pseudocomposer

If “reference capabilities” are the important thing about Pony, they should have a max 100-200 LoC example on the front page that uses them.

As far as I can tell reading here, “reference capabilities” don’t do anything that properly-used C semaphores haven’t done for near half a century. Or that their abstraction of that isn’t nicer to use than, say, Elixir’s, or better than Rust’s borrow checker for managing mutability. A code example could convince me otherwise.

Show us code that uses “reference capabilities” to do something. This “the syntax doesn’t matter” talk just comes off as bullshit to devs wanting to actually use a language. It would be better to commit to a syntax, post some damn examples on the site, and let devs get used to “reference capabilities.” If the syntax needs revising, just do that in Pony v2.

If you want devs to be enthusiastic about your language, make it easy for them to understand why they should be enthusiastic. That means code, front and center, first thing.

Was this meant to be a reply to the top-level story, and not a specific comment?

It seems really bizarre to respond to “there should be easily-accessible examples of code that demonstrate the language’s key features on the website” with “there’s a $200 conference in South Carolina where there will be a talk on it.” Honestly, it comes across as not just bizarre, but somewhat disrespectful (though I’m sure that was not your intention).

> In many ways, beltway media is the most informed, at least with regards to the government picture of things — after all, the job is talking (informally and formally) to key stakeholders (and their underlings).

Certainly, we need reporters who have physical access to people in Washington, DC. But why do you think the way beltway media operates today is optimal? I’d argue it’s actually quite pathological.

I think local reporters, from any county of any state, should be able to routinely go to and report from DC. This would probably have to be paid for with some combination of state, federal, and local taxes (and hopefully concessions from the federal government to let smaller towns/cities in). Yes, there would be “inefficiencies,” but of course the tradeoff is we have robust, trustworthy media.

In today’s news media market, only reporters working for big corporations can even afford to stay in and report from DC. In fact… that’s exactly the problem. These people really are deeply disconnected from beltway outsiders (99% of our population).

As a member of the general public capable of understanding even elementary school playground social dynamics, you’d honestly have to be pretty braindead to trust what comes out of a “news” system that operates this way.

Finally let’s address your assertion (without evidence or anecdotes) that “decentralized smaller media holding powerful entities to account hasn’t shown us that it works better.” Um, are you familiar with the American Revolution? Or French Revolution? Or Bolshevik? Do you think these people were recruiting, marketing, and communicating through centralized news channels? And to go only just a bit further back… you do realize that the printing press has barely been around for a fraction of human history, right?

We also didn’t have the internet in the past. The internet has basically been a death blow for the actual profitability of the big corporate news media orgs that we allowed to form from the 1870s-1980s. This handful of news mega-corporations we had then just can’t operate in a way any American would describe as “ethical,” and also earn a profit, in a world where the internet exists. Since then, the economic system that created them has pushed them to “consolidate for efficiency” and fall into ever-wealthier corporate hands.

I certainly can’t claim I know the solution to all this - decentralized media has issues that need addressing. But I don’t think that “double down on centralized media” is part of it. Centralized media is pretty well-understood as a primary tool of fascism - every tyrannical government in basically all of human history has been built upon it. I also don’t think “this org is too big to fail” has ever done much good for working people - just the wealthy. It’s preserved some 401Ks, but we also need to talk about the issues with that system, which is getting a bit far off topic.

Anyway, hope you don’t deem this “casual and lazy.” Curious about your response.

PS: It would be helpful to avoid using terms like “beltway media” that aren’t clearly defined in dictionaries, or universally understood. Instead, say “media from the DC metro area.”

This whole article led me to believe that a lot of people who work in big-corp news orgs don’t really understand what the rest of our lives are like in many ways. Be it the Times, Post, Fox News, or CNN, they think they are the centers of the universe. They think they themselves are critically important, not people being able to access accurate news.

Over the last century or so, our smaller local media orgs have been eaten up by massive corporations. I don’t think that’s been particularly good for us, nor do I think people who’ve learned to thrive in these sorts of organizations really see that what’s happening now is just a more overt version of what’s happened over the last century or so.

As for solutions to all this? I think these folks, the ones who really care, need to start leaving and forming their own independent, smaller news orgs. And if it’s not affordable for them to do so in cities like LA or NYC (hint: those places aren’t affordable for anyone), they need to do this in other parts of the country.

