I truly love the experience of using apps with rich, deeply interactive, beautifully animated, gorgeous user interfaces.
Then I see a beautiful text-based interface and something about it feels so natural, so inevitable, so perfectly clear, and I'm instantly captivated by its simplicity and clarity.
Hypertext is fascinating.
Any conversation
I'm doing experiments with short attention-span students and code. Starting with python, and, oddly, now working in BASIC. As a C programmer of 40+ years, I find this aesthetically and pedagogically displeasing, but I am delighted to see them getting fully absorbed in writing
130 PRINT "You have been eaten by a bear!" : GOTO 900. Yes there is spaghetti, but it's their spaghetti and they seem to take delight in debugging it. Python will come later. Switched from gpg to age, because pinentry sucks. With age I set both of my Macโs security enclaves + software private key (stored in Passwords.app) + yubikey for hardware backup. Looks good.
I notice that language models are much better at programming than at writing. This is largely because, in programming, they have a closed feedback loop that allows them to find errors. Writing is much more complicated because the feedback is much more diffuse and delayed over time. In fact, it is often not well-defined.


