Simon @spoltier@qoto.org

#notesArt #mastoArt #art #illustration

Not sure if anybody's already coined the term "OStalgia"—the feeling you get when you see a screenshot of the OS you used growing up—but I've been having a fair amount of that lately.

Lot of good memories associated with System 7 and Mac OS 8–9.

Saw some text online that made me want to turn it into signage. What good are graphic design skills if you can't have a little fun with them.😜

I’ve had folks I’ve been mutuals with forever unfollow me for saying that leveling Palestine and waging war against a population trapped within its borders is wrong.

That scares me. Because people I have respected for years, that have clearly respected me for years, are coming to the conclusion that saying that this act is wrong, is antisemitism.

That can’t be a line. It must be possible to criticize a literal atomic power that has already killed tens of thousands of civilians, and hurt tens of thousands more.

adventures in cartography

WP21

It seems like just yesterday WordPress was becoming a teenager, and in a blink of the eye it's now old enough to drink! 21 years since Mike and I did the first release of WordPress, forking Michel's work on b2/cafélog. There's been many milestones and highlights along the way, and many more to come. I've been thinking a lot about elements that made WordPress successful in its early years that we should keep in mind as we build this year and beyond.

https://ma.tt/2024/05/wp21/

More feedback from CRAN:

"too many spaces in the description field".

o_O

#RStats

But enough of the expletives, let's talk a bit of what to do instead?

I think good C library design is always built around some kind of opaque context object (possibly multiple), that all relevant functions provided by the library get passed in as first argument. This context object should be constructed by one library function and destructed by another, but key really is that the library is "dormant" until that constructor is explicitly called by its user, and "dormant" again…

Which means that constructors are invoked in the order the shared libraries are loaded in, and if shared libraries have dependencies, they are first loaded "down the tree". But that sucks hard, because libraries tend to have interdependencies, non obvious ones at that, and cyclic ones too! And that means you might end up calling functions from libs whose constructors haven't run yet, or whose destructors already ran.

Then, various libraries (including systemd's) use "-z nodelete", …

…, labelled, initialized and so on. One prominent library which we do link against that used to do horrible shit like that, is libselinux btw. They fixed much of it, but still use ELF constructors/destructors these days, and they really shouldn't.

Now you might say that not all projects are systemd, that we are a special case, but there are many other problems with it:

1. There's no ordering defined in which constructors/destructors are called. Or at least not a useful one: it's "topoligical".

Barcelona makes sense to me #bloomscrolling

Are you interested in a conference/festival hybrid that tries to combine the vibes of Strangeloop and Resonate? Then you'll be pleased to learn that I'm helping organize exactly that for the first Berlin edition of @causalislands this October!

https://causalislands.com/berlin/introducing-causal-islands-berlin-2024/

I guess the first question is: does anyone *want* an asynchronous-process-heavy introduction to Elixir, one that embraces styles supported by third-party libraries³?

I’m sort of at a loss: how to proceed in a way that might be broadly useful?

Advice?

¹ https://podcast.oddly-influenced.dev/episodes/e44-an-interview-with-david-chapman-about-the-offloaded-brain and https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2655505-computation-and-human-experience

² https://hexdocs.pm/elixir/introduction.html… (3/4)

Give me Werner Herzog as the voice of ChatGPT and I will consider giving it a try.

Do they want people weeping emotionally into the cheese display?! Because this gotta be how that happens. Is this some kind of evil marketing thing to get the people who like food for comfort to buy more? 🤔

people always rail against math notation as "illegible" and "elitist gatekeeping" and "unreasonably opaque" and while I'm sympathetic to these arguments I think it's worth understanding this not as a property of some ivory tower elitism but of the percentage of math that is done by hand on chalkboards.

"why don't mathematicians use descriptive names for things" because my arm is tired! have some sympathy.

this phenomenon where trans women have an easier time carving out niches in male-dominated spaced than anywhere else… fedi, mtg tournaments, speedrunning, etc. it’s a little exhausting really. especially when we get propped up in this “see? we’re inclusive” kind of way when the underlying problem usually hasn’t been addressed — men in these spaces just see us as unthreatening and undesirable

Is there some Aldi curse where all of them must play the saddest pop from the last forty years or?

The synesthesia will continue until morale is purple