So if you want concise precedence that isn't an a priori lookup table, there's... a thing, you can do.

assert(4+1 * 3 == 15)
assert(4 + 1*3 == 7)

Allow a layer of implicit paren-ish grouping for non-whitespaced operators, and within groups, operations flow left to right.

assert(4+1*3 == 15)

What about unbalanced whitespace? Well, this is used for unary postfix and prefix operators, which are allowed to have distinct behavior, but some have obvious choices.

assert(-1 == 2-3)
assert(5 + -1 == 4)

The crazy thing is this gives us unambiguous dereference syntax for free, for things that need it.

So awhile ago I was a bit concerned about a Prone syntax decision, because of the following tension:

1. Gosh it would be nice if the parser could be stable forever, even as operators come and go in various stdlib editions. Both concatenative and LISPy languages are good at this.

2. People really like their operator precedence, though, because it makes it easier to translate math from proper mathematical notation. And precedence is kind of an arbitrary table that relies on knowing about all operators.

Well I just figured out a clever solution. I'm not married to it. The problem is that it seems bioengineered to piss off as many people as possible. I remember how people felt about significant whitespace when Python did it...

#pronelang

I need to do music production this weekend. I can't keep writing songs and not producing them. I can't. This is wrong.

Clearly the world is in the state it's in because we didn't listen to them and we should have listened to them more.

True taking-the-advice-of-big-tech-security-consultants has never been tried.

I've heard that cheap RISC-V chips and small lithium-ion batteries are mostly being used to drive little LCD screen animations on vacuum-driven heater element rigs...

But I don't know about all that. Sounds like some vaperware to me.

Womp womp

Well. I think I just figured out where the "Posted from ${appname}" bit at the bottom of toots come from. In fact, if this status actually submits properly, I think I'll have conclusive evidence that it's one of the most annoying (but, from Mastodon upstream perspectives, reasonable) answers possible.

For the record, this status was posted without using madonctl at all.

I remember a couple years ago - probably more than it feels, with the way time passes these days - that the internet was finally having a conversation about unintentional algorithmic harm. I think that's what people were deciding to call it at the time. The way Facebook would offer you a photo collage of pictures with you and a dead relative or a bad ex, in the bright exuberance of Corporate Memphis. There actually was a moment of a movement to actually consider at a product design level: "would this feature be horrific to offer someone on the worst day of their life?"

It's darkly gratifying, as a skeptic of mainstream tech, to see that the industry briefly considered incorporating that question into its decisionmaking, and then roundly decided "nahhhhhh, fuck that actually." The only choice they were equipped to make, really. But it was all a bit of pleasant kayfabe that Big Tech could behave responsibly, while the moment lasted.

Having to deal with some Google products for kind of morbid, estate-y reasons today, and I'm freshly offended at how much more crowded Drive and Docs are than even the last time I used them, with the endless pleading for validating metrics by an untold mass of product managers lining themselves up on the street corners of the red light district in San Francisco.

Like for example, watching Greg make drinks where he challenges himself to highlight the existing ingredients in a drink, use the best version of them that he can, make them look good without hiding any of them in embarrassment, and make an incredible final synthesis. It's like Chopped. This is a lot of what I try to do, in a different medium. That often results in good engineering, but it would be weird to call the process or motivation "engineering."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1n9NMs53jg

I do feel good about transitioning from thinking of myself as a software engineer to thinking of myself as a software artist. But I'm not sure which one sounds like the more horrible pretentious ego claim, when I really feel about these things more that they're statements of intent, priority, mindset and aspiration.

So this is a little bit of a delicate post. There's a thing that concerned white leftists* do to minorities regularly, where the minority person needs to talk about a real racial tension that affects their safety or autonomy, a tension they didn't ask for (but some nasty people care, so you have to too), and they get hit with the "why are you trying to talk about race? That's sus."

Well, I'm white, so I managed to make it to my mid-thirties before the stars aligned to have an experience like that, and I probably never will again. But they did align, and it happened, and boy was that surreal and bad. Until I gave context, I think I worried someone I was going down some FOX News pipeline or something. So I know most of us know this, but pleeaaaaase let minorities talk about these things without shooting the messenger.

*and not just leftists, but that's... a tangent.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@ninlyricbot/117493303552856956

This also works for that one Porter Robinson song. You know the one.

The single biggest reason people hate SD cards is the ports, I think. "Oops, that was a vent hole, fuuuuck how do I get my card back?" SIM card style trays would have solved this. But those are more money.

See also: FUTO, and also the Linux Foundation.

This is why I have mixed feelings at best about the common sentiment that corporations use our work all the time and ought to pay for it. Sure, that's like saying the sky is blue - it's such a true observation that it's unchallenging. But the tricky part is achieving that without it becoming a problem of creative control. This is something that proprietary software companies often have much more leverage about, though they misuse the power. When was the last time Microsoft cared about the opinion of a paying customer?

Non-profit orgs are a consistently safer bet, if still something you should probably vet before just taking money.

Not to totally harp, of course, but this is why I've drifted to a position of intense skepticism and caution when it comes to for-profit corporate funding.

Plenty of projects think they need that money, when actually they need architectural hygeine. And if you think corpo money is the thing you need to meet those hygeine goals, you're being naive about the strings attached to those finances.

Hunger is not a valid reason to eat rat poison unless you want to die faster.

I do feel some sympathy for Tantacrul. Imagine staking your personal reputation on the public internet on the promise that Audacity 4 would not be terrible, and then - likely for reasons you have no control over - the actual product is "hey we're building this around a store where most of the stuff for sale is AI sparkles. You wanna buy some sparkles, right?" And then you're on the hook for the community harm of trying to convince people to take it seriously. Probably after a lot of genuine effort to make something that isn't garbage.

Lot of cautionary tales to take away from that one.

Me and my wife getting ready this morning, her naked and me a little handsy and apparently channeling pure cheese.

Me: "You got me speaking French this morning, baby: oh hon hon!"

Her: /giggling hysterically

Me: "That's the language of love!"

Her: "Oui oui!"

I'm half awake and don't know where that came from, but the fact that it worked on her tells me how hard she's already fallen for me.

#ThingsThatMadeMyPartnerLaugh

I kinda feel like we need to culturally normalize in-house microframeworks, but even the word "framework" makes me feel like I'm regurgitating brain poison, so the language could use some workshopping.