> The golf-ball-sized dice are now available to buy ...

I agree the math problem does not map well to a real problem players are having.

The summary is this:

  > A writer needs readers ... Any worthy pursuit needs a mat.
  > ... Better to be pinned in public with courage than to train
  > endlessly in private like a coward.

If I produced art like Darger (or Van Gogh or Kafka or others who did not try to push their work into the public view), I would be happy with myself.

But, on the other hand, I do appreciate some aspect of this article's thesis. "Putting yourself out there" does have value. This line from the article resonates with me:

  > Yet the Cave, despite its darkness of solitude and dampness from
  > sweat and suffer-porn, is comfortable. It lets us tinker with
  > our own delusions.

But it's not necessarily the solution. Some people get addicted to public recognition, and it twists their work for the worse. Some people know they've done something good, put it out for people to see, but don't receive the recognition they wish they had, and get depressed. Nick Drake comes to mind.

I think it really comes down to your own personality and which of these traps you're prone to fall for. Once again, "know thyself" is the real nut worth cracking.

Anyway, good article. Made me think (:

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Darger also see various images of his work at: https://www.wikiart.org/en/henry-darger

Yes; I think what I described matches that meaning?

Post-death, as in: "it's over," "activity has halted," "no more work being done."

Death does not necessarily have a bad/negative connotation. It's just the end of something.

This is in contrast to the original comment: "something that went so wrong you had to kill it." Death does not imply something went wrong or that it happened forcefully.

I guess "autopsy" generally is talking about "finding the cause of death" so maybe that has a more negative connotation ("something (bad) happened, causing death, let's find it").

Ah, words with their fuzzy meanings (:

Example: https://blog.codinghorror.com/game-development-postmortems/ Note the dual emphasis on both "what went right" and "what went wrong," not just one or the other.

Perhaps a more apt example would be Duchamp's "Fountain" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fountain_(Duchamp))

It reminds me also of the eternal "can we separate the art from the artist" debate, too. For instance, some people (myself included) find that their experience of some art that they previously enjoyed is soured when they learn that whoever made it is a Bad Person in some way. Neil Gaiman comes to mind as a recent example.

I think it goes beyond just creative people being more interested in the process behind the art. Even people who are more purely consumers care about where this thing that touches them came from. I think a person's experience of the art makes them feel closer to or entwined with that artist, even if they might be long-deceased. Or non-human?

Andy Warhol might disagree [1] (:

(I realize that's not exactly apples-to-apples, but y'know.)

Or there's "art is anything you can get away with," which I just mention to point out that this kind of issue ("what is art?") is not new. In some ways it seems like a good thing to get people, like you, riled up about these topics, arguing the merits of their point of view. That's how culture happens.

It's an interesting question you tangle with: is it art because of what the artist did, or is it art because of how the viewer/listener/etc receives it? Some of both? How much of each? If you encountered some art but you didn't know its provenance, and it had some emotional impact on you, would it still be art if you found out later it was 100% AI generated?

Like you say, it's all subjective, but it's nice to see random people on the internet talking about the nature of art, since it's something I care about too.

So in other words, thank you for being angry (:

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell%27s_Soup_Cans "... what Time magazine called the 'Slice of Cake School'—artists who treated the banal artifacts of contemporary civilization as legitimate subjects for high art"

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIE_1931_color_space

Interestingly, at Reed, there is a low emphasis (or even anti-emphasis) on grades — a student has to go out of their way to obtain them. Instead, emphasis is on written feedback and discussion, to understand one's performance on assignments.

All this to say: de-emphasizing grades in school is not necessarily a bad thing, and does not necessarily harm the reputation of the university. It can be a sign of good priorities (eg: learning, rather than numbers-gaming).

[1] https://www.gradeinflation.com/Reed.html

I haven't used a lot of different distros, but for me, Debian has been a good balance of those factors. You may need to do more upgrades per decade, but the ones that you do are more liable to go smoothly.

Just my 2¢ on the topic (:

Though perhaps more to your point, if some superhuman AI is developed, and understands things better than us without telling us about it (or being unable to), it could perform feats that seem magical to us — that would concern us even if we don't understand it, since it affects us.

But I think in the frame of reference of the commenter you were replying to, they're just saying that the low-level AI used in this specific case is not capable of making its results actually useful to us; humans are still needed to make it human-relevant. It told us where to find a gem underground, but we still had to be the ones to dig it out, cut it, polish it, etc.

Mercurial's "branch" was generally intended for long-lived things. Think the "stable branch" or a "version X" support branch for a project.

The branch name is baked into the commits that use it. You can hide them from the UI with "--close-branch", but they will still exist forever in the commit history. This is both a good thing and a bad thing, depending on your desires.

This is different from Git's "branch" which is basically just a pointer to a commit. It is not part of commit history, it is just a convenience for the developer. Later, Mercurial added "bookmarks" which are similar.

[1] https://repo.mercurial-scm.org/hg-stable/rev/d4ba4d51f85f

[2] https://wiki.mercurial-scm.org/CompatibilityRules

HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47603231

  [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal_dimension
  [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coastline_paradox

I laugh (:

But good for you, whatever works. Personally, I can't do music with much lyrics or narrative; I find it distracting.

But to each their own!

The one in the article is the same essential technique (structurally speaking), but with a lot more decorative flourish.

  > there are billions of souls on this planet. They're not a rare thing
  > like say, gold. They're very easily produced, by two people getting it
  > on. That leads to a harsh conclusion: human beings aren't that valuable
  > as individuals. We are in fact very disposable and replaceable.

Lumps of gold are largely interchangeable. It's just a mass of gold atoms that we don't differentiate between, so one lump of gold is as good as another. But people are not like that. If you were to painstakingly transform a lump of gold into a beautiful sculpture, it would be worth more than its face value. And if a person transforms from the lump of flesh they are born as into a unique individual, they are worth something more, too. Two gold sculptures would not be interchangeable, to an art aficionado, and two people are not interchangeable in that way, either.

On the gross large scale, yes, we're all lumps of flesh squidging around on the planet; a uniform slimy patina on a tiny ball of dirt. And our various large-scale systems and policies (economic, political, etc) treat people in this way, too, in varying degrees.

But you are living your one and possibly only life (just like everyone else). And you have taken a unique path through that life (just like everyone else), and I'd just encourage you and/or others reading to cherish that, both in yourself and others, even if (or especially if) the systems in which we live don't seem to. It is something that can't be taken from you, because it is intrinsic to you, and that is a value beyond "what someone will pay for."

Just my 2¢

But using keyboard arrow keys work for me.