On deciphering ancient Minoan scripts
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LiDaR is the gift that keeps giving, in the dense forests of South America: www.vice.com/en/articl…
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It’s good to make things _for fun_https://austinhenley.com/blog/programmingasplay.html
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A not-so-long-ago article on SBF by Sequoia: web.archive.org/web/20221…
“After my interview with SBF, I was convinced: I was talking to a future trillionaire. Whatever mojo he worked on the partners at Sequoia—who fell for him after one Zoom—had worked on me, too…. I don’t know how I know, I just do. SBF is a winner.”
“He’s an ethical maximalist in an industry that’s overwhelmingly populated with ethical minimalists. … I know who I’d rather trust my money with: SBF, hands-down. And if he does end up saving the world as a side effect of being my banker, all the better.”
Pretty … unbelievable in hindsight.
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Looking at Gemini and other “web bloat” fixes: youtu.be/I2Q35uFCq…
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On over-hyped claims and throwing around the word “wormhole”
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Vaguely disturbing: www.palladiummag.com/2022/11/0…
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“The forty year programmer”
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A reasonable overview of Urbit
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It’s one thing to find evidence of an impact on Mars. It’s another thing to find water and ice on Mars.
It’s a whole other thing to find evidence of a mega-tsunami on Mars.
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A psychedelic take on generative AIs: return.life/2022/06/2…
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A review of “non-C-based” operating systems: https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/29/non_c_operating_systems/
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Obligatory Octopus post – this time, an explanation for their brain complexity that suggests a possible common factor for all complex brains: an expansion in the variety of microRNA
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Interesting talk by Peter Thule: youtu.be/ibR_ULHYi…
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An interesting science v religion take: www.theguardian.com/science/2…
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A range of Lisp typography (!)
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A short, tragi-comic account of GNU/FSF: www.spesh.com/danny/wri…
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Getting romantic about the craft of programming :-)
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On the difficult market for developer tools: www.kite.com/blog/prod…
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Level-headed assesment of blockchain: www.tbray.org/ongoing/W…
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Remembering Erik Naggum http://jackkelly.name/blog/archives/2019/06/17/erik_naggum_10_years_on/index.html
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“Tools for Thought” as medium, as computation, as cultural practice, as memory aid.
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The right “introduction curve” for Kubernetes: matt-rickard.com/dont-use-…
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Haven’t had “an Octopus post” in a while: here’s them throwing things at each other:
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“The pursuit of beauty”
This reads like a movie of sorts. Unbelievable.
Leading up to arxiv.org/abs/2211….
Inspiring AF !!
Edit: the cost of doing all this:
Zhang’s preference for undertaking only ambitious problems is rare. The pursuit of tenure requires an academic to publish frequently, which often means refining one’s work within a field, a task that Zhang has no inclination for. He does not appear to be competitive with other mathematicians, or resentful about having been simply a teacher for years while everyone else was a professor. No one who knows him thinks that he is suited to a tenure-track position. “I think what he did was brilliant,” Deane Yang told me. “If you become a good calculus teacher, a school can become very dependent on you. You’re cheap and reliable, and there’s no reason to fire you. After you’ve done that a couple of years, you can do it on autopilot; you have a lot of free time to think, so long as you’re willing to live modestly. There are people who try to work nontenure jobs, of course, but usually they’re nuts and have very dysfunctional personalities and lives, and are unpleasant to deal with, because they feel disrespected. Clearly, Zhang never felt that.”
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Great old forth blog (from about 15 years ago!): www.ultratechnology.com/blog.htm
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A stock-sentiment-tracking service built on Lisp:
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Looking at structures found in the Azores: www.youtube.com/watch
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A new space station lives !
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On letting go of the GPL, by Martin Kleppman:
For all these reasons, I think it no longer makes sense to cling on to the GPL and copyleft. Let them go. Instead, I would encourage you to adopt a permissive license for your projects (e.g. MIT, BSD, Apache 2.0), and then focus your energies on the things that will really make a difference to software freedom: counteracting the monopolising effects of cloud software, developing sustainable business models that allow open source software to thrive, and pushing for regulation that prioritises the interests of software users over the interests of vendors.
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Phenomenal tour of the Great Pyramid, feels like I’m right there!
