John BS @johnabs@qoto.org

Really diving into common lisp to write code for my startup. It's pretty sick.

Does anybody have experience with Disroot who's willing to provide their opinion?

Pricing seems very reasonable but I'm somewhat dubious of privacy claims, considering many "private" utilities have inevitably been compromised by government orders or bad behavior (e.g protonmail, tutanota, lavabit, etc.)

My wife made me this 😂

Very interesting takes here! Someone tell me why he's wrong, or why we aren't doing better if he's right. Cleaner energy is always a good thing, right?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aUODXeAM-k

Yeah, CommonLisp and Julia (which is Lisp based, funnily enough) are solidly my top languages of all time, and they should be yours too. Fight me 😂

I legitimately don't understand why people didn't just stick with it after it was developed in the 60s. It has so many excellent features, the syntax keeps getting cleaner due to macros, it's really fast, and the major complaint is just the parentheses? I'd trade the parens for interactive, stack-preserving debugging any day.

I'm hoping we can have a bit of a CommonLisp "revival" soon, as it's incredibly stable and just gets so many things *right*. The only downside is a lack of community/"political will" so-to-speak, to get people to get through the prickly intro and to be able to really see how excellent it is.

My wife: "All my best memories are of chocolate 🤤"
Me: "What about our marriage? 😢"
My wife: 😳
Me: 😭😂😂😂

For context, our anniversary is tomorrow...😑

It is officially time I master lisp so I can reach enlightenment.

Does anybody know of any privacy respecting home security hardware? I can't find any and it's seriously pissing me off

Get ready to feel:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mM-bp5PB34

Does anyone else feel alienated in their own culture? I often feel like a foreigner in my own country, and have felt more at home abroad, which isn't my favorite thing to deal with.

A project well outside my comfort zone that I did for a class is going through peer review!

Inspired by my lovely wife, and my own fascination with optimizing workflows, a collaborator and I performed a comprehensive literature survey to determine what work has been done using brain/human computer interfaces and neuroergonomic frameworks to improve design inclusivity for neurodivergent individuals.

Once it's published, I'll share a link here, after all I probably shouldn't be posting spoilers before it's accepted ;)

Actually, here's a way better pic thanks to my wife's camera.

Here's the buckeye burl one! The best of the bunch IMO.

I've been making pens! Here are three I turned on my mini lathe recently, the woods are (from left to right)

Bolivian Rosewood
Cocobolo
Macassar Ebony
(Buckeye burl in the works, it's gorgeous)

Each one is made with different embellishments, slightly different widths and grips, and an increasingly refined process as I make more!

The refills are by Cross, and if I can find kits for fountain pens, I'll definitely want to try my hand at making those too! These are really hefty and dense and have great balance to them, so I'm pretty happy with how they all turned out!

Quick rant:

Clarity of writing should not be mistaken for simplicity of the ideas being expressed through the writing. It takes a LOT of work to explain difficult topics clearly and concisely, and I think that extra work should (ideally) be rewarded or encouraged in academic publishing as well.

Unfortunately, obtuse, clunky, and unclear writing is common in modern scientific literature. I'm at least partially convinced it's used as both a shibboleth, and to make sub-par ideas look better in a manner similar to "putting lipstick on a pig".

Don't get me wrong; precise, well-reasoned writing is absolutely critical. But precision does not necessitate prose that beats you with passive voice, nested appositive phrases with no delimiter differentiation, and frankly disgusting style.

As an added benefit, you may be able to increase popular scientific literacy of your field if you manage to write your papers in a way that doesn't require a master's degree in linguistics with a focus on cuneiform and Latin to parse.

Related comic:
https://phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=2049

Should all critical cyber infrastructure be written in languages that seek to guarantee safety, such as Haskell or Rust?