Notices by Alex McLean (yaxu@post.lurk.org)

I travelled down to Cambridge University to give a free talk a few weeks ago. Their procedure to reclaim travel expenses is an absolute joke, involving reading and processing three different documents with overlapping info, then sending information they already have to another email address manne which turned out to be manned by the same person who asked me to send it, to register with their system. Two weeks later nothing has happened so I can't even start the actual claim process which looks awful. I feel completely ripped off and disrespected by one of the poshest institutions in the world.

@pettter Yes I'm thinking of the mother of all demos, and projects like Dynamicland that have followed it. Personally I'm a live coder writing code to make live music to make people dance. I'm not really sure where I'm going with it but it just seems to me like there must be interesting unexplored territory between natural and programming languages, or explored territory that I don't know about (which is why I asked ;) )

@pettter I think you're talking to a straw man there, I not arguing that programming-as-we-know-it should go away necessarily (maybe it should, but that's an entirely different argument).
I don't think programming-as-we-know-it was the 'original' use of programming languages though. Have a look at early work of Douglas Englebart for example.

@pettter That's a bit like saying that speech is primarily intended and used to create air pressure waves. It's true but is totally missing the point I think. Programming languages are primarily used to explore ideas, and interact with and ask questions about world in which we live.

@pettter I've come across the 'category error' argument a lot, but it just makes no sense to me. There is no single 'entire point' of programming languages, people use them for all sorts of things.

I'm not really interested in LLM approaches to this question as like you say, they don't really work, and natural language is fundamentally embodied and LLMs don't have bodies.

What research work is there comparing / blurring the lines between computer languages and natural languages?
I guess there is inform7 as the most famous and maybe successful attempt https://ganelson.github.io/inform-website/
but what about trying to make programming languages that are _really_ natural? I.e. change through use, change through being learned, have prosody or other analogue carrier of information/emotion, have dialects, sarcasm etc..

Is there a fairly cheap and quick way to get a cv signal to control synths out of a computer?
It seems a hifiberry stuck to a raspberry pi is one way (as they're 'dc-coupled' audio DACs), but I'd love an easy way to use teensy or arduinos for it that doesn't involve too much soldering.. I need a few for a workshop and am time-poor.

I've been thinking a lot about what a friend pointed out - that mixed gendered spaces often quickly become male-exclusive because men tend to have much higher tolerance for arsehole behaviour than women, so it only takes one dodgy person to destroy a community as all the women basically leave. Once such a community has heavy male bias it can hardly recover, and its lack of representation means it can hardly succeed in any social, cultural or technical aims. Rings true for the extraordinarily bad gender balance in free/open source software in the context of the Stallman report.

This is a trend.. People with a lot of 'X' followers desperately encouraging them not to leave, despite admitting that the platform is an intolerable cesspit. Why don't they at least post to multiple platforms instead of being obsessed with the most toxic one?

@pettter yep hopefully! I've enjoyed engaging with that field in the past although I imagine it's been overridden by the currently pervasive 'ai' fashions lately?

Who'd be interested in an event with talks and some performances around making notations and programming languages for pattern-making (textile, musical, choreographic etc)? Half focussed online, half focussed in-person, all streamed. Mix of open call and invited talks. All free/open access. Probably in January. Maybe called "Programming Of The Art Computer".

Happy to be taking part in the online "After AI" symposium with @anu1905 on the 17th May, talking about "Algorithmic Patterns after AI" https://afteraisymposium.com/symposium-program#WMQ8490mh8PyRvGR

The more mainstream programming languages I learn, the more I think they're all basically the same with minor tradeoffs, and that the posturing of the more aggressive language advocates is wasted energy. For real difference and possibility you have to look at the weird fringes of esoteric, live and visual languages

@pettter Yes fair points. The original data reporter did supply plenty of context though, making it clear that access to healthcare in the UK has consistently got worse under the tories, due to underinvestment https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1606223922474627073

@pettter According to the graphs I posted, there are three times the number of people on waiting lists than when Labour last left power. Waiting time depends on what they're waiting for, but e.g. for emergencies the people waiting more than four hours has gone down from close to 100% to close to 50% in that time. The point I'm making is that it matters who you vote for, I don't think it's reasonable to disagree with these figures but feel free to share counterexamples.

It doesn't matter who you vote for, they're all the same.

I'm looking forward to 1993

Seeing arguments about how great Facebook UI is and that free/open source needs to catch up to survive. Have they tried using Facebook lately? It's slow, glitchy and bad.

@rml Basically I think what's really holding back programming languages is programming language culture, and this war-like rhetoric is part of that.

@rml More broadly programming language culture is limiting because it is exclusionary, and poorly equipped to challenge its basic assumptions about what a programming language is and what its for.
I think war-like rhetoric is more of a symptom of that, than a cause.