Notices by Elias Mårtenson (loke@functional.cafe), page 2

@brokengoose it is remarkably tasty. And I think this would be a great place to start for someone who might not be used to durian flavour.

Highly recommended.

Nice stuff

Google required to sell Chrome? A rare piece of good news.

But we can't have that. People don't deserve any good news. How can we fuck that up?

https://www.androidauthority.com/google-chrome-openai-chatgpt-browser-3547082/

I learned about SINCON 2025 in Singapore, and it definitely looks like a conference I would enjoy.

Then I noticed that @hacks4pancakes is going to keynote, and that's enough of a confirmation that it's a good conference for me too get a ticket.

#infosec

Been chatting with Swedish people, while doing other things on the computer. This means switching back and forth between en_SG and Swedish keymaps. I don't know how many times I've typed _ when I meant to type ?

A tale of two liberal parties.

@clacke I won't be in HK in time. Make you you share some pictures. 🙂

@clacke I just want to see what the big blåhaj looks like. 🙂

@mdallastella Were you working on mainframes?

@mdallastella Will you be using gcc cobol?

@jannem @cobolworx If you use it for the things it's good at, it's not bad.

I kinda like using the SCREEN stuff (which I don't believe is supported in GCC yet, but it works in GnuCOBOL).

Does anyone know of a Common Lisp activitypub library that is complete enough to implement subscription to accounts, tracking subscribers and posting messages?

I want to build a small service which allows users to tag it in a message (or users can ask the serviceto subscribeto it, in which case it will absorb all mesaages), and conaume those messages, and then post updates to its main feed.

#lisp #commonlisp #activitypub

GCC now supports COBOL. I find this to be unreasonably exciting. @cobolworx

So, I've been playing around with the GPX file format and PostGIS. My goal is to build a tool where I can run my own server that collects GPX tracks from bike rides, and match them against predefined routes. Like a self-hosted Strava if you like.

I started this because the enshittification of Strava has reached a tipping point and I cannot in good faith upload anything to them anymore.

Once I get this working, I want to add the ability to share rides and favourite segments via the Fediverse. Not entirely sure how far you can take that, but that's something to think about later.

Anyway, it seems I can use PostGIS to match a ride against a set of segments, at least when using a small set of test tracks and some synthetic data that I've generated.

Is there anyone here that is familiar with PostGIS who would be willing to advice me as to whether I'm actually doing this right? I can't help but think that my successful experiments are actually pure luck.

@clacke it's certainly possible that it went the other way. They're too similar for it to be a coincidence, no?

What does enshittification look like? Well, most of you know what it looks like, but here's another example.

Today I was biking in an area I had never been to before, going on a bike route that takes the route of an old railroad line.

I needed to go back where I came from, so I asked google maps for a bike route back. It recommended a 43 minute route that began with going in the opposite direction, and then snaked its way via small side roads to where I needed to go. The bike road I was on wasn't even properly marked.

I then when to OsmAnd (openstreetmap for android) and it gave me a 30 minute route that started by turning back on the same road I was, back for about 10 minutes and then pretty much straight back.

I think I know why this is. Google Maps no longer exists to make navigation easier. For users, it's become little more than a vehicle to provide connections to businesses. Taking it a bit more abstractly: Its real goal it's all about location-based advertising, and bikers don't make them any money.

@clacke same here. I wonder if the american comes from someone mishearing bubble tea?

@clacke it's called the British style, and I guess it's used in former colonies. It's interesting that Singapore has then the right way around.

Fortunately it's ready to switch them when you rent a bike. I recommend you do that since your instinct will take over in a panic situation and you can easily go over the bars.

@amszmidt @emacsomancer you can actually do that in vim too. All the necessary infrastructure exists in vim to do that. The reason people don't do it much is partly because vimscript is not something a sane person wants to program in.

But it's also because vim users are in feneral more aligned towards your view on what an editor is supposed to be. No one really wants to build applications on it like they do in Emacs. Rather, they prefer to launch vim from the application that needs to edit something.

So while there are technical reasons it's mostly a cultural thing.

@amszmidt @emacsomancer but it lives in Emacs, using the GNU Emacs infrastructure like an operating system.

Is GNU Emacs a great platform to build applications on? A proper Lisp operating system would be nicer, but it's still better than Electron.