I'm careful to say "I don't know" as opposed to the proper Internet way of speaking, which is to say "there doesn't exist". (-:
Brown Computer Science / Brown University || BootstrapWorld || Pyret || Racket I'm unreasonably fascinated by, delighted by, and excited about #compsci #education #cycling #cricket and the general human experience.
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I'm careful to say "I don't know" as opposed to the proper Internet way of speaking, which is to say "there doesn't exist". (-:
It really frustrates me that I don't know a command pipeline remotely as well as I do the Unix shell for, say, json. I mean, it's fine, I fire up Racket and code away, but there's got to be a better way. I should probably learn jq and friends and quit my bellyaching.
I've never gotten the vi vs vim difference. I guess I use vi sufficiently simply that the difference has never really helped…
So if I want to write these bits in something other than PowerShell-the-language but want to take advantage of PowerShell-the-CLI what would it look like? Can you rewrite this same script in some other language (say Python or OCaml or Racket or…)?
What programming language are those terms written in?
Oh, I never even tried running any kind of Emacs on a VAX. Total non-starter. The single greatest thing about Moore's Law is that Emacs went from a sloth (eight megs and constantly swapping, etc.) to something you could fire up just to edit one line.
I think awk is mostly only used by the 40+ set. It really is great for line-at-a-time. But so often I have to do things that at least slightly cross a line. Imagine an awk that was designed for json, say.
Haha! Yes, indeed. I hope you at least enjoy the "roll the dice" interface on the second language.
Oh, that's really awesome to hear!!!
I have NOT performed the experiment with different mixes. I suspect the sodium is a good part of it (because of sweating). So some kind of water+ is what I need; exactly which kind, as careful experiment, maybe a blinded experiment (eg, having my wife prepare different mixes), I have not tried!
I am, to be clear, far from an elite athlete. Nor am I looking at performance *gains*; rather, *avoiding side-effects*. It's not fluid alone because there are many days water is just fine but days it's not (eg, if I'm riding only one hour, I use water; I only use a mix if it's 1.5 or more). ↵
Trees have proven to be a really good point in the Chomsky hierarchy: almost all of the nice properties of regular, you get context-sensitive for not much work, you can have a nice bicameral syntax, etc., etc.
I'm not sold on regular being the way to do it, both since people don't understand their computational limits (StackOverflow: "why doesn't my regexp parse HTML?!?") and because they're hard to write correctly and to read (we actually have a study on this right now). ↵
That's interesting, thanks. Certainly wouldn't mind if data had their own shebang to match that of control. (Racket's `#lang` is basically a modern variant of shebang that applies just as well to data as to control.) ↵
Yeah, it's tricky getting the right balance. (I don't know what Powershell did, though—maybe there *is* no sweet spot beyond "stream of characters"!) bsky.app/profile/shri...
And what Emacs are you running now?!?
You'll still have to grab my TeXbook from my cold dead hands. (Especially now that Don Knuth has touched it.)
Though sadly I would argue that it's not TeX that's going strong but LaTeX, which is a bit of a bumbling layer atop TeX (though it's gotten way more robust over the years), and absent LaTeX, I'm not sure TeX would have survived (though someone would have had to create *a* LaTeX).
The Old Ways are the Best Ways.
The longest possible one.
But it's a *great* mis-spelling! Freudian typo.
Perlis talks about this in the Foreword to SICP, but I think we could still do a bit better — especially when the "stream of bytes" view is *still available* (just don't ask for the semi-structured output).
I wrote this in my PL textbook in 2003 (hence XML) but and still feel this was a missed opportunity. Semi-structured w/ tags would also make your code more robust to variations in Unix platforms. I disagree with the article's call for "datatypes"; down that road comes mutual incomprehension. ↵
My long-held cancellable view is that Unix pipelines would be much better if programs could distinguish "output for humans" from "output for machines". Keep current formatting for humans, but have a --json/--xml/--sexp tag that produces and consumes semi-structured data instead of parsing text. ↵
This just popped up on my Mastodon feed a few minutes ago. programmingsimplicity.substack.com/p/what-unix-...
If you'll allow me to count Edwin (what's that, you say?) on PC Scheme, just over 35 years. groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/ftpdir/s...
