matrix - neo and cypher talk

I dig his vision of huge, persistent infospaces after all the "method of loci" [0] is a very effective and well described mnemonic device at least since antiquity. The basic observation: It takes very little effort and exposure to remember places (spatial information) in contrast to taking in linear heavy processed information from writing and numbers (e.g. "facts"). Combine these two and you have a powerful way navigating through the information space itself. If you look at it, we are confined to rectangular boxes, fancy interactive books enhanced by moving pictures, audio and some very limited tactile feedback but nevertheless bound by the superstructure of a static tiny detail in our overall spatial awareness. Of course we are now so used to the endless iterations of rectangular boxes that we are extraordinarily proficient at extracting a lot of richness/information from that: in scrolling, clicking, typing, imagining ... I'm reminded by the scene of "The Matrix" where Cipher let Neo glimpse the Matrix code on his screens: "You get used to it, I don't even see the code. All I see is blond, brunette, redhead."[1] IIRC once a 50s western movie was shown to a rural "test" public from the Eurasian steppe some of who saw a moving picture for the very first time. The reactions were mostly enthusiastic during slow "panorama shots" but the audience reacted very agitated in "close-ups" or "medium shots" where e.g. in the heat of the action the horse's legs were "cut off". We take i

> [...] I find it hard to believe that anyone reasonable can take the stance that its desirable that error handling requires writing substantially more code than The Thing Which Generated The Error In The First Place. I have personal experience with Java, Go, and C#, to varying degrees. Over the years, my personal style has changed a lot, based on my experience running applications (as someone in ops), developing applications, debugging applications, etc. First of all, I'll say that doing Go error handling well figuring out the right place to add context to your errors. So in the example above: return nil, fmt.Errorf("failed to query user: %v", err) The error is from a method named "GetUser", and in the style guide I use, errors from GetUser would already say something like "get user %d: %w". You'd know this when writing code that calls GetUser, and wouldn't double-wrap it with additional context, if the additional context is not useful. That's a bit of a tangent. My experience working in operations is that errors in languages like Java are often stack traces. The stack traces are often large and often have poor signal-noise. Important context is often missing--things like arguments to methods. C++ is sometimes worse, since there's a lot of C++ code out there which won't even give you a stack trace. Worst of all worlds, perhaps. As I've gotten older, I've moved to a very proactive style of error checking. This style is verbose in all languages, and sometimes this style is muc

Remember that scene in the matrix when he says "I don't even see the code anymore". After a short while (about a couple of hundred pages of typing latex math for me), the code is mostly as intuitive as the visual formulas. At least for not too long equations. [1] ▶ this video