spacehobo

@spacehobo@teh.entar.net

British dad with a Yank accent and a Dutch bike who just wants both his countries back from the fash.

"Forget the damned motor car
and build cities for lovers and friends."
— Lewis Mumford

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

jef, to random
@jef@mastodon.social avatar

So as of Monday, CA AB1909's LPI provision is in effect. LPI is Leading Pedestrian Indicator - when the crosswalk signal says you can go before the traffic light turns green. AB1909 says that this applies to bicycles too.

I've been doing this for the past year, even though it was not legal yet, as an advance scout to see if I ran into any problems. And I did: scrambles. 🧵

spacehobo,

@enobacon @jef https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yd1ivPt09q0 ← @hembrow has a bunch of old videos of simultaneous green junctions on his channel, which are worth watching to see different scales of this just...working.

spacehobo, to random

I have no idea what I'm doing is my knee slewed send halp

spacehobo,

let the bodies hit the noise floor

spacehobo,

I dunno, these plugins sure are pretty, but every time I try to learn how to mess with audio it always comes across as utter babble. I seem to have achieved the effects I wanted, but I was using an old pre-treated track so who knows what it'll do on raw input from the new mic that's coming next week.

Anyway, at least it's all non-destructive effects now. I don't care how much latency gets chucked at this stuff, so long as it works, so I'm happy to keep fiddling around.

spacehobo,

A lot of this reminds me of trying to learn Unix in the 80s: loads of people babbling in jargon, insistent that the terse man pages told me exactly how to use each tool.

None of those pages told me why I'd use any given tool! And if they did, they did so in more jargon. And any actual "here's a normal human use case, broken down" documentation tended to be a sales pitch for a particular expensive suite of proprietary BS.

Audacity has live LADSPA/LV2/VST plugins, now, so these things are available outside the realm of chin-stroking synth musicians. It's time to actually help people set up effects chains for normal stuff like recording voice tracks or fixing up noisy field recordings. I don't want to crunch my flange on a saturated meta-harmonic oscillator sidechain: I want to remove mouth clicks and over-projected sibilants.

spacehobo, to random

All the Americans on the fediverse are tragically reminding me that #EggNogg in the US is not the boozy posset it is in the rest of the world. I remember growing up drinking horrid vanilla-nutmeg heavy cream from tetrapak cartons in the 80s, and wondering who found that enjoyable. It wasn't until I left prohibition-scarred America that I found out what the rum-and-egg-white drinks are actually supposed to taste like.

spacehobo,

@FourT4 Wait until you find out what they mean by "cider" over there!

spacehobo,

@penryu https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/egg_nog_64580 ← Sorry, you're right: it's the yolks, not the whites. I shall amend.

cenbe, to random
@cenbe@mastodon.sdf.org avatar

I'm starting to like the "eric" Python IDE, but the UX is criminal. Look at the number of icons, you could die from it!

spacehobo,

@cenbe Was this the one you were IRCing from, earlier?

jwz, (edited ) to random
@jwz@mastodon.social avatar

ZALGO, HE METAL.

Best spam of the week. At least they spelled my name right:

From: <export001@huaxiaometal.com>
To: <jwz@jwz.org>
Subject: To jwz : 43O SS coil,sheet,bar,wire,tube,pipe.
Date: Fri, 29 Dec 2023 14:52:43 +0800.
X-Mailer: Microsoft CDO for Windows 2000

To j͕̠̦̪͕̓͛̊̾̄ͅw̧̧̳̪̘͊̋͗̾͢͠z"̘̞͈̺̞̩̓̽̐̋͗̆̋̚͟͜

Dear jwz

There are our competitive products:
https://jwz.org/b/ykH6

spacehobo,

@jwz For one brief, utterly baffled second, I thought you were referring to the ZWJs used in the Zalgo string.

penryu, to random
@penryu@hachyderm.io avatar

This reminds me of every time I've ever talked about Legos.
https://www.velcro.com/original-thinking/the-velcro-brand-trademark-guidelines/dont-say-velcro/

spacehobo,

@penryu Technically it is Velcro® Brand Hook-And-Loop Food Product™

spacehobo,

@penryu WE MUST CONFORM TO BRANDING GUIDELINES OR SOCIETY WILL FALL TO RUIN.

amoroso, to retrocomputing
@amoroso@fosstodon.org avatar

Those who dismiss or deride BASIC don't go beyond the language. Guillaume Chereau points out there's more to BASIC as on early microcomputers it provided a full development environment too, almost an IDE.

I'd say BASIC also supported a REPL-based, exploratory programming style similar to Lisp's.

https://gcher.com/posts/2023-12-24-basic/

spacehobo,

@amoroso And I think that derision of BASIC as a "toy" language by smug 6502 or z80 ASM programmers caused some smugness to rub off against REPLs as a concept for a decade or so.

