rlamacraft @rlamacraft@social.cleverlibre.org

making a Lisp, checking it twice
gonna find out who's (or naughty nice)

Elm’s been a hugely inspiring language to me, because it did such a great job of making Functional Programming a joy to use & to teach.

But front of the queue for Elm-related inspiration must be Richard Feldman, who’s currently taking the best of its philosophy into a Roc. Lots of rich, juicy design ideas in this week’s episode of Developer Voices.

📺 https://youtu.be/DzhIprQan68
🎧 https://pod.link/developer-voices/episode/12c96f4851e6c11c51eff8975a556f7b

Here's how the "Ship of Theseus" page looked in July 2003 when it was first created! Since then, the article has been edited 1792 times and 0% of the original phrases remain.

It's hard for people to visualize removing tons or billions of tons of carbon dioxide (CO₂). I propose we talked about CO₂ removal (CDR) like a time machine (e.g., this machine will take us back 5 minutes). For example:

Q: How far back in time does planting 100 million trees take us?

A: If one mature tree takes up an average of 25 kg of CO₂ per year, then 100 million trees will take up 2.5 MtCO₂. That's a time machine that takes us back 33 minutes and 6 seconds in a year.

It's not a lot.

I have to say, Unison's documentation system is just next-level brilliant.

* All your libraries' docs are local.
* Everything's perfectly hyperlinked, even after refactoring.
* Markdown-ish with extensions that totally nail literate coding.

Seriously, if you're writing a language, look at Elm for the error messages and Unison for the docs.

(And Haskell for the monads, of course. 😅)

https://www.unison-lang.org/docs/usage-topics/documentation/

Just a thought

Fascinating charts about power generation by country (gift link).

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/11/20/climate/global-power-electricity-fossil-fuels-coal.html?unlocked_article_code=1.BU0.DsDB.wfepDJfyFvMY&smid=url-share

Look, this is silly. Yes, we would need unfeasible amounts of new wiring to recreate a modern high energy economy powered only by (green) electricity. But we would also need completely unfeasible amounts of lots of other things – most particularly metals. We are going to have to learn to live WELL in a much lower energy world – and, actually, it isn't hard to see how we achieve this.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/nov/25/race-to-get-uk-electricity-grid-ready-for-net-zero

If God wanted us to have unlimited free energy He’d have put a giant fusion reactor in the sky.

Public transport isn't supposed to make money. It's not even supposed to break even. It's supposed to lose money and to be financed and extended from general taxes because it gives back way more than mere money.

And all the politicians know this because they keep building and maintaining streets for free

how git cherry-pick and revert use 3-way merge https://jvns.ca/blog/2023/11/10/how-cherry-pick-and-revert-work/

I can't help but notice the new Apple laptops rate "Video Playback 22 hours, Web Browsing 15 hours" under battery life.

Congratulations web developers everywhere, it's now more computationally intense to render a webpage than video playback!

Disabled people should not be required to give their PIN to anyone - friend, stranger, or shop assistant - and probably wouldn't be protected by the banks if they did and were then robbed. This is ridiculous. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/disability-67239870

REMINDER: ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion, and other large trained neural models are NOT "artificial intelligence", they're just stochastic parrots, remixing and regurgitating what they've been fed. There's no theory-of-mind involved, so no understanding: there's no "there" there. (A real live parrot exhibits more intelligence than this.)

Don't call it AI; call it parrot-tech. That way you'll have a better perspective on what it can (and can't) do.