sramsay

I take a more skeptical view of the relationship between politics and technology (not specifically on cryptography, though I think my point stands in this context) in a recent (scholarly) article:

https://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/17/2/000690/000690.htm...

Abstract: A consideration of the political meaning of software that tries to add greater philosophical precision to statements about the politics of tools and tool building in the humanities. Using Michael Oakeshott's formulations of the “politics of faith” and the “politics of skepticism,”[Oakeshott 1996] it suggests that while declaring our tools be morally or political neutral may be obvious fallacious, it is equally problematic to suppose that we can predict in advance the political formations that will arise from our tool building. For indeed (as Oakeshott suggests), the tools themselves give rise to what is politically possible.

Been teaching Shakespeare at the college level for a long time. At the end of the semester I like to ask them which play they'd cut from the syllabus next semester and which they'd insist on keeping for the next group.

Measure for Measure consistently tops the list of keepers year after year.

Very excited about this, because one of my favorite ways to "doodle" during a Zoom call is to fiddle with compressors and EQs and see if I can make everyone sound better. Switched to Linux as my daily driver from Mac a few months ago, and haven't done as much in this area. ;)

RME makes terrific audio interfaces with onboard DSP. Like the Apollo systems below, they are not cheap. (I've used both).

Author, here. I was just thinking yesterday that it's time to write part II of that piece. But briefly, for the HN crowd: I ended up switching my toolchain to a markdown-based system relying on a combination of pandoc, Makefiles, and various little command-line utilities. Again, this is mainly for large, book-length projects where compilation speed becomes an issue (though I have been using the same system for written lectures all semester).

Pandoc, of course, gives me HTML, EPUB, docx, LaTeX, and plain text. But what I really wanted (for the speed boost) is groff -mom, so I wrote a custom pandoc Writer to make the translation.

I haven't released it, though I'd like to eventually. Pandoc recently changed the way it does Readers and Writers, and I'm not sure I completely understand the new way (right now, it sort of does an "include" on the old-style code).

Delighted to see that the post that inspired this journey is back online. Here's the link again, in case it gets too buried:

https://yockyrr.gitlab.io/jstutter/

> article documenting how it is possible here

Best line on that page:

"It’s an exciting time in the Lotus 1-2-3 enthusiast community – that was a joke, there is no enthusiast community, it’s just me!"

This person was teaching compiler courses and didn’t know what a parser combinator is?

I completely agree with what you're saying here and wonder every day why Nim hasn't taken over the world. People seem not to realize that Nim not only has a "pluggable" gc system (so you can pick the gc that makes sense for your use case), but also allows you to turn the gc off. As in, no gc (which is exactly what you need in certain very narrow situations).

Yeah, it's the "and banks lend that money out" part that is wrong, and it's why banking is way, way more complex than people realize. There's a lot of "it's all very simple" going around (here and elsewhere). It is not simple.

This. We have had a lot people -- including journalists and academics with big microphones -- learn for the first time what a Markov chain is, and then conclude that ChatGPT is a "just Markov chains" (or whatever similarly reductive concept).

They really, really don't know what they're talking about it, and yet it's becoming a kind of truth through repetition.

Pretty soon, the bots will start saying it!

What bothers me about this -- and it bothered me enough to leave the platform -- is not fees, or "hobby computing," or "it's just for my own use," or trying to figure out why this or that would be in Apple's interest. What bothers me is that it feels like an offense against the entire notion of what a computer is.

I am, of course, aware that many (perhaps most) computers in the world are effectively appliances, but at some level, the great glory of this glorious, epochal machine -- the "personal computer" -- is one's ability to program it and make it do something new. It is not just a machine; it's a machine for creating machines.

Take that away, and . . . to what shall I compare it? It's like giving someone a deck of cards and telling them that these cards can only be used to play blackjack. You can't invent a card game, or change the rules, or build a house of cards, or do card magic. Putting such stipulations in place isn't just annoying or inconvenient. It's a kind of basic betrayal of the concepts and affordances that underlie the thing itself.

[edit: grammar]

Funny to be reading this, because on Friday, I decided I should join the modern world and install Arch (I’ve been using Gentoo pretty much exclusively since it was new).

It’s Monday, and I’m back on Gentoo. And the reasons for that surprised me. (And yes, I spent all of Sunday compiling).

