aag

My house is already maxed out on electric capacity because I have an electric car. I've investigated increasing the current coming into the house, but changes in code mean that making that upgrade would cost $20K. So if my hot water breaks, it will cost me $20K+ to fix it. That's not reasonable.

What about them?

Yes, Scheme has the concept of exactness[0]. In most Schemes, (exact? 2.3) ==> #f. But at least the exact? procedure exists. It can tell you whether your result might have been affected by these problems. If you want perfect answers, you can always use the rationals that are built into Scheme implementations with the full numeric tower.

[0] https://standards.scheme.org/corrected-r7rs/r7rs-Z-H-8.html#...

P.S.: I hate robocalls, too.

For a tiny personal project (delivering alarms for calendar entries to my Light Phone 2), I used Twilio for several years. I was always impressed by how easy and cheap they made it to implement SMS delivery, even for a hobbyist.

Late last ever, they started sending me warning notes insisting that I fill out all kinds of paperwork for my "business" if I wanted to continue sending SMS messages. None of the paperwork made any sense for a hobbyist, but they insisted. It was clear that this requirement was coming from outside of Twilio, so I wonder whether it was the result of earlier discussions with the FCC. Since I don't use the Light Phone any more (couldn't do without a camera), I just turned off SMS delivery rather than deal with all the new bureaucracy. But I still use them for another hack: I can call a Twilio number and leave myself a message, which they will then deliver to a hook on my web server, along with a transcription.

I'm impressed with Twilio technically, and I can sympathize. I wouldn't want to be caught between the FCC and a bunch of SMS spammers, especially if the spammers were customers.

It does. I'm a happy Blendle customer.

https://blendle.com/

I have used Blogtrottr since Google Reader went away, and I love it. It's great not having to check yet another app for updates, and all the filtering and labeling tools of modern email clients can be used.

What I don't like are the pop-ups asking me to sign up for a mailing list where the choices are "Sign me up" and "No thanks." Don't put words in my mouth. I am most not definitely not thankful for the opportunity to be spammed.

And don't get me started on "Sign up for notifications?" where the choices are "Yes" and "Remind me later."

Termite Scheme did something like this for Scheme programs. It combines Erlang-style concurrency with process migration.

http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~feeley/papers/GermainFeeleyMonn...

Free market? How is it a free market if you can't even find out the price before you pay? The Republicans are no help, but not because they purport to believe in free markets.

Given this idea, I can't figure out how to deal with the fact that fonts are finite and, even with ligatures, relatively quickly enumerable. User interfaces, on the other hand, often require drawing arbitrary pictures. As I understand it, Chartwell takes advantage of the fact that charts have finite resolution, so that it's possible to enumerate all the possible heights for a bar or angles for a pie wedge as individual glyphs. But would that be possible for a general user interface? I may be missing something obvious.

Thank you very much. That is a lot of food for thought.

I am fascinated by this idea despite the fact that I don't actually understand it. Ever since I read your comment, I've been trying to think what it would mean to build a GUI this way. It has been thought-provoking, and has caused me to read about interesting things like ligature substitution rules in OpenType, but I still haven't made much progress.

I would be grateful if you would elaborate in any way at all.

Thanks!

I'm very happy with Blogtrottr, which turns feeds into email. It has flexible delivery options, e.g. digests, plain text vs. HTML, and sort order. Best of all, receiving posts via email means I don't have to check yet another app.

Videographer here. Amateur videographer, that is.

I apologize for the sound quality. I'm still learning how to do this stuff, and one thing I forgot to check is whether the final audio sounded good in headphones. On my laptop's speakers, I couldn't hear that there was only one channel. Checking that is now in my post-production checklist.

Unfortunately, while the lapel microphone I use normally produces good sound, I needed to do some level setting first. That's also in my checklist now. And I didn't expect the amplifier's sound to be picked up so strongly by the lapel mic. That may be something I'll have to solve using equipment.

I promise that I'm working on getting better at this.

Many thanks to Philip Greenspun, of Greenspun's Tenth Rule [1], for giving me the video camera that I've been using.

By the way, this talk was co-hosted the Bay Area Lisp & Scheme Users Group, [2], of which I'm co-organizer. You can see videos of prior BALISP talks at [3]. If you're in the area, please join us. We encourage you to give a five-minute lightning talk on anything interesting you've been working on that is related to Lisp.

Thank you so much to Robert Smith and Rigetti for giving and hosting such a terrific talk.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_tenth_rule

[2] http://balisp.org/

[3] http://balisp.org/videos

I am a huge fan of Blendle, the news micropayments system, which meets the first four of these criteria. The last two depend on the underlying news organization.

They must have trouble recruiting volunteers.

This reminds me of a demo a friend once gave me on a Symbolics Lisp Machine. He turned the garbage collector off, then ran a program that allocated memory like mad. After a while, a message popped up saying something like "you are about to run out of memory. Activate GC?" He declined, and the program continued running. After a bit more time, another message popped up saying "you are about to run out of memory, and if you don't start GC now, there will not be enough room to run it when you do. Activate GC?" Again, he declined. After more time, another message popped up saying "you have run out of memory, and it is not possible to start GC now. Would you like to attach an external disk drive?" The idea was that the external drive could serve as additional memory either to continue running without GC or as scratch memory for the GC. I've always found that impressive.

Missing Scheme Requests for Implementation (SRFI). We do standards work for the many Scheme implementations in public using 151 Github repos and counting. The home page is at srfi.schemers.org.

OP here. Since this is a video, I'll post the abstract, etc.:

by Ron Garret

The lambda calculus is widely known but also widely misunderstood. It it considered by most coders to be nothing more than a theoretical curiosity and not really useful for anything by itself. In this talk, I show how to write a factorial function in pure lambda calculus, i.e. using nothing but lambdas, in a way that is actually efficient enough to compute the factorial of ten in a few seconds. Seeing how this is done can provide deep insights into functional programming, compilation, and other useful programming techniques like CPS-conversion.

Bay Area Lisp and Scheme Meetup, http://balisp.org/ , Sat 17 Oct 2015, Hacker Dojo, Mountain View, CA