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Friedman describes the paradoxesl we’ve been led to, in the absence of clear priorities:
I understand why people want all five — now. I want all five! But they involve trade-offs, which too few of us want to acknowledge or debate. In an energy war like the one we’re in now, you need to be clear about your goals and priorities. As a country, and as a Western alliance, we have no ladder of priorities on energy, just competing aspirations and magical thinking that we can have it all.
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Keyboards
I wanted the Moonlander but ergonomics led me to the Kinesis Advantage2.
Today, you can get a mix of both, with the Kinesis Advantage360: arslan.io/2022/10/2…
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A “pre-historic” amputation: www.aljazeera.com/news/2022…
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A somewhat despairing article, from the Economist: www.economist.com/essay/201…
(except it’s from 7 years ago, and things haven’t got any better …)
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Elegant code, or inscrutable code golfing? You decide: “random walk in two lines” asindu.xyz/2022/10/0…
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Goddamnit, geeks have been righteously complaining about “feature-itis” and retreating to their hermit kingdoms for so long.
Here is one such complaint all the way back in 1999 (!)
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“Systems at scale”, w.r.t. money laundering: www.propublica.org/article/c…
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"Intelligence beyond the brain"
- Single-celled organisms are intelligent too
- “Intelligent problem-solving in morphospace”
- We can bio-engineer at a low-level, but not at a high-level
- Cells can “recruit their neighbors” !!
- Radically self-organizing
- Experiments (some weird ones) show chemical intervention can “repair hardware defects”
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Who made who
From a HN comment
Sometimes I wonder if we’re just giant machines built by microorganisms. It would certainly make an interesting story, along the idea of a robot discovering they were made by somebody else, which I believe has already been explored
(Referencing links between cancers and fungi within them)
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NeoVim is now just as much of an extensible editor github.com/ggandor/l…
(the easy use of Fennel for config has created an Emacs-Lisp counterpart !)
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Interesting, I had initially dismissed this “crater full of ice” photo as too-good-to-be-true, but … it is real !
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Attempting to predict the future of computing: bzogrammer.substack.com/p/the-nex…
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“Software to be thankful for”
I would add a bunch of macOS desktop software to this, but otherwise a good list
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Closer to deciphering the Indus Valley Civilization script, perhaps: www.smithsonianmag.com/history/h…
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Something ambitious that I’ll need time to digest
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An instrument the size of an house: a giant pipe organ.
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Luxury doomsday bunkers: www.theguardian.com/lifeandst…
Manages to be ridiculous and frightening at the same time.
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A weirdly wonderful take on Terry Davis:
Modernity has a strong apocalyptic feeling to it, in the biblical meaning of the word, which means “the unveiling”, the event when we see and know reality in all of its forms as it truly is. If we are in a stagnant period of history in which we are not having real technological progress but rather we just optimize screens to get people addicted to click ads, maybe the way out of this mess and to get actual innovation is to get on your knees and pray that God will illuminate you on how to build a warp drive.
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An interesting anecdote about the development of the Soyuz transport vehicle: www.russianspaceweb.com/soyuz-7kt…
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Great overview of different financial eras with “computer analogies”: youtu.be/HcugCDf6s…
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Interesting new browser, “Arc”:
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TIL about “hyper-legible” fonts: brailleinstitute.org/freefont
(I never thought about how “blurry letters” would be so hard to distinguish!)
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Remembering the Queen
From this article in the Atlantic
The second Elizabeth was born on April 21, 1926, and has reigned over Britain since 1952. She was six weeks older than Marilyn Monroe, three years older than Anne Frank, nine years older than Elvis Presley—all figures of the unreachable past. She was older than nylon, Scotch tape, and The Hobbit. She was old enough to have trained as an army driver and mechanic in the last months of the Second World War.
“The conception of monarchy as a way of life is not easy to explain to those who are unaccustomed to it,” Morrah wrote in 1958, just six years into Elizabeth II’s reign. “To peoples whose social system and patriotic tradition are founded upon revolt against a distant or authoritarian king—to the Americans and the French, for example—it is apt to seem a paradox. Such as these are inclined to suppose that the British people only continue to tolerate their ancient monarchy because its real content has been emptied out of it by political progress.” But this was not true, Morrah argued. The British monarchy is one of the few institutions in history to have voluntarily ceded power, whether it be Charles II accepting the existence of Parliament or Elizabeth II paying income tax.
The Queen is dead; long live the King. The world must now discover, after a reign that lasted seven decades, what England, and Britain, is without her.
