It's wild that management would be willing to accept it.

I think that for some people it is harder to reason about determinism because it is similar to correctness, and correctness can, in many scenarios be something you trade off - for example in relation to scaling and speed you will often trade off correctness.

If you do not think clearly about the difference with determinism and other similar properties like (real-time) correctness which you might be willing to trade off, you might think that trading off determinism is just more of the same.

Note: I'm against trading off determinism, but I am willing to think there might be a reason to trade it off, just I worry that people are not actually thinking through what it is they're trading when they do it.

Management is used to nondeterminism, because that’s what their employees always have been.

Determinism require formality (enactment of rules) and some kind of omniscience about the system. Both are hard to acquire. I’ve seen people trying hard not to read any kind of manual and failing to reason logically even when given hints about the solution to a problem.

OK well let us then not call it winning a lottery, let's call the negatively affected ones getting run down by a car. That's better! People who did not get run down by cars have it pretty good, no matter if they like to wear certain clothes or have hyperfocus on hobbies it's all pretty good stuff, but the ones who got run down by cars and then the car turned around and went over them a couple extra times, they don't have it that good.

It's not very helpful to say if someone has been run down by a car that they just have different highway experiences than people who were not run down by cars. Their difference is a significant problem, because they have been run down by a car and it hurts.

I agree with you and I’m struggling to see how my reply wasn’t helpful. I’m saying those people who get run over by a car in this analogy shouldn’t be run over by cars on the highway. I look at what’s wrong with the highway. I don’t believe the sole primary reason people get run over in this analogy is because their brain developed wrong.

More that their brain developed differently and our current highway system is incompatible with that difference.

The highway system can and should change just as we individuals can and should try to change our minds in areas where it makes sense to do so.

My preferred analogy is that all neurodivergent people are playing the game of life at least on hard mode. Some are playing on ultra hard mode. Some are playing on impossible mode.

As it relates to treatment, the goal is to help a person live as close to typical difficulty as possible. Same goal for accommodations extended to the person by society.

it's fine I guess. but the thing really is that there are two different problem levels, and it seems almost always that any discussion of autism only focuses on one or the other problem level.

So if people discuss the getting run down by car problem level the people who have an "I'm different" problem level feel as if they are being insulted, and if people discuss the "I'm different" problem level the people who care for the people who have been run down by cars feel like... well, insulted would probably be the least of it.

For my part I'm obviously at the "I'm different" level and I don't feel insulted discussing the whole spectrum. Hopefully that's true for more people over time.

Edit: In retrospect I suppose the “developed wrong” language is insulting to me and the boundary is just beyond the idea of “different”

I suppose then the request is for those people caring for autistic people who are so different life is impossible to live without care to view the concept of “different” as a spectrum too. Not wrong.

they just said "LLMS"!

My point was that js would be vastly more complicated than these html/css "incantations".

Most front end engineers could do it in JS without ever having to look something up. But the CSS to do it is still obscure to most.

so, why not answer my question and say how you'd do it in js...?

I agree, but must also observe that I have never met a designer who was willing to admit without a knock-down drag-out fight that any animation they put in was not somehow crucial.

I've never met a designer who wasn't completely fine with my suggestions for more pragmatic solutions. Like just styling a default scrollbar instead of implementing my own scrollbar to make it exactly like the design. Using a default drop-down menu instead of rolling my own just so I can round the corners of the selects.

The designers I've worked with are fine with these things. We have more important things to work on than small style details. We can go back and change these things later if anyone actually cares, but generally nobody ever does.

I've never met a designer who cares how it gets done but I have hard time believing they were OK with the corners not being rounded as per the design. They may agree on shipping without the rounded corner, as long as the ticket to round that corner is registered.

I suppose though that we have just had very different life experiences, as that is what the HN guidelines would require of us.

I think you're both right.

I have also met a lot of completely unreasonable designers that would insist on the most minimal things (even to the detriment of usability), and would act like assholes towards developers.

I have also had situations where developers would beg to work with a certain designer because their experience made development a breeze, even for complex layouts. Funny enough, the projects where this designer worked would always get done, and the visual result was always great.

The trick is they'll see it working for themselves. :)

If society at large is being a dick to me and my group as a whole, I'm likely to be an even worse dick to society at large, which is why protesting doesn't work for people like me because protesting is generally about very nice and calm about outrageous things and causing a bit of inconvenience, that is to say being not as bad as what one is protesting with the hidden message you don't want us to make things bad (I decided to drop the dick metaphor before it would have to get graphic)

on edit: not to mention I hate crowds.

how is Lua quirky? I've looked at it once and I didn't see anything that I thought was weird, although that was on the syntactical level.

Syntactically: From `~=` instead of `!=`, and no support for `+=` or `continue`, to free-form syntax with no statement separators - except in that one place where they're necessary.

Semantically: Conflation of arrays and maps, conflation of `nil` and empty (both in tables and in function arguments), and the perennially-unpopular 1-based indexing.

>Communication networks are not profitable.

Ma Bell tells me they may not have considered all possible angles on this matter.

Ma Bell was never profitable without government cheese. And her offspring can’t do much but complain about how every one else is making huge margins over “their” infrastructure.

Telecom is very very broken.

>A few days ago, I did a controversial blog post

and

>When I originally wrote this post, nearly one year ago,

I am confused.

Bloggers don't always publish immediately after writing a post, the start of the prior post explains the time line and the delay: https://ploum.net/2025-12-04-pixelfed-against-fediverse.html

hmm ok, I thought it might be that, but then I would have expected "I did" to have been "I published"

It's like Mark Twain and the rules for reselling a slave in Missouri https://medium.com/p/fe48ea07ad20 "the free black man in Missouri could only remain in the state for 6 months before being taken and put on auction as a slave." only it turned out to be false, and evidently made up by Twain for reasons of fiction.

I think GRRM is failing the first two obligations of the author: https://medium.com/luminasticity/obligations-of-the-author-0...

Finish what you start — When starting a work that has readers or viewers, complete it if it is financially rewarding to do so. You have unfortunately made an aesthetic promise to your readers in exchange for money. Suck it up.

Keep Your Customers Informed — If you will not be able to do the first, inform people as soon as possible.

I'm with Gaiman on this. No author has any obligation, ethical or otherwise, to provide further books in a series to the readers unless those readers are paying hard cash upfront for the missing books.

And what on earth is is an 'aesthetic promise'?

from the phrase I would expect that "aesthetic promise" is similar to a monetary promise, except as applied to aesthetics instead of money. A promise that something will be given.

from reading the article "aesthetic promise" seems to be "that particular bit of aesthetic satisfaction that you counted on when starting out on the series", in other words, one of the aesthetic promises of a continuing series of books is that there is a conclusion, so you read one book and the next, expecting that at some point they will all be put together into a whole.

Rather like how readers of Dickens day started reading his serialized novels in their papers expecting that the novel would in fact have an ending.

>unless those readers are paying hard cash upfront for the missing books.

Back a few years ago plenty of people would have done this if it had been offered. Maybe that would've helped his writer's block.