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If I could code with a piece of music playing in the background and not lose focus means it's not worth listening at all.

Very rarely I use custom-filtered (brownish) noise to help with isolation. Perhaps some kind of Ambient or New Age would work too in such situations, but things I like in those genres require attention and not paying it would be absolutely disrespectful.

I listen to all kinds of music at my dayjob but only during specific activities that do not require much contemplation and I can mostly flow with the music and do the work in the background.

Though, I'm a musician and sound engineer, so my relationships with music in general might be a bit special.


Friend, you're missing out by applying a too-rigid filter. There's a bright-line distinction to be made between this use of music as a tool for cognitive enhancement, vs listening for valid reasons other than focus.

I'm a musician too, and a lifelong student and appreciator / afficianado of music across many genres. And I spend hours every workday listening to tracks from my "flowstate" playlist -- which tracks are excluded from my taste profile. Other use cases include music appreciation (close attention for pleasure), education / cultural literacy (close attention for analysis / learning), performance (close attention for reproduction, typically broken into segments / fragments), dancing (mixed attention, emphasis on rhythm and physical movement), relaxation (minimal attention), meditation (minimal attention), mood-setting / socialization (mixed attention), etc.

Judging a piece of music intended for one of these categories based solely on whether it's "worth listening to" or "[demanding of] respect" in the context of the wrong category will leave you impoverished in the other areas.

EDIT: P.S. That doesn't mean tolerating muzak! I recommend curating playlists limited to tracks that you can appreciate in a given appropriate, narrowed context. For example, here's my "flowstate" playlist:

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6UScdOAlqXqWTOmXFgQhFA

-- which bears almost no relation to my favorite artists or the kind of music I make.


This might be not so far from the truth, if you count total loc written and rewritten during the development cycle, not just the final number.

Not everybody is Dijkstra.


This is exactly why ReStructured Text is better/worse.

For a layperson it's clear that it's either "Writings" and "Talks", or "Readings" and "'Listenings", but CPP profeciency is in an inverse relation with being apt in taxonomy, it looks like.

Thanks for the list.


The key insight in the third sentence?

> ... CRDTs for version control, which is long overdue but hasn’t happened yet

Pijul happened and it has hundreds - perhaps thousands - of hours of real expert developer's toil put in it.

Not that Bram is not one of those, but the post reads like you all know what.


I have a weird hobby: about once a year I go to the theory page [0] in pijul manual and see if they have fixed the TeX formatting yet.

You would think that if a better, more sound model of storing patches is your whole selling point, you would want to make as easy as possible for people who are interested in the project to actually understand it. It is really weird not to care about the first impression that your manual makes on a curious reader.

Currently, I'm about 6 years into the experiment.

Approximately 2 years in (about 4 years ago), I've actually went to the Pijul Nest and reported [1] the issue. I got an explanation on fixing this issue locally, but weirly enough, the fix still wasn't actually implemented on the public version.

I'll report back in about a year with an update on the experiment.

[0] https://pijul.org/manual/theory.html

[1] https://nest.pijul.com/pijul/manual/discussions/46


> It is really weird not to care about the first impression that your manual makes on a curious reader.

On the contrary, I think this is an all-too-familiar pitfall for the, er... technically minded.

"I've implemented it in the code. My work here is done. The rest is window dressing."


Hilarious. I agree that it says a lot how a project handles reports like these.


I mean, I personally just saw some stuff inside dollar signs and went "huh, weird choice of delimiter"


I hadn't heard of Pijul. My first search took me to https://github.com/8l/pijul which hasn't been updated in 11 years, but it turns out that's misleading and the official repo at https://nest.pijul.com/pijul/pijul had a commit last month.

... and of course it is, because Pijul uses Pijul for development, not Git and GitHub!


> I hadn't heard of Pijul

I'm surprised! Pijul has been discussed here on HN many, many times. My impression is that many people here were hoping that Pijul might eventually become a serious Git contender but these days people seem to be more excited about Jujutsu, likely because migration is much easier.


Looks like it makes the homepage only once or twice a year (using points>50 as a proxy for that), had more buzz around five years ago: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...


I too am here all the time and have never heard of it. But it looks interesting.


The canonical website is https://pijul.org. The homepage has a link to the pijul source repository.


They should mirror on GitHub for marketing purposes


How would they do that if they don't use git for version control? Does GitHub allow other forms of version control other than git?


SQLite does it despite using Fossil - their mirror is at https://github.com/sqlite/sqlite

Git is so established now that it's sensible for alternative VCS to have a mode where they can imitate the Git protocol - or seven without that you can still checkout the latest version of your repo and git push that on a periodic basis.


