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Norman door

A Norman door is a nonintuitive #design feature that needs extra instructions for how to use. Like a door that needs stickers saying "pull" or "push" because the handles look the same on both sides.

The #R Tidyverse designers try to make a consistent API so that the whole ecosystem starts to feel intuitive when you learn a part. They follow the principle "avoid making Norman doors" among others. I guess some software ecosystems are nothing but Norman doors.

Created (4 years ago)

To enumerate Mass Effect plot holes

  • The usual injunctions against space opera
    • There seems to be an upper limit to technology everyone lands on, because human tech can face Turian tech and not be wiped with the floor. Yet the player sees cases of "new and experimental" tech that is much better than what came before, so is there a limit or isn't there?
      • Since the ME races have been around for tens of thousands of years, they ought to have invented the new and experimental thing already. It's a massive plothole that everyone has a roughly competitive level of tech (even the Protheans and races that haven't had first contact are roughly on a playing field with Citadel races).
        • Plus there appears to be no difference between the Protheans of 49.000 years ago and those of 50.000 years ago.
    • Apparently everyone just settles on what the "dreadnought" size class is, even before first contact
    • Language, but on this everything has been said already
    • Manned ships; space as a sea; not enough room given to AI (or VI) and drones
      • Think about it, you don't need to send a ship to your enemy homeworld to bombard it, you can just start lobbing missiles right from your own homeworld to theirs. Call them ISBM (interstellar ballistic missile). Warp is not needed because what's the hurry, the missiles can jump thru mass relays to cover most of the distance
      • In ME and most space opera, the design of manned ships is 90% accommodation for the beings inside. More realistic is the Foundation trilogy with kilometers-long battleships that carry a crew of three (3) hanging out in a tiny livable part of it.
        • So, in the ME universe you could for the cost of one manned ship build dozens of unmanned ships, each packing the same firepower, plus they'd be tiny and take a lot less fuel. But nobody comes up with this innovation.
      • That you have to get within eyeball distance of the enemy to engage in space combat is just weird. Even in sea and air battle here on Earth, we don't need to do that.
      • Why do we see ships oriented the "right way up" all the time?
  • Why did humanity have five "battlefleets" before meeting the Turians? What were they for?
  • The Migrant Fleet…
    • A hundred years in space? In the whole galaxy with you tell me how many livable worlds, nobody can spare a patch of land somewhere? Even though the Council forbade aiding the Quarians, realistically, they would have found a deal with some shady organization… and can we talk about what a weird kind of punishment it is for the Council to hand out in the first place?
  • Why are Geth platforms just humanoids with handguns? Where are the flying Gatling guns, or the little grenades with legs, or other sensible units? Why have AI in a story if they won't be their AI nature (Answer: everyone would lose)? They're metal men but still men.
  • Reapers
    • Why do they have to land on a planet and slowly raze building after building? It would take years to finish off a planet this way.
    • What is "harvesting"? This is probably the central question mark in ME.
  • Why don't biotics just crush enemies' lungs? Seems it would take less effort than lifting their whole bodies and throwing them about.
  • Why does it work to take cover behind boxes in close-quarters combat? They're hollow boxes, not solid cubes of steel.
  • Where's all the chemical and biological warfare?
  • Where are the landmines?
  • Why don't unshielded and unarmored Rachni turn into so much bloody mush the moment anyone points their super-deadly future-pistol at them? If Rachni cause the Citadel races trouble, it would logically be because they are too many, too small and come crawling out of the vents (and Krogan would not be the solution), but instead we see essentially "battle tank Rachni" shrugging off direct fire. What kind of useless guns are those they have in the future?

The other races have multiple worlds with dense populations, while humans are mostly on Earth, with a few scattered colonies. On a galactic scale, the other races are the United States, China, and Germany, while Humans are (say) Iceland. Awesome, skilled, and empowered by good home resources, sure. But there’s no scenario where, over a single generation, Iceland becomes so powerful that a single fringe group within Iceland can become a standalone superpower capable of conquering the capital city of one of the major nations.

www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=30943

www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=30968

Created (4 years ago)

Stupid tricks to quickly learn Eshell and Dired

Eshell, Dired, Never learn Bash

Maybe no one told you, but Dired and Eshell go together. Try to learn just one without the other, and enlightenment will be tardy.

