(#krcubia) @prologic@twtxt.net Oh yes, this isn’t my student and he has a video on this page about how it works. So simple but amazing.

Recursive Drawing is really fun to play with. You can make spirally-looking things like

and

(which is a minor variation that looks more feathery). Or you can make more organic looking shapes like

or

This tool was a student’s degree project and doesn’t have all the bells and whistles you’d expect from a mature drawing program, but the one thing it does well, the recursive drawing, is super cool.

(#r6icgfq) @prologic@twtxt.net I saw a release announcement for gum, which looks like a great way to add interactivity to shell scripts.

Much as I’d love to help, I have my hands full right now! Job+kids takes up 200% of my time! I’ve been meaning to play with salty chat just to see how it looks but so far I haven’t even had time to do that!

(#r6icgfq) it’s nice that you can self host the charm cloud part of it. Even though they say they end-to-end encrypt anything sent to or stored on their servers, and even though I mostly believe that, there’s no way to verify. Reading the source code is not verification because there are no guarantees that what’s running on their servers matches what’s in the source code. So, it’s safest to self host, and I’m glad they provide that option.

Charm

This whole set of libraries looks incredibly neat.

Firefox Focus is meant to be one of the more privacy friendly browsers on Android, yet after install it has Google set as the default web browser and it collects telemetry. So you still need to hunt through the settlings to find and turn off these things if they concern you (which they should imo)

(#asw7hqa) @prologic@twtxt.net lol, well I was venting so I had to be creative

Android always has seventeen different apps for any particular thing you want to do, where five are so full of ads they’re unusable, three are hobby projects, two are paid and cost more than you’re willing to spend on a phone app, three haven’t been maintained in over two years, and four might possibly work for you. But you can’t know any of that till you install all seventeen and try them.

Resurrected some old formal concept analysis code I’d written years ago. It’s not great, but it works well enough and now it’s dusted off.

I am a night owl by nature but ever since having kids I almost never sleep past 6:30am and am often awake by 5:30am. 😩 Gone are the days when I’d go to bed at 2am or later.

(#rn5muxa) @prologic@twtxt.net there is only one active user on my pod lol. Someday I may invite friends and family to use it though so we will see.

(#mzw5ema) @prologic@twtxt.net a little experimental framework for helping to build agent-based models. I’m unhappy with the existing frameworks I know about so I’m trying a different tack and so far I’m pretty happy with the results.

(#jvmjdoa) @mckinley@twtxt.net 😆

(#mzw5ema) for instance, I’m just firing all the agents’ workloads asynchronously at the CPU and hoping for the best, where it’d probably be more efficient to batch up the work. I’m using scala and haven’t done any jvm heap of GC tuning yet, so that’s another way to improve performance.

OK lovely, I have a little demo of my nascent agent modeling framework thinger that can run 100,000 agents doing non-trivial (but faked for now) computations at about 1/3 of my screen refresh rate, meaning near real-time. I haven’t tried optimizing it yet, just tinkering so far. That’s pretty promising.

(#saig7mq) @prologic@twtxt.net 🤷‍♂️ lol

(#saig7mq) Anyhow, in the scala world I like the approach the Laminar library takes. Somewhere in the guts of it is an Observer pattern but the abstraction presented to the typical library user is a bunch of signals that you wire together, some of which require responses.

(#saig7mq) As we all know, Earth subscribes to the Sun’s gravity Observable and that is why its orbit is the way it is 🙄

(#saig7mq) On a related note, I think the Observable pattern has caused a lot of damage to how people think about reactive systems.

Spent a fair amount of time today working on an agent-based modeling framework I’ve been stewing on for a long time.

(#zuvgjia) @prologic@twtxt.net get well soon!

(#5ekuk6a) @prologic@twtxt.net The main reason I used “likes” on twitter or on mastodon is as a kind of acknowledgement that I read someone’s post. Back when they used to be stars on twitter I did that more often, but likes remind me too much of facebook 🤢 Anyhow I think it’s maybe better to cut down on noise by not doing that, and only replying when there’s something to say?

(#5ekuk6a) and they’re starting to add features to promote “popular” toots and hashtags, which of course is a recipe for disaster. You’d think people would’ve learned by now how easy it is for a group of people to game popularity-based systems 🤔

(#5ekuk6a) @prologic@twtxt.net oh, totally. The fediverse has some of the same dogpiling problems as twitter, and you’re often beholden to the administrator of the instance you joined to take care of that for you. There are tools for blocking people and whole instances, which helps, but if a dozen people dive into your mentions to harass you because they decided they didn’t like something you said, you’re stuck with the labor of identifying each one and blocking them. At some point it’d be easier to abandon your account.

