"Use minimalism to achieve clarity. While you are writing, ask yourself: is it possible to preserve my original message without that punctuation mark, that word, that sentence, that paragraph or that section?"
This echoes advice I first read in Strunk & White. It remains the most actionable tip for better writing I'm aware of, technical or otherwise.
Aside: I consider McCarthy's residency at SFI an ideal job
When I read papers I often think: if only the author had the space here to write two sentences instead of one, then perhaps I would immediately understand what they are trying to say.
Oh, that's the only way to write a good paper - first you write 1.5x pages to figure out what you want to say, and then, with this knowledge, you replace entite confusing paragraphs with short sentences focused on exactly that. When i don't know how to express an idea, i ask myself "-so what idea are you trying to communicate? -well, that XYZ holds -if so, just go ahead write literally that!"
FWIW I think this is exactly the opposite of what the OP was trying to say. I think the OP meant that they often wish authors had used more space to explain their ideas, because that would immediately make them more accessible.
And I must agree. I often feel papers are written with an extra 20% over the page budget, then condensed in the last minute to fit the constraints, which hurts the exposition.
"Use minimalism to achieve clarity. While you are writing, ask yourself: is it possible to preserve my original message without that punctuation mark, that word, that sentence, that paragraph or that section?"
This is rich, coming from the guy that spends multiple paragraphs describing an empty ditch in the desert.
Sorry, but he takes it too far. McCarthy's omission of punctuation makes his books difficult to understand who is saying what, and a challenge to follow especially with dialogue. The Road and No Country for Old Men both do not contain quotation marks for speech, and he omits the common speech tags like "he said" or "she exclaimed" which makes it a challenge to know who is saying what. It is a choice and the art form he's choosing, but is far from writing for clarity.
I would assume that his suggestions for clarity in "scientific papers" and his literary style don't overlap all that much to infer the former from the later.
This is certainly the case, but it does make it all the more amusing that the myth
> Commas denote a pause in speaking.... Speak the sentence aloud to find pauses.
made its way into this article. Hard to imagine that this particular point, to which I might attribute many of the comma splices I see in scientific writing, actually came from a professional writer.
no, it's just a stylistic pet peeve of mine. lacks specificity and always makes me have to think about which is the latter and which is the former, no matter how many times i look it up. scrambles my brain.
I recently read Blood Meridian, the only one of his books I've read. I agree this was a bit jarring and confusing at the start, but I got used to it by the end.
Though I haven't read any scientific papers, so can't comment on those.
I agree about clarity, so this is just an aside but that's what makes it a fun experience for me. It's unlike reading anyone else (although I haven't read many authors). I'd say no country for old men was still pretty straightforward, but I had to re-read sentences and whole paragraphs with blood meridian.
The work makes it worth it, makes it that much more rewarding to me personally. It's like choosing to play a difficult videogame, because you know once you overcome it, it'll be great.
I agree, his literary work is unique, and does take a bit more work to read, and with that it includes additional meaning behind it. For example, in The Road often times it doesn't even matter if its the boy or the man saying it.
However, I wouldn't take his advice on how to write for clarity. I too often found myself rereading paragraph, "wait is this description or dialogue", "who said that" - this is not what you want in scientific papers
> The Road and No Country for Old Men both do not contain quotation marks for speech, and he omits the common speech tags like "he said" or "she exclaimed" which makes it a challenge to know who is saying what.
I am reading NC4OM right now and this is not, technically, the case. He does use those “speech tags”.
technical writing and fiction writing are two totally different forms of writing. the ability to modulate between those disciplines is the sign of a good writer.
yep, its always funny to come across a company that uses it. For me the latest one was tubi, ive heard truth social also uses it not 100% sure. Sometimes I wonder if they're quiet about elixir praise is because the technology just works with very little to no issues
Truth Social is just Mastodon on the backend and an alternative Twitter-like frontend called Soapbox. Soapbox is indeed Elixir-based and open source.
