Brian Beach has moved @bwbeach@qoto.org
- GitHub
- https://github.com/bwbeach
- Lame website
- https://www.beachfamily.net
Now at: @haiku_brian
Proud papa/dad/husband. Choral singer. Aspiring linguist. CTO at Backblaze. Usually in Indiana, sometimes on Maui. He/him.
Joined Nov 2022
Brian Beach has moved
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@marick @schwaigbub At the same time, I was at HP Labs porting Portable Standard Lisp to the Motorola 68000-based HP workstations. And also, for some reason, ported to the DEC 20 in the computer room downstairs. Good times.
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Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the illustrious @williamfspivey to Mastodon. He’s a little short on followers at present, see if you can help him out with that. 😉
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According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) $7,000,000,000,000 were spent on direct and indirect subsidies for fossil fuels in 2022.
Government support for fossil fuels is equivalent to just over 7% of our planet's entire economic output.
By comparison, global education spending accounts for 4.3% of all GDP.
Cutting that could prevent 1.6 million premature deaths per year and increase government revenues by $4.4 trillion.
https://www.statista.com/chart/31016/volume-of-global-fossil-fuel-subsidies-timeline/
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We see on the fedi every day the results of the cancerous philosophy or racism: the lack of Black and Brown voices here because of the constant and largely unprovoked harassment and violence of white-identified people playing out their Manifest Destiny fantasies to keep this place a digital ethnostate.
We see the history of racism in action daily as we attempt to push forward.
It is critically important to recognize the origins of this behavior so it's not repeated and weaponized.
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Via bikinginla.com
" From November 13th to December 3rd, 2023, Ortlieb will be offering repair services at 40 percent off the usual cost of repairs for all products out of their 5-year warranty period. The idea is, fix what you have instead of buying something new." #BikeTooter
https://www.bicycling.com/news/a45860914/ortlieb-repair-weeks/
@marick @schwaigbub I, too, remember the old days. I worked at HP Labs in the 1980s, when "AI" meant Lisp and "expert systems".
HP and the University of Utah were working on Portable Standard Lisp, which was intended to be a performant platform for building AI systems.
I was into flying, and wrote a flight simulator, and an autopilot to fly it. That's me in the picture, taken from an HP brochure from 1985.
There's no way I would have gotten into an actual plane flown by that software. Without strong typing, and without rigorous testing, it just wasn't reliable enough.
@marick @schwaigbub I very much enjoyed the 99PI episode on safety bicycles.
@marick I haven't looked at Swift yet. Maybe it's time.
I was super happy to discover a few weeks ago that we once again have a good bookstore in #Bloomington. It's a real book store with employees who read books and write recommendations that are posted on the shelves. Morganstern's seems to always be busy selling books, and providing coffee to people hanging out and studying.
Sharon and I went over this afternoon for coffee and cookies. There was a trio playing medieval recorder music. I found a good book, and we found some holiday cards to send.
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“If you commute on an e-bike 20km a day, five days a week, your charging cost would be about $20 – annually.”
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I’ve reshared parts of this thread already, but I feel compelled to do it again from the beginning and encourage people to read it. Because this is exactly how I feel about software engineering and the importance of a liberal arts education. And if you consider how *fast* the tech sector changes, it just puts that much more weight on the need for people in the industry to have an education which doesn’t teach CS as a vocation, and *does* teach about the world and environment our systems impact. https://hachyderm.io/@inthehands/110390739226017146
@schwaigbub @marick I like the “clone the CTO plan”. As the CTO, that should lower my workload. 🤣
Writing command line tools in Haskell does seem like a good place to start. Unfortunately, I was the one who made the rule that we have a critical mass of people who know a language before we start using it. That way we can count on having somebody who can maintain it.
@marick I'll be curious what you find out about pure functional languages.
I'm making my second go at learning haskell. I did #AdventOfCode in Haskell last year. In preparation for doing it again this year, I'm dusting off the VSCode environment and doing a few small problems.
I successfully used monads to carry state through a calculation. It was really cool. And it took me a week off-and-on to wrap my head around it. If I'd been doing it for years and it was just another tool in the belt, it would be an awesome tool to have.
For me, the mental shift from Java in my day job to Haskell is huge, and takes work. I can see why people don't use functional languages without a strong reason. And I've never been at a company where management provided (or allowed) a strong reason.
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Serious question: there was a time, a few years back, when the Haskell-ish languages seemed poised (finally!) for a breakthrough. Some of that was due to an association between Haskell and cryptocurrency, but there was also a sense that people were *ready* for Haskell’s particular vision. (I’m thinking of, say, PureScript as an alternative to both JavaScript and Elm)
That seems to have fizzled. Have there been writeups as to why?
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In college, I took a class called The Letters of Paul. I took it for two very good reasons:
1. I was (and am) named Paul.
2. The prof was (and is) cool.
I didn’t figure it was an especially practical course. It was for fun, for the challenge, for the cultural knowledge, for the pleasure of doing it.
WHAT LIBERAL ARTS EDUCATION IS FOR: A THREAD
1/
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No American should have to log into a private platform which requires to give away privacy to read official statements of Representatives or US officials — much less pay. Continued unique uses of X by state, local, & federal government is a single point of failure. Congress & White House should cross-post to alternative social networks, after negotiating terms of service for federal use that require open archives through an API & create an open archive for social media. https://e-pluribusunum.org/2019/12/20/the-us-government-should-preserve-the-social-media-history-of-officials-not-delete-them/
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It’s a beautiful morning in Mountain View, catching the train to work.
I find that the Bay Area is much nicer to visit using public transit than renting a car and fighting the traffic.
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I love direct air capture. The kind that's already been done. By living organisms creating hydrocarbons sequestered in the Earth's crust. Let's all celebrate direct air capture by not digging any more of them up....
- GitHub
- https://github.com/bwbeach
- Lame website
- https://www.beachfamily.net
Now at: @haiku_brian
Proud papa/dad/husband. Choral singer. Aspiring linguist. CTO at Backblaze. Usually in Indiana, sometimes on Maui. He/him.
Joined Nov 2022
