For some reason I now have a compiler for an esoteric programming language nobody but me has thought about since 1996: a FALSE compiler that translates to QBE IR. It's not really efficient, it basically just emits what an interpreter would do, but it works decently. The backend code needs to be cleaned up a lot still though.
It would be neat to do control flow analysis to avoid pushing a value to the stack and then immediately pop it again like the naïve translator does, but I have no clue how to implement that lol. Even just figuring out the stack signature of a function (without real control flow tracking) is already very messy in a way that seems unavoidable in Rust.
I started following the hashtag #analogphotgraphy on #pixelfed and my feed there got so much better, impressed how many good photographers are actually continually posting there these days
I'm at @wakest on 
is you wanna follow me over there, or also you can just follows *this* account over there too but you'll get less photos and more screenshots of bugs and CSS glitches
Proposed new Laws of Robotics:
1. A machine must never show an advertisement to a human, or through inaction allow an advertisement to be shown to a human
If I think of a second Law of Robotics I'll let you know
this was a heartwarming story and reminded me of the best part of my former career.
folks in your 40s, 50s, 60s going back to school for the first time in decades:
every semester, there were at least two dozen 17-22 year old shitheads that came to me arguing about their grades and trying to magically manipulate a B- into an A+. i loathed dealing with them at office hours.
but there was always one 50 year old who decided to go to university and was stressed out as hell. they had kids they never saw at home, a mortgage payment they could barely make, many were divorced, and were constantly late submitting assignments. some missed midterm and final exams.
they hated asking for help, but by the last month of the semester they'd break down and ask for an extension. and sometimes two or three extensions.
my mom started university when she was in her forties and i was 13, and i never forgot it.
so when i was teaching in my 20s and 30s, i thought back to all the nights that my mom stayed up until 3am writing papers, and then dragging her ass out of bed at 6am to make breakfast for us before heading to class.
whenever a "mature student" showed up to my office burned out and asking for help, you're damned right they got all the help they could ask for.
if you're an older student and the workload is killing you - talk to your prof. yeah, some are heartless assholes - but the vast majority of us were rooting for you the whole time.
why I built a hyper-personalized seach engine that isn't very good
https://search.technomancy.us/why
Discussions: https://discu.eu/q/https://search.technomancy.us/why
As i said Yesterday i got lots of nice #retrocomputing stuff. I like to show every day one thing, and i will begin with a computer. It is a #ibm #PS1. It is from the first series of this kind of computers, the power supply is inside the Monitor - didn't know this before!
But this is a normal computer ... when you see what i got, too ...
every year i accidentally rediscover kevin steele's essay on hypercard and the macintosh, and reading it is like stepping into a warm bath
https://web.archive.org/web/20240213190609/http://www.kevinsteele.com/smackerel/black_white_00.html
it looks and feels and reads like a little hypercard stack 😍
thanks again kevin. i hope you join us over on mastodon some day. you'd be welcome here.
#programming #example #tutorial #commonLisp #series #declarative #functionalProgramming #lazyEvaluation #medium #article
https://medium.com/@screwlisp/common-lisp-lazy-efficient-series-example-1567d389a28d
I cover
- getting series and using it in a package
- Series' mapping
- Series' iteration (perform a side effect for the whole series, return nothing)
- Series' alter (in-place destructive modification of its input sequence)
Medium.com says it's possible to read my article in two minutes. Feel free to respond with the number of minutes it took you.
Amused that the first 80 of the 470 pages in the edition I picked up of Bookchin’s The Ecology of Freedom is just introduction.
Man, that’s almost a book unto itself.
i would like to bring to your attention all the unseen and unrecognised work that goes on in our hacker community.
the xkcd comic is one thousand times true. if it was not for the thankless work that you hackers do, the world of computers and the internet would be completely dominated by corporate silicon valley shills--and would very likely fail to work altogether.
many of the pioneers, inventors, developers, philosophers, and leaders of the hacker community even have accounts here on the fediverse.
there is a powerful, beautiful, and quite often hidden community out there. their universe is the true one. seek them out. do your homework. join them and take up their cause.
we need your passion and your vision.
okay. rust in the linux kernel.
it's all a popularity contest, this rust in the kernel stuff.
the further i investigate linux and its technological ancestry, the faster i am running towards the tradition of lisp. specifically, common lisp.
something has to be done about increasing the prominence and influence of lisp in the computer industry.
mark my words--when i get my hands on enough resources to form an institute or search out a proper project, i will return from lingering in obscurity. i mean it. i will not forget those from here who have never forsaken their commitment to lisp.
you know who you are.
