I used to feel like our FOSS battles were pretty much over. The “downhill battle” era. The “year of the Linux desktop”. Fewer and fewer .doc and .swf files littering our drives.
Anything they would write, we in the FOSS world could clone better; and we also had our own ideas and our own apps which were pure fire magic. Compilers, wikis, milters, httpd, rsync, blender, gigs of .oggs—we had it all.
Then three calamities struck. Silo sites, miniaturization, and DRM.
I used to feel like our FOSS battles were pretty much over. The “downhill battle” era. The “year of the Linux desktop”. Fewer and fewer .doc and .swf files littering our drives.
Anything they would write, we in the FOSS world could clone better; and we also had our own ideas and our own apps which were pure fire magic. Compilers, wikis, milters, httpd, rsync, blender, gigs of .oggs—we had it all.
I’ve said before that Gemini doesn’t make the web less complicated or remove any cruft from the web (since the web is still there, with all it’s diamonds and rust); it only adds to what the web can do. But what it adds is something pretty nifty: living the semantic dream. Simple text expressed simply.
System by @neauoire for when you need to turn a number between 0 and 65535 into a two-syllable, pronouncable word (probably better known as two bytes or four hex digits, so a four byte IPv4 address is two such "proquints", and an RGB color is one and a half proquint).
So something like deadbeef becomes tupot-ruroz.
There are some hard-to distinguish phoneme pairs (like n/m and v/f).
System by @neauoire for when you need to turn a number between 0 and 65535 into a two-syllable, pronouncable word (probably better known as two bytes or four hex digits, so a four byte IPv4 address is two such "proquints", and an RGB color is one and a half proquint).
Wizard: “I have delved the forbidden libraries, labs, and vats and studied the stars and crystals for unspeakable power.” Witch: “Nerd. I just charmed my way into doing it by making a deal with an entity that could just do it.” Sorcerer: “You mean like me? Because I can just do it. I came out the gate drawing Mozart.”
Modern D&D has a coolness overlap problem where you’re constantly getting upstaged by some even purer expression of the trope.
One way I make dwimmy designs is by listening to my heart.
Brain: "types are necessary, efficient, and useful"
Heart: "they get in the way, explicit conversions and annotations annoy me, it's code duplication, it's inflexible design, and ergo they suck"
Synthesis: "make some wrappers that do the conversion automatically, or use generics"
I'm not all the way there yet.
I have as-list, as-string, ->string, string->dwim etc but even using them is annoying!
I get that it cuts down on duplication that, if I have imported a frobnicate function that works on lists, I can (as-list frobnicate) get a version that works on everything, but even that is too much. If I am making a (define (foo bar) ...) and I need bar to always be strings, I can (define (foo (= ->string bar)) ...) but that's still too much!
The world of types is a world full of square pegs and round pegs and triangular pegs where I just want water.
My super educated big brain comp sci self knows all the good types can do. Efficiency and implementational minimalism. But I can't let myself get flimflammed by that big-brained self! Instead, I need to listen to my id that's like "but I wanna use reverse and member on strings and vectors!"
The fact that there are no typeclasses (in R5RS—there are plenty of libraries that provide (mutually incompatible) implementations of typeclasses) is what makes types in Scheme even more painful than even Haskell.
With typeclasses, there can be an isa-relationship between types and both a string and a list isa sequence so code could've been built to work on both.
One way I make dwimmy designs is by listening to my heart.
Brain: "types are necessary, efficient, and useful"
Heart: "they get in the way, explicit conversions and annotations annoy me, it's code duplication, it's inflexible design, and ergo they suck"
That was git-revise. Then the other thing I wanted to install was called git-branchstack, which is also in pypi but not debian, but after bashing my head against pypi for three hours I wanna give up.
I tried upgrading fpm to the latest version from git to get this commit in. https://github.com/jordansissel/fpm/pull/1896 — easy enough with the specific_install gem which can install gems from repos — and that builds the deb package but then it refuses to install because it depends on git-revise 🤦🏻♀️🤦🏻♀️🤦🏻♀️ Which I already just installed via Debian.
Why is it always Python apps that are so messed up? I'm always a li'l scared by cargo and go get since they let you install unvetted random stuff, but no other platform gives me so much grief and hell as Python. It's worse than GNU autotools. (Maybe not as bad as CMake. Although I wouldn't know because it'd be like comparing infinity to infinity since I've never managed to install either.)
That was git-revise. Then the other thing I wanted to install was called git-branchstack, which is also in pypi but not debian, but after bashing my head against pypi for three hours I wanna give up.
Since I switched to iPad, my browser history has been completely destroyed. On Debian I had everything I had ever visited in easily accessible SQL, which was wonderful. On iPad it feels like even if I just open "History" for the same afternoon in Safari, I find nada. In other words, I must come up with a good system for building a reference library for things I have seen and felt "done with", in case they are needed again. Or things I didn' even reflect over 🤷🏻♀️
I had a shellscript that could make a combined and unified search in the sqlite databases for both Firefox and qutebrowser and I never felt like it missed anything. I never needed to bookmark anything. Whereas on iPad Safari, all that is solid melts into air.
(Things I do know that I still have to do something with, on the other hand, I have a good system for.)
Since I switched to iPad, my browser history has been completely destroyed. On Debian I had everything I had ever visited in easily accessible SQL, which was wonderful. On iPad it feels like even if I just open "History" for the same afternoon in Safari, I find nada. In other words, I must come up with a good system for building a reference library for things I have seen and felt "done with", in case they are needed again. Or things I didn' even reflect over 🤷🏻♀️
Sometimes I think I should make a writing style guide for the sole purposes of communicating that some of my style decisions are deliberate, including some that are 180˚s from my own previous policies (for example, I've become less hesitant towards starting paragraphs with "But" since I find that can increase clarity and reduce misunderstanding).
@Sandra As for myself, I teethgnashingly write more "I think", "for me", "it seems to me" and so on, on my own blog no less, because I kept getting pushback from people commenting on my blog arguing with me that the things I said were not universally true, which seemed super obvious to me because I was writing on my blog. Grrrrr.
On the other hand, with the pandemic clearly illustrating how simple minded many people are, and having realised that for me as a person who is not writing manuals, instructions, or working in public relations or for the government, being super simple to understand is not a top priority, I have started writing more in the style that my inner voice sounds. Longer sentences, relative clauses, walls of text, made up words (though still not as many as some of us, haha) – all of this in a vague attempt to lift people up. I expect more reading comprehension and I don't want to talk down to people – I don't want to assume people are barely literate. Since I cannot have both at the same time, I'm opting for harder but hopefully better, perhaps as delusional as many failed authors. Oh well.
@Sandra As for myself, I teethgnashingly write more "I think", "for me", "it seems to me" and so on, on my own blog no less, because I kept getting pushback from people commenting on my blog arguing with me that the things I said were not universally true, which seemed super obvious to me because I was writing on my blog. Grrrrr.
Gregory's Server