melloclello

Ted Blackman (one of the Urbit developers) recently posted a puzzle on Twitter, asking people to describe what a piece of code (written in this phonetic representation) does. [1]

I was delighted to find that I still remembered the phonetic names after first reading of them back in 2013, though I got the exact result wrong.

[1] https://twitter.com/rovnys/status/1199958608483684352

Velvia makes people look far too red in the face.

Whoa, do you have a link to that Atkinson talk?

Ah, I didn't realise that was Puffin's use case.

Quite sincerely, they should just look into running WebKit server-side.

That said, in my experience if Apple has secretly decided they don't like you, they tend to move the goalposts on you in subsequent reviews, so migrating their systems to WebKit may not be time well spent.

Imagine if we nationalised Uber.

A pox on people that make me add closed source binaries to my apps! Adtech companies are the worst for this.

It also seems like they were trying to abuse/repurpose OS level functionality (the power button). I imagine that was difficult on Android, and the article completely fails to acknowledge that this is actually impossible on iOS.

We ran some casual benchmarks on this at work once, and it's important to note that the performance of AutoLayout dramatically improves based on the degree of nesting you employ.

If you have sixteen views on a cell and their locations all depend upon each other, it's going to take a long time to solve those constraints. But if you can break up the cell, say into four subviews with four elements inside them, it's likely to be faster (no guarantees, though)

A long time ago I put my Snapper Card (NZ equivalent) in a cup of acetone to get the chip out. I then stuck the chip in the back of my Nokia bar phone.

> It’s no secret that I really like Clojure and as a lisp, it was the easiest language for me to start the prototype with, but there’s no reason this couldn’t be done for any language with a dynamic runtime. The rest is mostly simple analysis of an AST and some clever inference.

I have looked into this. It is kind of criminal that for most real world languages (Ruby[1], C[2] etc), it's not possible to just define a grammar and throw it at a standard parser generator for them - they generally have one or two quirks which make this infeasible.

In my ideal alternate universe it would be considered unthinkable to publish a language without also publishing a grammar in a standard format for said language, which can then be plugged into your favourite text/semantic/tree editor. Our tools should dictate our languages, not the other way around.

[1] http://programmingisterrible.com/post/42432568185/how-to-par...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_lexer_hack

"Design hubris" is such a common problem for mobile/front end developers and the source of so much wasted time I'm surprised it's not talked about more commonly. Shit's expensive, man!

I am thankful that these days I get to work with talented designers who know what a UITableView is and understand the limitations of the medium.

I find this 'Facebook = cigarettes' meme fascinating and hope it continues to propagate

Ostriches... is that up by that bizarre castle house that's been turned into a dog kennel?

As I remember, an early CSS proposal included the Cassowary constraints solver engine, but they decided not to go with it because either a fast implementation didn't exist at the time, or they were worried users wouldn't find the system intuitive?

Man, imagine if you could compose chinese characters out of radicals like this.

I'm not sure if that would be a good thing or a bad thing.

I once built a calculator app where you could two-finger swipe to undo/redo: https://appsto.re/nz/oxLx3.i

Previous/future states simply appear adjacent to one another so you can scroll through them easily.

I absolutely believe that version control history is something that needs to be treated as a dimension like any other

I suppose sonar could be an alternative worth considering.

I sometimes wonder what technology would look like if it were developed by an alien culture with no sense of vision.

You must have read about Urbit, right? Their VM's underlying language/bytecode/thing, Nock, is based on nested pairs of natural numbers, which is perhaps only slightly less unwieldy than operating on single bits.

PS, if you're as enthusiastic about this idea as I am, we should talk, can I email you?

Wow. I hope that didn't kill your project? I wouldn't mind seeing the UI, if you have any pictures, it sounds way ahead of its time!

I've also been thinking about this for about as long (read this same article about 2-3 years ago), and came to pretty much the same conclusion. I actually think defining the grammar for turning text into a tree is likely to be the easy part, compared with building the editor itself.

That said, during my research I ran across an ancient Usenet thread from 1989[1]. In it, the OP asks:

> Should the language designers be making work for the language-oriented editor designers or should the language-oriented editor designers be making work for the language designers?

(The thread rapidly devolves into an all out flame war about whether or not C can be considered to be context-free)

Lisp feels like a language designed specifically to make a language-oriented editor designer happy, but most other popular languages fail the context-free test one way or another, thus making them difficult to define good grammars for. The problem seems to be that historically the language designers have far outnumbered the language-oriented editor designers.

[1] https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.lang.misc/MCZmQv56--Q/O...

I've never really seen breakfast the same way since I read Bukowski describe it as 'force-feeding'...

I kinda have a soft spot for ol' Joe Rogan and I see him hosting moon landing theorists on his show as not unlike Louis Theroux doing a show about UFO nuts. Interestingly enough Rogan did have Theroux on his show once, I was hoping it would be a good interview but it went really badly.

A friend of mine is from Carbondale, Illinois - Fuller's home town. From what I understand it's a deadbeat midwestern hellhole now. He once told me a story about breaking into Buckminster Fuller's now-abandoned dome house and smoking weed in there.

tl;dr: the dream is over

I believe you are thinking of http://unisonweb.org

I grew up reading everything2 and I dearly wish the internet was still more like that

Some links:

* http://everything2.com/title/catting+weird+things+to+%252Fde...

* http://everything2.com/title/How+to+destroy+the+Earth

They definitely spend a lot of time throwing ideas at the wall to see what sticks, I think (not everything sticks but it's interesting to see what does)

If one is Musk, then the scientist is doubtlessly Max Tegmark.

Man, Stross has written a whole lot of shitty pulp over his career but some of his short stories are kinda kooky [1] and Accelerando [2] was a ripping yarn

[1] http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/toast/to...

[2] http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelera...