Notices by Ramsey Nasser (nasser@merveilles.town)

incomplete thought: some programming is like building with clay and some programming is like building with legos. both great to build with in different ways!

you can do anything with clay, its a strict superset of what you can do with legos. but it gets difficult to build something very big out of just clay unless youre very good.

if what you are doing fits the lego aesthetic then its nice to build with little blocks and hear the pieces go click and know theyre going to stay put.

whats clay and whats legos? my original thought was dynamic types and static types (i am porting clojure code to c#) but unsafe code (eg memory and pointer shenanigans) and safe code (eg with static and runtime checks) could also work.

@neauoire this was the original post: https://merveilles.town/@nasser/109265538480410221

I was thinking about programming specifically, particularly dynamic and static types at the time

me: I have a video I would like to upload
instagram: is it a reel? a post? a story? all of these require different resolutions, will be cut off in different ways, and will show up in different places. all these details are opaque to you.
me:
instagram: we succeeded because we are easy to use

me: I have a video I would like to upload
mastodon: ok

I'm still convinced that whenever you see multiple broadly identical features in a corporate product each version of that feature is championed by some VP as they jockey for a political power inside of a structure that resembles feudalism more than anything else. i.e. I do not believe for a moment that Instagram did a cost benefit analysis or user design research to determine that there *needs* to be three confusingly similar ways to upload videos.

@atheistengineer https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing
https://masto.host/pricing/

its extremely funny that its cheaper to self-host a mastodon server than pay for twitter blue

heard on a youtube video just now: the nice thing about giving presentations in emacs with org mode is you dont have to learn complicated presentation software

its still not clear to me that writing my own lisp editor is more work than learning emacs and making it work to my liking

programming languages don't succeed because of their type systems but rather because of their hype systems

no type system will ever save you from building the wrong thing

i got my hands on an old east german arabic typewriter and ive been taking it for a spin! the thing is pretty wild. missing some obscure but important letters, representing some letters up to four different times to accommodate for the cursive nature of the script. the typeface is spartan but fine. it has a certain charm to it. i dont have a project in mind, just noodling for now.

the machine is on loan from the internet archive ?

this is the machine and its keyboard. it came out of the personal collection Martin Tytell, who's family maintained typewriters in New York City for decades. @textfiles found it when picking up documents from Tytell to add to the internet archive. it was one of 140 typewriters kept across multiple storage shuffles and collection down sizes, so it was special in some way. it came with this little tag attached too which I find fascinating.