Notices by mcc (mcc@mastodon.social)

Everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about

The battle is against vampires

Their battles against vampires are basically the same as your own battles against vampires

If only it wasn't considered rude to talk about vampires,

Then maybe we'd realize we're all fighting the same goddamn vampires

"I wish 'nice' was real", I told a friend, and I was talking about the UNIX process model but after typing it it suddenly felt like I had said something very deep

Super fucking frustrating thing in Android: In Do Not Disturb mode, there's a special setting for "receive calls from: - your contacts - anyone". However also it's possible to add "Phone" and "Phone Services" to allowed apps. This won't do anything unless you ALSO set the separate flag. I've been having problems for 2 years with important calls not going through in "Do Not Disturb" mode despite having "Phone" on allowed apps. Only found the REAL switch today.

Update: No!! No the above is wrong!!! Checking "your contacts - anyone" did nothing!! Nothing at all!! I got a critically important phone call from my doctor four minutes ago and the phone did not ring!! There is literally nothing I can do to make my phone ring when I get a phone call!! My smartphone can do anything at all EXCEPT receive phone calls!!!

The REALLY frustrating thing is that every time I tried to set this up, I asked my wife to call me to see if I got an audible notification. I did! I then assumed it was working and I didn't need to do anything else. No wrong my wife is a "contact" so it lets her through whereas my doctor, lawyer, etc would not be pre-existing contacts and those go to voice email.

Here is the tradeoff of modern life:

- USE IPHONE: The corporation "Apple Inc" will control your every thought and action, cradle to grave. But you will be able to get your phone to ring when you have a phone call

- USE ANDROID: Your phone will have a problem where it does not ring when you have a phone call, and you will spend years trying to fix this but you will never succeed

@whitequark @jrose wikipedia claims the original lisp is dynamic scope.

@whitequark I think what worries me is that any intentional semantics for having a *specific known thing* happen when you edit a list mid-execution would both require amount of added complexity in the language spec to challenge the claim this is a "simple" language, and also might put awkward long-term restrictions on the implementation.

An important thing about homiconicity: In homoiconic languages, you can build code in an in-memory structure, and there's some way to execute that structure, but that *doesn't mean the interpreter is literally executing the structure you built*. LISP has "defun", TCL has "proc". In each of these cases, you pass in a code structure (formally, at runtime) and get back an executable object. You execute these "compiled" executable objects, not the original data. This is a fiddly distinction, but…

LISP and its descendants are "homoiconic" languages: The code model is represented within the data model. You can easily represent LISP code within LISP as quoted lists of symbols, you can(?) construct a function by constructing a list containing code and then pass that to defun (??) to make an executable function. I feel homoiconicity has lost some meaning with time, as modern languages like Go or Rust with (LISP-inspired!) macro systems only present a *representation* of code to other code.

So I'm re-formulating my "0-LISP" experiment from the last couple months, in a kinda fundamental way. I think this makes it better / more likely to be someday useful, but it feels weird.

https://mastodon.social/@mcc/114365866529550435

The original intent of this experiment was to make a language where code is a hygienic data structure:

- In TCL, strings are functions, because strings can be "eval"ed.
- But strings are not a good data structure; when they break it's in unclean ways.
- A solution: Go LISPy, use lists.

…it matters because *this specific experiment didn't work that way*. I've talked about this on here already but if this language sees a list in function position it just interprets it:

https://github.com/mcclure/lisp0-experiment/blob/4f74f1a4a210507d7de8ded2e44c63c9e43bbd16/sample/test/basic/lisp/fun.ls0#L15

This turns out to create three big problems.

1. Lists are mutable. What happens if a list gets modified while it's being executed?
2. How do you represent args?
3. How do you represent locals?

I chose to simply ignore problem 1. Problems 2 and 3 were not so easily banished.

Do you ever write a fiendishly complicated implementation of a piece of code, stare at it for ten seconds, git reset --hard HEAD to undo the entire thing, and then write a compact, clear 4-line implementation that does the same goddamn thing

I have now created three languages along the theme of "what would it be like if we made our programming languages aggressively simple?" and every time the answer has turned out to be "it would be very complicated" https://mastodon.social/@mcc/114365307342990008

Windows 11 is actual literal malware https://cyberplace.social/@GossiTheDog/114360637766024432

The way my social media use shakes out right now is that Bluesky is my "cogitohazards" site and Mastodon is my "no cogitohazards" site. If I am feeling strong against cogitohazards at a particular moment I will open Blueksky because amongst the cogitohazards are cute "anime" drawings. Meanwhile if I am not feeling able to withstand cogitohazards I go to Mastodon and accept I will have to wait a bit to see the "anime". This is all fairly absurd, but it's working surprisingly well

You know what's super irritating is when you want to ask for advice/assistance on setting up infosec type software but publicly documenting what software you're using or in what configuration is technically an opsec fail

@cwebber *Thinks* wait. Wait. Wait. I've been wanting to develop a Newton app. Is there Mastodon for Newton yet

But also I do think it would be best if they just removed it

I have filed a Github issue about this new feature. Because I suspect "this sucks, you should remove it" would not get a good response, I have tried to limit myself to "constructive criticism".

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/34463