@marick@mstdn.social avatar

marick

@marick@mstdn.social

Long-time software person (programming and testing). Involved in Agile from relatively early on. One of those grumpy old-timers who think it's lost its way.

I retired during Covid. I am now focused on https://podcast.oddly-influenced.dev, "a podcast for people who want to apply ideas from outside software to software."

There’s a podcast-specific account at http://social.oddly-influenced.dev. This, my main account, is for other tech tweets, boosts of the amusing or interesting, and some leftish #uspol.

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

marick, to random
@marick@mstdn.social avatar

Annoying though they could be, those French Structuralists were on to something with their “binary oppositions are fundamental to thought”¹. Why else would bird identification apps say “that bird is a scarlet ibis” instead of a ranked list of likely species? Or at least say, “It’s most likely a scarlet ibis, but it could be a cardinal.” We crave absolutism, certainty, in a world that just doesn’t offer it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_opposition https://c18.masto.host/@SethRudy/112520740835645193

A cardinal. It is a red bird. It has a notably short beak and no apparent neck.

marick, to random
@marick@mstdn.social avatar

Oh, so so many wrong paths in coding/design I could have avoided if I’d voiced nagging suspicions.

Life in general, probably. https://botsin.space/

marick, to random
@marick@mstdn.social avatar

RIP Paul Parkman, codeveloper of the rubella (“German measles”) vaccine. He and Harry M. Meyer assigned their patent to the government so the vaccine could be put to use more quickly. “I never made a nickel from those patents because we wanted them to be freely available to everybody.”

The rubella vaccine is the “R” in the MMR vaccine. Andrew Wakefield, who profited handsomely from fraudulently claiming that vaccine was linked to autism, and is responsible for uncounted deaths, lives on.

marick, to random
@marick@mstdn.social avatar

49% of Americans surveyed think that unemployment is at a 50-year high. (It’s actually just a smidge over a 50-year low.)

49% think the stock market is down for the year. (It’s up 12% [S&P 500 index].)

56% think the economy is in a recession. (It’s not.)

And long-termists want to infest the universe with (the descendants of) this species! What have they got against cold, lifeless matter?

https://lamag.com/economy/3-in-5-americans-falsely-believe-u-s-economy-is-in-a-recession

https://jabberwocking.com/the-unemployment-rate-is-at-its-lowest-in-half-a-century/

marick, to random
@marick@mstdn.social avatar

Heres a chart that shows the Daily Sea Surface Temperature for every day since 1981. January 1 of this year was hotter than any other January 1 in the data set. January 2 of this year was hotter than any other January 2. … May 16 was hotter than any other May 16.

Or: every single day this year has set a record. Also it seems that every day last year since March 16, 2023 also a record.

What’s that the crypto bros say? “Number go up”?

https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/

marick, to emacs
@marick@mstdn.social avatar

I am being a good little programmer and adding docstrings to some Elixir code. I hate looking at it. It so gets in the way of the code; see below.

I want an keypress that hides all lines between two regexps (One for @…doc…”””; one for the ending “””.) Weirdly, I can’t find anything. I used to be good at Elisp/Emacs programming, but I pretty much stopped doing that around 30 years ago. So looking for something similar I can hack on (or package that obviates the need to).

Any pointers?

marick,
@marick@mstdn.social avatar

P.S. It’s my opinion that docstrings were a mistake. I imagine there was some hope that putting them next to the code they describe would help them stay up-to-date, but I am unconvinced they do. It’d be better to have a separate file which you’d bring up / jump to just like your editor lets you jump-to-definition. You don’t want to read the unformatted docstring anyway.

marick,
@marick@mstdn.social avatar

@cammerman @JeffGrigg How could code understanding be an objective thing? Are there people who actually believe a text’s interpretation is independent of the history and knowledge of the interpreter? (OK, sure: there are. Too many, in fact.) (1/4)

marick,
@marick@mstdn.social avatar

During my “literary theory” days, I remember reading Stanley Fish, whose early schtick was “reader-response criticism” (a cool idea). He started out by semi-implicitly claiming that every reader of “Paradise Lost” would react, line by line, the same.

This is obviously silly, but hey those were different times. Theories-of-everything were all the rage. (2/4)

marick,
@marick@mstdn.social avatar

So he invented “interpretive communities” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpretive_communities), which is a formalistic way of saying “people’s history influences how they react to texts”. It seemed to me kind of a deflection, because he dodged the issue of how “community” is an extremely fuzzy category. (3/4)

marick,
@marick@mstdn.social avatar

I’m reminded of poet/programmer Dick Gabriel’s assertion that “a poem is a program that executes in the brain of the reader”. It was his way of saying that of course people who extract meaning from a poem will be referring to their private Postgres instance to do SELECTs on connotations of words, phrases, etc. (4/4)

marick,
@marick@mstdn.social avatar

@JeffGrigg I broadly agree that “what the author meant” is not a useful move.

