Kartik Agaram @akkartik@mastodon.social
#introductions Researching new ways to write software that make it easier for newcomers to understand rather than for insiders to maintain. Systems that build easy, reward curiosity. http://akkartik.name/about
Author of Mu: https://github.com/akkartik/mu. Using it to teach kids programming 1:1: http://akkartik.name/post/mu
#BarbarianProgrammer. Ethos: ship with all deps, gradually streamline their code for own situation, get ideas for improvements, send patches upstream. Implies: can't have too many deps!
Lately I've been programming in raw (32-bit x86) machine code, evolving some minimal tooling for error checking rather than information hiding. A few different ways to write the same instruction ("mov ebx, 42"):
1. <binary>
2. `bb 2a 00 00 00`
3. `bb 42/imm32` (todo: check that `bb` accepts an imm32)
4. `mov_imm 42/imm32` (planned; like Forth, no overloading names)
It'll eventually start getting more high level.
5. String literals.
6. Function calls.
7. ...
I think a lot of people have a wrong idea about is that they'll recognize when their country corrupts itself. That getting groceries will just somehow *feel* different for them.
What's hard to fathom is that there very well might be *no* immediate personal impact for them.
This is why attending to the marginal in society produces clarity, whereas distance inhibits judgement. Reliance on personal experience produces a myopia that's exacerbated to the extent it's distanced from this exposure.
Why do birds suddenly appear? Show more
express train 🚉 from `Metaphor Consultant` to `Burn out Home` in 7 minutes
'Tourists go home, refugees welcome': why Barcelona chose migrants over visitors
When people talk about political correctness they are referring to the overton window.
Anyone complaining of PC culture is angry that the overton window is leaving them behind.
Anyone asking you to make a public display without substantive action(Share a post, Wear a pin) is asking you to help them move the overton window.
"Comparing open source infrastructure to “roads and bridges,” Eghbal provided not just a comprehensive overview of the challenges facing open source, but also a call-to-arms for more users of open source to care about its economics, and ultimately, how these critical projects can sustain themselves indefinitely."
Silicon Valley read the writing on the wall and is already hard at work to monetize FOSS in a way that will suit THEM and not the people. We need to act FAST.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/23/open-source-sustainability/
TIL (struct*)pointer + value != (void*)pointer + value
oh yeah opera also fucking injects ads into the address bar now in probably the most intrusive way possible
if i type "dis" and hit enter i'm taken to a search for "disneyland hotel" instead of "discogs.com"
@britt pro tip: available in book form, which is actually superior to the show in many ways, since it adopts first-person hacker diaries format and transforms many scenes into memos, and adds interesting extra world-building
gdb: it doesn't work, just use printf instead
I need to rave about #Python.
One of my colleagues has deep knowledge about #GreenhouseGas calculations but doesn't write code, in any language. She was giving me instructions on how to perform a calculation, which I kept getting wrong. Frustrated, I just show her my Python code. She instantly recognises the error and tells me how to fix the code. This is the first time I show her Python.
Can *your* programming language do this?
I'm glad to hear I'm not the only one who feels this way, in fact I was ranting about it recently :)
@dpwiz @akkartik @britt Blogs especially, but also information websites have a tendency to be long running and have embedded images inserted years (even decades) ago that are served as http. So at least some of the content ends up being mixed http / https. Which then throws security warnings. Actually fixing all this can be a major piece of work.