"at least not at the moment" - rotfl.
I have seen pockets of physics teaching excellence (the Modeling Instruction movement, with whom I collaborate), but this is the vast minority of curricula and teachers. Outside that, physics—across continents—seems to be the science of what can be computed with closed-form equations.
With respect: I had what would count as an excellent STEM education in high school (in India), with full-fledged physics teachers, and I'm not sure I could have answered or even thought to ask these questions. Nor is my teen from trained physics teachers and taking an Advanced Placement course.
We've all done this one, Clément. Trie again.
It's the Caregorical Imperative!
Has Crawley trodden on a rake? Every bit matters!
In the same vain: youtu.be/xacdDrylrek?...
I really hope "vain" was an intentional misspelling.
This is a GREAT piece, thanks for bringing attention to it! Would have loved to hear from @johnmarion.bsky.social *why* CC:RI isn't taking a position. Profoundly disappointed @antoniafarzan.bsky.social didn't slip a Bluesky reference into the article, given that almost everyone named is On Here.
Link?
Hope he doesn't turn into the next Bernal.
GPUs ca. 1875
Oh no, I should not have watched this while sipping (zipping) my tea…
I changed my iPod’s name to Titanic. It’s syncing now. #joke
The juxtaposition of these varieties of flour is probably funnier to me than it should be
So maybe you *can* get people riled up by saying "my favorite American food is New Mexican"?
I'm afraid this won't cut it, you're going to have to work a lot harder. "Mexican" is understood to be a spice combination that has nothing to do with any geography. Also, you're dealing with a country whose knowledge of geography is so bad they think New Mexico is a separate country.
Maurice.
Walter Godefroot dies aged 82 Dubbed the Flemish Bulldog, Walter Godefroot lived one of the remarkable cycling lives. He was the first winner on the Champs-Élysées, he discovered the Koppenberg, he won four Monuments, and he managed two Tour de France winners. 📸 Cor Vos
As is ever my stance, Americans, for the most part, should not have opinions about anything that happens south and east of the Rhône beyond "the food's good" or "hm, seems bad".
Next up: the Marquess of Cholmondeley.
This is a brilliant quote because it applies to so many things. (For bonus points, guess what it's applying to.)
I've met some lower-level Obama alums and adjacents and I would concur. Of course, technocratic competence also has its issues, as Halberstam so superbly documented and that Buckley so brilliantly skewered…
What's the y-axis?
As one of the rare ones who loves cricket but also enjoys baseball, I have just added Ed Smith's "Playing Hardball" to my reading list. An interesting cultural comparison from a Cambridge University and Kent cricketer who trained with the NY Mets. www.worldofbooks.com/en-gb/produc...
Look what showed up as a free appetizer this evening!
"As a die-hard Venus cloud colony advocate" — is this your typical correspondent? You live a charmed existence.
Driving a pickup is woke
WOW. That is a whole new thing. And now I can no longer unsee it, like O'Bama. We have a lot of Portuguese and a lot of Irish in Rhode Island; who knew they're the same!
Eeyah eeyah oh!
Definitely not going to fall into "yours is not a valid name" territory on any Web site!
Speaking of, @andreamatranga.bsky.social , it's hard to get a carciofi alla Romana in Providence. Il Massimo restaurant has a carciofi but it's "Baby Artichokes, Crushed Pistachio, Golden Raisins, Calabrian Chili Aioli". What's going on here? Sounds like some Dubai Carciofi madness…
I still remember my first gobi manchurian, at a hotel in Jayanagar, BLR. One of my dad's friends very excitedly came over and said "you've gotta try this thing", in the tone reserved for the fried-est of foods, and he was right. Wait, you're telling me it's not actually from Manchuria?!? /s
A non-existent person is impersonating being a journalist at my city's paper (supposedly "uncovering the layers of truth"!). What fun things can you construct that this person/bot account might be up to?
I mean, I'll take a great cacio e pepe or carciofi alla Romana or perfectly prepared cicoria contorno any time, but compare that to the union of everything from Central Asia to South India?!?
Precisely! Both great cities!
Oh, I'd forgotten those days! Pittsburgh, computes.
Concerned that we are losing the necessary ratio. 15% of teachers/faculty should be irretrievably strange eccentrics. Every learning experience should have some element where in later life you can reflect with former classmates about how bizarre at least one (1) class per year was.
