💾 Archived View for pn.id.lv › shortform.gmi captured on 2022-04-28 at 17:26:43. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2022-03-01)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
author: @paulsnar
Colophon:
So for the past two days I've been suckered into re-reading 17776 (still, I posit, one of the best pieces of contemporary fiction). It holds up just as well as it did when it came out.
What football will look like in the future
And also, from the same Jon Bois, just about two years ago a followup, 20020, was published, which I somehow missed.
The Future of College Football
Now I'm eagerly waiting for 20021. If 17776 was more exploratory, 20020 is a proper story with long-term heroes and consequences. The technical execution is brilliant on both, using just the right amount of gimmicks for it to come together beautifully. And Bois definitely has a distinctive, casually-realistic style of storytelling and a vision for how it should come together. I cannot recommend both of the above highly enough.
Also, from earlier today:
Those Tailscale folks are goddamn crazy in their quest for simplicity. I mean, I'd use their setup any day of the week, if only stuff like PHP supported it just slightly better.
SQLite is lowkey bae, and its usefulness in any level of the stack cannot be overstated. As they say, the database format itself works very well for structured data interchange, especially for any data that's remotely relational, and SQLite itself is also amazing for data analysis (again, when useful to do relationally.) It's almost like a well-structured spreadsheet, if you think about it, against which you can run ad-hoc queries (or make them persistent with views) and it's fit for more than just the number crunching that spreadsheets are usually used for.
This is buying directly into my PL enthusiasm, but nonetheless:
Weak-Ref Implementations: Swift, Obj-C, C++, Rust, and Vale
https://verdagon.dev/blog/surprising-weak-refs
Interesting survey of trade-offs among the various languages that have to deal with this. This focuses on non-GCed languages with precise memory management—for languages like Java, they pretty much have zombie objects anyway for indefinite amounts of time until the GC decides to notice them being disused, and at that point it can update all of the weak references to them to explicitly be nullified, and therefore both aren't particularly interesting in this context and aren't discussed.
As an aside, the god object paradigm isn't that bad, at least when used in moderation. Say, for game engines, oftentimes the current object list is as good as global anyway (in fact, I reckon it actually is usually stored as a global) so the fact about a god object in isolation isn't necessarily a bad thing; just that it should be done carefully if the context of such a list isn't actually beneficial to be global.
Secondarily, Vale seems like an interesting post-evolution of a language that seeks to fulfill a Rust-like role but also have various properties evolved beyond Rust (or simply have different takes on them; Rust is in some senses very opinionated, but the opinions it embodies aren't the only valid ones.)A lot of the material surrounding it implies that it's designed very deliberately, much like Zig has been, so it'd be really interesting to check out.
There's a small subsection of general purpose programming languages that were prominently created by a corporation, supposed for use beyond their own purview, but failed to pick up momentum in that way and instead got relegated to being the language of that particular company. Two examples are Swift for Apple, and Dart for Google (in fact, primarily for Flutter at that.)
And it's a shame. They're good languages and they could well be used for more than they tend to be, but a failure to be picked up at an early stage for wide use has instead feedback-looped them into being very secular and in turn making it more risky to build anything good atop them, lest the big user decide to break something that you rely on. (In Swift's case, I believe not all of the tooling is even available outside Xcode.)
Notable counterexamples are Rust and Go which too were created by corporations but are used much more widely than for the corporation's internal interests only. (And there are others which begun corporatively or were majorly sponsored in that way, like Python and Node.js, but transitioned out of that phase.) There's still the fact that sometimes their evolution can be bent by corporate interests, but for constrictive changes there's enough of a countervailing force among the wider userbase to push against them.
(Content warning: suicide.)
Ukrainian mathematician Константин Ольмезов has passed by his own volition, in part due to circumstances arising out of current events. He was also a poet, and quite a wordsmith at that; I reckon his parting note is worth reading. The definitive source is in Russian and on Telegram.
For those who don't speak Russian, there's an English translation here that's fairly good, though in some places not as elaborate and colourful as the original.
https://twitter.com/UkrainianMath/status/1505616935454654464
The war rages on.
Quoting zverok, please proceed with your day.
Though the framing of this article about "ghosts" is a bit too cute for my tastes—maybe there isn't a great name for this concept but I feel like "implicit state" is a bit more in line with the terminology that usually gets used, though I'll admit that it might not be exactly the concept the author referenced—it raises some good points, the central one being that the way many references tend to be formulated requires extra context to evaluate them properly, and the context is usually invisible or at least poorly defined; the example about IP addresses hit home hard.
https://blog.sunfishcode.online/no-ghosts/
Checking out Jet Set Radio. Wow what a cult classic it is. Like, from a modern sensibility for the most part it's as vanilla as the Beatles, but similarly it's a jam despite its age and influence. It feels floaty at first but once you get used to it, the controls start to make sense as an analogue to supercharged rollerskates. And boy howdy, the soundtrack deserves all the praise that it's ever gotten. (Oddly enough, this is the third? game I've gotten into because of its OST.)
Also yes, a Splatoon/JSR or FNF/JSR crossover would be *rad*.
Hey all. This is a test of the ``paulsnar shortform`` system.
Short remark on the "remnants" article.
gemini://tilde.pink/~maria/log/2022-02-21_remnants.gmi
I feel as though I'm in much the same boat some days. Unfettered enthusiasm for computing feels good at first, but it becomes a burden if taken as an impulse to create when you're unable to. I reckon most people have a graveyard of half-finished projects (or even ones that haven't started) to show for it. And in that sense, perhaps it is better to recognize this early and avoid the emotional toll that comes with having to let go of something you had high hopes for.
That said, I can't say that should be a barrier to creation. When you can find something that's innately limited in scope and you are sure you can accomplish in a reasonable timeframe, there are few things better than having a project become useful. And maybe this skill of being able to call a project's scope and deciding whether to indulge in it is itself something that's harder for techies than it would be for people in the real world, given that computers are innately untangible and also are good at hiding pitfalls until you fall into them.
Either way, I loved that.