The lua escape hatch is interesting.

Are there other lisps like this? I’m guessing closure has some similar features re Java/JVM?

Surprising twists there about the tomb having been vacated by Egyptians due to flooding with the second tomb yet to be discovered.

Yep! Embracing boredom is likely the path back. Because it’s not a dead space. It’s a canvas.

I’ve been starting to think that it’s something us older millennials can actually do for our younger friends … remind, demo and teach what a less tech ruled life can look like, how tech can be treated as more humane and not a necessity.

Not to claim equivalence or anything, but smartphone and the internet (ironic saying so here I know).

I’m a xennial … old enough to remember living without all this and the middle time where computers were either games or just useful tools.

For me, and I’m pretty sure many others, I’m pretty convinced it’s better that way.

I’d really like to get away from these things, at least just to relearn older habits.

Yyyep! That’s what this mind rot gets you!

Because the office is an awful thing in so many ways. Perhaps nice to visit occasionally. But to be forced to live there!? Fucking trash society.

EDIT: I’m agreeing with you here. My tone was probably confusingly aggressive. I just meant to add the idea that managers wouldn’t even know if WFH was good or bad let alone know whether you should keep your full pay.

How about we decide on what doing the job actually is, in a way that can reasonably be measured, and then see if we can do it better from home or the office?!

I’ve always felt that the elephant in the room on this is that remote work highlights the incompetence of management. And so instead of embracing the notion that remote work can work well provided the work force is well orchestrated, they’ve embraced fear mongering around uncontrolled labour.

I’ve read plenty of books digitally. And it’s fine and convenient. But there’s something fundamentally missing. Each time I’ve finished a digital book I’ve had the urge to buy a physical copy. To have it on my shelf as a constant reminder … something I can go back to with the ease of moving into a neighbouring room.

It’s the big elephant in the room with modern tech IMO … it’s big obvious failure … that it’s all stuck in little screens. Look at the desktop computer … replacing a whole desk with … a single screen (sure things have gotten bigger now, but still, desks and whiteboards and pin boards can be quite large too).

I’m in a new office and there isn’t a single piece of useful information on the walls. No whiteboards or posters or pinboards or anything. So much is hidden in the computer where mostly no one sees it but where we are all supposed to consult and update it like a shitty ritual that no one believes in. And don’t get me wrong, I’m “pro-computer” as a knowledge work tool. It’s just we’ve bought into lies and the dumb promise that having all of the Google or Microsoft things will just make us productive provided “we learn to use it properly” (where not enough ever do, and things change regularly enough that there probably isn’t a point anyway).

First, no need to apologise.

Second, no I don’t think you summarised the video, IIRC, it mostly gets into the theory of the techniques used and what can be done to do a better job.

Possibly, but when scientific knowledge and problems were smaller, one person could actually make a mark alone IMO. And if they happened upon a new discovery or insight then they’d appear to be geniuses, all alone.

At some point, when the work to make a discovery requires more than one person and the amount of theory involved in understanding its significance is too much for one person to be authoritative on all of it, then it’s a team sport.

Yep. There’s a whole world of people happy to work very hard on research for the rest of their lives … and instead we have them writing emails wrangling spreadsheets for … ??

Sometimes “shitty” work needs to be done, obviously … but I think it’s far less obvious that the pool of things that need to be done lies entirely in the random inefficient shit the business world just accepts. Instead, that’s just where the money flows.

Absolutely. It’s a shit show.

And interestingly, making the general public more aware of this is likely quite important. Because 1, they have very idealistic views of what research is like, and 2, just about everyone is entering research blind to the realities. It’s a situation that needs some sunlight and rethinking.

IMO, a root cause is that the heroic genius researcher ideal at the base of the system’s design basically doesn’t really exist any more. Things are just too big and complex now for a single person to be that important. Dismantle that ideal and redesign from scratch.

There was an article by Google about the security of their code base, and one of their core findings was that old code is good, as it gets refined and more free of bugs over time. And of course conversely, new code is worse.

https://security.googleblog.com/2024/09/eliminating-memory-safety-vulnerabilities-Android.html

Generally it seems like capitalism’s obsession with growth is at odds with complex software. It’s basis in property also.

Yea. Even nicer if it could be adjusted on a post-by-post basis (however viable that is).

It’s definitely an interesting and relevant idea I think! A major flaw here is the lack of ability for communities to establish themselves as discrete spaces desperate from the doomscrolling crowd.

A problem with the fediverse on the whole IMO, as community building is IMO what it should be focusing on.

Generally decentralisation makes things like this difficult, AFAIU. Lemmy has things like private and local only communities in the works that will get you there. But then discovery becomes a problem which probably requires some additional features too.

it’s the sort of tool that is really just fundamental now and should be ubiquitous and promoted and taught and talked about every where there is knowledge work. Even more so as there’s a great open source version of the tool.

The catch is that the whole system is effectively centralised on BlueSky backend services (basically the relay). So while the protocol may be standardised and open, and interpreted with decentralised components, they’ll control the core service. Which means they can unilaterally decide to introduce profitable things like ads and charging for features.

The promise of the system though is that it provides for various levels of independence that can all connect to each other, so people with different needs and capabilities can all find their spot in the ecosystem. Whether that happens is a big question. Generally I’d say I’m optimistic about the ideas and architecture, but unsure about whether the community around it will get it to what I think it should be.

Oh yea I hear you.

Just recently read your 2017 article on the different parts of the “Free Network”, where it was new to me just how much the Star Trek federation was used and invoked. So definitely interesting to see that here too!

Aesthetically, the fedigram is clearly the most appealing out of all of these. For me at least.

It seems though that using the pentagram may have been a misstep given how controversial it seems to be (easy to forget if you’re not in those sort of spaces). I liked the less pentagram styled versions at the bottom. I wonder if a different geometry could be used?