For faster enlightenment:

  • Realize that there's effectively no prompt as far as the shell is concerned, they're just bookmarks for prompt nav commands. Try having a blank prompt for a while (prompt nav commands won't work) until it feels normal.
  • Forbid cd. It's not sufficient to "try to use it less"; either run something like alias cd=echo in .bashrc, or have cd open a Dired buffer for the target.
  • Forbid ls, or have ls just switch to the Dired buffer for that directory.
  • Have a good hotkey in Dired to open the Shell buffer for the present directory, creating the buffer anew if necessary.
  • Have a good hotkey in Shell to open the Dired buffer for the present directory—or you could content yourself with the ls command doing that.
  • Previous Dired and Shell buffers should always bury themselves at the bottom of the buffer list! They would flood it otherwise.
  • You'll notice that your shell buffers will be cleaner, with no trail of cd or ls output, and this may have made the scrollback more interesting. That ties into the next point: when using the shell, aim to never repeat a command. Decline to engage in the ancient workflow of iterating on shell commands, trying different switches and building pipes incrementally. In fact, you could set a counter for eshell-send-input (RET) such that you can only send 20 commands per day, and display this counter in the modeline or prompt.
    • Learn emacs-piper – it won't be needed as often as you think, but it's great as your last weapon.
    • Learn the hotkeys for navigating and manipulating the output. In particular:
      • C-c C-p – jump to previous prompt
      • C-M-l – similar, but jump to top of last output (better)
      • C-M-j – my-ins-oth-buf-fil-nam
      • C-c RET – more on this later
    • Instead of building pipes like ls -l | grep .jpg | cut -f1, use C-c M-o (eshell-mark-output), narrow-to-region and carry out the appropriate buffer-editing commands to get the same result that the shell command sequence would have. This is the hardest part by far, but the skills you gain in text transformation are general and carry over everywhere.
    • Learn to operate on the custom output you've munged – or even on any text, for example an Occur or EWW buffer – save it into a Lisp variable 'var, and access it as $var in eshell. Write custom functions to instantly pipe selected region to xargs. That sort of thing.

More, if you like going off the beaten path:

  • Save the shell scrollback per directory
  • Save the shell command history per directory
    • A side detail: keep track of the commands you've used the current session. They should be appended to the open directories' histories, regardless which directory they were used in.

if you follow the earlier advice, every directory already gets its own shell (remember that you disabled cd). With this last advice, when you enter a new directory's shell, you may be shown scrollback from weeks ago! Relevant or not, it can be fun to see, and anchors you in the passage of time. If you realize you wanted to use the output from earlier commands, from before you changed directory… simply go back to the previous directory's shell and grab it (hopping between shells should be a hotkey, that's faster than cd .. and cd -). Of course you'll still want the recent command history, things you used just minutes ago in another directory, which is why they should be brought along on the ride. The difference from usual history-tracking is that only the commands this session get saved to only those directories in which you have opened a shell, which is going to be a minority of all the directories you've visited with Dired.

I could ban the pipe (|) operator as part of a learning process for text munging.

What links here

Created (4 years ago)

What I'd tell past-me about houseplants

Use standard unpainted clay pots

They have much less risk of overwatering, due to multiple factors:

  • The walls breathe
  • The conic shape means there is less dirt at the bottom to get waterlogged
  • The drain hole gets rid of the excess

That matters because watering should be dead easy, especially when you have to travel and let someone else water your plants for a while.

If I cannot have this, I must have a glass pot so I can see how much water is inside.

Use big plates

Re. the pot-and-plate method. Big plates let you water plants "from the bottom up": you fill the plate with water and let it be sucked up into the soil. Watering this way 3 weeks out of 4 keeps the topsoil dry most of the time, which discourages gnats (fruit fly-like pests).

When you water top-down,

  • It carries soil out into the plate, making the standing water more dirty and contributing to plaque buildup on the outside of the pot. Always water bottoms-up and there should be less of this type of plaque.

When you commit to watering bottom-up,

  • any decorations you put on the topsoil will stay clean. so you can:
    • add water-vulnerable decorations, like paper artworks
    • style it like a Japanese stone garden
    • etc

Sanseveria / snakeplant / mother in law's tongue

Give it a good deep pot. In a shallow pot, it ends up splaying rather than standing straight up.