Soapbox has a very weird history of first being forked from Gab for a feminist platform called Spinster(.xyz), then it got acqui-hired by Truth Social, then many of them left Truth Social to be independent. Soapbox(.pub) today is mostly abandonware, the team switched focus to building products on top of Nostr.
The amount of times it switched sides in its 5 or so years of existence has been truly fascinating and difficult to keep track of.
Creator here — the site runs a shortest-path search over the set of photos I’ve manually verified. Thanks for pointing this out, I just added Carson-Leno and Leno-Cooper, so now their interview guests are all down to a couple hops. Talk show hosts are major connectors! Letterman is a real skeleton key to the 20th century, he interviewed Edward Bernays who has a pic with Eleanor Roosevelt, and it all pops off from there.
I tried a connection with John Frusciante (guitarist in Red Hot Chili Peppers) and while he was in the photo, his face was tagged as Chad Smith who was not in the photo and a woman with a mask covering her face was tagged as John. I didn't see an obvious way to identify a unique image except for an attribute in the HTML which was "15552" if that helps.
I see! I can imagine them as serious connective tissue, who else interviews royalty/presidents one day and young pop idols the next. Again, really cool project, thanks for sharing!
That would be an interesting topic to analyze. Generate random parings of people and compute the paths between them, then tally the people who show up most frequently in the connections.
Technologies: All of the standard PM tools, Mixpanel, Amplitude, Figma, SQL, much of the AI/LLM ecosystem (frontier models/prompting, RAG, fine-tuning pipelines, and agentic tools/architecture), Python/JS
Hello! I'm a technical product manager/lead looking for a new role (I've had luck on here previously). I've worked at startups and in the enterprise, across a few spaces, and was PM #1 twice. My favorite products have manifested as platforms, and I particularly enjoy building for a developer-user (API's, SDK's), but those aren't hard requirements.
Ideally I am building something important, that will challenge me, on a team that will do the same. I've been consulting for a while and am looking to join a company in a permanent, full-time role.
It's a matter of ownership vs. licensing. You own the hardware you buy, but you license the software. I agree with the author that as long as you use that software, you should be subject to the constraints of the license.
The key is that if you choose not to run that software, your hardware should not be constrained. You own the hardware, it's a tangible thing that is your property.
Boils down to a consumer rights issue that I fall on the same side of as the author.
The hardware should not be equipped with undefeatable digital locks. Put a physical switch on the hardware (like Chromebooks have-- had?) to allow the owner to opt out of the walled garden.
Also worrisome are e-fuses, which allow software to make irrevocable physical changes to your hardware. They shouldn't be allowed to be modified except by the owner. (See Nintendo Switch updates blowing e-fuses to prevent downgrades.)
E fuses are needed so people can't downgrade the device to old insecure software to exploit it. Without it or an equivalent like a secure monotonic counter how do you think such attacks be protected?
There's a disagreement on who the attacker is. From Nintendo's perspective, the owner of the device is the attacker. From the owners perspective it's Nintendo.
Obviously the parent commenter believes you should be able to exploit your own device and downgrade the OS if you wish.
Is this is a real threat that's actually happening on a scale that matter or moreso a make believe type thing?
Because I can do make believe type arguments all day. We should lock everyone up, because what if a super astroid hits the Earth and only prison is strong enough to protect them??
See, easy, and kind of fun. Doesn't mean much though.
That's an oddly legalistic line to draw. What if they start licensing the hardware too? Surely if we care about users being respected by technology, the line between software and hardware or between ownership and licensing is immaterial. These are all excuses to deny users the opportunity to do things they should be entitled to do, like installing arbitrary applications.
Well, the line is drawn by the fact that hardware and software have intrinsic differences. It sounds like we're on the same page about hardware -- with the software, should we not be bound by licenses in client/server services (phones, consoles)? You are using someone else's service with others, for some collective benefit like playing a game, and being bound to constraints on that software doesn't seem that offensive. Modified clients can piss in the pool for others using the services and affect the network's quality.
Again, if you want to run purely OSS software with permissive licenses, that should be your prerogative. But you might miss out on the Play store. If you want to mess with Valve anti-cheat, you can't connect to Steam games online. Etc. I think these companies do have a right to dictate software requirements for client code accessing their servers.
