Notices by Shriram Krishnamurthi (shriramk@mastodon.social)

@ahfrom A sequence of miserable little characters.

BREAKING: Trump signs executive order rescinding the undecidability of the Halting Problem, claiming it holds back American progress. All major chip manufacturers immediately slave through the night to add HALTP to their instruction sets in compliance.

Just learned about this recent case where a transgender person in Karnataka, India successfully challenged the Registrar to accommodate name and gender changes (not possible by prior law). Progress that I couldn't have imagined decades ago.
https://clpr.org.in/litigation/ms-x-v-state-of-karnataka/

Trying to figure out why Elon's transgender child is real estate news…Oh, I see, I'm on the WSJ, so this is perfect clickbait for the median readership.

@aral Zoom was a genuine improvement over its predecessors, and is still better than Teams, so I don't think that's fair.

Of all the UX improvements Zoom needs, they have decided to make precisely zero and instead enshittify it. Can't wait for someone to do to Zoom what Zoom did to Skype.

EDIT: You can turn this off, instructions here:
https://x.com/ajay9470/status/1876363012011180114

It's funny ("funny") how it turned out there are two ways to build a fash social network: you could start from the bottom (like 3-4 did in the past few years) and struggle to get past like 100K users, or you can just buy X and lose a lot of people. The latter is clearly much more successful.

I seem to be on a "defend LLMs for personal use" kick. It seemed like fun to see how I've used them in the past month. In most cases, I first did a search that proved useless (often, spending a long time following links that looked like they *could* be helpful…but weren't). ↵

"Evaluating Human Factors Beyond Lines of Code" by @tonofcrates.
https://blog.sigplan.org/2024/11/21/evaluating-human-factors-beyond-lines-of-code/

A while ago I had a Twitter thread encouraging people to write more books. @neeldhara urged me to turn it into a proper blog post, and I just have: "You Too Can Write a Book!"

https://parentheticallyspeaking.org/articles/write-a-book/

@landley I too grunt (like @robpike), but when I'm in a more friendly mood, I instead go "Ahoy, ahoy!", because that's how Alexander Graham Bell answered the phone. It serves the same purpose as a grunt or "potato" but has the added edge of letting you pass on an anecdote to your caller if they're a good person to hear it.

@inthehands @chrisamaphone Well played.

@rk @inthehands @chrisamaphone But to do this properly the prologue would have to be written by the system.

Good advice not only in life but also in formal semantics.

@inthehands @stephstephking I completely agree re. writing, but there are ways to teach writing without an English department. The average CS major may learn more from the "writing across the curriculum" model than from the Brönte's.

(Skin in the game: When it was smaller, I had my programming languages course designated a writing course, and a personally read and gave feedback on everything written. And boy did they need a lot.)

@tealeg Given that Pyret's primary audience is people learning to program, we should actually default the other way around: colors are more familiar to them than trig.

We could also stick an extra `u` in the middle in the High British fashion, e.g., make one of them "taun", and hope we have no Scots users (though it would be on point given the language's naming tradition).

Today in programming language design issues…

How it started: How it's going:

This is so real. Trying to use Google Drive from an app-like program has become an endless headache.
https://ia.net/topics/our-android-app-is-frozen-in-carbonite

Saw this recently; as it pulled away, it emitted a mighty ROAR, too. Jurassic Pahk, as they say around here. #RIpix