← Feed

Posts

• Post #4380630

  My wife’s family is pretty long-lived. My family is not (my father is an outlier at almost 80). I hope I get to retire “young” enough that I get to spend some golden years with my wife and then, I dunno. Haunt her or something. If she gets remarried I’ll be sure to make sure he treats her right or else it’s gonna be fuckin’ Poltergeist up in there. But yeah. I do hope I get to have at least a little retirement.

• Post #4366323

  I am again asking the elders in my life to limit themselves to one crisis at a time.

• Post #4287890

  “Rob you’re a computer scientist, so you’re good at math, right?” “You’d think so, wouldn’t you.” #math

• Post #4248768

  Story idea: we discover an anisotropy in the cosmic microwave background that we pull the thread on and discover that it is significantly easier to accelerate in one direction in the Universe and basically impossible over long distances in the other. This leads to one half of the universe being an empty backwater (where we are) and the other end being an overcrowded mess, with a civilizational gradient. Humans being human we decide to attack The Density from The Sparse. #story #writing

• Post #4243100

  I need to go pick up my other little scripting language that was very focused on variant types/sum types. It was pretty but I got off on a tangent on extensible parsing and it ended up getting shelved. Procedural, strongly and statically typed with an emphasis on sum types. Flow typing, etc. I need a name. I was calling it “Flow” but that was just a placeholder. I’d definitely entertain suggestions. Oh and a bit of Typed Racket’s occurrence typing, as a treat. #programming

• Post #4228371

  In honor of Mel Brooks’s 100th birthday, here is Dr. Dan McClellan, scholar of the Bible and Religion, translating the Hebrew on the third tablet that Moses dropped in History of the World Part I; it actually had real words, and Brooks committed to the bit: https://youtube.com/shorts/RAycIBNgXcg #film #MelBrooks

• Post #4197478

  For some reason YouTube plopped an ad for a “Warrior Husband Workshop” in the middle of my retrocomputing video. It was all AI images of an unhappy married couple and a voiceover explaining how marriage problems are because husbands don’t “exercise their authority” over their wives who, from what I gather, can’t help but be “prosecutors who never forget your mistakes.” I feel really sorry for these people who fall prey to this, and horrified of the people who perpetrate it. Good lord.

• Post #4182538

  Who called them Large Language Models and not Burroughs Large Systems? …see, ‘cause William S. Burroughs would cut up magazines to rearrange text to find hidden meaning *and* Burroughs Large Systems was the name for the mainframes made by Burroughs Corporation and so…see…it’s funny. …y’all ain’t laughing though…

• Post #4148010

  If I want to have beautiful handwriting for hanzi/kanji, how do I do it? Getting practice books where I repeat the same mistakes ain’t it. Plus I always miss the lovely hooks at the end of strokes. Gotta be a calligraphy class somewhere in central Texas, but I need people to smack my hand with a ruler or something if I don’t write beautifully.

• Post #4142639

  The Fiat 500e is cute and if I didn’t have kids I would consider it but, frankly, it should be illegal to claim it seats four. There is zero leg room in the back. No average-sized human could fit in the back seat if an average sized human was in the seat in front of them.

• Post #4128641

  Rewatching Rocky, the first one. I had forgotten just how ~~70’s~~ the soundtrack is. Oof. Talia Shire’s performance still impresses. And people give Stallone guff but he accomplished what he set out to do. The subsequent movies in the series just get *so weird* though. Weird throwaway scenes with domestic robots. Soviets. Such a huge departure from the simple underdog story. #film

• Post #4095633

  Look at this asshole. #cat #caturday

• Post #4022554

  Fuck me it’s hot.

• Post #4019385

  @Dio9sys@haunted.computer Your honor if you are what you eat then I am an innocent man. Thank you.

