Years ago, someone demonstrated an improved mobile text editing system called "Eloquent" [1] and I wish this would be the default today.
However, my biggest issue with mobile text selection is accidental scrolling or scrolling too fast/far while dragging on the screen to select longer text parts. This is especially annoying in landscape mode when there is just a tiny gap between the visible text and the touch keyboard. I don’t know how to solve this, but it just makes the text editing process feel incredibly insecure/slippy and annoying for me.
That looks so much better. The hierarchical popup menu is soooo annoying. It's not even consistent about what gets relegated to the overflow!
In case it isn't clear to people, that research was actually done by Google. It's a shame the researchers didn't have the political clout to ship it.
I guess one issue with it might be the "press harder" bit. That isn't a thing anywhere else in the Android world at all and I expect hardware has pretty poor support for it.
Don’t know if it was added after your comment, but there actually is one separate page for each character, just click the arrow in the top-right corner of each box. For more "giant" character previews I can recommend https://decodeunicode.org/en (which is more focussed on writing systems though).
There is also a "Copied x" toast (is this the correct term? idk) at the bottom of the viewport when you click a character box, maybe it was also added later on.
Maybe the structure and operation in LLMs is a somewhat accurate model of the structure and operation of our brains and maybe the actual representation of “thought” is different between the human brain and LLMs. Then it might be the case that what makes the LLM “feel human” depends not so much on the actual thinking stuff but how that stuff is related and how this process of thought unfolds.
I personally believe that our thinking is fundamentally grounded/embodied in abstract/generalized representations of our actions and experiences. These representations are diagrammatic in nature, because only diagrams allow us to act on general objects in (almost) the same way to how we act on real-world objects. With “diagrams” I mean not necessarily visual or static artefacts, they can be much more elusive, kinaesthetic and dynamic. Sometimes I am conscious of them when I think, sometimes they are more “hidden” underneath a symbolic/language layer.
In the past few years I have seen some serious efforts from the Clojure community to make Clojure more attractive for data science. Check out the Scicloj[1] group and their data science stack/toolkit Noj[2] (still in beta) as well as the high-performance tabular data processing library tech.ml.dataset (TMD)[3].
What's worth emphasizing is that you're not marrying in to an ecosystem of libs. There are a lot of separate pieces that you can typically use separately. I do climate data work without most of Scicloj's tools, but I do use tech.ml.dataset extensively
You might have forgotten the language but I bet it must have had some influence on how you think or write programs today. I don’t think the value of learning Prolog is necessarily that you can then write programs in Prolog, but that it shifts your perspective and adds another dimension to how you approach problems. At least this is what it has done for me and I find that still valuable today.
It is unfortunate, but I can absolutely understand it. Keeping up such open-ended, time-consuming projects year after year while the person doing it changes inevitably – their personal life, habits, job, interests, etc. – must feel like a burden at some point, even if it is out of love and passion (I know that from personal experience with my voluntary work, from which I had to take a break after 10+ years).
I am truly thankful for all of Eric Wastls work on Advent of Code, no matter how much time he can invest and how much puzzles we get. I already look forward to the challenge at the start of autumn and consider what programming language I will choose (this year it’ll be Uiua :)). I am very slow at these puzzles, so I mostly quit at around puzzle 12 anyway, but I learn so much from them and they are a lot of fun.
As an autodidact who never learned this stuff at school/uni, his lectures are what made linear algebra really click for me. I can only recommend them to anyone who wants to get a visual intuition on the fundamentals of LA.
What also helped me as a visual learner was to program/setup tiny experiments in Processing[1] and GeoGebra Classic[2].
Nitpick: No one is a visual learner, or more correctly everyone is. Multimodal is the way, so good teachers will express the same concepts in several ‘modes’ and that helps develop the intuition.
Years ago when I was reading this (just a couple of chapters, not all of it), it opened my eyes to the power of diagrammatic representation in formal reasoning unlike anything before. I never did anything useful with string diagrams, but it was so fun to see what is possible with this system!
I had a similar revelation when watching 3Blue1Brown's Calculus series. Had they included those kinds of visual representations in school when I was first learning about Calculus, my understanding (and interest) would have been greatly expanded.
Very impressive how some people can create visual representations that enhance understanding.
I guess you already know the command `dired-find-file-other-window` (bound to `o` by default), which reuses the right split window, if already there and opens a new window if there is none. Horizontal splits do not seem to be reused though (they often don’t have enough vertical space for dired anyway, which is why I guess they designed it this way).
Yes. dired-find-file-other-window is the one I found annoying. It moves the cursor/focus to the other window, and it keeps opening new split windows. If I ran the cmd 3 times, it would open 3 new split windows. Really annoying.
I want the cursor/focus to remain on the dired window so that I can go down the file list and see the file content on the other window. Ctrl-n and ctrl-o are all I need to do.
Okay, I can see the issue now, maybe I haven’t really used dired intensely enough for it to bother me. I just tried your snippet and having the cursor remain on the dired buffer for a quick preview is a feature I didn’t know I needed. Thanks for sharing!
Processing is what ignited my passion for programming and Quil has become my favorite way of writing it. It is amazing that you can re-evaluate the draw/update function in a running sketch and immediately see the changes, without having to reload the whole thing. And on top of it you have the beauty of the whole Clojure Stdlib with its immutable datastructures.
I just learned that there is now a tweak mode in Processing that lets you tweak certain parameters in the code (via draggable values, etc.) while the sketch is running, which is pretty awesome for experimenting with values. However, you still have to reload the whole sketch when you want to change other parts of the code, you can’t just eval a function in the editor and get immediate feedback like in Quil.
However, my biggest issue with mobile text selection is accidental scrolling or scrolling too fast/far while dragging on the screen to select longer text parts. This is especially annoying in landscape mode when there is just a tiny gap between the visible text and the touch keyboard. I don’t know how to solve this, but it just makes the text editing process feel incredibly insecure/slippy and annoying for me.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9YPm0EghvU