James Cash 🍍 @jamesnvc@mastodon.social

@sonya funny story, I first switched my default search engine to DuckDuckGo while I was doing an internship at Google :p

@cdaddr I've definitely been using RSS the whole time...birdsite kinda started fulfilling a lot of that function, but never subsumed all of it and now I'm making an effort to improve my RSS workflows now instead.

I want a game that gives me the tension and excitement of exploration of PUBG, but without the kinda moral qualms of being a murder simulator...

I started doing the Cryptopals challenges (https://cryptopals.com, formerly the Matasano challenges) in Prolog and it is really fun - so satisfying to see nonsense suddenly resolve itself into plain text.
I was worried Prolog might not be a good fit for this sort of bit-munging thing, but it is actually working very well.
Love (SWI-)Prolog; it has definitely become my current favourite programming language (sorry Clojure).

@apg I just started using rofi and really like it, I'm finding it much more useful than dmenu

@Lucie I feel like your network grows a little more slowly & organically on here compared to other networks, which I actually kind of like

For the past few years, we've been building a new kind of chat program. We really like using it at my little startup-thing, and we think others could benefit from it, but it's a little hard to explain what about it we like so much; here's my longer-form attempt: http://occasionallycogent.com/2018/03/28/why_and_what_braid.html

I wrote a little about how much I've been enjoying learning & using Prolog: http://occasionallycogent.com/2018/03/24/discovering_an_old_language.html

@xahlee By the way, I've started using Prolog recently (started with this tutorial for SWI-Prolog http://pathwayslms.com/swipltuts/html/index.htm) & I'm realizing it has a lot of the attributes you talk about liking from Mathematica (nice syntax that is sugar for M-exprs (which can be seen with write_canonical)). Have you used Prolog much before?

@xahlee No problem! Love your site(s), by the way :D

@xahlee I believe it's a relatively-new accessibility feature. You can turn it off in Settings, under Accessibility > Display > "Shake Mouse to Locate"

@lucie Hello! Very glad to see more people joining; I like Mastodon so much more than the other social networks, I look forward to being able to just fully leave them behind.

#introductions time, as more people join?

I'm a programmer & highland games athlete

I have a software start-up sort of thing in Toronto.
Mostly code in Clojure(Script)

cishet white dude

I dunno, I like reading a lot of everything?

I am really enjoying the "Economic Update" podcast. The host, Richard Wolff is very fun to listen to and the content is great -- like it says on the tin, an update from the perspective of a Marxist economics professor. The episodes are nice & tight too, not meandering at all. Highly recommended!

I am really liking writing Prolog. Very nice language in a way that I didn't expect - I knew about the logic programming stuff, but the underlying uniform syntax & term-rewriting stuff was a very pleasant surprise.

I wrote my first somewhat real thing with it: A "bot"/integration with Braid (the chat program we've been building) to do scheduling, a sort of text-based Doodle thing https://github.com/braidchat/schedulebot

@algernon I am super excited to hear about this :D

@bheesham yeah, I think it really hurts that STEM topics in general are taught as somehow “above” politics, instead of making the question “how does this impact the world” a fundamental part of the process. Maybe we can make it so it will in the future though!

I wrote about trying to bring politically relevant examples into my programming instruction http://occasionallycogent.com/2018/02/21/politics_in_programming.html

@fluffy Tbh, I think a lot of terminal & curses libraries still get really confused about line-lengths and double-space characters; I actually switched from terminal vim to gui emacs in part to get better handler of that.
I guess I should just write my own terminal emulator then, because I now really want the emoji roguelike to exist