(Really, this applies to everyone in every industry: if you don’t like what big corporations and evermore shareholder-driven economies are doing, go work for smaller companies that don’t have shareholders.)

I think something like Apple News (one subscription, many publications) is the best thing we’re likely to get in our current market conditions.

In an ideal world, 10-25¢/article access fees, charged in a clear and uniform way, would probably be the most fair.

macOS will always show the user yellow/green notifications in the menu bar when apps access the microphone/camera, as far as I understand.

I keep Notion Desktop open pretty much all the time on my work laptop, and have not seen these.

I’m happy to be wrong (well, in this case, I’d be upset at a big privacy violation)… but it seems pretty unlikely the audio monitoring is happening on macOS.

It’s almost like our social norms prevent “good” and “okay” people from becoming parents, waiting for a “perfection” they’ll never achieve… but those norms have no real effect on the people who will be “shitty” parents.

If you know anything about dating and relationships, that’s an extremely narrow window. More so if you want 2-3 kids.

When I meet people who immediately use hyper-specific jargon with strangers, I either distrust them, or assume they’re not emotionally intelligent (because it’s a choice demonstrates little respect for the person they’re addressing). It also projects that they may be compensating for some emotional insecurity on their own end, trying to assert intellectual “superiority” in some way.

The first option (explaining things simply) might make your job sound easy to a very small minority of extremely uneducated, under-stimulated people, who also have unaddressed insecurities around their own intelligence. But that’s not most humans.

Moderately-to-very intelligent people appreciate how difficult (and useful) it is to explain complex things simply. Hell, most “dumb” people understand, recognize, and appreciate this ability. Honestly, I think not appreciating simple explanations indicates both low mathematical/logical and social/emotional intelligence. Which makes explaining things simply a useful filter for, well… people that I wouldn’t get along with anyway.

With all that said, I prefer to first explain my job in an “explain like I’m 5” style and, if the other party indicates interest, add detail and jargon, taking into account related concepts that may already be familiar to them. If you take them into account, they won’t get bored when you go into detail.

Why do you associate tipping with “work harder => more pay,” exactly? I don’t see a clear logical route from “socially-forced customer tipping” to that, at all.

If anything; tipping leads us to “leverage information to ensure you get a large amount of high-tipping customers => more pay.”

Continuing that logical process, we might realize that “make your coworkers have to deal with the bad tippers => more pay.” Which might lead us to “socially manipulate management to get optimal shifts and locations => more pay.”

If you really want “work harder => more pay,” then just pay a high/fair/livable hourly rate, and add a bonus for number of orders fulfilled in the shift (or total sales volume during the shift). Certainly, some perverse incentives remain with this approach. But nothing nearly so bad as tipping. And like with tipping, the higher the hourly rate compared to the bonus, the more those problems are reduced.

But yeah… tipping has very little to do with “work harder => more pay.” You need to examine your logic more. Or just, like… have a few beers with a single person who’s ever worked in a restaurant as an adult.

How “high paying” a job do you need though? My last three companies, I’ve worked on products that don’t involve marketing or data mining of any sort that I’d consider unethical. While they have certainly involved automating away jobs (car sales/bank loan people, pathologists, and now accountants, respectively), they were all software designed to benefit humanity.

And they all paid $180k+, the last two $200k+, in salary alone, plus benefits and equity. I only work over 40 hours if I’m working on something I’m passionate about. I realize FAANGs can go into the $400k+ range, but… do you really need that? Is it worth it? For the stress, the rat race, the pressure and all that?

Granted, they’ve been remote roles, and I live in North Carolina, not one of the HCOL metros (I don’t see how anyone can justify living in NYC, SF, or LA, honestly).

But like… this just seems untrue. There are plenty of good-paying, ethical roles to be had. Moreover, I’d say if you spend some time actively seeking out ethical, fairly (not excessively) compensated roles… they’ll find you, without you having to search for them.

HR isn’t irrational; you’re just making the mistake of thinking their role is to serve you, the employee, as opposed to the C-suite and shareholders.

