What is the purpose of ASCII diagramming today? Seems like graphics are supported by every document and communications medium that I use. Is it for including directly in code?

Well I can’t speak to ASCII in particular, but I create a lot of mermaid UML diagrams specifically because unlike an image, they are:

- Text searchable

- Easy to adjust

- Supported by a surprising number of markdown viewers.

LLMs can understand ASCII diagrams

LLMs nowadays can understand png diagrams too.

But not all CLIs handle pngs as easily as a text diagram. Syncing images is also multiple times slower.

png diagrams should never be the default.

They can’t update it though. In docs it makes sense to use that as a basis and have the Llm update it when needed

Mermaid diagrams are even better because you don't waste characters on the visual representation but rather the relationships between them. It's the difference between

    graph TD
            User -->|Enters Credentials| Frontend[React App]
            Frontend -->|POST /auth| API[NodeJS Service]
            API -->|Query| DB[(PostgreSQL)]
            API --x|Invalid| Frontend
            DB -->|User Object| API
            API -->|JWT| Frontend

and

    +-------+           +-------------+           +---------+
    |  User |           | React App   |           | NodeJS  |
    +-------+           +-------------+           +---------+
        |                      |                       |
        |  Enters Creds        |       POST /auth      |
        |--------------------->|---------------------->|
        |                      |                       |
        |      Invalid         |    <-- [X] Error -----|
        |<---------------------|                       |
        |                      |       Query DB        |
        |                      |---------------------->| [ DB ]

Plus while an LLM can understand relationships via pure ASCII or an image, it's just easier to give it the relationship data directly.

But the point is to have something easy to read both for humans and LLM, no?

It’s harder to read mermaid in a terminal or a markdown file…

Mermaid diagrams automatically render on Markdown and IDE chat windows as in VSCode or Cursor. So you get the best of both worlds, a graph you can look at a ND manipulate with the mouse but also in a format LLMs can read.

Ah thanks I didn’t know that…

more tokens, less reliable, dont work in all CLI agent harnesses

My unpopular opinion is that programming is stuck in the 1970s: a lot of programmers use a 1970s-style terminal window to enter 1970s OS commands, which run on a 1970s processor architecture (which is slowly getting replaced by a 1980s architecture). They use a 1970s editor (which is much superior to the other 1970s editor) to write programs in a 1970s language. ASCII diagrams are just a symptom of this. Hardware is millions of times better than in the 1970s, but programming is stuck in local optimums for historical reasons.

(Not to take anything away from Monosketch, which is cool.)

I wish it were stuck in the 1970s! (Although the mouse had been invented by then.) I do not want the mouse and I do not want all these windows. If I am using agents I want the mouse even less.

This is not historical reasons, this is just that moving my hands from the keyboard to the mouse is inefficient and technically unnecessary. I prefer mouse only on niche (for me) tasks like screenshot cropping or something.

I am about to test out Niri on my laptop and I expect to be quite pleased with the change.

I was thinking about this the other day - I watched a video about the acme editor and it was showing off text editing in a shell buffer, much like M-x shell. I realized I haven’t yet found a terminal emulator that will let you select text with a mouse while you’re editing in the shell. It’s such a simple thing that would be so useful, especially on a Mac where CUA bindings don’t conflict with terminal escape codes. iTerm lets you Option+click to position the cursor but you can’t select a word with the mouse and press ‘delete’. Why? It seems like such a simple thing to do.

Windows Terminal allows this, afaik. It might be a feature of clink, but I feel like I've seen it in powershell and cmd both. Not sure if it's available in traditional console window, I rarely use those much these days though (sudo on windows is nice, the only reason to use an elevated window is for multiple commands, like browsing system directories you don't have access to; I just wish it had a different 'official' name)

Because we are yet to invent a more efficient data transformation system as a shell, or a more efficient text editing interface as vi, but its not like there is no innovation in the space, we have `jq` now.

What is there to improve? Very genuinely.

A car has had largely the same shape since its creation, indeed since antiquity.

Sometimes, a problem space is explored to most humans' needs, and no more innovation is needed.

(edit: this said, I'm hopeful there is something new, and people like Bret Victor may show the way with things like https://dynamicland.org/ )

This is what I like about programming

And yet here we are communicating over a network from the 1970s.

Same reason people love and swear by games like nethack. ASCII art is cool af.

Is it common for graphics to be supported in the terminal?

ASCII to me represents something that can work in my term, in my source code, checks into git a bit more sanely than binary does, etc.

I still quite like it

agents can understand them. and you can view them in the terminal

I use this for traking change with git.

That "seems" is doing so much heavy lifting I got a hernia just from looking at it.

The core of Apple's success has always been to capture the cultural leaders. Artists, musicians, journalists, etc. have used Apple at much higher percentages than the general public.