It's important to remember that BASIC was used in some heavy-duty production workloads! The lighting system for A Chorus Line in the mid-70s was all managed by a PDP-8 running BASIC, and it was at the time the most complex lighting plan of any stage show in history.

https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/X1060.91

spacehobo,

@amoroso And worse code density, for some use cases!

luis_in_brief, to random
@luis_in_brief@social.coop avatar

Sigh. You can see in the data that this mailing list suffered a catastrophic dropoff after a specific month. What happened in that month? (checks archives) Oh, right, giant flamewar that moderators did not (could not?) put a stop to. Wish I could see how many unsubscribes happened that month.

spacehobo,

@luis_in_brief @jessamyn I remember @joeyh published a blog post once that was sort of a Jane's Guide to Thread Structures. You could see from screenshots of the thread indicators whether something was a dogpile (lots of people responding to one post midway through a thread, but no further engagement after that), or "get a room" (two people replying back-and-forth, for screenfuls), or any number of other common patterns.

Of course he also set up the mailman-haters list, which I recommended use the controversial "moderate unsubscription" feature, so nobody could leave...

evan, (edited ) to random
@evan@cosocial.ca avatar

When you play online games, how often do you play with strangers?

#EvanPoll #poll

spacehobo,

@penryu @evan Same.

spacehobo, to random

Me? Oh, I'm anti-prescriptivist except I support the death penalty for anyone who says "a software".

spacehobo,

@penryu Do people say "A hammer is a hardware"?

Do people sit on "a furniture"?

Do you turn on "an equipment"?

spacehobo,

@evan @penryu Jail for Evan! Jail for a thousand years!

amoroso, to VintageOSes
@amoroso@fosstodon.org avatar

This 1982 interview with Gary Kildall is interesting because it focuses on CP/M-86 which is little known.

It made me notice a difference with MS-DOS I hadn't thought of before. Like Unix and unlike MS-DOS, CP/M-86 shipped with a complete software development environment with tools such as an assembler, which might have contributed to the higher price.

https://computeradsfromthepast.substack.com/p/gary-kildall-has-a-talk-with-pc-magazine

#cpm #cpm86 #retrocomputing

spacehobo,

@amoroso He was also using the sales to finance development of MP/M, which was something people used to run z80 systems like minicomputers, with loads of terminals on one machine. I think he saw the 8086 machines as a future expansion for that ("I can have 10 users, each with their own 64k of RAM!!") rather than the more middle-ground workstations they became.

spacehobo, to random

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vc0DFCVzAEY ← Mostly about non-London, but it absolutely neglects the self-defeating corruption within the bus companies in London.

amoroso, to Lisp
@amoroso@fosstodon.org avatar

The Register published this fascinating article. It's a reread of the history of computing with a focus on Lisp, Lisp Machines, and early workstations:

https://www.theregister.com/2023/12/25/the_war_of_the_workstations

#LispMachines #lisp #retrocomputing

spacehobo,

@amoroso It's a popular type of rose-tinted glasses, and the Unix-Haters definitely had some valid complaints about the rough edges and sharp corners of the Unix workstations of the era. But this misses two things:

  1. Even back then, the Unix systems ran their LISP code something like thirty times faster than the purpose-built hardware.
  2. Their complaints about stability sound a lot like Unix/Linux nerds mocking Windows in 1996. Both complaints were outdated, after time was put into stability.

Watch someone demo a running Symbolics machine from the 80s, sometime. It's a massive pile of fans blowing over boards covered in ULA/PLA glue, and the GUI draws at something like one frame every two seconds.

There's a talk I used to clip, by B🤬b M🤬rtin, before he let the mask slip and showed what he really was. He recounted a story where Ward Cunningham, one of the original Smalltalk bigwigs, was asked at a conference what made it fail. His answer was a summary of all of the problems with a live-editing environment without a model of source files, or the inability to reproduce or share software without sending over your whole environment, or the fast-and-loose attitude toward data types:

> "It was just too easy to make a mess."

This also holds true for Lisp Machines. They let you shoot yourself in the gun, and people did, and then you had a million-dollar paperweight until Genius could be applied to right the ship and raise it from the sea floor.

One thing the move to Unix brought was reproducibility and stability. And for all the hacky project that Unix itself was in the BSD era, the Lisp payload environments were like little containers that you could stab like a virtual machine. Yeah, people had to go from GUIs back to serial terminals, but they could edit code from a PC at home and they could afford for more than one or two people to use LISP at a time. And hey, your code actually finished before the heat death of the universe!

GossiTheDog, to random
@GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social avatar

deleted_by_author

    •
    spacehobo,

    @GossiTheDog Yeah she does that on purpose.

    spacehobo, to random

    Happy #Boxeen, everybody.

    hotdogsladies, to random
    @hotdogsladies@mastodon.social avatar

    It's not even in the first five things normal people know about Tom Waits, but, holy shit can that guy write a pop song.

    Terrific arrangement too.

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

    spacehobo,

    @hotdogsladies When Rod Stewart did that anodyne rendition of it that sold a squillion records, Tom apparently called him up to thank him for the new swimming pool.

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