5 Matching Annotations
  1. Jul 2022
    1. Think about the sad essay we all used to write for your (insert language here) class: back then you didn’t have permission to generate original ideas.

      I'm not sure that's the correct diagnosis.

      Alternative take: you were not, at that point in your life, equipped to understand that you could be generating new ideas and that you should walk away from that writing course with an appreciation for writing as a vehicle for what you'd like to accomplish with a given subject/format. It's fine that you didn't—many people don't—and your instructors, institution, parents, community, etc. probably could have done a better job at communicating this to you, but it was there, and it was the point all along.

    1. // NB: Since line terminators can be the multibyte CRLF sequence, care // must be taken to ensure we work for calls where `tokenPosition` is some // start minus 1, where that "start" is some line start itself.

      I think this satisfies the threshold of "minimum viable publication". So write this up and reference it here.

      Full impl.:

      getLineStart(tokenPosition, anteTerminators = null) {
        if (tokenPosition > this._edge && tokenPosition != this.length) {
          throw new Error("random access too far out"); // XXX
        }
      
        // NB: Since line terminators can be the multibyte CRLF sequence, care
        // must be taken to ensure we work for calls where `tokenPosition` is some
        // start minus 1, where that "start" is some line start itself.
        for (let i = this._lineTerminators.length - 1; i >= 0; --i) {
          let current = this._lineTerminators[i];
          if (tokenPosition >= current.position + current.content.length) {
            if (anteTerminators) {
              anteTerminators.push(...this._lineTerminators.slice(0, i));
            }
            return current.position + current.content.length;
          }
        }
      
        return 0;
      }
      

      (Inlined for posterity, since this comes from an uncommitted working directory.)

  2. Mar 2022
    1. The report is 33 slides long; yet about 10 slide-equivalents are essentially content-free (compulsive repetitive branding, twiddly hierarchical organization, empty space, assorted title pages, and so on). This PP fluffed-up material here and quite a bit more could easily be placed in a technical report on 4 pages of an 11" by 17" piece of paper (folded in half)
    2. One does not read a printout of someone's two-month old PowerPoint slides, one guesses, decodes, and attempts to glean meaning from the series of low-resolution titles, bullets, charts, and clipart. At least they do that for a while...until they give up. With a written document, however, there is no reason for shallowness or ambiguity (assuming one writes well).