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necrotic_compon A Road to Common Lisp (2018)

It's about modal editing and the editing commands/paradigm inherent in that.

Agreed with the siblings, you're describing emacs! :)

necrotic_compon Superfile – A fancy, pretty terminal file manager

Thanks. That makes sense. I guess I'm just super entrenched - very comfortable with my tooling and would generally write a one-liner for something like the above.

The way I do it is a bit nuts though, and you're right, the above is much more consistent and has its advantages

necrotic_compon Superfile – A fancy, pretty terminal file manager

so I don't understand what the usecase for a terminal file manager is. I've always felt comfortable using cp/mv/mkdir/etc. but I feel like I'm missing out. Can someone explain how and why you'd use this ?

necrotic_compon The Linux Command Line

yep, I recently did something similar with data that wasn't updated properly and programmatically generated thousands of targeted SQL statements to fix our database. A little bit of python and a lot of shell scripting.

One of my biggest moments was figuring out you could run SQL from the command line, using environment variables in the query string.

necrotic_compon The Linux Command Line

Knowing the command line is one of those unsung critical skills of being a software engineer. Doesn't really matter so much what flavor of command line you're using (though bash is great for obvious reasons), but the ability to glue different, disparate commands together through pipes is one of the most efficient ways of getting throwaway work done. Heck, just knowing IFS=$'\n' and how to do a for loop will get you a long way.

necrotic_compon I no longer maintain my Emacs projects on Sourcehut

From my experience with Gitlab, it feels like Github but slightly worse so things aren't exactly in the place you expect them to be. Sourcehut is completely different, so (for better or worse) any user knows they have to adjust their approach.

necrotic_compon I no longer maintain my Emacs projects on Sourcehut

It's really a drag. I really really really want to like sourcehut and I like Drew Devault's stance on things, but it seems like it's one of those projects that's almost there but not quite.

Github is great. However, it would be wonderful if there were true viable alternatives, and if the global ecosystem played nicely together. (e.g. sourcehut took in patches from github and visa versa) I idly worry that with the state of things on the internet now, there's gonna eventually be a github-only version of git that ends up drifting and then wham lock-in.

necrotic_compon Vvvv – A hybrid visual/textual development environment

That was definitely a gigantic influence, I agree.

necrotic_compon Vvvv – A hybrid visual/textual development environment

This aesthetic is of its time but is really import - I went to the share@open air parties in ~2003 or so, continuing to visit periodically through their run at Santo's Party House. I didn't know anything at the time, and the overwhelming obscurantism was part of the appeal.

I have a lot of feelings about this movement, and I'm happy that I was a part of it. It's driven my feelings about music and art in general, and I've spent a ton of my time since then trying to figure out how to make things that put music first while still containing the cold stochasticity of this time.

I found a great set of pictures on Flickr from ~2007-2008: https://www.flickr.com/photos/oblaat/with/3062581867

necrotic_compon Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened (2001) [pdf]

This is also just good practice in general. You learn through struggle, so giving juniors a safety net (when they don't know they have it), is a good way to get them up the curve.

necrotic_compon LaTeX and Neovim for technical note-taking

This is exactly my experience as well. I just ended up not taking notes.

necrotic_compon A CEO's Guide to Emacs (2015)

That's awfully harsh. People's brains work in different ways, and for some people separating movement from editing makes a lot of sense.

necrotic_compon The changing face of post-pandemic New York City

This is true. It's so depressing to have your salary and responsibility go up, but still have the same living circumstances as you did when you had your first job out of college.

I still don't have a laundry machine or a thermostat, I have holes in my walls from when my landlord half-did things, my rent has gone up, and I'm expected to continue to do more and get more responsibility.

Something's gotta give. I'm not sure what it's gonna be.

necrotic_compon Sci-Fi Interfaces: Hackers

That's exactly right! I didn't see hackers until I was in my mid 30s, but when they had the initial flyover of the city representing tables in a database ... I had a moment where I said "my goodness, this is the closest representation of how I think of data".

