@Kazinator@mstdn.ca
@Kazinator@mstdn.ca avatar

Kazinator

@Kazinator@mstdn.ca

I'm Kaz Kylheku, in #Vancouver, #Canada.

I've been working on a long-term side project since 2009: TXR Language (a programming language).

I have a history of working with #FOSS.

I'm into #cycling, #guitar, #Japanese.

#ShowYa fanatic: https://show-ya.jp/

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

jwcph, to music Danish
@jwcph@norrebro.space avatar

Yes, I know, some of these "I wish I knew this sooner" tips from a bunch of guitarists directly contradict each other - but that just means there's good advice for every type of player 😁

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekBfGdm51gU

Kazinator,
@Kazinator@mstdn.ca avatar

@jwcph

What I don't "get" in is how there have been successful players who used thin or medium pick all their careers.

I can't help by thinking they just used their talent to brute force their use of a bad piece of equipment; they could all have been even better with a proper 1.5 mm thick unit with a beveled edge.

I mean, when you just A/B compare them (same guitar, amp settings) there is no contest between the tone and release speed.

andrewfeeney, to HashtagGames
@andrewfeeney@phpc.social avatar

CAUTION KALE


Kazinator,
@Kazinator@mstdn.ca avatar

@andrewfeeney

Let that be a cautionary kale to all ...

sfwrtr, to business
@sfwrtr@eldritch.cafe avatar

Got down to stuff, now that I'm retired and can devote time to the of . First order of business: catalog the unsold novels from after the burn out that need revision and rewrites.

Turns out that disconnecting my Mac from my work VPN messed up my folders. I had somehow mapped (don't know the Mac term) my work Windows computer folders to the Mac, and when I look in documents it tries to find it on the network and fails. If I reboot, so long as I go directly from my user's directory to documents directory, I'm good. If I click on Documents in Finder, it redirects and I'm screwed.

First thing I did was copy all my writing folders to the desktop. At least I've lost none of my old novels and short work.

I thought there were 7 completed books, and I said so online. There are actually 9, three that form a trilogy and one novel with a sequel in the mix. There are two incomplete novels.

Some works are older than others. Pages refuses to open one novel from 1996, a fun space opera that possibly has the highest chance of early sales. I haven't tried the others. Now I gotta install Word, of which I am not a fan, and investigate programs that'll open the really old files. If anyone wants to chime in with suggestions, please do! (I can always find someone with a Windows machine if need be.) Putting Google on TODO. I actually have original copies of chapters from my Apple ] days, but thankfully I updated those to the Mac and to a new millennium version of Word in what were my PowerPC days.

Incidentally, there really are three novellas in good shape.What surprises me though? There looks like about 15 short stories, many complete because I see multiple submissions in the various folders. I completely forgot about these, and was sure I never wrote short-form.

Baby steps, I guess.

[

Kazinator,
@Kazinator@mstdn.ca avatar

@sfwrtr @stevendbrewer @taur10 @alan

That problem with the file from 1989 (lower case a's becoming circumflexes) is worth reporting.

If you were able to attach that file to the bug report, there is a good chance someone could look at it.

I reported a user experience problem in a certain Libre Office Writer dialog about paragraph breaking, just this past summer. It was discussed, and got addressed.

Kazinator, to Lisp
@Kazinator@mstdn.ca avatar

For decades now, has provided synonyms for those functions named after IBM 704 ISA features.

In 2024, can we please lay this issue to CDR?

Kazinator,
@Kazinator@mstdn.ca avatar

@ksaj

I belong to an elite group of humorists; our cadre is second to nil.

Kazinator, to Lisp
@Kazinator@mstdn.ca avatar

Magic Pipes:

Suite of tools to operate on structure (S-exp) data via Unix pipes, with conversion to and from text formats.

https://kitten-technologies.co.uk/project/magic-pipes/doc/trunk/README.wiki

rjblaskiewicz, (edited ) to guitar
@rjblaskiewicz@mstdn.social avatar

Bought 2 more guitar tuners. Jesus. I've bought, like, a half dozen in the last year, but I can only find one. Where do they all go? (I will say that you strummin' youngin's have it super easy though. We old farts had to tune by ear. Uphill in the snow.)

Kazinator,
@Kazinator@mstdn.ca avatar

@rjblaskiewicz

I use an Android app called Pitch Lab Lite. I originally used it years ago on a phone that was on Android 4. You can't find it in the store any more, but the APK is easy to find. Runs fine on a Pixel 4a with Android 13.

I tried many apps in the past, but none compare.

Kazinator,
@Kazinator@mstdn.ca avatar

@rjblaskiewicz

I sometimes use it to check my own pitch. I fire it fire it up and whistle the first two notes of Bach's Violin Concerto 1 in Am, as I hear it in my memory. The second note should be an A.

I see I'm 10 cents sharp today.

My whistle identifies as near A6 (1760 Hz). It's actually an A5 in the violin score.

