i always say a trip to lebanon is a trip to the future.

my village gets basically zero power from the central government so people increasingly rely on solar energy. so many conversations here now center on battery capacity and the power draw of various appliances and machines. this kind of consciousness is entirely the result of the collapse of the central power grid. i expect the world to follow suit, waking up reactively instead of proactively, and probably too late...

absolutely losing my entire mind at this web site that decided to take their irritating distracting "chat with us" popups that no one ever asked for and make it *fucking bounce around like the fucking dvd logo* what the fuck is happening

in conversations ive had around "open" source and "open" protocols im recognizing a recurring sentiment that does not sit well with me: the idea that "openness" requires that we tolerate capitalist corporations, that if we don't we are no longer "open".

i disagree categorically with this definition of "open"

about to go live! https://www.causalislands.com/virtual

friends, in preparing for an upcoming talk i am putting together a list of future thinking/low power/solar punk technologies for people to keep an eye on. uxn, CollapseOS and the Solar Protocol come to mind -- anything else?

i love "i18n" as short for "internationalization" because nothing telegraphs "we consider this a burden and dont really care about it" like "i cant be fucked to type out all the letters"

its still not clear to me that writing my own lisp editor is more work than learning emacs and making it work to my liking

*very* rough initial prototype of the approach @vade described to me the other day -- running in a browser in ~80 lines of regl! the video in the corner is an HTML video element playing a recording i made off of one of the videos anton shared and is driving the vertex shader. the sampling, blending, orientation, all the details need a ton of attention but the basic principle works!

i wasnt able to use it for a thing i am working on but apparently there's a :target selector in css that matches every element with an id matching the fragment in the url 🤯

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/:target

the company that controls all the drawing software had a falling out with the company that "owns colors" so now your old images might turn black unless you pay a recurring licensing fee but people keep telling me this economic system is not literally insane

hard lesson learned from complier implementation work: it is sometimes beneficial to "bake" hash values into your compiled code. in MAGIC we hash keywords at compile time and use the results when building eg switch statements.

this is fine and good except you need to be ABSOLUTELY sure that you will get the same hash values at run time that you did at compile time. this might break down if you are compiling and running in different environments that have different hash functions!

wait why did rss die again? just because google shut down their reader app or something? if so that sounds surmountable. as people flee corporate social media and people reevaluate blogs maybe rss is worth revisiting. i might be missing something but an rss reader sounds borderline trivial to write...?

last bit of fun for the day: progress on my function reactive scene graph thing for livecoded visuals. i am trying to avoid using a heavy framework like vue or react for the livecoding / reactive parts, so i am writing that bit myself. right now i have a basic virtual dom reconciler working on top of a-frame which talks to three.js and eventually webgl. you can see the scene change as i edit the file and the element view reflecting the relatively efficient updates to the dom.

live! https://m.twitch.tv/sierra_offline