Arch was not as stable. I don’t know why, but I was having weird crashes (mostly with audio apps). Gentoo breaks at the install stage from time to time, but I do not ever have random application crashes.

The Gentoo docs are better. Those are fighting words, I realize, but I find the Gentoo Handbook a lot easier to work with than the Arch wiki. The GH is more opinionated, but I feel like that’s a strength.

Your mileage may vary, I suppose, but since when do gentoo users care about mileage! ;)

They’re the Sharper Image of audio.

Hadn't thought of that. Take my money!

This (I also generate my blog using pandoc). In another case, I wanted to go from Markdown to groff -mom and it was a totally straightforward matter with a custom Writer in Lua.

Yes. Are they not!?

Well, look at that. Thanks!

Greybeard here. Just blogged about this very topic a couple of weeks ago: “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Awk”

https://stephenramsay.net/posts/unreasonable-awk.html

> It's like Lisp. Just knowing about them is extremely enlightening . . .

I agree. My introduction to Lisp was Seibold's Practical Common Lisp -- a very hot book back in the mid-to-late aughties, that I suspect introduced a lot of people to Lisp.

Forth feels like it's having a similar moment (by which I simply mean: a lot of people are talking about it in terms of enlightenment, not that it's going to replace JavaScript!). So I wonder. Think someone will write a Practical Forth?

> As a useful counterexample, glib has GArray, GPtrArray, and GList, along with functions that you use to manipulate the lists. Those functions are presumably implemented correctly, and will prevent you from making out-of-bounds accesses.

> But of course those things are not widely adopted, because they're not standardized, they're not in libc, and libc has not been reimagined such that all of its APIs take and return these safer list primitives instead of bare C arrays.

I'm really not sure why the second thing is regarded by C programmers as such an insuperable barrier to the first thing.

I absolutely understand that there are circumstances where extreme portability is a major requirement. That, and C's ability to operate in highly constrained environments are among its most laudable features.

But many of us (including me) write user-facing C applications that have neither requirement and where Glib is either already installed or easy to install. Why not just go ahead and use it? If you're trying to get it to run on a tiny embedded system or in some land without Glib . . . well, this isn't the program for you!

I feel like this is more of a weird cultural prejudice than a technical matter. People run programs in JavaScript (or Haskell, or Python) with hundreds of dependencies, and while some find that annoying, I don't hear people in these communities objecting to idea of dependencies the way people do with C.

Could the standard library be better? Of course. But there's something to be said for not including a lot of batteries in the standard and just using the third-party tools that are available.

Just don't want you to be too discouraged by the HN pile on. A lot of this is stuff to think about (and I'm sure you're doing just that!). But really, creating a new system like this is a massive achievement, and you should be proud of what you've done.

I would just like to say that this work is amazing.

I get what people are saying, but for people trying to dip their toes into electronics (and who maybe can’t afford the equipment just yet), this might be just the thing! I don’t mean to restrict the use cases, I just think a both/and world is just fine. And this is some excellent hacking.

I tip my mouse to you.

The usual reasons, I suppose (speed, portability, ubiquity . . .) Do you mean as opposed to Go?

I suppose this is as good a time as any to plug noaa, a CLI tool that can give you the current conditions and forecast, but also allows you to retrieve any product the US National Weather Service produces. It’s way geekier than the above, but perhaps more useful for some.

https://github.com/sramsay/nowa/

(I am also the author of wu, which was a popular cli tool for the Weather Underground API. I had to discontinue that when they closed free access to their API. That was written in Go; this one is written in C).

The real news here is that there is such a thing as a "gut-on-a-chip."

You may disagree with the way the TIOBE index is compiled, but it's hardly "arbitrary."

You would recommend a language below Scratch and a language below COBOL (Kotlin) on the TIOBE index?

When I’m teaching (a very high-level language), I make a point of saying that a variable is a named memory location. Where is that location? We don’t know. Now, I am absolutely aware that the address isn’t the “real” location, but I have this idea that talking about variables in this way might help them grok the lower-level concept later on.

This is exactly how I feel. On the one hand, this technology seems completely miraculous (I remember watching Star Trek TNG back in the day and thinking the "computer" was about the coolest thing imaginable).

Now it's here, it works amazing well (considering what it's doing), and . . . I'm talking to Apple, Google, and Amazon? No thanks . . .

I don't get it. Why doesn't everyone just use the battle-hardened, fully-compliant Rust implementation of OpenSSL?