Now that the iPhone made Apple much more of mainstream company, it's harder to do -- what does it mean to focus on cultural leaders when 90% of American teens have an iPhone? But in the 15 years since Steve Jobs' death they have still been doing a decent job of it.

The company

The "Wall Street tech sell-off" is QQQM being down 1.7% over the last five days and up 17.4% over the last six months

Oracle: -24% in one month

Core Scientific (CoreWeave): -19% in one month

It just started.

Tons of money to be made if you’re confident.

*Confident _and_ correct

There is always be random in such things. :|

Yup.

This is how jealousy and regular ol' misanthropy manifests itself in the suburban biome

ROFL. The neighbors are not "regular people" for any reasonable definition of that term.

> ROFL. The neighbors are not "regular people" for any reasonable definition of that term.

why do you say that?

Decamillionaires complaining about billionaires. A story as old as time...

Facebook built a poker bot called Pluribus that consistently beat professional poker players including some of the most famous ones. What techniques did they use?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluribus_(poker_bot)

> Pluribus, the AI designed by Facebook AI and Carnegie Mellon University to play six-player No-Limit Texas Hold'em poker, utilizes a variant of Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) as a core component of its decision-making process.

Very cool - I would like to contact you about this. Do you mind emailing me? My email address is in my profile.

I find that checking Facebook is almost always an emotional experience. I see so many more new babies than I ever did before Facebook.

Yeah. I'm not denying those kinds of experiences can happen on Facebook, but Facebook the company doesn't seem to care about making its users happier so much as it cares about keeping them on the site. Like network television or any other ad-supported medium, it doesn't need to be really good, it just needs to be minimally diverting. It's about generating addiction and not fulfillment.

But working hard isn't ever enough to reach the pinnacle of achievement. I could have worked my ass off at basketball, from age 3, and I would have never been an NBA player. Someone with more natural gifts than me, but fewer than Michael Jordan, might work hard his whole life and only brush the minor league/NBA border.

Probably, but you'd be surprised. I don't know if I would say Charles Barkley was "naturally talented" at basketball--his body type was all wrong, especially since he played in the era before everyone bulked up--but he worked his ass off and became one of the greats.

Same thing with Jim Courier in tennis. He became #1 in the world in tennis by working harder than anyone else. He didn't have half the talent or strokes of some of the other guys, but he just worked his balls off. It's the same story in just about every profession: the guys who work the hardest are the guys who climb to the top. Sure there are exceptions, but this is the general rule. Cheers, Scott

A lot of reasons can sound totally justified in retrospect. "The Colts will win the Super Bowl because they have superior talent." "The Saints will win the Super Bowl because the Colts' ego will go to their head." A lot of people take actions and have reasons for them -- when those actions turn out to be right, the reasons are often given undue credibility.

Right. It's the classical data mining problem. What should be done is to take the reasons given and use them as a hypothesis to predict other events. Reinhart and Rogoff have done just that in their book. After reading it I find it very difficult to accept the claim that people predicting this crash were just lucky or that all their reasons are bogus.

And I think you're making a mistake to equate ball games with debt markets. The fortunes in ball games can quickly and unpredictably turn. Debt doesn't work that way. If many people on low income take out mortgages on a teaser rate that goes up two years later to levels they cannot afford unless house prices keep rising at historically exceptional rates so they can remortgage, you know you're going to be in trouble eventually.

If the Colts did indeed have superior talent and then win the super bowl then obviously the reason was justified. If the Colts' ego is obviously making them overconfident and does indeed go to their head and cost them the game then again the reason is justified.

The point is that the reason isn't justified because the person correctly predicted an outcome. The reason is justified because the reason was based on true fact and is demonstrably capable of causing the effect.

Now if the Colts win the super bowl despite having worse talent because the opposing Saints team members all got drunk the night before and were playing with hangovers, then you would be justified in saying the predictor was lucky. It's not enough to say someone could have been lucky and then dismiss them. You should show they were lucky or accept they were correct in their reasoning.

"If the Colts did indeed have superior talent and then win the super bowl then obviously the reason was justified."

It should be pointed out that with Aristotelian logic, that is false. "Previously I said X will happen because of Y, and X happened." is basically "Y implies X; X is true; therefore Y".

Nevertheless, it is true that if a person makes a claim that something will happen for a given reason, gives plausible logical reasons, that we have priors that also indicate the causative connection is sound, and the prediction ultimately comes true, we should not just ignore it. We may not be justified in using Aristotelian logic to conclude with 100% confidence the person's reasoning was correct, but we are justified in taking it into account and concluding that there is some reason to believe this person, who made a prediction contrary to many people's other beliefs, may in fact have something.

After all, if you're not going to listen to people who make accurate predictions with plausible reasons used for their predictions, you can just give up on science right now, because that's all it is.