But, you should be able to wipe those clients if you don't care about them and play tux racer on Arch.
> Well, the line is drawn by the fact that hardware and software have intrinsic differences.
Do they? Is microcode hardware, or software? If I open up the plugboard on my IBM 407 and rewire the connections, am I updating software or reconfiguring hardware? I think this is a false dichotomy. Software or hardware, kernel or userspace, these are all just parts of a machine. I care about the holistic behaviour of that machine, not about which specific parts do which specific things.
> But, you should be able to wipe those clients if you don't care about them and play tux racer on Arch.
I don't need to play tux racer. I need to use my bank.
> I think these companies do have a right to dictate software requirements for client code accessing their servers.
They're not just dictating the requirements of the client code, they're dictating requirements for the entire execution environment. Following your logic to its conclusion, if I'm going to do banking from my phone (and that's a foregone conclusion), I have to have to cede that bank the right to veto any other piece of software from my phone.
I could buy a second phone, because I'm a relatively affluent software developer, but most people have neither the money nor the energy to buy a special phone for banking. They'll just let the bank control their phone. I consider this is an unacceptable abridgement of their freedom.
I have no problem with Valve anti-cheat, so long as it's reasonably permissive. Valve anti-cheat won't stop me from installing my own software. I'm not drawing a hard technical line here; there's a grey area of reasonable integrity provisions. Sideloading restrictions in Android cross well beyond that grey into the black.
First, we had bespoke computer systems where the hardware and software were tailored to solve specific problems. Then, as computers became commoditized, the hardware was more standardized and software interacted with it through an abstraction layer. Now, we're circling back to heterogeneous hardware where software and hardware are tightly coupled for the best performance and power efficiency. Of course there's always a trade-off. In this case, it's flexibility.
The smartphone does not consist of just one processor, it's a collection of dedicated processors, each running custom algorithms locally. Sure, there's software running in the application layer, but it's playing more of a coordination role than actually doing the work. Just think of sending a packet over the internet and how different it is between a smartphone and a computer, how much more complex a cellular modem is compared to a network card.
It's less about software now and more about hardware accelerated modules. Even CPUs run primarily on microcode which can be patched after the fact.
These patterns are cyclical. It will take a number of years before we return to standardized compute again, but return we will. Eventually.
When the hardware is complicated enough that the software required to run it al all would take many millions of dollars to replicate, hardware freedom alone doesn't cut it. Just like a modern processor needs mountains of microcode to do anything you'd actually want. And that's without companies needing to obfuscate their hardware to avoid interoperability they don't want.
In practice, a whole lot software would have to be open source too so that the hardware is reasonably usable. The layers you'd need to let an iPhone run android well, or a Pixel phone to run iOS are not small.
Yeah. The oldest known gag is a Sumerian proverb from 1900 BC: "Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband's lap"
You also have another joke from 1600 BC: "How do you entertain a bored pharaoh? Sail a boatload of young women dressed only in fishing nets down the Nile - and urge the pharaoh to go fishing."
Besides the mercury compound, the Lewis and Clark contained a natural laxitive called Ipomoea purga (jalap) which was native to Mexico. Presumably the natives there used it and maybe laughed about it.
Made me look up what "jalap" actually means, but apparently it's just a reference to the city it grows near, and means "sand water" or something like it.
Most likely sasparilla and root beer. Sasparilla in particular is made from Sassafrass which in its natural state contains safrole and produces a euphoric feeling when imbibed.
I just got back from backwoods camping, each site has a wooden chest/thunderbox/toilet out in the open woods near the site. I'm not sure if the thunder is the heavy wooden lid closing or the noises that come from it. Some are out of sight of the campsite but ours was only 75ft away, fortunately the lid blocked your view if it was in use.
This echoes advice I first read in Strunk & White. It remains the most actionable tip for better writing I'm aware of, technical or otherwise.
Aside: I consider McCarthy's residency at SFI an ideal job