Git is not a protocol, it is a data format. That only makes sense when your VCS system is similar enough to git to easily allow converting between the two representations.


I mean things like git-svn, hg-git, git-p4, git-remote-fossil, git-tfs, jj.


Every single one of those is following variations on the exact same data structure, or is actually git in a trenchcoat.


Similarly, CUE uses Gerrit and has two way sync. If you are building a VCS today, git interop is a must.


What if the whole point of your VCS is that it its core data structure is nothing like git's at all?


As a user, why do I care how the internals work?

What I do care about is an easy path to progressive adoption and migration. Without that, I cannot convince my team / org to force everyone over.


It solves problems that you dont encounter if you are asking that question. I’ve lost a literal year or more of my life, in aggregate, to rebasing changes against upstream that could have been handled automatically by a sufficiently smart VCS.


An alternative explanation is that I already have a tool that helps me with these situations. The question was a bit rhetorical, because the vast majority of devs don't care what language many of their tools are written in or what algos are used.

A different example, Go's MVS algo can be considered much better for dependency management. What are your thoughts on the SAT solver being replaced in your preferred language tooling? It would mean the end of lock files


If you have a tool for better rebasing, I’d love to hear it.


pijul clone https://nest.pijul.org/pijul/pijul

pijul log --hash-only > all_changes.txt

pijul unrecord --all

git init

``` for HASH in $(cat all_changes.txt); do pijul apply "$HASH" pijul reset # sync working copy to channel state git add -A git commit -m "pijul change: $HASH" done ```

git remote add origin git@github.com:you/pijul-mirror.git git push -u origin main


Do you use Pijul?

From time to time, I do a 'pijul pull -a' into the pijul source tree, and I get a conflict (no local work on my part). Is there a way to do a tracking update pull? I didn't see one, so I toss the repo and reclone. What works for you in tracking what's going on there?


From time to time I get curious about Pijul, attempt to pull the Pijul repo from the nest, and encounter a no-workaround-possible bug in the network sync. I have never been able to do a fresh clone of Pijul.

It is very hard to take a project like this seriously.


Pijul isn't a CRDT is it? It's theory of patches (i.e. DARCS++) alongside native conflicts.


Its author says it implements a CRDT in its theory documentation.


Are you saying Bram hasn't worked on VCS problems much? https://web.archive.org/web/20071213090008/http://codeville.... is 20 years.


At least both get paid in not-pretend money.


For the time being. Their manager is under constant pressure to lay them off and replace them with “ai”.


This is a google problem, but only secondary.

The crux of the matter is that there's nothing that protects an open project besides reputation, and nowadays in the digital space it can be cheaply farmed.

Laws could help, but they only work when you undertake purposeful actions to be covered by them, like register a trademark, and it's never cheap.

Imagine you're in a local band playing shows. It's 3 month old and you have no issued records. A second band tighter with venues takes your name and starts performing under your moniker. You have no money to take that to court and good luck making a case. You can't do anything besides screaming on the web or, don't know, kicking a few butts. You change your name.


You can trademark your open source project, but only the biggest projects do.

You used to be able to buy yourname .com, .net, .org and that was a de facto trademark. Now there are gTLDs you can't.


If by AI you mean the LLM-based tools common now, then I don't want the commits in PRs I'm going to review to bring any more noise than they already do. The human operator is responsible for every line, like they always were.

If by AI you mean non-supervised, autonomous conscience (as I believe the term has to be reserved for), then the answer is again no, as it's as responsible for the quality of its PRs as humans.

If the thing writing code is the former, but there's no human or responsible representative of the latter in the loop, then the code shouldn't be even suggested for consideration in a project where any people do participate. In such case there's no point in storing any additional information as the code itself doesn't have any value (besides electricity wasted to create it) and can be substituted on demand.

Commit comments are generally underused, though, as a result of how forges work, but that's another discussion.


Why shouldn't this be a simple wrapper to tie Delta to some kind of file browser or a thing like television[1]?

[1]: https://alexpasmantier.github.io/television/


television??


Years ago replacing Notepad with an alternative was a given and everybody had their favourite. Before UTF everywhere you needed at least proper character encoding handling, other features followed.

Surprisingly, some of the projects such as AkelPad are still alive.

Win32 made things easier, as well as things like Delphi and Scintilla later.

Just checked my archives, and my own naive but functioning attempt measures whole whopping 36520 bytes, though not without the help of an executable packer, which was a fashion then.

Mostly works fine under Wine, though it is about the legal US drinking age.


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