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Things happen.

john honked 29 Oct 2024 17:04 +0000

You might think that a sufficiently large open source project could avoid the second-system effect by having developers across a wide spectrum of experience.

Seems like in practice, it's the second system for some of the developers so we get second-system effects... but it's also a first system for others, and a third system for others, and we get to enjoy all those problems too.

john honked 28 Oct 2024 21:07 +0000

I first used #emacs in the early 2000s and have used it on and off, sometimes as my primary editor, since then.

Today was the first time I ever recorded & used a keyboard macro. I guess I always preferred to do macro-ish things with external tools like sed.

john honked 25 Oct 2024 23:09 +0000

"nation-state" is a phrase with a real meaning, it's not just a cooler way to say "country".

Say "state actors" if you want to sound smarter when talking about cybersecurity stuff.

edit: the cool kids used to call them "APTs" but I haven't really heard that one lately

john honked back 23 Oct 2024 20:19 +0000
in reply to: https://mastodon.social/users/amszmidt/statuses/113355088368503469

@amszmidt @larsbrinkhoff You're right, I shouldn't have classified it as strictly tiling, rather that it has features for tiling which are prominently available.

Makes sense that it was probably inspired at least in part by emacs. I'm not especially familiar with Smalltalk preceding Smalltalk-80, did they have similarly tiling-friendly options?

Tiling also just makes sense from the POV of getting maximum use out of the pixels on your screen

john honked 22 Oct 2024 17:39 +0000

@larsbrinkhoff You know as much about ITS as anybody I know... Can you point me at a manual for the Knight TV? I'm trying to figure out why the CADR machines used a tiling-style window manager, and I wondered if there was any sort of multi-window capability in the Knight TV.

john honked back 20 Oct 2024 19:58 +0000
in reply to: https://social.9grid.net/u/john/h/2XGWdtVphT3t6Zs513

There's no Javascript in the whole thing, by the way. That means the page might show the wrong song for a bit until it autorefreshes (every 60s, for now) but it keeps everything real simple.

Working with just basic HTML and CSS means it does fine on very limited browsers, too.

XF8txx31j1b8sgK64M.png

john honked 20 Oct 2024 19:49 +0000

A small weekend #lisp project: hacking a web UI into the Shuffletron (http://vintage-digital.com/hefner/software/shuffletron/) #commonlisp music player.

I'm not particularly adept at HTML or CSS, but think I came up with something that's reasonably usable. I thought setting font-family: cursive was kind of a fun nod to the seemingly wider variety of fonts you'd see in regular use on Lisp machines. The colors, on the other hand, are largely derived from Plan 9's acme editor.

I used Eitaro Fukamachi's ningle/lack/clack libraries to build the web stuff, and djula for templating.

The index page of the shuffletron web UI

john honked 17 Oct 2024 21:58 +0000

I keep thinking about the first date conversation I overheard at a cafe in Burlingame, where the guy was bragging about how he corrected his mom for referring to "Mexican music" on the radio: "Mom, it's called folklorico!"

john honked 17 Oct 2024 21:52 +0000

Based on what I'm seeing in online parenting discussions, I think there's a niche for a book publishing company that caters to parents whose social anxiety is so severe they can only communicate with their kids via picture books. This stems from how often I see posts like "My second cousin's podiatrist has giardiasis, can anybody recommend a book to help my child understand this???"

Like, you could also just talk to your kid, you don't have to mediate it with ten pages of low-effort rhymes and illustrations.

john honked back 16 Oct 2024 19:39 +0000
in reply to: https://bonk.cozysumo.space/u/knapjack/h/9Q76WZ7BVk8fb7dwQ8

@knapjack I think so. It's not magic, but it is good and worthwhile. The tools are different and can be obtuse for someone coming from another language. It took me quite a while to figure out how to get any value out of the debugger, for example. Programming Go in my day job, I find Quicklisp kinda lacking when compared to the go modules tooling.

Documentation for libraries, even widely-used libraries, can sometimes be so sparse (just a list of function names, go read the source if you want to know what they mean) as to be essentially useless. And maybe McCLIM is extremely obvious to those deeply steeped in Lisp, but goddamn if it's not a challenge for plebs like myself.

Despite those gripes, I try to write Common Lisp code for little side projects when I can. I recently tried making a website with caveman2 and found it really easy to build a JSON API w/ a database backend plus templates to populate HTML. That's a big part of my day job in Go, and I'd rate the two options at a very similar level of ease and effort.

john honked 10 Oct 2024 00:09 +0000

I've just learned that my parents wash out and re-use paper coffee cups. I called them "pretty eco" to tease them about it... apparently my dad prefers to drink from a paper cup rather than a travel mug, and my mom likes to use them as a receptacle for cooking grease.

john honked back 30 Sep 2024 18:38 +0000
in reply to: https://hachyderm.io/users/jbcrawford/statuses/113227948595363747

@jbcrawford Sorry to hear Shooting Range Park is in bad shape, I always really admired it when I lived in the area. Nice and big, not expensive, and they were pretty good about enforcing safety whenever I visited.

I loved the Bosque trails, both on foot and on a bicycle, and I'd hate to see them turn into unofficial OHV parks where a kid can't safely walk... so I'm really glad to hear you don't think that will happen! You're right that there's plenty of space elsewhere that's way more conducive anyway.