It's like when you're reading a book - you don't think about the words, the concepts and people come to life in your brain. I feel like this is the only movie to get that that happens with computers, too.

necrotic_compon Emacs and the mouse: A modest defense of the rodent

There's also the Tex Shinobi, which I've been using for a long time now and is the best keyboard I've ever used. https://tex.com.tw/products/shinobi?variant=16969883648090

necrotic_compon A coder considers the waning days of the craft

Yes, agreed. The best way of putting this is "using google when google was actually good."

necrotic_compon Email and Git = <3

Not to derail the conversation, but Slang is incredible. Its interface is old and archaic, sure, but it's the best and most expressive coding experience I've ever had. It took some getting used to (especially case-insensitive variables with spaces ?! and the UFOs) but I really enjoyed working in it. All of the other workflow tools, like Procmon, were icing on the cake.

The internal cloud was just getting up to speed when I left, and that was more modern and also a joy to use.

There's a lot to dislike about working there, but in my experience, the firmwide tooling was excellent.

necrotic_compon Why a browser and mail combination is worth it

Using https://github.com/LukeSmithxyz/mutt-wizard, you can set it up so that you can view html emails in your browser with a keystroke. I've found it's the best of both worlds, since i don't really use HTML email, but I like being able to look and see what's been sent to me.

necrotic_compon Olympia Musicwriter

Woah that is incredibly full featured and I've never heard of it. Down the rabbit hole I go...

necrotic_compon Olympia Musicwriter

That's a really slick workflow and I totally agree that writing music is just listening to music in your head. :)

I write a lot of multi-part scores (i.e for big band and small jazz combos) and the idea of linting to check for things like note doubling or parallel fifths is a dream of mine.

When you say write parts of this composition into the script - what form does that take ? Is it midi ? Is it score data generate by a musescore plugin ? This workflow sounds amazing and I'm really curious how you get from point A to the intermediate point.

necrotic_compon Olympia Musicwriter

Nowadays, I'm so used to my new workflow of writing a script that checks my music, creates a LilyPond file (as well as a .musicxml to work in MuseScore4), and generating a PDF using lilypond.

Can you expand on this a little bit more ? I hate my workflow for scoring, and I'd like to have something a little more efficient for generating multiple parts/etc.

necrotic_compon DuckDB: Querying JSON files as if they were tables

Recutils is great, but it needs a rewrite, I think.

necrotic_compon Gentoo Linux 2022 Retrospective

This is distcc.

necrotic_compon MusicLM: Generating Music from Text

One could say the same thing about programming. If I'm playing or writing music for people, and they are enjoying it, I want to get paid.

necrotic_compon Show HN: Don't lose track of HN post comments

eh - I think Hacker News is qualitatively different. There's a lot of shared values here, and low-effort comments are actively discouraged. It's a lot more pleasant to read the comments here than on a place like Reddit, even in some of the higher-functioning subs.

Maybe it's the way comments are weighted here, or the fact that post scores aren't shared, but it's definitely the best place on the web for me.

necrotic_compon Exxon made ‘breathtakingly’ accurate climate predictions in 1970s and 80s

The expectation is that they would take the long view and start investing in alternatives that pay more instead of burning the planet to the ground.

necrotic_compon Sperm counts worldwide are plummeting faster than we thought

This is so sanctimonious and makes me angry.

Part of having kids is wanting your kids to have a life that's as good as, or better, than your current life. You want to give them all of the possible opportunities they can have in addition to instilling them with the values you deem important.

When I was in a position to potentially have a family, I realized that despite my good-on-paper job, my partner and I would not be able to afford any semblance of a good life if we stayed where we were living, and if we moved, I would never be able to see my family - all I would do is work and commute. I had to say no and it led to the dissolution of our relationship.

I don't have family around me, I don't have the option of having family around me, and it makes me angry that you say that I just need to "open my eyes" and see how the poor people do it.

Take a deep breath and reflect on what you said, please.

necrotic_compon Scaling Mastodon with systemd template units

The process control in systemd I think is unambigously good, but it would be nice if it wasn't as tightly coupled with journalctl and all of the other random stuff it's gobbling up.

necrotic_compon Colleges that ditched admission tests find it harder to fairly choose students

"humanities is all about flattering whatever opinions the professor personally holds" - maybe at some universities, but not at a good liberal arts school.