i had been referring to the smaller wollaston's market on campus as "wolly's" and the larger one as "big wolly's". but i overheard someone today in the smaller one call it "smolly's", and now i have to rethink everything.
do you think it feels weird to the computer to run code that simulates its own memory model
it's funny how posting "please explain to me the thing everyone is making jokes about right now" feels like a social taboo but then when you do it nothing bad happens
thank you for explaining
okay why is the number 4 trending* right now
*by which i mean a conspicuous number of posts on my feed from the last hour are about it
What is the powerhouse of the cell *wrong answers only*
anyway i put bows on them
t-shirt that says "I SOMETIMES ❤️ NUANCE DEPENDING ON THE SITUATION AND ITS CONTEXT"
is there something we can cite as scientific evidence that providing food at a work-related gathering is a good idea? surely *someone* has done this research. easy path to impact and citations
cowardly UI designers are keeping sharpened corners from us
PSA: applications for the Programming Languages Mentoring Workshop @ POPL 2027 (https://popl27.sigplan.org/home/PLMW-POPL-2027) are due today (19 October) Anywhere on Earth (so still a bit over 36 hours away). This includes funding for travel and registration.
If you are a late-stage undergrad or early-stage PhD student interested in Programming Language research, this is a great opportunity! If you know such students, give them a reminder!
oh right and the relevant interaction between parsing and editing here is that it would be cool if editing a syntax node didn't disrupt the appearance of visually-adjacent (but non-subterm) syntax nodes in the editor
i'm honestly not really sure why i find it so much easier to read grid-pattern rewrites from left to right than top to bottom. possibly connected to the direction i read linguistic text?
the inspiration for this is the grid-based pattern-rewriting language i've been collaborating on with some games people (play around with it at https://crowdgames.github.io/trrbt/edengine.html !). the first image is the visual syntax in our web-based editor vs. some speculative text-based syntax for the 2d parts
the other side of this is parsing i guess. i want to be able to write something whose ast is a(b1(c1, c2, c3), b2(c4, c5)) as, say,
```
a > b1 > c1 | b2 > c4
> c2 | > c5
> c3 |
```
(the delimiters are because ideally i want to avoid whitespace sensitivity in parsing...)
...oh no, this is a "spreadsheets as programming language" problem isn't it
thinking about editing interfaces for 2d grids of text.
i like the "editor-agnostic" property of text. however, with 2d grids, i want to be able to edit columns and sub-grids with the same affordances i can edit rows.
if i were more of a vim hacker this seems like it'd be doable. probably with an emacs mode too? no idea about lsp. (i feel like at minimum a claim to "editor agnosticism" needs to work with those 3 things.)
random thought:
you should have forums for your hobby / subculture / open source thing / etc., that are not discord, and that are openly accessible in HTML online. you should try to make those appear on google and be like the place to discuss the thing, if that's at all doable.
many online subcultures used to have a politeness norm of "don't ask questions without first googling it". this rule is obsolete. googling it doesn't work anymore. stackexchange is dead. it is very difficult already to find reliable information. you need to make it as easy and inviting as possible for curious people and newcomers to get used to asking human beings about the thing. this means tolerating common questions rather than replying to them like "read the FAQ/TFM/search the forum" etc.
in fact, actively establish spaces specifically meant for people who are too intimidated to ask questions. in a reddit-type forum, do "weekly quick q&a thread—all questions welcome" kinda thing (it's less intimidating to post a brief comment than making a question post). do "weekly casual chat thread" and "beginner's corner" and "off-topic fridays" and stuff like that, too.
and on the converse, actively discourage people from posting chatbot answers, through both forum rules and fostering forum culture. don't be aggressive about it but also don't be lenient.
It's vexing and yet it is gratifying to be loved by a creature with such bottomless self-regard.
They say you can't really fall in love unless you love yourself. So, what is the love of a cat? A creature that has never once doubted her place in the world, or that you should be just under that place holding her.