JoelMcCracken

This is what the best sci fi is. Using context shift and a drizzle of “what if”, provide enough distance from a problem to help readers think about it anew.

I experimented with Rhombus some time ago (most especially with Shplait). Is there much new with Shplait? Something I remember struggling with was trying to use racket libraries in Rhombus/Shplait

So, I injured my left index finger to the point of tendon interruption. It was approx 2018. I was fortunate enough to have surgery that repaired it to near 100% extension.

So, I clearly have no synovial fluid at that joint. The tendons were in it, and so by necessity it was also violated.

I just popped that knuckles, and it sounds exactly like the others. Anyone have any ideas?

You’re missing the fact that Ukraine desperately needs missile defense, and these incidents incentivize its neighbors to keep all their defenses to themselves.

No one wants to be blamed when they can’t defend themselves when Russia attacks.

I always love coming across a new site and it screams “org-mode”.

This is one of the things I keep thinking about. At the very least, these tools make prototyping and idea vetting remarkably cheaper.

Then we go back to the old “the prototype works; I’m the boss and I’m telling you to deploy it to production”

Why I like using AI right now is that I get to try out far more of my own ideas quickly (and find issues with them!)

Before, it was like:

"Oh, X idea is really cool, let me try it!" ... (loses interest before idea validated)

Now: "Oh, X idea is really cool, let me try it!" ... with AI, I get to actually validate that it works (ideally), or reformulate the idea if it doesn't.

To me the primary answer was a fully functional web browser. the mobile web was extremely limited; I know, I used to use it on a windows pda device.

This is true/valid in many ways, but the signs of significant AI gen are pretty obvious. And now I wonder how much of the overblown narrative is here.

This reminds me of the slop bug reports plaguing the curl project.

The iPhone was revolutionary. There really was nothing like it at the time. The closest thing (the PDA) was _nothing_ like it.

This. While I was in college, I worked for Circuit City doing tech support (the "IQ Crew", heh, later called "firedog". Memories). People would call/come in and I would try to gather information about their setup.

It was extremely common to get Q/A like:

Me: Who is your internet serviced provider?

Them: I just click the 'e'.

Translation: They were telling me they use internet explorer.

Me: OK, bring in your computer and I can look at it.

Them: (arrives some time later, plops their CRT monitor on the table).

It was always like that. It took me a while to figure out how to ask the right questions to get the information I needed from them. TBH, this was most of the job.

This is generally a big problem in Pittsburgh where huge areas of the most valuable land is owned by “nonprofits”

IIUC the maintenance costs of suburbs is higher. Not sure if you meant that.

I mean I don’t know anything absolutely about someone else’s internal mental state. But I’ve just observed enough to come to certain conclusions, though not necessarily about any particular person.

I do think there are absolutely instances of people virtue signaling.

But, after observing society over the last few years, I've come to think that people who _whine_ about virtue signaling are so full of vice that they cannot possibly believe someone _else_ isn't also as base as they are.

Its all such a shame. It seems like society has no ability to have reasonable, sensible conversation. I really wonder how the enlightenment even _happened_.

Don’t get me wrong, this is very interesting, but there is something very funny about the idea that “give a chimpanzee stuff and see if they like it” is academic research.

This could absolutely be a headline on The Onion.

I’m not in favor of these tariffs. At all. However, it seems that they haven’t had such an impact yet on the economy, at least regarding consumer prices. You’d expect much larger inflation given the tariffs IIUC.

My current understanding of the general consensus is that many companies have been eating the tariffs with the hope SCOTUS will strike them. If they are upheld, prices will likely rise significantly

I'm less worried about the "vibe coded" than "vibe-language-learning"

Though I do think there is vast potential for such things, it needs to be approached judiciously.

I remember using one of these tools and it falsely identified some other account as being mine. Of course, I only have just this account.

Oh wow this is a great reference/image/metaphor for "software engineers" who misuse these tools - "the great pakledification" of software

IIUC koka can apply these optimizations dynamically when it determines data is unique via reference counting. However the paper has more details.

Ditto. The entire issue with microplastics is that at certain scale they might have all sorts of bio-active aspects, like BPA and _other_ chemicals used in plastic.

I wish we did more to honor "Unknown unknowns" and make changes more gradually, especially when the difference is barely consequential. Plastic is essential for many things, but not for shopping bags, drink bottles, etc. We over-use it like crazy, and at this point if we find out that omnipresent plastic pollution causes issues, we better hope we find a solution quickly because we won't be able to get rid of the plastic.

Yeah I figured that, but the combinations I was dealing with really weren’t that many.

The problem was https://xmonader.github.io/prolog/2018/12/21/solving-murder-... and trying to solve it with list monad. Someday I hope to get back to it.

Na each key press goes to a separate lambda invocation that gets submitted to a Kafka queue, and what happens after that is a mystery to all involved.

We can make crazy latency ourselves just fine, no space transmission necessary

Yea I’ve wanted to try using logict to do some larger logic programming stuff. I’ve done it with list monad but found a lot of speed issues, never quite figured out why it was so slow.

The only languages I know that can do prolog-like-constructs as-a-library are lisps, or at least langs that have reasonable symbol constructs. Usability is way way worse if you can’t talk about variables as first class objects.

I was talking to Bob Harper about this specific issue (context was why macro systems are important to me) and his answer was “you can just write a separate programming language”. Which I get.

But all of this is just to say that doing relational-programming-as-a-library has a ton of issues unless your language supports certain things.

oh my god, what a horrible but incredible idea

neat! I've been moving my site over to heavily use emacs/org for the authoring format and nix for the tooling infrastructure. I'll keep this in mind as a possible tool to help; I don't precisely know what I may still need to do that won't be easily doable with emacs.

Ditto. I have a hard time thinking in pictures. When I do there can only be one detailed part at a time, a very small area.

I don’t really think in language either. To me thought is much more a kind of abstract process

This is cool. I could see myself using this for notes.