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On food security and the end of abundance
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Wisdom from HackerNews:
The longer I am a software engineer the longer I begin to understand that the soft skills are much more important than all the technical skills. For me software engineering is much about dealing with my insecurities and coming to term with my weaknesses. I also feel that it is a lot about dealing with your ego and a lot with cooperating with colleagues and bosses. The longer I am a software engineer, the more I understand that developing software is not about writing code but communicating with people.
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A look at the engine that made the SR-71 Blackbird possible:
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A look at Racket and Rhombus
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“Planta Sapiense”: www.theguardian.com/books/202…
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Some interesting comments in this post on what was lost with the loss of the old Usenet:
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Fun fact: Alligators can go up to two years without food !!
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Fun fact: a Russian team was hunting for Atlantis near Britain in the late 90s 🤷♂️
A paper about it: www.shimajournal.org/issues/v1…
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Interesting overview of the types of computation in games (simulation + numerical + shading) and the varying performance aspects of each, and musings on “language suitability”: www.st.cs.uni-saarland.de/edu/semin…
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Matt Damon explains things :-|
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The promise of Rust, and a perspective on the languages that came before:
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In which I learn about the python concurrency landscape: superfastpython.com/python-co…
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- Scheme in Excel? code-magazine.com/Article/2…
:-O
First Windows Subsystem for Linux, now this … how different from the world of 15 years ago ! :-)
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Some Guix evangelism: gexp.no/it-wasnt-…
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A blend of FreeBSD and macOS? lunduke.substack.com/p/the-fre…
Sounds too good to be true, but good luck to the folks doing this 👍
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On unifying “toy languages” and “real languages”
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On the bio-electrical science behind how organisms control anatomy through gene expression: www.youtube.com/watch
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An entertaining Youtube channel which also promotes a much-needed “cultural coming-together” in these times:
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A look at “low-level” schemes (though still missing a mention of Gambit/Gerbil)
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Everything getting older
The Onion’s Our Dumb Century is a classic satirical look at the twentieth century, of course, but it’s also a nice tour through the American zeitgeist over that time. One of the headlines that hits a little harder than it used to is from 1985: “Dynamic New Soviet Leader Not on Brink of Death.” In the early 80s, the USSR successively appointed Yuri Andropov (68 years old, died in office in a year and a half) and then Chernenko (who took power at the age of 72 and died after just over a year). But now the US Senate is the oldest it’s ever been, the speaker of the House is 82, the party leaders in the Senate are 71 and 80, and the Presidency is held by someone who won at age 77, running against a 74-year-old.
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Spectacularly contrarian take: “Use one server“
When you experience growing pains, and get close to the limits of your current servers, today’s conventional wisdom is to go for sharding and horizontal scaling, or to use a cloud architecture that gives you horizontal scaling “for free.” It is often easier and more efficient to scale vertically instead. Using one big server is comparatively cheap, keeps your overheads at a minimum, and actually has a pretty good availability story if you are careful to prevent correlated hardware failures. It’s not glamorous and it won’t help your resume, but one big server will serve you well.
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Two approaches to (web)publishing
The “_just use Fossil_” approach is particularly novel!
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Public art in a surprising place
Hilton Waikoloa’s art collection
In pursuit of that goal, Hemmeter traveled to China, Japan, Indonesia, Thailand, Burma and beyond. He spent at least a year traveling and shipping artwork back to Hawaii on barges where it would then be flown by helicopter to the hotel’s property.
But the best thing about the collection, besides its sheer size and diversity, is that viewing it costs nothing, and that holds true for both guests and members of the general public.
Displayed throughout the corridors and common spaces for all visitors to enjoy, the Hilton Anatole’s varied collection ranges from 12-foot segments of the Berlin Wall painted by Jurgen Grosse to an 18th Century Thai Reclining Buddha fashioned in gilt-bronze.
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“_The Hajj trail_”
Well made online rpg!
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The backstory of Marcel the shell
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Inferior is Better
Software that is better in principle comes with everything you need. Software that is inferior does not, and someone has to fill it in. They do it by building tools.
Every third-party “tool” is actually a weakness: it’s doing something that either didn’t need to have been done at all, or could have been done better in the first place. However, it creates a community. There’s a way for people to contribute. It’s like a game that leaves little bonuses lying around for people to pocket. If even a novice can make a small contribution, so much better. They feel good about themselves, and now they’ve made a commitment to that ecosystem. The switching costs suddenly became significantly higher.