• Post #3999424

  Objectively it’s probably not as good as many other shows but The Amazing Digital Circus is the only show I’ve watched more than once in a six month span in who knows how long. I mean it helps that the episodes aren’t that long and there’s only nine of them, but still. It’s really well done for what it is. If you haven’t watched it, it’s worth the roughly five hours of your life it takes to watch it. #tv #tadc

• Post #3997502

  Having an athletic 15yo is how I found out about the Fairlife ransomware attack, because my 15yo texted me in a panic to buy some cases of their protein drinks before the price shoots up. #infosec

• Post #3944018

  I have a little purely functional embedded language I'm working on, looks like Elm. It doesn't do modules; I figured modules were overkill. The problem is I don't want the Prelude internal names exposed to user scripts (interior constructors for Dict tree nodes, etc). So there's a flag on the lexer: names can contain $. On for Prelude, off for user scripts, which then can't construct the name to reference it. Do...do I still get to go to Heaven #compilers #programming

• Post #3943752

  What is the proper term for constructing a new function of lower arity in the lambda calculus that is a partial application of a higher arity function: #programming #shitpost

• Post #3900301

  If you’re from Texas or have ever been to Texas, you know how much of an institution HEB is here. Anyway apparently they use Haskell: https://blog.haskell.org/enterprise-haskell-at-h-e-b/ #haskell #texas

• Post #3892144

  The average Greek citizen in 300 BC could go their whole lives without seeing a single Cyclops. We don’t know how good we’ve got it now.

• Post #3849356

  I need you to understand that Budweiser had an ad campaign where three different frogs were croaking, one said "bud", another said "weis", and the last said "er". You could download a screensaver for Windows 95 that had the frogs on your screen and the sound effects and it was the height of technology. That was it. We peaked.

• Post #3799498

  Got back from walking the dog. 15yo: Dad in a minute I want you to taste my blueberry chocolate glaze that I’m working on. Me: How are you melting the chocolate? You know you have to…oh. 15yo: I know how to melt chocolate dad. I’m the only good cook in the family. 11yo: It’s true. #cooking

• Post #3795378

  Why is Biscuit T. Dog licking my face so intently #dog

• Post #3794255

  Email from my kids’ dentist: Greetings from - This is a reminder about your upcoming appointment… Thank you, Appointment Coordinator Little Dr. Tables we call him. #shitpost

• Post #3792672

  15yo is taking Sports Medicine for his PE credit next year. He's basically on the same schedule as the HS football team, meaning I gotta get his ass to school at 5AM. God help me. At least he can drive himself in a year. He's really showing a lot of interest in this though. He really wants to be a lawyer but a career in sports medicine would be interesting too.

• Post #3757092

  Bismuth is, I believe, starting a project to walk us through the entire Super Mario 64 120 star speed run, star by star. This is amazing. I am very excited. https://youtu.be/XFHMhNjtPmQ #speedrunning

• Post #3743025

  There is a bug in macOS Terminal.app: when (certain?) combining characters are drawn, the background color-per cell tracking is broken for the rest of the line. This affects a ton of my projects and it drives me crazy. I’ve spent so many hours of my life trying to figure out a workaround. Even going in and literally moving the cursor directly to the damaged sections and redrawing them doesn’t work. #macos #bug #programming

• Post #3712705

  Preferred standard email closing form #shitpost

• Post #3593641

  It has been 32 years since Soundgarden's Black Hole Sun was released and I'm still not ready to hear it again. Those of you who weren't around in 1994, you have to understand: we couldn't skip songs on the radio, and they played it *constantly*. I lived in a small town. On a good night I could receive a Houston alt-rock station (locally all we had was talk/gospel/country). I'm still mad at how many spots Black Hole Sun took up. How many awesome songs did I miss out on for...

• Post #3589886

  Duolingo has, unreservedly, solved the “get people to come back” part of language learning. That’s important: 10 mins a day in a suboptimal curriculum beats 0mins a day in a better one. However, I’ve often wondered what the *best* language learning app would be, for suitable values of “best” (in my case, literacy-focused; I want to read). I’ve got a ton of ideas but I’m curious what the state of the art is (yes I know “tons of comprehensible input”; the question is *how*). #languageLearning