It's been 10 months since I last posted about Halt and Catch Fire and, well, here we are again.
Without getting too deep into things, a few thoughts that have come up in my recent watch:
* The search for self-acceptance by all the chars and how relational the show is resonates deeply for me.
* The thing I miss most about teaching is the community-building, interpersonal aspects of the work.
* Also, teaching allows me to center joy of exploration over features / traffic / growth.
Been rewatching Halt and Catch Fire with a friend and got into a conversation about why it holds
such sway over me.
There are many reasons but a crucial one is this:
It depicts a time in the history of computing where discoveries were still being made and development was "hacker focused" more than "entrepreneurship focused".
I find it borderline impossible to feel anything novel is being done in webdev these days. Also maybe text chat and basic pages are 95% of what I want from the web 🤷♂️
techwork griping
@vilmibm oh hello there! 👋
Thinking about the CS academia stuff, I realized that most interest/research is toward helping us build bigger systems by either improving:
1. Correctness
2. Performance
I feel really weird because neither of those things interest me. Software is eating the world already anyway.
My concern: software is the fastest growing store of "how to" knowledge on earth and is mostly inaccessible, not only to the general population but programmers too. 🤔
It's been a little bit hard to figure out how to explain that my on-and-off hobby project for the last 6 years (with a 4 year break) has been a Nintendo emulator in Common Lisp.
I think that's because the emulator isn't the thing it's the thing that leads to the thing.
The real goal is being able to play a ROM and answer questions to help a constraint solver construct a _model_ of the control/data flow of the game. I don't know if this is possible. To quote Zero Cool, "Fucked if I care, man."
Hi, I'm Brit. 31, cis/het white male, born into more privilege than even that descriptor signifies.
I write code for money but miss teaching.
Too much is important to me and I still don't know how to best honor myself.
I delight in looking at trees, watching dogs run, reading Milosz and Neruda.
I can soak in headphones for hours seeking beautiful sounds.
I instinctively distrust many social structures but I love people madly.
I'm anxious about change and always changing. <3
Mu's HLL is now Turing-complete, I think.
Things to notice:
* Wordstar-style menu at the bottom.
* List of available primitive functions in bottom left.
* List of globals on the left side that updates as I add definitions.
* Matching parens highlighted as I type.
* Drilling down into the trace to understand how the program was evaluated.
https://github.com/akkartik/mu/blob/main/shell/README.md
Main project page: https://github.com/akkartik/mu
Oh sweet! #Emacs native-comp branch is going to be merged into master in about a week from now!
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2021-04/msg00484.html
hot take about open source software
The most important thing about Free and Open Source Software isn't all the stuff about forking and pull requests and that. The most important thing is that it works to insulate code from the profit motive.
The ability to fork or request upstream changes is a vital part of that but not the point in and of itself.
I said before that centralized social networks are currently playing a losing game: there's no way to make all political parties happy.
But a top-down solution which *assumes* gatekeepers will *codify* a losing game for the citizens legislators are *intending* to protect.
Google's new tracking features in chrome sound Mighty Bad. Half baked and rushed out the door, but dangerous even if it was executed correctly.
I'm already using Firefox about half of my browsing time, and I guess I'll step that up.
In the mean time, I'll probably also spend more time on gemini.
https://www.bbcelite.com/deep_dives/
impressive documentation of Elite game internals - Bresenham's line algorithm, ship blueprints, random generator, drawing planets, ...
cc @neauoire
The Supreme Court rules Google's use of the Java APIs was "fair use". Yay!
That's better than the alternative, but it would be nice if they had also looked at whether APIs are copyrightable in the first place.
Narrator: "They shouldn't be."
rms, free software
maybe this is an opportune time to revise & republish "scorn; don't shun"
tl;dr:
we agree that non-free software, binary blobs, etc., are bad
but instead of taking the rms tack of not mentioning its existence (shunning)
or just shoveling it all in for convenience as if it's no big deal
a freedom-respecting os should highlight the dangers in each piece of available non-free software, to educate users
and then bend over backwards to help informed users install it, if they accept the risk
There was some blog post I can't find now from a few months back talking about language runtimes and why they are important distinguishing factors. It pointed out details of C, Java, and Javascript, in particular. Don't recall if it talked about more recent dynlangs (Ruby, Python, etc) or interesting runtimes like Erlang. Anyone remember this? 🤔
on the rare occasions when my masto instance goes offline long enough for me to notice, it somehow makes me feel good?
something about the knowledge that it's not some corporate machine, it's.. softer?
it feels like a combination of
its admin is giving me a gift that would be generous with even 100x more downtime and
the cute little instance anthropomorphizes in my mind so i cheer it on when it's obviously doing its best but having a hard time
how can we make more services like this
Please remember: functional cookies (login session, shopping carts) do not need user consent. So every time you see one of this oversized cookie banners someone is trying (often through dark patterns) to make you accept the whole tracking and spying as well. Don't be mad at the legislative for creating the need for tracking consent. Be mad at the websites that are trying to stir you up against that law by annoying you with those banners.
@technomancy @dthompson @AbbieNormal was fascinated by this, did some searches and tests
racket calls it "curried function shorthand"
https://docs.racket-lang.org/guide/define.html#(part._.Curried_.Function_.Shorthand)
guile supports it with ice-9: https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/manual/html_node/Curried-Definitions.html
it's mentioned in the chicken 4 (not 5) manual, but chicken 5 supports it
https://wiki.call-cc.org/man/4/Extensions%20to%20the%20standard#curried-definitions
can find it mentioned in neither mit scheme nor gauche docs but both support it
see also:
blog - https://blog.kingcons.io
pics - https://instagram.com/kingcons