If you want window plants, this plant is one of the best, because it doesn't twist its prettiest side to face the window. It also handles rough transportation without any trouble, good if you move often. Spiderplants break apart if you so much as look at them.

Golden pothos / devil's ivy

The vines can be fragile. Specifically, when you have a side shoot growing out of another vine, that side shoot is forever at risk of snapping off, even if it's grown to a healthy 8-meter beast. The connection to the parent stem is still so weak that a flick of your finger can be its end. In nature, this is fine because the vine is supposed to be securely wrapped around a tree trunk or some such, so jostling a part of it will not jostle the entire vine.

For a pothos in the home, it's nice if the main stem(s) are be responsible for most of the plant mass. If you have side-shoots near the base, bury the base in a lot more dirt. The dirt will keep things from jostling and breaking. If this is not realistic, stick the vine's tip into a new pot where it will start over more strongly. Bury the tip deep!

Or find some kind of safe sealant to strengthen where the side shoot branches off from the parent stem.

Spiderplant

Unless you like the weeds look, don't get these. It can be very pretty if a single spiderplant grows in the middle of a pot and has not been jostled or touched since birth, but as soon as someone touches it or looks at it wrong, leaves start bending and breaking and now it looks like weeds.

With opaque pots lacking drainage, make a reservoir and watering tube

If you must use an opaque pot lacking drainage… do it right. It's hard to improve later.

Rig a water reservoir in the bottom and install a watering tube.

((If you don't want to bother, a good minimum is to stick a pipe through the dirt, so you can pull it out and make a proper watering pipe at some point in the future.))

It's easier than you think. Ingredients:

  • a wine cork
  • a plastic pipe
  • some steel wire
  • expanded clay balls (or round balls of any kind)
  • some old nylon or polyester clothing you can cut up

Put the pipe in the pot, making it stand perfectly vertical.

Cut the cork down to something that will fit inside the tube.

Stick a steel wire into the cork. Drop the cork into the tube so it hits the floor. Don't cut the wire just yet.

Fill the pot up with a few centimeters of clay balls. Then add water until it matches the same level.

At this point the cork will be floating in water. Now cut the steel wire at the exact point it exits the tube. That's your marker! That's how you see that the reservoir is full.

Put down some nylon or polyester like a mat over the reservoir, blocking roots from growing down into it. If you can, seal tightly around the tube and also line the walls, but don't be a perfectionist… it's just a plant.

I prefer pots with drain holes or glass pots, it sidesteps all this work.

With climbing vines, consider initial setup

Pole

Want a pole for it to climb on? Install it before you need it, i.e. when the plant is still young. That also lets you center the pole in the pot, which is impossible later.

You might be tempted to use a broken broomstick or something else lying around, but pick a material that won't rot or rust. A plastic broomstick or a PVC pipe is good. You can even take a short pipe now and a longer pipe later inside the first pipe. Make it a thicker pipe than you think you'll need, having a too thin pipe is the kind of mistake that's hard to fix later. I mean, now you imagine a half-meter pole, but what if you want to extend that to eight meters (the maximum length of a golden pothos vine) at some point?

Where to put it

For any climbing plant, bonus point if you can find a permanent spot for it (ideally a corner) and let the vines climb the walls. Vines like climbing on things and this encourages the leaves to grow big, I hear. This may scrape the wall surface, so decide if it's worth it. Further bonus if you're willing to spray water directly on the walls: aside from motivating the vines to use the wall, this gives you the freedom to apply and rinse off insecticide without moving the plant.

When you buy a new plant

Check it at the shop. Undersides of leaves, etc.

Bring it into the house in a plastic bag. Wash yourself since you've been at a greenhouse.

Quarantine the new plant for 40 days. If you don't have an extra room, you can put a plastic bag over the pot.

Pest prevention

  • Water bottoms-up
  • Quarantine new plants
  • Quarantine sick plants
  • use insecticide as needed
  • use soapy water and rinse
  • use clean pots & clean soil (sterilize it yourself). Consider non-soil potting mediums too.
Created (4 years ago)
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