But why did the USSR dissolve? A lot of it had to do with citizens’ dissatisfaction with what was available in the Soviet economy, compared to media images of what was available in the 80s-early 90s American economy. And, well, the fact that their government was, in fact, quite democratic, reflecting the wishes of the people.

But again… a lot of these images American prosperity of the 80s were caused by marketing, and corporate structures like Jack Welch’s, which were ultimately unsustainable (per the whole conversation here).

Basically: Soviet citizens saw we could have bananas year round. But they never saw the conditions of people living in banana republics, or really even of the American poor of the time.

Have fun! Note that it is GPL-licensed. Also, note that the "main" branch is for a very old Dart/Flutter version (but it does correspond to what's in the App Store and on the site today).

I've been working on a separate branch, which finally builds (there were 1100+ errors), but I'm still working through iOS/macOS build things for it before merging it to main. (I've sadly had to abandon the Android build, because Google Play was a comparative pain, and FluidSynth upstream kept breaking the Android build I set up for them. But I'm reviving the project for iOS, macOS, and web at least.)

Here's the branch: https://github.com/JonLatane/BeatFlutter/tree/update-to-late...

I was shocked at the amount of smoking I saw in Copenhagen 3 years ago. And I live in Durham, North Carolina, a historically tobacco city, whose nickname (Bull Durham or the Bull City) literally comes from old tobacco ads.

This is what I did for BeatScratch! https://beatscratch.io

My music model is all Protobuf messages, which go from Dart/Flutter land to Kotlin/C/Swift/JS audio backends on target platforms. I also use Protobuf for saving and sharing. It’s been incredibly resilient and performant.

Is there actually a viable alternative to Amazon that ever-increasingly-overworked people can use? Not tech workers like (I assume) you and me, but say, a single dad janitor or mechanic?

Many of these same things happened with Wal-Mart in the 90s in rural America, destroying thousands of small businesses.

I’m all for individual responsibility, but at the same time, we have to acknowledge all the government-mandated economic forces that let Amazons and Wal-Marts establish these types of monopolies.

Individuals need a way to organize to prevent this. That’s historically what our democratically-elected government did, but since Nixon or so, it’s not really been democratically-elected at all.

Is the argument here that Harvard, an institution (not a human being), deserves to exist more than descendants of slaves (human beings all) deserve reparations?

To be clear: I have spent the years to memorize and be able to perform a few Beethoven sonatas (not to mention the years required to even get to that point). I can also play them drunk (though not as cleanly, and wouldn't do that in any paid/professional performance situation). I literally did this sort of thing for a living before deciding to use my CS/Math degree to be able to better provide for my family (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonlatane/).

And none of that makes Beethoven "better" than Chappell Roan. Because there is no objective assessment of "better/worse"ness in art. That's not how art works, or what art is.

On the other had, your inability to correctly spell the name of an influential contemporary artist, with 40+M listeners per month, replying to a comment that did correctly spell her name, is a pretty objective reason to not trust anything you have to say about art (or, perhaps, much else, at least until you address whatever underlying issues/pathologies have you thinking this way).

Perhaps this will offer you some perspective: back when I did music for a living, I often did think this way. I thought most contemporary music was trash if it didn't offer the harmonic or contrapuntal complexity of classical, or even jazz. Really, being a young man from a poor background, I believe it was more a survival instinct (trying to gaslight myself and others into measuring me as "good enough" for gigs). It nearly ruined music for me, though. It required me being dishonest with myself about what I really enjoyed. Letting all that go has been a multi-decade process, and it's made me a much more well-adjusted individual. It also applies in many ways to the software world (as long as you stay out of Google-/Meta-/Oracle-type bigtech misery-inducing rat races).

This is all built on an assumption that arts/media can all be strictly ranked “best” to “worst.” There are a million metrics by which we might try to measure it, but well… that’s just not how art works. Thinking this way indicates a fundamental lack of understanding of what art is. Probably one of the most important metrics is “relevance to, and effect on, the state of the world as it is right now.” And pretty much any arbitrary “1000 best” list is not going to take that into account.

That’s why people listen to Chappell Roan, and near-instinctively belt her songs out out after a few drinks, instead of Beethoven symphonies or Mozart operas, even if the latter may be “superior” in nearly every measurable way. Part of art is how it speaks to the listener. In fact… I might argue that that’s all of art, with metrics about it being an entirely different, not-art thing.