In the realm I know best, programming languages, this is especially true. And in fact, to be “successful” in terms of size, perhaps every language should start out somewhat flawed: it should have bad scope rules, weird modules, funky overloading, floating points as the only numbers, and so on. To a rational observer, this might seem an awful idea. But programmers, as a species, have gotten acculturated to salt mines as a natural habitat. They will think nothing of it.
From this great rant
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Illuminating article about Chuck Moore and levels in Forth
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A novel way to blog, using Curio
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How much better James Webb pics are!
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On notation
“Two notes” by Donald Knuth
Collection of quotes on notation design
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Apparently, WordPerfect (I used the DOS version 25 years ago) is still around
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Beginner’s guide to tinkering with a very accessible game engine.
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Mind-opening take on how REST is not REST (but can be …)
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A local decades-old cold case solved: www.mountainview.gov/news/disp…
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“Interesting software”, the most under-rated list ever: fallows.substack.com/p/interes…
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“Hypertext and horror”: dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/1…
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“Hypertext, social media and totalitarianism”: www.markbernstein.org/WebAtWar/
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A slice of Kourosh Dini’s “flow” tips with OmniFocus: www.youtube.com/watch
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Avoiding conflating simplicity and size, in programming languages: arrdem.com/2022/07/0…
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From 1997, Python presented as the “best among 5”: web.archive.org/web/20040…
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A pretty good “Scheme primer”: spritely.institute/static/pa…
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Ancient Amazonian lived in densely populated cities (!)
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A guide to the world of Smalltalk:
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Looking back at Erlang, but also the rich history of telephony from which it (and distributed systems in general) drew inspiration:
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Showcasing the history of Smalltalk, or rather the role of Smalltalk in the broader quest for a better form of learning by modelling
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A beautiful rendition of the Interstellar soundtrack
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A good scene composition from Dune, set to the best track from the soundtrack:
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The “weird elephant story” I heard someone talking about is real.
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A great video showing a quick overview of the features of Tinderbox by Eastgate.
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One day, I’ll pick up this thread of self-learning more math again: www.susanrigetti.com/math
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How flexible is flexible
Software Design for Flexibility: How to Avoid Programming Yourself Into a Corner was billed as the “successor to SICP” when it came out.
A counter-point: wozniak.ca/blog/2022…
The same content may be seen as (1) overly-idealistic utopianism and hence practically useless, and, simultaneously, (2) futuristic, a way out of the muck.
It’s hard to say which is true.
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Of REPLs
Clojure does not need a REPL, it needs an Eval RPC protocol. To turn Rich’s methods against him, current REPL complects command-line interactions with code evaluation.
It’s trivial to build human-friendly CLI on top of machine-friendly RPC, but much harder to build machine-friendly RPC on top of a human-oriented command line.
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Making (“printing!”) objects with Sound!
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Lisp in the browser, playfully done.
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Fun take on the various bits of naming and pronunciation of Guix (“geeks”): lambda-y.net/post/sche…
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New pyramids and villages in the Amazon
The “Lidar payoff” continues!
Many of the sites included complex monumental mounds known as lomas, waterways and reservoirs, in addition to massive pyramids topped with small platforms. Most important, according to study co-author Heiko Prümers, an archaeologist from the German Archaeological Institute, these settlements were linked by elevated causeways up to 6 miles in length that cut through the savanna.
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Gobekli Tepe wasn’t a one-off
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A very creative use of Reader-Macros within Common-Lisp
https://gist.github.com/chaitanyagupta/9324402
(enable-json-syntax) (defun example-object () { "someArray": [1, 2, 3], "someBoolean": true, "someNull": null, "nestedObject": { "type": "example" } }) (disable-json-syntax)(not IMO an improvement over just using native structures, but an example of what reader-macros enable)
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I don’t know if this is accurate (probably not), but certainly a fun way to browse, courtesy of Merriam Webster: www.merriam-webster.com/time-trav…
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Fly, A possible alternative to Heroku: christine.website/blog/fly….
However, I can confidently say that fly.io seems like a viable inheritor of the mantle of responsibility that Heroku has left into the hands of the cloud. fly.io is a Platform-as-a-Service that hosts your applications on top of physical dedicated servers run all over the world instead of being a reseller of AWS. This allows them to get your app running in multiple regions for a lot less than it would cost to run it on Heroku. They also use anycasting to allow your app to use the same IP address globally. The internet itself will load balance users to the nearest instance using BGP as the load balancing substrate.