But I contrast that with something I read from Isaac Asimov. He’d written a story. He read an analysis of it from some sort of “lit crit” person. He scoffed at it. Then he thought about it and realized, “Yeah, that’s what was actually going on, though I didn’t realize it.”

marick,
@marick@mstdn.social avatar

@qurlyjoe @inthehands @paninid @JeffGrigg SNOBOL! A great language. (Well, based on using it for a week, for fun.) If I remember right, every single statement could be a goto. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Dijkstra.

swart, to random
@swart@mastodon.cloud avatar

TIL the default Emacs calendar can
display the names of the months as they were used in Revolutionary France.

marick,
@marick@mstdn.social avatar

@swart Reingold was a professor of computer science at Illinois back when I was a student there. He was quirky: seemed to like “semi-regular” problems like weird calendrical systems, laying out trees so they looked nice, etc.

marick, to random
@marick@mstdn.social avatar

“Mothers’ Day was not designed to encourage people to be nice to their mothers.” So honor the spirit of the holiday by not being nice to mom today.

Bit serially, it grew out of an anti-war movement founded by Julia Ward Howe: “The question forced itself upon me, ‘Why do not the mothers of mankind interfere in these matters, to prevent the waste of that human life of which they alone know and bear the cost?’” (1/2)

marick,
@marick@mstdn.social avatar

"Arise, women! […] Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. We, women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country, to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.’”

She proposad a “festival which should be observed as mothers’ day, and which should be devoted to the advocacy of peace doctrines”.

Info from: https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/may-11-2024 (2/2)

interfluidity, to random
@interfluidity@zirk.us avatar

i'm looking for a replacement travel backpack, something big, water resistant if i get caught in the rain, can pad a 16" laptop. i'm on a budget these days.

i find i no longer trust reviews on the internet, pretty much anywhere. maybe i trust "word of mouth"? any recommendations?

marick,
@marick@mstdn.social avatar

@interfluidity I’ve had my Tom Bihn bag for about a decade, use it for bicycle commuting daily and took it on trips. Interior stitching that forms pockets for pens, wallet, phone, etc. has partly come loose but otherwise solid. Their bags were advertised as “rain resistant” rather than “rain proof”. I carry a stuff sack in it for rain.

Laptop has its own case that clips in.

Not cheap, but amortized over a decade…?

https://www.tombihn.com/

marick, to random
@marick@mstdn.social avatar

This is “helicopter” season in Illinois, during which maple trees drop vast numbers of seeds with “wings” that twirl attractively as the seeds fall.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jt5tnmBZoTo
…

marick,
@marick@mstdn.social avatar

I’d always assumed that the point was that the seeds could be blown away from the parent tree, find better places to sprout. But I noted, as we sat on the stoop, that they did not in fact go any further than, say, acorns.

Dawn pointed out that helicopters almost always fall seed down. It’s true! Maybe that’s what makes the expense of building the wings worthwhile.

Lesson in why programmers should chill out and not judge how other people are doing their jobs.

raganwald, to random
@raganwald@social.bau-ha.us avatar

“At first you may say to yourself, ‘Hey this thing looks kinda like a Playdate’ and you wouldn't be far off.

“But the difference is the Playdate is a fun, charming, intentionally simple little console that you play for five minutes whenever you remember you own it, and the rabbit is a cretinous imposition that I don’t ever want to hear about again after this blog.”

https://aftermath.site/why-would-i-buy-this-useless-evil-thing

🎩 @dandean

marick,
@marick@mstdn.social avatar

@raganwald @dandean @daringfireball I guess I failed to do the background reading because, having finished the product review, I’m not sure what the product does and why I would want it. I point it at things and it tells me about them? I ask it questions and it gives me answers while not being a phone?

marick, to random
@marick@mstdn.social avatar

I’ve developed a dislike of the American Robins that are all over our yard. They head south when the going gets tough in the winter, then they come back when things are easier, all fat and smug. You know they’re telling the Cardinals – who toughed it out all winter long – about how They Did It Wrong, and should have pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, and what not.

Robins are the Mitt Romney’s of the bird kingdom: “we had it hard too, we had to sell inherited stock to fund college”.

A male Cardinal, sitting on a coniferous tree branch, including small pine cones. The leaves have clumps of snow on them.

marick, to random
@marick@mstdn.social avatar

Haidt is one of those “public intellectuals” whose later work makes me wonder if his earlier work that I liked was just as bad, but happened to tickle my biases or my innate contrarianism.

See also Jared Diamond. https://mastodon.social/@jeffjarvis/112309679600238882

marick,
@marick@mstdn.social avatar

@acdha Haven’t really followed it closely, but Diamond’s description of Easter Island in /Collapse/ was fairly strongly contested. His “Vengeance is Ours” article in the New Yorker¹ was also strongly criticized.

Over the years, Diamond has shifted into my “assume by default he has a fixed idea and looks for confirming evidence” category. Which doesn’t make him special, and I certainly don’t think I’m better than him.

¹ https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/04/21/vengeance-is-ours

cvennevik, to random
@cvennevik@hachyderm.io avatar

Man I really wanna do more stuff with https://gleam.run/

marick,
@marick@mstdn.social avatar

@gvwilson @cvennevik I, too, am interested in your answer.

marick, to random
@marick@mstdn.social avatar

Dawn, on the stoop: “I’ve seen a lot of scrotums, and human scrotums are the grossest.”

I think bull and goat scrotums are uglier, but reasoned discussion failed.

Dawn cares most about wrinkliness.
I care most about dangliness.

I am obliged, given my ideological commitments, to agree that there’s no linear scale of grossness upon with which you can place wrinkliness and dangliness.

So I am compelled to accept her point of view as valid. It sucks being woke.

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