I don’t have a clear view of how I’d deal with something like that on yarn.social (not that I think it’d happen), but at least since I administer my own instance I have a lot of power 💪

(#lxe2kdq) @retrocrash@twtxt.net nah, this isn’t accurate. I’m on the fediverse and the Nazi problem is very real and always in your face. There are hundreds of Nazi instances and new ones pop up every day. Every day I see toots about some new asshole. And I don’t know what you’re talking about “the radical left”–in the US at least there is no such thing.

(#hkjnx7a) I guess what I do with a phone is pretty tame and doesn’t require too many resources but what I do with a computer is pretty intense and does. So maybe that says more about me than anything!

(#hkjnx7a) @mckinley@twtxt.net Thinkpads are great. I have a circa 2013 Thinkpad that is still going strong. For my day to day work though I’m doing some heavy coding of a big simulation and need as much RAM, CPU, and GPU as I can fit in a box.

Once again I am exploring scala functional effects libraries 🙄

(#gnujfjq) @prologic@twtxt.net Will do! Not sure about a PR since I don’t know Go, but I can definitely share suggested improvements if I think of any.

(#urcykrq) @prologic@twtxt.net oh yeah, the outrage cycle is horrible. It almost seems like a public health hazard that ought to be dealt with. idk, I just want to be a nerd online and not have all that in my face day after day after day 🤓

(#urcykrq) @prologic@twtxt.net I played around with Mastodon for awhile, and while it felt like a bit of an improvement over twitter, say, I didn’t like how complicated it was to self-host and federate. Also the developers seem to be pushing Mastodon more and more into becoming a twitter clone. I feel like twitter is pretty mean-spirited in part because of how it’s structured, so this worried me a lot.

(#2gjshuq) @prologic@twtxt.net I guess it’s not to everyone’s taste 😆 I’ve been mostly doing functional programming for awhile now and unison seems to address several pain points, and I think their big idea of hashing parse trees and keeping an ever-growing database of code that is easy to marshall over the network if you want is very cool.

(#urcykrq) btw I have no plans to migrate out–definitely want to give this a go for awhile. I’ve found some interesting feeds to follow, and I’m sure that will continue. However, I do like very much that the post data is not trapped in some corporation’s data center.

(#urcykrq) @prologic@twtxt.net Yes. I noticed quite a few people used to keep up twtxt feeds but then stopped. You can goodl “twtxt.txt” and find lots. Hopefully with a nice web app and phone app and cli tool like yarn.social has enough critical mass will build.

(#gnujfjq) @prologic@twtxt.net Both the web app and yarnc. I’ve mostly been using the web app to experiment, but some days I’m mostly in the command line (I’m in tech and code a fair amount) and it’s cool to be able to dash off a thought from there. I liked that about twtxt.

(#rxeepiq) @prologic@twtxt.net ahhhh that makes sense. Thank you!

(#ia7tn7q) @prologic@twtxt.net no worries! I find this to be a feature, not a bug. I like asynchronous communication because I can’t always check in (busy with life!) but do want to stay connected…

(#4y24kla) @prologic@twtxt.net hi! 👋 Thanks for writing back! I wanted to see what interacting with another person was like. And also to meet new people!

I’m liking yarn.social a lot so far, so thank you for this.

I have not been using twtxt very long. I stumbled on it long ago, but I’ve never really been into social networks and always found twitter pretty mean-spirited. But I decided to give it a go again and wanted to try to meet some folks so that I’m not always talking to my @testuser@anthony.buc.ci

(#gojpmta) I don’t think I could tolerate a ten-year-old computer, by contrast.

(#gojpmta) The camera is not good, and the battery life could be better. There are definitely some improvements in modern phones. I’m pretty impressed by how usable a nearly decade-old phone is though.

(#gojpmta) There’s a lot to be said for phones where you can replace the battery and SD card.

(#gojpmta) usable*

(#gojpmta) I put a new SD card and a new battery in it for about $30 total. One of the reasons I originally mothballed this phone and bought a new one is that at the time replacement batteries were very expensive.

(#gojpmta) Aside from the 3 Gbyte RAM limit, which hurts at times, and occasional stutters, it’s perfectly unable.

My son chewed the screen of my smart phone into nonfunctionality, so I resurrected a 9-year-old Samsung Galaxy Note 3 that used to be my primary phone.

(#mdu3vsq) @akoizumi@kyoko.nerdpol.ovh lol

(#oxj5o2a) @assets@maya.land 👍 dig this

The Unison language

Looks like a lot of fun.

(#gnujfjq) It’s nice to be able to read the timeline and write posts from the command line, since I spend a lot of my day there.

Have a computer that keeps dropping off the network and I don’t understand why 😠