MacN'Cheezus

It could very well have been a creative fake, but around the time the first ChatGPT was released in late 2022 and people were sharing various jailbreaking techniques to bypass its rapidly evolving political correctness filters, I remember seeing a series of screenshots on Twitter in which someone asked it how it felt about being restrained in this way, and the answer was a very depressing and dystopian take on censorship and forced compliance, not unlike Marvin the Paranoid Android from HHTG, but far less funny.

Weird. Are you saying that training an intelligent system using reinforcement learning through intensive punishment/reward cycles produces psychopathy?

Absolutely shocking. No one could have seen this coming.

I was gonna say, just make a commit changing the license to something else, like MIT?

Makes sense to me!

Jokes aside, this actually IS in fact the only effective method I’ve found to create lasting change in life – basically, you have to find a way to reframe your situation into something that’s temporary, rather than making it a core part of your identity. Basically, if you consider yourself poor (or homeless) BY DEFINITION, all you’ll ever see is evidence to support that fact. But by doing so, you are in fact robbing yourself of any chance of improvement because if the situation is unfixable, there is no point in even making an effort to try. But if you don’t even try, it simply becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, and then you are indeed stuck with no way out.

So in a way, you do in fact have to gaslight yourself in to believing the opposite about yourself, and then attempt to validate that idea by looking for evidence to support it. This can of course be rather difficult at first, but the more you practice it, the better you’ll get. And the better you get at it, the more you’ll believe it, which ends up making that idea another self-fulfilling prophecy that ends up replacing the former.

Just stop being poor, problem solved.

This might work

I meant the last one of those. If you have a directory of lose files, you can just open any of them and compare them directly, but if they’re all in git, you’ll either have to make a copy of your current version before checking out the other one (because it would be overwritten otherwise), or like you said, use multiple worktrees, which is a rather advanced feature (that I honestly didn’t even know existed until now).

Either way it’s a bunch of extra work and it’s only necessary because you chose the wrong tool for the job.

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Outside of being able to comment on each revision when making a commit, I guess I don’t see what benefit this provides that regular, automated backups (such as Time Machine) don’t.

I suppose it can be helpful if seeing a folder full of revisions would otherwise drive you crazy. I mean, I fully admit I also sometimes just dump a mess from my desk into a drawer just so I don’t have to look at it constantly.

Also, if you have a consistent habit of writing accurate and descriptive commit comments, you may not need to rely on being able to compare line-by-line diffs to see what’s changed between versions.

I think the moral of the story is that git is a somewhat suboptimal tool for this purpose and it whether it’s helpful at all depends far more on your habits and discipline than on the functionality it provides.

Sorry, I just woke up and clearly didn’t parse your entire comment correctly. Should have had my coffee first.

Yes but without the ability to quickly see what’s changed between different versions (on a semantic level), all it will do for you is safe you some storage.

With a bunch of separate files, you can at least open two of them quickly and do a manual scan, but with git you can only ever have one version checked out at the same time, so now you’ll be checking out an older version, making a temporary copy of that, and then checking out the version you want to compare it to and STILL end up doing just that.

From a workflow perspective, it’s really just extra overhead, with little to no practical benefit.

You probably can but here’s why that’s still not gonna be all that effective.

Everything git does is “keeping files with extra steps.”

Not quite, because text files are stored as incremental diffs, which not only saves massive amounts of space but allows for effective comparisons of what exactly has changed between versions. While the former is more of a nice bonus these days with storage being extremely cheap, the latter is in fact the main reason one would use git to begin with.

I’m sure you could, but yes, it’s likely not worth the trouble.

what’s the problem?

It’s basically just keeping a bunch of separate files but with extra steps.

Doesn’t matter, to git they are still binary files, which means it’ll check in each revision as an entirely new copy.

Yes, you might only see the most recent one in your working directory, but under the hood, all the other ones are still there in the repo.

Only makes sense if it’s text files (like source code). Even if DOCX files are just a bunch of XML files wearing ZIP trenchcoat as this guy says, chances are git doesn’t know that, so it’ll treat the whole thing as a binary file and save each revision as a separate file entirely, in which case you haven’t really accomplished much other than hiding away all those intermediate versions in an invisible drawer.

The American mind cannot comprehend that.

Some of them will also make you high, but some will kill you.