(I say all this as a classical musician and senior software engineer with a math background, myself.)

I think the “cure” to this is fostering curiosity within ourselves, and learning to balance our curiosity in real world objects, locations, people, activities, etc. in a way that’s balanced with digital information. And understanding that all digital information is really just an approximation of these real-world things.

Put another way… you have to let yourself be curious about, say, the garden in the park, rather than looking at your phone. And when it comes to people - talking to a stranger rather than looking at your phone - you have to not only let yourself be curious, but also be vulnerable enough to make that curiosity known (a secondary skill, that I think can be built on a foundation of curiosity).

Super cool! If the author/creator happens to be reading, I’d suggest that, when the user is at the top of the page (ie on first load), the default demo wheel’s should animate between a few different curves. At first glance (before scrolling down), it looks somewhat primitive, and less interesting than it really is.

Unless https://www.math.net/pounds-to-tons is severely wrong, a US ton is 2200lbs, UK 2240lbs, metric 2204lbs. Put a different way, US to metric is a <0.2% difference (the smallest), US to UK is a <2% difference (the biggest).

At a scale of 433 tons, it doesn’t really matter much which kind of tons (unless you’re actually doing the rocket science, of course).

I’ve said the same things elsewhere (see my profile), but we need to differentiate between centralized publicly-funded and decentralized publicly-funded approaches.

A lot of libertarian types’ arguments against publicly-funded infrastructure is mostly against that public funding being centralized.

I don’t think Mozilla becoming publicly funded, with money taken in from the EU, US, Russia, India, and China, would end up being good for users.

However, I do think that each of these entities having their own branch of Firefox/Iceweasel/whatever, with their own teams focusing on their users’ needs, contributing upstream, with a small team to handle the “mainline” version, would be pretty ideal.

The same should probably also be happening for at least one Chrome/Webkit browser, too (though, the mega-corps do seem to have its support system much more reinforced).

The deprecation of third-party cookies, that all browsers were at one point on track to implement, was pretty much the most realistic first step to that. Which is why Google killed it last year by leveraging their control over Chrome.

While not technically a crime, it was a disgusting, unethical market manipulation move that never really got the public outrage it deserved.

Google execs’ initial support for it was also telling: leadership at Google must literally thought they would find another way to stay as profitable as they are without third-party cookies. Put another way: Google leadership didn’t understand cookies as well as someone who’s taken a single undergrad web dev class. (Or they were lying all along, and always planned to “renege” on third-party cookie deprecation.)

Sorry, yes, it’s actually at https://github.com/JonLatane/BeatFlutter.

I initially open sourced it under my “Fully Automated Luxury Robot Music” organization, but I mostly use that for music projects I no longer plan to actively maintain (a category into which BeatScratch no longer falls).

This does assume the direction you see is accurate, which I’d argue heavily depends on communication skills.

LLMs are also very prolific programmers that don’t actually understand any of the math underlying what they’re doing.

I’m in the midst of reviving https://beatscratch.io (https://github.com/falrm/BeatScratch-Flutter). I’ve let it sit unmaintained (because it’s been “good enough” at its job) for a couple of years, through the addition of null safety to Dart and numerous Flutter changes (though I have to say, its API stability over this time is pretty impressive!). I’ve also GPLed the code in that time and the new version will also be under that license.

Once I’ve got at least the iOS and web release pipelines working again, I plan to replace its Reddit integration/sharing features with an implementation based on https://jonline.io (https://github.com/JonLatane/jonline), the AGPL, Rust/gRPC-based social network I’ve built in the intervening time.

I’m also planning on adding more detailed (left to right audio) panning and other output controls, oriented towards using BeatScratch live with other musicians. My hope for this is to use it to complement my own musical practice I’ve been working on, outside of all this 1s-and-0s programming time.

Have you considered that maybe metriculative education systems, and the prestige- and status-seeking behaviors they invoke, aren’t exclusively Western at all? You might give “The Scholars” a read: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scholars_(novel) tl;dr (it really is quite long): Famous/influential Qing-era comedy novel about “successful” scholars in the Chinese imperial education system, with much of its humor revolving around their prestige- and status-seeking behaviors. (And lots of fart and poop jokes.)