John BS @johnabs@qoto.org

@Paulos_the_fog @glynmoody

Indeed, the thing is, a) I'll be a postdoc as I'm currently completing my PhD, but b) most academic papers and even courses are currently taught primarily in English, apparently. I'll still learn the language and check employment requirements, but since they require an IELTS score of 6 for students to attend, I suspect this will be the case. Additionally, it's always nice to have the token "native English speaker", as we're really good at proof-reading and editing papers (I know from experience in Taiwan, Korea, and from working with my non-native English speaking colleagues 😅 )

As for the niceness, even if people are reserved, that's fine as long as they're not outright mean or exclusionary, lol.

As for regulations, I wish we had more, lol. Though we may need to get another dog, although my wife works from home, so Freyja doesn't get too lonely :)

@freemo Back-in-time debugging (not really exclusive to AST based languages, but it apparently only exists in CL and maybe smalltalk), stickers for capturing output FROM THE EDITOR (without modifying the code itself directly), and semantic navigation are really only possible with AST based languages, unless you leverage tree-sitter as an intermediate which isn't always accurate.

All I'm saying is this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0EZobdiJ4M

(Replace "still real" with "beautiful"...couldnt' find a better fitting meme 😅)

@freemo Please consider the following: sometimes function follows form, but aesthetics != form.

Take me for example: I'm not that pretty, but my wife still loves me because I get stuff done! Sometimes attraction ends up becoming an acquired taste...and I've made my peace with that 😭 😂 😂

@freemo Use Clojure with Datomic/Datalog (or if you want simpler, an isomorphic web framework may fit the bill)!

1. Clojure has plenty of full stack frameworks, and there are great resources I can link on recommendations (Macchiato is a great looking framework). Additionally, it's very easy to spin up on AWS, which makes it quite convenient.

2. Datomic/Datalog is a query language that allows querying based on "facts" and "rules", which can deduce new facts from known facts. Conveniently, many of the syntactic structures in datalog are highly sugarable and allow for compact queries, as compared to their SQL counterparts, though both database methods are (more or less) equivalent. I would seriously check this one out, even if you don't end up using it :3

3. You could also consider common lisp weblocks (or similar, there are others), which is an isomorphic web framework which makes a lot of things really nice and convenient both for writing and debugging! I personally plan on using this once my startup gets more off the ground and we get into the web dev phase, at least if I can get a few more devs on this in the mean time 😭

Anyway, that's my two (three?) cents, don't spend them all in one place 😂

@KorinnaAllhoff If you don't mind me asking:
a) What language did you use?
b) Did you use any linters/static analyzers?
c) (the long shot) would you consider a different language if it had a better debugger?

@Paulos_the_fog @glynmoody Well I'm glad to hear the people are nice (hopefully by American standards, lol)! My wife and I don't regularly eat out or get coffee (we tend to cook most of our meals, snacks, and coffee/tea etc) so I'm not super worried about that, but I've seen rent/mortgage prices as well as grocery prices be rather high, though I've only looked in the cities.

We're enamored with the trains especially, and I'm sort of hoping that if I get a job in the city that I can just commute via train, rather than needing to worry about the cost of living in the metropolitan areas. Do you happen to know if there's a difference between the population centers and the rural areas, as in America, or are prices fairly homogeneous across the country?

I'm still working on picking a language to learn (probably will pick german, as french is impossible for me to pronounce, and if I learn Italian my in-laws will never leave me alone, lol), but it's good to know that English is pretty popular.

@Paulos_the_fog @glynmoody We personally love the rain, if that's what you mean by poor weather. Do you have any opinions on Switzerland? There are a few universities there in my field of interest (in Zurich and Geneva), and it seems their train system is excellent, but I've yet to have the chance to visit Europe so I don't have any first hand experience (though we're planning on visiting soon since my wife just got her passport renewed!)

@Paulos_the_fog @glynmoody

If wanting to accommodate people that exist outside of the norm (e.g 95th percentile and up or 5th percentile and below) is equivalent to expecting everyone to behave abnormally, then I suppose you're right.

But those two things are not the same. To analogize my understanding of your point, it's like saying that advocating for handicapped parking spaces is the same as advocating for parking lot inflation where all buildings are circular with a single row of parking so everyone can park equally close. All I've been saying is that people should have accomodations available if needed, nothing more.

But regardless of your initial point, my wife and I are planning on moving to Europe once I finish my PhD specifically for public transportation and accessibility reasons because she cannot drive and I have to chauffeur her everywhere because the US isn't built for people like her. And we're willing to give up our very comfortable car (among other things) to do so.

I want to live in a place where she can move freely and go where she wants to safely rather than somewhere with the expectation that everyone must drive, but our public infrastructure/transportation is basically non-existent in most of the country, and unhygienic/poorly maintained in the rest of it.