In a way Sam's complaint makes more sense after you've understood the node diagram. In many design sciences we use a group of related diagrams that each highlight different aspects. The node diagram is the basic "notional machine" (CS Ed term), then dive into "deep semantics" from shallow.
You don't have to limit it to potatoes, either!
If you can't think of a word, just say "I forgot the English word for it." That way people will think you're bilingual instead of an idiot.
Gotten my home paper archives down from 24 to just 1 file cabinet (but my total bit archive is > the world's archive level in early '90s). As I further pared down my archives today I came across my Roomba design notes from '98. I remembered the "Clean Team", but not "Cybersuck"! Relevant today...
Whova?
Where was the ice cream?!?
Finally a reasonable— oh, never mind!
Percentage of people who say that Religion is very or rather important in their life.
More and more my opinion is that Delhi is like Rome but with better food. (-:
CC @joepolitz.bsky.social
The kind of person who puts rails in their name…
CTS throwing you off? I'm including it in this photo because I believe the back makes abundantly clear where it's from. Guessing you don't have that and the Delhi one? Gotta say, it's gorgeous! Puts the others to shame.
I'm realizing that there is a very, very particular kind of person for which this kind of collection would be an awesome gift. Some of these are prolly as dead as the envelopes of lire and Deutsche Marks and so on that sit next to them.
Apparently I took this photo on Nov 16, 2024, which is the time of the year when I start to get *very* ready for my fall semester to finish…leading me to do things like arranging my travel cards in grids for no good reason. Here, in contrast, are ones that make their location very clear.
Yeah, that one is at least *slightly* memorable. Tell me where the rest of these are from. (I guess I'm going to crack out the photo anyway.)
Definitely not deterministic. Some summers ago our tomato plants didn't suffer any infection and we were just flooded with cherry tomatoes. I was putting them in *everything* and we still had some to spare.
Our caged tomatoes yanked the caging out, if that makes you feel any better… ("I am not a number, I am a free tomato plant!")
United Airlines blue representing.
I can never keep track of these damned names. I have a whole envelope full of them, and even photographed them once to do some spicy hot take about the unplaceability of them that I realized nobody cares about and hence didn't post.
We did decently on peppers and middlingly on cherry tomatoes. But didn't exactly bend our backs on them, either…
Beautiful!
Wait, will my Ventra card not work any longer?!?
Of course it's concentrated. That's the point of a social medium.
Send some to Prof. Dr. Uwe Aßmann.
Using French words as-is can be dangerous as well. Nobody's safe. (🇫🇷"petite bite" = "small dick")
OMG TIL
It'd be far less weird if it were spelled «roquette», which is what it's often called in is native Mediterranean. Given how many Brits used to study French in school (I'm told), leaving the spelling intact instead of re-spelling it phonetically would have been a favor. (-:
If you leave, be prepared that someone might create an account in your name, impersonate you (e.g., cross-post what you write on other social media), essentially "become" you on FB, and then use that to scam friends, misrepresent you, etc. It's why I keep my FB account without using it.
PSC?
I figured it out once the sandwich came out. (-:
Gentle correction. Since 2002, I've done public records research & investigative reporting (on my blog) as a hobby. Here's how my wife & I exposed my dad as a remarkable - and dangerous - medical quack. medfraud.info IMO here's the best history of "the Heimlich." www.abc.net.au/listen/progr...
Still reeling from the first time I went to the UK, was sat in a restaurant, and the waitress came around and said the sandwich contained "rocket". What the heck is a *rocket*, we asked, and we stared at each other uncomprehendingly, emissaries of two countries separated by a common language.
Very true. It's not like the current MA flag is any gem; it's terrible, and even the people annoyed at these acknowledge that. I think the bigger frustration is that there's been a bunch of new flag proposals and they all seem very identikit. When you can't tell apart AL from MA…
Just wait a few hundred million years and Mauna Kea will be part of the Bay State!
I don't really see the problem with the left ones. In 100 years New England *will* be a swampy tropical paradise (the parts that aren't underwater, that is), so they'll be right at home. The one on the right, though. Someone really needs to tell these people what a real MOUNTAIN is.