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“The Face in the Tank”
(Taken from a picture of a blown up tank’s turret lying on the ground)
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A promising new Outliner!
(I’m a Roam convert right now, and a simple outliner doesn’t really replace that for me, but I can see this replacing plain writing needs)
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Land trains: the largest land vehicles ever built
The TC-497 is a truly remarkable feat of engineering. Capable of hauling 150 tons at 20 mph for nearly 400 miles (this range could be extended by carrying extra fuel cars), it was powered by four 1,170-hp gas turbine engines. Only one of these engines was in the locomotive, with the other three were housed in their own separate cars. It retained the hub motor system from previous overland trains as well, meaning all 54 wheels on the vehicle were powered.
The locomotive itself was massive at over 30 feet tall, but its size belied the fact that the smaller gas turbine engines allowed LeTourneau to add living quarters as well. The inside of the locomotive could sleep six and had a complete galley and bathroom. The train’s total length? 570 feet—nearly two football fields. And due to the train’s modular construction, the max length was theoretically infinite. As many power cars as were necessary could be added, along with the fuel to keep them running.
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Black hole sun
Big respect for the technology that makes such imaging possible:
Because the black hole is about 27,000 light-years away from Earth, it appears to us to have about the same size in the sky as a donut on the Moon. To image it, the team created the powerful EHT, which linked together eight existing radio observatories across the planet to form a single “Earth-sized” virtual telescope [1]. The EHT observed Sgr A* on multiple nights, collecting data for many hours in a row, similar to using a long exposure time on a camera.
And just like a high-powered camera, imaging Sgr A* required the support of the most sensitive instruments in radio astronomy. That sensitivity comes from the 1.3mm Band 6 receivers on the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), designed by the Central Development Laboratory (CDL) at the US National Science Foundation’s National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO).
“We are very proud at CDL to have provided some critical technology to support this amazing discovery by the EHT collaboration,” said Bert Hawkins, Director of CDL, who explained the role of Band 6 and CDL in making the research and the results possible. “Our team contributed by installing a custom-built atomic clock on ALMA and reprogramming the ALMA correlator to make the telescope a phased array. This effectively turned the telescope into a single dish with an effective diameter of 85 meters– the largest component on the EHT. In addition, the mixers at the heart of the receivers on ALMA, the Submillimeter Telescope (SMT) in Arizona, the Large Millimeter Telescope (LMT) in Mexico, and the South Pole Telescope (SPT) in Antarctica were developed at CDL along with our partners at the University of Virginia.”
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Giant prehistoric worm: www.atlasobscura.com/articles/…
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The deep complexity behind seemingly simple computer interactions: josh.works/dizzying-…
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Ellen Ullman’s memoirs and an attempt to get at the “nature of code”
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The japanese influence in early “cyberpunk” sci-fi (here, Gibson’s Neuromancer): jrogel.com/neuromanc…
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Praise for Guile: www.draketo.de/software/…
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DIY conference details: www.scattered-thoughts.net/writing/h…
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Comparisons between Neolithic cultures at opposite ends of the earth: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/may/04/stonehenge-exhibition-explores-parallels-with-japanese-stone-circles?CMP=share_btn_tw
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Climate change might be real if landfills begin to spontaneously combust: gizmodo.com/an-enormo…
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An excellent set of bests practices for “textual websites”: seirdy.one/2020/11/2…
(yeah, after trying all the static website generators, it’s static-html-or-bust for me too)
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The soundscape on Mars
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TIL Alexander Stepanov (of Elements of Programming) wrote a long overview of Scheme: stepanovpapers.com/schemenot… !
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Low-code/no-code
Great write-up: tomasp.net/blog/2022…
Also, TIL how Hypercard allowed a “layered approach” to permissions for modification that I haven’t seen anywhere else:
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Yanis Varoufakis on “techno-feudalism”: youtu.be/wNf3dN0VX…
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From six years ago, a look at something that should be too crazy to believe: www.theatlantic.com/science/a…
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How electricity works is one of those things that I thought I knew, but there are subtleties to it: youtu.be/bHIhgxav9…
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Airships as carriers: www.airships.net/us-navy-r…
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Learning by watching (via Twitch): earthly.dev/blog/gola…
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The “two faces” of the moon: blog.jatan.space/p/the-two…
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Trying to explain music about lost futures
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I’ve always enjoyed learning about “non-C” operating systems: https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/29/non_c_operating_systems/
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Hmm, there are “smartphone addiction” quizzes.