@Paulos_the_fog @glynmoody I wasn't talking about all of Europe, and keep in mind that the Netherlands is arguably the best country in the world at public infrastructure and transportation. I suspect many of the taller individuals there either ride a bike, take the tram, or walk because their country is designed to prioritize these modes of transportation, and designed with their taller than average populace in mind.

I understand the fad of SUV purchases is unreasonable; however, it's equally unreasonable to expect your country's infrastructure to change overnight to accommodate you. Sometimes personal choice is the only option many people have, unlike the very fortunate Dutch, of which I am quite envious. In my original post, I was just advocating for people such as myself and my friends who are as tall (or even much taller) to have transportation options that are designed with them in mind, rather than needing to be part time contortionists to go places.

@Biggles @freemo @trinsec @jellycrystals Hah, of course I do, what kind of uncouth ruffian do you take me for? Honestly, you peasants never cease to amaze me 😏...😂😂😂

@freemo @trinsec @jellycrystals Preach! All the more reason to buy both a bidet and ventilated seats in your car 😂

@trinsec @freemo @Romaq @khird I've never used wordpress personally, though I've used static site generators like hugo and jekyll. I suppose my first question would be what are the benefits of using wordpress in this particular usecase over a simple index submission page or similar? This is where I'm not the most knowledgeable, but I'd love to learn if you have time to educate me trinsec :3

As for the journal stuff though, I have loads of experience creating journal templates, peer reviewing papers, proofing work, experimental design, etc. Also, I have a few novel ideas for using distributed micro-server maintenance as an alternative for journal membership fees and such, along with mandatory steganographically embedded digital signatures to validate that the data on the servers has all been peer reviewed...I'll try not to spam this thread but I have loads of ideas for various use-cases if we need to consider niche ways of running things in a lean way! :D

@freemo @trinsec @Romaq @khird

I have to say I agree with trinsec and romaq about not splitting the instance, but I love the remaining ideas.

How about an index site/page/feed that people can post their blogs to that allows interested parties to rapidly search the index? That way each person can manage their own static site blog, but any content tagged specifically for QOTO (e.g. tutorial, etc) gets crawled and added to the index?

I 10000% think that having a set of learning resources and tutorials would be excellent, but I also think there are lots of benefits to individual site maintainers to keep their sites that way, rather than needing to interface with some alternative posting strategy.

Finally, *inhales* I WANT THE ACADEMIC JOURNAL IDEA TO BE REAL AND I HAVE IDEAS FOR THIS THAT I'VE BEEN SITTING ON, PLEASE CAN WE DISCUSS THIS? *exhales* I've wanted to help set up a journal and data store for AGES. I even have ideas on how to manage membership structuring/fees, journal requirements including replicability/code review, peer review, grant/funding opportunities (if that's a future option under consideration and we get big enough) etc. please let me help or at least chat with y'all about it 🥺

@freemo In the immortal words of Miley Cyrus: "everybody make mistakes, everybody has those days...just, preferably not with highly reactive chemical species" 😂

@Paulos_the_fog @glynmoody I purchased one because I don't fit particularly well in most sedans due to my height, and made sure to purchase one with even higher gas mileage than my previous sedan (a hybrid with 40mpg, as compared to my 'old' sedan's only 36), and the improved safety features that it offered (namely merge cameras, among others).

Admittedly, this isn't the absolute best mileage I could have gotten (nearly 60mpg with a hyundai ioniq!), but it's a huge improvement over what I was previously driving in terms of both comfort and mileage.

I think the conquering of the road by SUVs is extreme (particularly when many people are poor drivers), but I think there is a legitimate use case for people who have to contort themselves to fit into shorter vehicles: being able to sit upright, rather than reclined, is a great improvement to my posture and back/feet pain on longer trips when I need to take them to visit family.

@freemo I can forgive storing chemicals with jewelry freemo, everybody's done it, but an elemental halogen? You crossed the line this time: everyone knows you store your halogens WITH your alkali metals and electrolyze AS NEEDED. Free halogens just say "screw it, *un-electrons your atoms*", and then everyone has a bad time 😂

@robby @cel7t@emacs.ch If you don't mind, could you provide an example use case? I'm not seeing the utility, but it's likely because I'm new to Guix in general 😅

Re-writing a graph library's inbuilt functions to use matrices instead of their inbuilt graph data structure is literally giving me 10x performance boosts in nearly all of my calculations.....I'm not sure what be up, but something, indeed, be up.

Edit: Their implementation is actually WAY better, the problem is I need to do conversions into matrix forms which is insanely slow, which leads to a bottleneck which is beaten just by using the matrix implementation, apparently.

@trinsec What happened?? Can you link me to an article (preferably in English lol) about what you're referring to?