Definitely agree! I switched to Spacemacs about 1.5 years ago and the increase in productivity was amazing.
If you work with Git a lot, it's worth looking at for Magit alone. The way you are able to perform complex tasks with a few keystrokes is a huge timesaver for me.
Those commands aren't exactly the same. These copy what you have selected. You can use xclip just like pbcopy/pbpaste though. Xclip has a few more features and you can get it on mac via brew and nix iirc.
Calvino, Invisible Cities — human life is so rich in complexity and detail that an infinite number of projections can be constructed to study slices of it, that are each worthy of their own story
Hesse, Steppenwolf — read this at an angst-filled time; the way this book builds and reconciles the conflict between two personalities that goes on within the main dude's head was extremely cathartic to my own life
Adams, the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy — introduced me to the inherent absurdity present in the modern world, technology, the scale of the universe, the condition of our own existence, etc, and how making light of it helps you grapple with it and live with it
Curious why you think Moby Dick is not a good book. I thought it was going to be a long drag, but found the writing extremely enjoyable. Apart from the obvious "literary merit", reading this book feels like being at sea, isolated from the world, where life is subject to the rhythms of much more powerful forces, and you can look around and study deeply the rich detail present even in a closed system like a ship.
To those skeptical that "old books" can have aesthetic relevance even today, I highly recommend reading the first chapter or even the first paragraph:
> Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.
The language is great. Melville is definitely one of those 19th century Americans who could work the run-on sentence for good. My complaints are almost purely structural. I really enjoy the begining of the book which establishes the unlikely relationship between Ishmael and Queequeg. I especially enjoyed the speech that gets the Quakers to allow the pagan Queequeg to join the voyage.
But around page 200 the book diverts for hundreds of pages to discuss historical whaling voyages, whaling implements, whale anatomy and whale processing methods. The book ramshackle bounces back into the narrative and kind of takes for granted that you'll still be invested in the characters.
I enjoyed all this content and am not at all opposed to a 19th century diversion or two. But the book just really drops the thread from Ishmael and kind of comes back in hard on Ahab.
Les Miserables has quite the diversions (80 pages or so describing the battle of Waterloo) but it returns consistently to the characters and resumes their previous connections.
I just really felt that I was introduced to a great character driven narrative then the book switched to become a technicalnmanual for several hundred pages and then jumped back in to a wow finish presuming upon the fact that my previous engagement with the characters would automatically resume.
Anyway, sorry to drag a book you clearly really enjoy.
I'm with you on Moby Dick, though I always feel guilty about that. I was loving that book, up until the whaling and "whiteness" chapters. I never got past that. Les Miserables, by contrast, I absolutely loved — even the essay-digressions. Hugo is an absolutely genius at dropping what seems at the time like the most inconsequential seed into the plot and then having it flourish into a great reveal a hundred or so pages later.
Memory leaks can certainly be more sinister than the example used here.
It's not possible to never use global state — it makes sense in some cases. And then you end up with harmless things like adding memoization leaking memory when not done properly.
Naming a song Paranoid Android (my personal all-time favourite) was pretty obvious, though it is not about Marvin. I do dispute his opening statement - Ok Computer was their best album and one of very few albums that you can just leave on repeat without skipping tracks.
> Third, modernism was built on the principle that formal experimentation is the only thing that matters.
This is the most appealing thing about modernism to me — instead of continuing an exploitation of techniques that had been perfected, modernism was an exploration of what was possible — an attempted unbundling of the things that strike us about art like color, shape, texture, forms, frames, etc. The fatalism is a necessary consequence of this idea of taking some simple axioms and carrying them to their extremes.
For architecture, this exploration is fine but they mostly shouldn't have been allowed to use existing city centres as the playground for their explorations and in doing so ruin the social and architectural fabric that had been breathing life into these cities for generations and centuries.
Take your modernist glass-steel-concrete geometry art piece, build it in the perimeter of the city in a park, woods, or plains where nobody can see it unless they choose to travel and explicitly enjoy the sight, and leave the old streets and traditional houses in the city because they are there for a reason. The modernist architecture would have had a much better reputation had they just succumbed to their rightful position, and acknowledged that in their exploration they were still prototyping and far from having deliverables.
I'm not sure I agree that modern architecture ruined social and architectural fabric of cities. Holding up vernacular architecture as some sort of beacon because it's been in cities "for generations and centuries" is equivalent to not performing a change in say software, "because that's the we've always done it."
Besides a few notable examples of poor execution (20 Fenchurch Street in London, Richards Medical Research Laboratories off the top of my head) can you point to an instance where a piece of modern architecture was detrimental to the cityscape it inhabited?
You have drifted off-point here, which is the destruction of what is good for something mediocre or worse, as in the functionally and aesthetically disastrous destruction of Penn station in NYC (there are software analogies to be made here, if you think they are useful - e.g. Windows Vista.)
I think there is a lot of value in bold new design, and it is worth taking risks, but it encourages two sorts of copycats: the developer who wants to make a statement on the cheap, which allegedly gave us the back side of the New York By Gehry, and the second-rate architect who wants to express himself rather than serve the community, which results in a rash of undistinguished architectural misdemeanors, rather than high-profile cases.
Now that the high tide of dogmatic modernism seems to have passed, its excesses offers sites that can be redeveloped without losing anything of value.
Absolutely. It's also a reflection of the world it was created in (which is what all good art should be right?) since a lot of the Western-focused artists had to look at art in non-Western forms and what that meant for the definition of art (Picasso), as well as what the decomposition of the "building blocks" of art could mean for it (Mondriaan, Warhol).
I'm not a fan of postmodernism at all, but it's easy to see where it gets its ideals from and why it was the natural next "step".
- Magit, to quickly organize hunks into commits and do general git things
- Org mode, to organize TODOs, thoughts and even draft code snippets and designs
- Language-specific layers with great features (usually REPLs, support for refactoring, autocomplete — stuff you expect from any other IDE).