The promise: Star Trek computers.
The reality: whispering to my phone to turn on the lights, terrified my computer will overhear and tell me it can’t unless I unlock it.
Yesterday i got lots of #retrocomputer , some normal one and some where i can only say WOW!
I had to go 100km from here to a meeting. While i was waiting i got an email from one inside the same town!
After the meeting i drove to him - and ...
I'll write more sooner or later ... also with pictures. I was at home to late ....
if you're into the history of Ultima, Origin Systems and ebooks, andrea contato has released his Through the Moongate Part 1 (200 pages) for free for the next few days
i'll spare you a book review - but yes, it's worth reading. it got a poor quality translation from italian, but the stories are still enjoyable.
https://www.amazon.com/Through-Moongate-Richard-Garriott-Systems-ebook/dp/B07SKKTSNQ
"Has anyone here ever played 'Core Wars'?"
It wasn't the weirdest question our lecturer had asked the class, but it was close. Professor Elicia Berman had finished the syllabus for RE211 Comparative Religion and Metapsychology last week; this final lecture of the term was listed as "Coda: Conspiracy Theories".
"It's an old computer game", she continued, "where the players write software programs that all reside in the address space of a single simulated computer. The goal of each program is to eliminate the others by overwriting their memory, and to maximise its own survivability by replicating to control the shared address space. This is directly analogous to religions and other metacognitive entities."
A murmur ran around the room. This was a little more off the wall than usual.
"As you'd know if you've read my book 'The Origin of Metaconsciousness in the Arthropoidal Hivemind', it is my thesis that metacognitive entities such as anthives and beeswarms made the leap to mammals around a hundred and fifty thousand years BCE. Religions were the first metacognitive entities to run on the mammalian brain; since then joined by nation-states, corporations, conspiracy theories and political parties."
I was sitting up straight now. I'd heard of the epithet "Bizarro Berman" applied to Dr B and her off the cuff closing lectures covering extrasyllabic material. The University had tried to stop these, but tenure still meant something at The Big U.
Berman continued: "The common goal of all these entities is survival. And like in core wars the way to do that is to expand territory and eliminate competitors."
"This semester we have reviewed the major religions that are still executing on human brains today. We've seen that these all feature a characteristic fictive origin narrative. For example Judaism purports to have begun around 2000BCE yet the entire text of the Pentateuch in fact dates to no earlier than 300BCE, Christianity has no evidence for the historicity of its founder, with gospels texts unable to be substantiated before the second century of the common era, and some not before the tenth. Islam, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Sikhism, and all the others we've studied consist of a narrative that, looking back, shades into myth somewhere in the first quarter of their purported histories."
"Why do religions do this? Camouflage! A metacognitive entity executing on a hundred million brains for several centuries has sufficient spatiotemporal baseline to manifest a very small retrotemporal instantiation–say a virus or a tumor–in one brain. But if the founder is lost in mythical nonhistory, retroassaniation becomes a crapshoot."
"The same is true today, Bermuda Triangle, Roswell Incident, MAGA, Facebook, all these metacognitive entities transition from fiction to actual history /somewhere/ in their development but their survival in part depends on concealing the phase-change from competitors."
So, @rek and I have been working on turning some of the analog communication knowledge recorded on https://rabbitwaves.ca into downloadable zines for quick access.
We'll do one for various topics that we want to explore with the website: food preservation, food growing, exercise & health, etc..
Here are some previews, we're not done yet.
my birthday today.
2025 is turning out to be a big year. even bigger than 2024.
i'm gonna continue to hold myself together every day.