When tuning guitars, I just use my memory of that concerto to get the A string close. Then put on some music and fine tune it, and check with the tuner app.

b0rk, (edited ) to random
@b0rk@jvns.ca avatar

what git jargon do you find confusing? thinking of writing a blog post that explains some of git's weirder terminology: "detached HEAD state”, "fast-forward", "index/staging area/staged", “ahead of 'origin/main' by 1 commit”, etc

(really only looking for terms that you personally find confusing, not terms that you think someone else might be confused about)

Kazinator,
@Kazinator@mstdn.ca avatar

@b0rk

Hi Julia, I'm a user of "rebase --onto".

I wrote a HackerNews comment about this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=38118040

Kazinator, to foss
@Kazinator@mstdn.ca avatar

I started a tiny project which, using a small Lisp program and Vim syntax file, turns Vim into a usable pager for man pages.

It remembers your last position in every page that you read.

https://www.kylheku.com/cgit/mnpgr/about/

malwaretech, to random

My favorite quantum physics explanations was from someone who responded to the question "what is electron spin" with "Imagine a ball and it's spinning, except its not a ball and its not spinning". It seems like a shitpost, but pretty much sums up all of quantum physics philosophy.

Kazinator,
@Kazinator@mstdn.ca avatar

@malwaretech

The thing is, electrons are actually spinning in the sense they generate a magnetic field in the same way as if a charge were going around in circles.

From the magnetic field we infer there is a current loop, which we interpret as spin since it looks that way.

loke, (edited ) to random
@loke@functional.cafe avatar

ArXiv is a weird name. How do you say it?

Kazinator,
@Kazinator@mstdn.ca avatar

@loke

R 14 ?

amoroso, to Lisp
@amoroso@fosstodon.org avatar

In this post Michał Herda explained what Lisp programmers intuitively know.

The parentheses don't bother Lisp programmers as they read code by its indentation and rely on Lisp-aware tools such as editors and IDEs, which match parentheses and properly indent code.

https://nl.movim.eu/?blog/phoe%40movim.eu/cd3577f6-fb1d-45f5-b881-7b9a68ee822e

Kazinator,
@Kazinator@mstdn.ca avatar

@ArneBab @amoroso

Not everything to which you don't constantly pay attention should be gone.

If you have parentheses/brackets/braces and indentation together, that's a useful redundancy. You can mess one up and recover it from the other. Or even diagnose when they don't match.

GCC has a "misleading indentation" diagnostic that would not be possible in a language in which there is only indentation.

Kazinator,
@Kazinator@mstdn.ca avatar

@ArneBab @amoroso

In related news, in a comunication protocol without checksums or ECC/parity bits, there cannot be a misleading bit!

Kazinator,
@Kazinator@mstdn.ca avatar

@ArneBab @amoroso

By the way, the next release of TXR will have an auto-compound mode in the listener. This affects only inputs that have two or more expressions. In the regular mode, they are put into a progn. so 1 2 3 evaluates (progn 1 2 3); 3 is printed. In the new mode, the progn is dropped so + 1 2 is evaluated as (+ 1 2). I merged this a few weeks ago.

itnewsbot, to guitar
@itnewsbot@schleuss.online avatar

Modeling A Guitar for Circuit Simulation - Guitar effects have come a long way from the jangly, unaltered sounds of the 1950s... - https://hackaday.com/2023/08/19/modeling-a-guitar-for-circuit-simulation/ #equivalentcircuit #numericalsolution #musicalhacks #simulation #circuit #effects #guitar #model #music #spice

Kazinator,
@Kazinator@mstdn.ca avatar

@itnewsbot

Article forgets to explain why: why the heck do you need a circuit representing the impedances of a guitar.

After playing with this in circuit emulation, you will come to the conclusion that your input stage should have an impedance of at least a megohm in order to minimize losing high end due to the source impedance of a passive pickup.

But that is something you would already know in the first place.

nil, to Lisp
@nil@functional.cafe avatar

deleted_by_author

    •
    Kazinator,
    @Kazinator@mstdn.ca avatar

    @nil

    In TXR Lisp, if a function call form has a symbol in the dot position, that symbol is understood as denoting a variable which holds a list of arguments to be applied.

    Thus you can do:

    (defun wrap-foo (a b c . rest)
    (foo a b c . rest))

    which is so obvious it makes you wonder where the hell it's been hiding for over sixty years of Lisp.

