Posts by kevin@fedi.kbg.sh
(DIR) Post #B5d2AJS5JeUjhf3XH6 by kevin@fedi.kbg.sh
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Like, is the goal here to make serious software or to make toys? I don’t care what hobbies people have but I also don’t find hobby software particularly interesting. If the purpose is to make something good, then I’m sorry, but unvetted, uncoordinated volunteers are just not going to cut it. This entire idea of just importing the transitive closure of cargo or PyPI or npm micro-dependencies clearly doesn’t work well. What we need is cohesively designed applications.
(DIR) Post #B5d65MWMsSenafxEYK by kevin@fedi.kbg.sh
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@wolf480pl I don’t see how “not having your contributions accepted” is “punishing” someone. No one has any particular right to contribute to any particular project. That they would seems really upside down to me.
(DIR) Post #B5dFYF6GRlIMYmag9A by kevin@fedi.kbg.sh
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@wolf480pl ah yeah, I see what you’re saying
(DIR) Post #B5p6gztZmMNEJrH5lY by kevin@fedi.kbg.sh
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Confession: I mostly hate command lines and I think the obsession with them in the tech world is basically a cultural signifier and little else. I constantly see obtuse command line interfaces that are worse in every way than simple GUI would be, but are preferred, I guess, on the grounds that that’s what the epic bigshot “coders” use.
(DIR) Post #B5p6h07OwxQt0jk8Jc by kevin@fedi.kbg.sh
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Also: as anyone who has followed my work will know, the “simplicity” of plain text is illusory. Like I recently saw a “text editor” that explicitly had RTL text “out of scope.” That’s not a text editor, that’s an English editor. You can make anything simple by being a cultural chauvinist!
(DIR) Post #B6Mw4wiojjprJ064eG by kevin@fedi.kbg.sh
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Somewhat niche question I’ve been wondering about:Consider the set of directed graphs with labeled nodes. What’s the largest subset that can be described with a linear, textual notation that implicitly represents edges? Which is to say, you can’t use node IDs or duplication to indicate an edge between nodes. 1/
(DIR) Post #B6Mw4wxLrhSg24tgIq by kevin@fedi.kbg.sh
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For example, we can obviously represent the set of n-ary trees using XML/S-Expression/JSON like notation.What’s less obvious though is that we can actually describe some kinds of DAGs using “improperly” nested XML-like tags. This is the basis of things like SGML’s CONCUR, and other systems of non hierarchical markup. E.g.<a>1<b>2</a>3</b>Where there’s edges from a to 1 and 2, and from b to 2 and 3. 2/
(DIR) Post #B6Mw4xDIuODopYMQAS by kevin@fedi.kbg.sh
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But can we do better than this kind of non-hierarchical markup? And is there a name for the class of graphs that can be notated with non-hierarchical markup?I can sort of imagine a scheme which can notate cycles without IDs by wrapping an acyclic structure in something which describes where the cycles are, but that’s sort of stretching my sense of “implicit” so I’m not going to allow it. 3/
(DIR) Post #B6N1DQ4pyiaCR7FxlQ by kevin@fedi.kbg.sh
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@wolf480pl yeah these are all good points. I guess I’d say something like, “given N kinds of distinguishable sets of left and right brackets, what kinds of graphs can you represent?”
(DIR) Post #B6OaZWTgYI86DF77ke by kevin@fedi.kbg.sh
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I rarely post about politics, but, this post is basically a perfect example of “slopulism”1. Almost no one makes the federal minimum wage. Like literally almost no one. Wages are too low, but the federal minimum wage is basically irrelevant.2. Congeesspeople and Senators have to own or rent 2-3 homes, one of which is going to be in DC, which is among the most expensive real estate in the country.1/
(DIR) Post #B6OaZWdbxO4Mi1l3Ds by kevin@fedi.kbg.sh
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3. If Congressional salaries are low then it just becomes a hobby for rich people, which is already the case in many/most state legislatures. 4. Similarly, low congressional salaries perversely incentivizes corruption. You’ve got a lot more to lose if your congressional salary is high.5. Can we please retire the terminally unfunny avocado toast joke? It’s been a decade
(DIR) Post #B6Rd00340xXSptIKFE by kevin@fedi.kbg.sh
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@stellarskylark @TomF Ada has been my main systems language for about a decade and I really like it, despite some major warts. Feel free to ask me any questions you have
(DIR) Post #B6RgQBwCjT7J6NGc40 by kevin@fedi.kbg.sh
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@stellarskylark @TomF ok, so, I guess what I would say is that it’s very “unsystematic” in the sense that there are lots of weird special cases. This is especially the case with the type system. Like if you’re used to ML like languages, you’d want to be able to speak of type expressions, but Ada just doesn’t have that. Another is that because generics are supposed to be runtime instantiable, there’re lots of limitations on how generic parameters can be used
(DIR) Post #B93Fz2vHyhEIz0IrOC by kevin@fedi.kbg.sh
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@wolf480pl in German, words which contain ß are capitalized as SS. ß itself was originally a ligature of two forms of lowercase s, but not every sequence of “ss” is spelled with ß, so not every sequence of SS downcases *back* to ß. Now, technically there is a capital ẞ, but this is very new and isn’t widely used.
(DIR) Post #B9ZH1mLVYp1nAUxf7Y by kevin@fedi.kbg.sh
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@wolf480pl lol, I don’t even know how I posted this
(DIR) Post #B9sacNTWaHWMDP84eG by kevin@fedi.kbg.sh
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@ariadne @rabbit_fighter I just cannot imagine any world where we return to a patronage model of artistic production (which was typically only available to a minute amount of relatively privileged people) vs anyone who puts their art out in public immediately getting ripped off. What economic reason would exist to support artists in this world?
(DIR) Post #B9sm2ycQCtrERGB1Rg by kevin@fedi.kbg.sh
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@ariadne @rabbit_fighter @jayalane I mean, this is just not my experience *at all* or anyone I know who writes for a living. It would be utterly impossible to make any money writing (even the pittance you can make now) without copyright protections. The patronage model would just close off this path to employment even further.
(DIR) Post #B9wf7ohYaHGW59mNDE by kevin@fedi.kbg.sh
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@ariadne I think I personally would frame things somewhat differently but I absolutely agree that the copyright argument is a losing battle. It’s obvious that copyright no longer has any use to capitalists and is now being swept away. Trying to get the powers to be to demur based on arguments from hypocrisy will always elicit a collective shrug of the shoulders and nothing else.
(DIR) Post #BA58yfU3TXrKgKJ1TE by kevin@fedi.kbg.sh
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@wolf480pl no
(DIR) Post #BAc13hfZWzFiLxv4bo by kevin@fedi.kbg.sh
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@wolf480pl I don’t know, still feels like getting Tom Sawyer’d into doing a megacorp’s work for free