(Though I suppose if you think you need one, you might be addicted, no?)
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There are still lots of fascinating mysteries out there: www.nature.com/articles/…
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Definitely the weirdest insect I’ve seen so far: www.sciencefocus.com/nature/wh…
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Crows are smarter than they seem …
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I always thought of David Allen (of GTD) as some sort of stodgy old guy.
But I’m just … blown away by his interview here: youtu.be/2EyIUbyCP…
He turns out to have had a very interesting background.
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Tolkien apparently did a lot of painting, frequently drawing from and supporting, his stories: www.tolkienestate.com/painting/
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H.P. Lovecraft’s favorite films: faroutmagazine.co.uk/h-p-lovec…
(Naturally all in the 1930s or 1920s)
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The poster child for publicly-released UFO footage might just be … video glare
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VDH on why classics matter with Clifton Duncan: youtu.be/6J04kREnO…
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Looking at “early” humans in the caves of the Yukon, 250 centuries ago: www.smithsonianmag.com/science-n…
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A variety of shell-wannabes: github.com/oilshell/…
(this is a wheel that has been re-invented a few times)
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On Emacs as a “lifestyle choice”: arjenwiersma.nl/writeups/…
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Looking back at the beginnings of hyper-text, hyper-media, hyper-fiction
“A half-century of hypertext at Brown”
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Distributed consensus using cellular automata: medium.com/nknetwork…
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The Unison language is really coming along well and is still futuristic
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World War I had no good guys, no winners, just mediocre, small-minded politicians unable to step back from the brink
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Ernest Shackleton’s lost ship is found
“For scientific discovery give me Scott; for speed and efficiency of travel give me Amundsen; but when disaster strikes and all hope is gone, get down on your knees and pray for Shackleton.” - Sir Raymond Priestly, Antarctic Explorer and Geologist.
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On how “the perfect system, the perfect app” is a mirage: https://inessential.com/2021/04/06/the_perfect_to_do_system_is_not_just_around_the_corner
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An account of the now-forgotten “Buran” fully automated space shuttle, and the “Energia” heavy-lift rocket: youtu.be/XLOCQw5s9…
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Fascinating account of someone’s “life story of programming languages”
Inspiring, I should write my own some day :-)
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Found this a good overview of the trends and limitations of computing hardware over the decades.
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“25 years of SmallTalk”, from 20 years ago
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The Richat Structure
I can’t believe I never heard of this before.
earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/92…
Nearly perfect concentric circles, nearly 30 miles wide!
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Interesting find that pushed back the homo sapien culture timeline quite a bit: www.haaretz.com/archaeolo…
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Something weird: a paper on the possible effects of of an ancient mega-tsunami in Peru: www.academia.edu/s/49ded1a…
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The biggest galaxy …
Lurking some 3 billion light-years away, Alcyoneus is a giant radio galaxy reaching 5 megaparsecs into space. That’s 16.3 million light-years long, and constitutes the largest known structure of galactic origin.
(Source)
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Writing a children’s book for programming, in 1991: “Professor Fortran”
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On Markdown
From the article "thoughts on markdown"
Today, I will argue that Markdown’s primary users are developers and people who are interested in code. It’s not a coincidence that Slack made the WYSIWYG the default input mode once their software was used by more people outside of technical departments. And the fact that this was a controversial decision, so much that they had to bring it back as an option, shows how deep the love for markdown is in the developer community. There wasn’t much celebration of Slack trying to make it easier and more accessible for everyone. And this is the crux of the matter.
developer friendliness that people relate to Markdown has mostly to do with 3 factors:
- The comfortable abstraction of a plain text file.
- There is an ecosystem of tooling.
- You can keep your content close to your development workflow.
If you think about it, do you own your content less if it’s hosted in a database? And hasn’t the developer experience of dealing with databases become significantly simpler with the advent of SaaS tools? And is it fair to say that proprietary database technology impinges on the portability of your content? Today you can launch what’s essentially a Postgres database with no sysadmin skills, make your tables and columns, put your content inside of it, and at any time export it as a .sql dump.
