Life is Tetris @tetrislife@qoto.org

@gohlisch that's just C’s problem but with objects 😆

@tymwol
#cpp - what if everything was a footgun?

@revoluciana I am working on the poster proofs for a climate hope conference, the pak choi and peas I grew on my balcony are lined up for dinner, and the informal network of downtown urban gardening fun people bartering our veggies and extra greens and gleaned fruit is just cheerfully getting bigger.

At least around here, acting as if I'm in the generous universe brings it halfway into being. Or at least does the good work of lighthousing for everyone else who's into it?

WebUSB and WebSerial exist so now they should make WebPCIe too

how else would I access my Thunderbolt device from a webpage?

Simon Dobson @simoninireland posted a blog series on Lisp debugging. He presents typical use cases of features and tools of the SBCL Common Lisp debugger with Emacs/SLIME.

The series is a practical resource that showcases the interactive style of Lisp development.

https://simondobson.org/2024/07/05/debugging-lisp/

#CommonLisp #lisp #debugging

The irony is not lost on me that the Internet Archive went out of its way to acquire the physical versions of millions of books and loan them out carefully and in a limited way, and is facing a near-extinction-level event over it, while for-profit and VC-backed companies are just stealing people’s content and making up excuses to validate the bad behavior.

If you ever want to explain latency to someone, just say “imagine you’re trying to change the water temperature in the shower…”

at the library with the kids and found a “high performance react web sites” book in the fiction section

@jesus if you can write assembler which is more performant than the code a modern #Lisp compiler produces, you're doing well.

@jesus @simon_brooke I find SBCL produces highly performant code, and is even faster with a small number of well-placed type declarations. I have a Lisp vs C story: I'm a mathematician and was doing some research on the Cops and Robbers game in graph theory with a friend of mine who is a computer science professor and has worked in the past a professional programmer. We needed some data on which graphs have winning strategies for the cops and decided to independently write code to compute them so we could vet the results against each other. I wrote my code in Common Lisp and ran it with SBCL; he wrote his code in C. My program was 500 lines and his was 4,000 lines. My program ran twice as fast as his and it's no mystery why: I tried several different optimizations my friend also thought of but didn't implement because it would have been another 1,000 lines or so. I also find my program much more readable than his, just because of the length: even if you are 5 times as fast at reading C than Lisp, his program is still 8 times as long!

I remember my hp48 being sluggish but accepting input so I could throw operations blindly. It was actually really cool to allow my brain to think a bit, even if the screen was lagging.

I'd like to reintroduce long loading times for webpages as a adhd firewall to enforce longer time thinking and less time jumping.

A few days ago @ward tooted about how it's somehow "AI art", but if it's human-made, inexplicably it's just "content":
https://mstdn.social/@ward@easymode.im/112294781477469111

His toot has been living rent-free in my head ever since.

I had ranted a few times before how "content" is a corporate-y way to devalue art. How "user-generated content" is a term designed to make it easier to deny the significance (not just monetary) of the amazing stuff people create online.

Contrasting this with "AI art" is jarring, and spot-on. 👀

@ben Your phrase “too brown to valorize” is perfection. Thank you.

I remember thinking that CPAN (the archive for Perl code) didn't look good and duplicated other services like issue trackers and software repositories.
These days, I'm just happy that they're still around. And when Slaven Rezić sends me a bug report because the tests of a package of mine are failing on too many systems on the automatic testing farm, it makes me so happy. Somebody cares!
These people thought ahead and knew what was coming with the GitHub quasi-monopoly, and they set something up. Perhaps it doesn't look as slick but it works
I'll try to keep that in mind, for the future: always have a non-proprietary alternative available, even if it looks self-made and nobody wants to use it. When things fall appart, some of us will be ready and we can keep things going for a while longer. Our islands can be refuges, our know-how can be important.
Don't be like past me, staring at the ruins of all the social software with nothing to show.

@louis Yup, always like that: you start actually using the software, and shit hits the fan. That's actually the second wave, the first one is when you start writing tests.

@stellarskylark Searching for the source, finding just one link to a Reddit post that links to something that is now gone.
https://www.reddit.com/r/scifi/comments/15fomr/any_sufficiently_advanced_civilization_is/
Buuuut, Wayback Machine to the rescue?
https://web.archive.org/web/20121226070610/http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/armstrong20121224
by Rachel Armstrong, Dec 24, 2012
With her name, I was able to find the "official" archive:
https://archive.ieet.org/articles/armstrong20121224.html
Possibly this is Armstrong, 12 years later?
https://eic.ec.europa.eu/rachel-armstrong_en
I love that quote. Thanks!
@x4nw

Dear friends, please don't point to aggregators (or much more problematic, sites that rewrite others' work). Please take a few seconds to find the original and point directly to that.

Give vital credit -- and readership -- to the people who do the work, not the ones who piggyback on it for profit.

Thanks!

On Monday a security disclosure went out, and all the young adepts scurried about updating their systems, for they were not up-to-date enough to have the fix. But the old master sat serenely amidst the motion, sipping her tea. For her systems were not up-to-date enough to require the fix

Going back to Linux I discovered two great sources for keeping up with the ecosystem.

They're blogs (not publications) by users for users, read as bloggers talking to you (no SEO or clickbait), provide practical information, and have few and unobtrusive or no ads. The blogs are:

OMG! Linux: short and to the point distro news and reviews of programs and tools.
https://www.omglinux.com @omglinux

RealLinuxUser: news and in depth tutorials and reviews.
https://www.reallinuxuser.com

#linux #blogs