ML @ml@qoto.org

I looked at the Erlang part of Elixir's source code to figure out how Elixir supports definitions inside for loops, since in theory it seemed like that would require mutable state. It turns out that they basically *do* use mutable state. More specifically, they use ETS ("Erlang Term Storage") to store function definitions during the compilation of a module.

I've been having some fun with Elixir. The macro system is really great, and it synergises well with Elixir's pattern matching. You can see it in how they implement unicode support directly in Elixir itself:

https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir/blob/v1.10.4/lib/elixir/unicode/properties.ex#L271

Basically they load standard unicode.org text files containing data about unicode code points, and then loop over the relevant code points and generate a function clause for each one, all this at compile time.

You can see it in action in the link, in the function do_trim_leading, which removes leading whitespace: the list of whitespace is loaded from lines 275 to 294, and the function clauses are generated on lines 302 to 304. Line 306 contains the clause for when it's not preceded by whitespace.

Being snarkily dismissive is very tempting at times, but I think I should avoid doing it.

@SEEK Thanks!

I might have news in a week or so, since it hasn't been given to me by the boss as some antagonistic scheme, but rather by an employee who was handling this agreement for new hires and who noticed I had never been given one of these to sign. So there's no pressure to sign it quickly and I have time to look it over and discuss it with others.

The boss has generally been pretty reasonable, but I've also heard that this company once was significantly larger before some employees left to form a competing business, so the boss might not be as reasonable as usual on this issue. I think my amendments are reasonable and do still protect the the boss from such things, but who knows what they'll think, it's entirely possible they'll just say to take it or leave it.

Anyway, gotta go work at that place now, have a nice day!

@Iambharani That is very cool!

For lesswrong links, a useful mirror is greaterwrong, accessed by just change the "less" in the url to "greater". It loads much faster, and you can read the comments even if you have javascript disabled.

The link I just boosted, but changed to greaterwrong:

https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/mXgsd5o9uuYaQKHMz/tools-for-keeping-focused

@SEEK Gemini doesn't have any support for that unfortunately, since it's more or less just plain text.

The plain text is unicode, so in theory you could use some of the unicode superscript² characters, but I don't really recommend it.

What I'd recommend would be to use ^ and _ to mean "superscript" and "subscript" respectively.

Playing around with Elixir, and it seems that you *can* make a macro that generates macros in this language. I am satisfied.

@tarixa I agree that LaTeX is not so user-friendly, though as you say it's useful for putting complicated formulae together!

Though despite being glad it's here I haven't used it at all yet lol

@wistahe I didn't know modal logic before now, but looking it up you're right, it's very interesting!

@wistahe What are you studying in formal logic? I agree that formal logic is cool!

@wistahe Personally I would enjoy this