major motivation behind OurBigBook.com.
Given a function :we want to find the points of the domain of where the value of is smaller (for minima, or larger for maxima) than all other points in some neighbourhood of .
- from some space. For beginners the real numbers but more generally topological spaces should work in general
- to the real numbers
In the case of Functionals, this problem is treated under the theory of the calculus of variations.
101 Crawfords Corner Rd Holmdel, NJ 07733 USA
It started with radio research apparently, including Karl Guthe Jansky.
They had a smaller building first: youtu.be/BPq_ZyOvbsg?t=51 and in 1962 opened the large new building.
N.J.’s historic Bell Labs complex brought back to life as Bell Works by nj.com (2022)
Source. Shows the renewed building after the Bell Labs Holmdel Complex closure. Ciro Santilli's self perceived creative personality by 
Ciro Santilli 35 Updated 2025-01-10 +Created 1970-01-01
Ciro Santilli 35 Updated 2025-01-10 +Created 1970-01-01Ciro like to interpret this as him having "a creative personality" with the tradeoff of generally not being amazing at his well defined jobs.
Ciro is a high flying bird scientist.
Ciro is obsessed by that which is "quirky". This also often has a parallel with "naughty". He often fantasizes about an imaginary parallel between that feeling and Jobs and Wozniak's blue box.
Ciro's natural fight-or-flight response is to hide in a little corner, and try to solve the problem out. Then get distracted and start procrastinating. And then he tries to solve the unsolvable. Someone Ciro barely new once told him quite correctly:This is also perhaps why Ciro likes prison decks in Magic: The Gathering. You just sit on your corner, making yourself safer and safer, until the opponent can't do you any harm and concedes.
In the event of war, you would be the type that hides away and makes the bombs.
There are of course infinitely many videos on the "entrepreneurial mindset" online, and it is impossible to know if they are bullshit, or if everyone just feels like that, but OK, just let Ciro feels that he is specially creative will you?
What Predicts Academic Ability? by Jordan B Peterson (2017)
Source. Good quotes:Creative people continuously step outside of the domain of evaluation structures
If you are creative and you go off on tangents all the time, there's some probability that one of those tangents is going to be exactly what is needed at the time, and you are going to become hyper-successful as a consequence[but the probability of that being the right time and place for the idea is extraordinarily low]The sensible thing to tell anybody is "you shouldn't do it, your probability of success is so low, that its better to just to something sensible".But the problem with that, is that creative people can't do that, because they are creative. A creative person who isn't being creative, they just wither and die.
Ciro also one heard a story, likely apocryphal, but still nonetheless resonated with him, that went something like this (TODO find source, Google wasn't helping, stuff that happened before website as usual):
The newly hired manager of some subsection of DuPont (or some other gigantic chemical company) came into the office, and found a chemical engineer, completely drunk in the middle of the day.Outraged, the manager searched for this colleagues who explained.Ah, don't mind John (or some other name), the guy invented Teflon (or some other substance) which accounted for 20% of our revenue last year. Even if he does not do anything else in his entire career, his salary won't make any difference compared to those gains, and we take the chance that he might invent something else later.
Ciro likes this story because although he does not drink, he feels his work mind works in a related way. Often, when there is something really hard he knows needs doing he hides, and distracts himself with less important tasks, or by watching crap on YouTube, because he knows that the hard task will hurt his mind. Then one day he wakes up and says: OK, fuck it, let's do it, and does it.
Once Ciro got a performance review from a colleague that said:This is closely related to effortless effort.
If Ciro spent as much effort on his job as he does on side projects, he'd be the most amazing worker.
Yes, low conscientiousness, give it to me.
And I am not and never have been 'familiar' scene from The Big Short (2015)
. Source. People want an authority to tell them how to value things, but they choose this authority not based on facts or results. They choose it because it seems authoritative and familiar. And I am not and never have been familiar.
blog.sbensu.com/posts/high-variance-management/ High Variance Management:
Like movies, software projects have parts that require high variance and parts that don't. For most projects, the logging system can be off-the-shelf and predictable. But core parts of the product that require novel design should be as good as they can be.
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