Because the expectations and needs from content and editing environments have evolved, I don’t think markdown will do it for us. I don’t see how some of the developer ergonomics end up favoring non-developers, and I think even for developers, markdown is holding our own content creation and needs back. Because content on the web has significantly changed since the early 2000s.
But something also happened to our content as well. Not only could we start finding it outside of the semantic
HTML-tags, but it started to contain more… stuff. A lot of our content moved out from our LiveJournals and blogs and into social media: Facebook, Twitter, tumblr, YouTube. To get the snippets of content back into our articles, we needed to be able to embed them. To do this efficiently and reliable you will need to adapt structured content. That means your content needs to be embedded with metadata and chunked up in ways that make it possible to parse for intent. If a developer just sees “page” with “content,” that makes it very difficult to include the right things in the right places. If they can get to all “product descriptions” with an API or a query, that makes everything easier.
With markdown, you’re limited to expressing taxonomies and structured content either to some sort of folder organization (making it hard to put the same piece of content in multiple taxonomies) or you need to augment the syntax with something else.
To be a bit polemical: the last decade’s innovations in reactive JavaScript frameworks and UI components are perfect for creating awesome authoring tools. Instead of using them to transpile Markdown to HTML and into an abstract syntax tree to then integrate it in a JavaScript template language that outputs HTML.
I also think that markdown captured a culture of savvy tinkerers who love text, markup, and automation. I’d love to see that creative energy expand and move into collectively figuring out how we can make better and more accessible block content editors, and building out an ecosystem around specifications that can express block content that’s agnostic to HTML. Structured data formats for block content might not have the same plain text ergonomics, but they are highly “tinkerable” and open for a lot of creativity of expression and authoring.
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A bunch of old hypertext papers: www.cs.unc.edu/techrepor…
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The world’s longest immersed tunnel
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Missed this a few years ago, but a way of thinking about “what programs are” that I hope comes back in style: youtu.be/Kgw9fblSO…
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Finding planets
A planet was found near Proxima Centauri. But more interesting than that is how it was found:
Astronomer João Faria and his collaborators detected Proxima Centauri d by measuring tiny shifts in the spectrum of light from the star as the planet’s gravity pulled at it during orbit. The team used a state-of-the art instrument called the Echelle Spectrograph for Rocky Exoplanets and Stable Spectroscopic Observations (ESPRESSO) at the Very Large Telescope, a system of four 8.2-metre telescopes at the European Southern Observatory in Cerro Paranal, Chile. The results were published on 10 February in Astronomy & Astrophysics1.
This ‘wobble’ technique look for changes in the star’s motion along the line of sight from Earth; ESPRESSO can detect variations of just 10 centimetres per second. The total effect of the planet’s orbit, which takes only 5 days, is about 40 centimetres per second, says Faria, who is at the Institute of Astrophysics and Space Sciences of the University of Porto in Portugal. “I knew that ESPRESSO could do this, but I was still surprised to see it showing up.” .
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Things (apps, services, products) to look forward to in 2023
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Looking at different ways of implementing “OOP-ish” methods, using Lua (Fennel)
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10 Ways that Guile is … good
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The dream of nuclear fusion
From the BBC
“The JET experiments put us a step closer to fusion power,” said Dr Joe Milnes, the head of operations at the reactor lab. “We’ve demonstrated that we can create a mini star inside of our machine and hold it there for five seconds and get high performance, which really takes us into a new realm.”
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Guile-Macs
Andy Wingo’s post from a decade ago, on the
emacs-develmailing list.Emacs and Guile have a long and lovely history, longer in fact than Guile’s existence itself. Hacking Emacs is the core of GNU – as you know, Emacs is alive, it’s fungible, it’s free. The GNU system grew out of Emacs and the hack-experience that it represents.
But when it was decided that GNU should be like a Unix, it was a fall from grace, in a sense. The system no longer had the Emacs nature. Time passed, and people looked to see how to spread the Emacs nature from Emacs itself to the rest of the programs in the GNU system.
** Guile can implement Emacs Lisp better than Emacs can.**
No one will notice! Except that after a switch, Emacs would be faster, more powerful, and have the ability to access all of Guile’s facilities – the Scheme language, other languages implemented for Guile (Javascript, Lua, …), a proper ffi, dynamically loadable libraries, a module system, the numeric tower (rationals, bignums, etc), Guile’s existing libraries, delimited continuations (!), fast bytevector access, native threads, etc.
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The Star Wars sequels as “the anti-trilogy”
