Notices by chris martens (chrisamaphone@hci.social), page 2

if you're someone who's been struggling lately to get consistent work, make sense of your career, find a place in the world where your skills are simultaneously valued with money/recognition and also contributing something you find genuinely positive to society, i want you to know that i'm incredibly fucking proud of you. please don't give up.

@dalias copycatting? not as disdainful but short and widely understood, not sure if it carries the meaning you want

i guess i need to remember about video games again since i have to teach about them in the spring

when you decide to create or work with a new material, you start by trying to use your existing tools with it, but sometimes they don't make sense and you have to invent new tools that are more compatible with the way the material encourages you to think about what you're doing and what's possible

a material does not prescribe a particular purpose. it has affordances that might be interestingly different from those of other materials, and suggest possible forms one could shape it to (using tools!) that wouldn't be possible with other materials. when you work with a new material you get new ideas!

a tool is something that helps you solve a problem without questioning if it's the right problem to solve. you have a task you want to do, maybe you already have a tool to do it, and another tool can be evaluated in terms of how it compares for accomplishing that task

programming language implementations aren't tools, they're materials. evaluating them like tools doesn't make any sense

trying to see if writing that as a toot will dissolve my urge to write an extended abstract about it

@julesh for the intuition part, it generally suffices to check the principal cut cases introduced by each new connective. if you’re doing something fishy with structural rules or adding new judgments then often the hard part is just *stating* what the cut principle should be

i don’t think it really makes sense for programming to be a direct manipulation activity, but i do think we can probably do better in terms of making visible/explicit the transformations on states implied by subcomputations

@jslr and if you take a care-centric approach to other professions that aren’t typically framed as care, including education and engineering, those things similarly don’t scale, which makes it tricky to justify to others even when you believe it’s right

values are
computations do
processes interact
sessions whisper
exceptions SCREAM

@julesh i need a thread or blogpost about this please

@julesh @zanzi if you scroll my TL to about 17 hours ago you will find various posts that start “as far as im concerned really theres only two types of software: …”

as far as im concerned really theres only two types of software: database, or compiler. your task is to work out which one of the two your idea fits into

@shriramk @stephstephking @inthehands I don’t know that that’s true. these conversations are really about money, right? admin can still be convinced to dissolve a department (and corresponding degree programs) if they believe its main purpose is to serve other units

@shriramk on the other hand, can anything a computer does really be considered an achievement?

all these software people obsessed with “shipping” and “deliverables” and “package managers” should consider the possibility that postal work might be their true calling

@anildash the links to the past posts 404 for me

@hannah true. This happened to me