    Kazinator,
    @Kazinator@mstdn.ca avatar

    @nil

    I got something along this idea to work in TXR Lisp, by defining a macro called sc (splicing call or spreading call)

    https://topaz.github.io/paste/#XQAAAQCBAQAAAAAAAAAUGQimgscbO3GxWdnFoSTGP3tIGIm0dQ/p+rsOaC2qfSRVons+tq9MkWxMqRNCtVR0kru8AJBKRXzrnd2HaV7zCjDKukzFr9FwE7Rjurx0gLiZ2BJFk/CMMhHWQotcUAgvia9w6o5f1+a3c9kj9vww4sea74PKXRoRbXufsFoIchhPWTV3gg4wHuT5CszZs1jOWi98wNzoawD4cn+3xlvTvX2u3yDuK1wldAQjEvqg1s2bciGeAWX4J6gSE+YdPqau/WPA4HcA2ltub8SkegBd9od1oeDsDnmj//VPK8M=

    Kazinator,
    @Kazinator@mstdn.ca avatar

    @nil

    But instead of targeting the quasiquote splice, we could reprogram the @ notation (where @sym means (sys:var sym) and @<expr> means (sys:expr <expr>).

    https://topaz.github.io/paste/#XQAAAQCZAQAAAAAAAAAUGQimgscbO3GxWdnFoSTGP3tIGIm0dQ/p+rsOaC2qfSRVons+tq9MkWxMqRNCtVR0kru8AJBKRXzrnd2HaV7zCjDKukzFr9FwE7Rjurx0gLiZ2BJFk/CMMhHWQotcUAgvia8jaJD3A6KHN1KGDALR/CR84zwnc4OfxgB2CEoAu4Yj9bmQXsUwx2mkiPotr4dcvyyOh5XrSFLWcY54HRNyPGn7eOa9JrDZEZQEhByKSSNbEcYnE8y21HT+nJolRqHz95frn3mfo0gRl9oXP2NIMcViBU0hiopJ8D7Y+QjAfrZfWwGr06D3uyyF//IxucI=

    Kazinator,
    @Kazinator@mstdn.ca avatar

    @nil

    I made the quasi-quoting operators unhinged on purpose; the reader/parser doesn't enforce commas inside backquotes. If you write ,foo at the REPL, that is just a (sys:unquote foo) form that is diagnosed via a binding to a macro that reports an error.

    TXR Lisp has two backquote implementations. The one with the syntactic uses operators in the sys: package.

    This lets you do:

    1> (let ((qq-fragment '(,x ,y ,z)))
    (qquote ^(abc (splice qq-fragment))))
    ^(abc ,x ,y ,z)

    rml, to Lisp
    @rml@functional.cafe avatar

    Just hear me out -- what if cons isn't actually magnificent.

    Kazinator,
    @Kazinator@mstdn.ca avatar

    @rml

    cons is the only structure that is naturally persistent without anything ugly going on under the hood.

    When we (cons item list), we actually, truly, leave the list alone. We do not copy any part of it, other than just the pointer, and allocate only a small cell of memory by pulling it off some free list, or bump-allocating it.

    Kazinator,
    @Kazinator@mstdn.ca avatar

    @rml

    Just hear me out! What if it's not magnificent that there cannot be a bignum whose value is 1?

    If you promise to listen to a 2 hour sales pitch on the N suffix on integers, you will earn a free weekend stay at a lake side time share!

    theteapixie, to AirBNB
    @theteapixie@mstdn.ca avatar

    Do the “more expensive” apartment buildings “” rather than

    How in the world could a one bedroom apartment cost more than $3,000 per month?

    Kazinator,
    @Kazinator@mstdn.ca avatar

    @AccordionBruce @theteapixie

    The housing crisis is caused purely by unbridled population growth due to immigration, without building out our cities to keep up.

    The investment profit has been possible because the fundamentals of the market (rapidly increasing demand, poorly increasing supply) support it, that's all.

    Profit doesn't simply arise from people's desire for profit. Bubbles driven purely by psychology, not supported by fundamentals, soon burst.

    E.g. Beanie Babies craze of 1998.

    loke, to random
    @loke@functional.cafe avatar

    I've come to realise that no one will even consider spending any time looking at Kap, the programming language I've been working on since the start of COVID.

    It doesn't matter how many neat posts I write explaining how to do various cool things. If there is no reference documentation, even the most dedicated people will not even consider it.

    So I started writing some reference documentation. I've only documented a small number of functions so far, but I still want to share my progress.

    Also, this document is really only useful for people who already know the syntax (probably by learning APL). I started writing a tutorial as well (it's liked from the main page) but it isn't very good and should be rewritten.

    With all those disclaimers done, here's the link: https://kapdemo.dhsdevelopments.com/reference.html

    I guess I'm just fishing for comments (good or bad). Just knowing there are a handful of people out there that cares a little about this would be joyful.

    Kazinator,
    @Kazinator@mstdn.ca avatar

    @loke

    > "Note that lines cannot be broken in the middle of a symbol. In other words, the newline is interpreted as a space."

    ... just kidding! While the thing about the space is true, symbols are one character wide and so don't have a middle. Had you going there for a minute!

    😜​

    cheeseblintzes, to showerthoughts
    @cheeseblintzes@c.im avatar

    Why are printers such fickle mistresses? Why do we all have bad luck with printers?

    Kazinator,
    @Kazinator@mstdn.ca avatar

    @cheeseblintzes

    They are complex, mechanical devices subject to merciless cost reduction pressures, with thin profit margins, which has reduced all but the higher end models to disposable vehicles for selling ink/toner.

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