Daniel Lowe @dl@cantos.social

@chr
If this is your first moot
You _have_ to toot.

#introduction

I used to be a lot weirder. I'm a middle-aged geek, father to two boys, and I bang out code at #Google. I live near Boston now, but I grew up in central Mississippi.

I know the conlangs #Lojban and #TokiPona. I write hobby code in #Tcl and #CommonLisp.

I play a bunch of #music instruments, but none well enough to perform. I've been playing around with a DAW.

I started the cantos.social instance, trying to be a part of the small-scale Internet.

I try to be as kind as I can.

The weirdness comes when the platform is unpopular enough that competing visions can come from individuals. Technical decisions become a lot more personal. "You personally are forcing work on me to make me stay relevant" becomes a thing. This sort of thing happens constantly in other programming languages but there's more people to absorb blame.

In https://www.timmons.dev/posts/cl-community-norms.html Timmons writes that #CommonLisp has no community, just a bunch of smaller communities organized around projects.

He finds this upsetting, but I don't think this is unusual for languages or any kind of technical platform. People invest in the platform itself. of course (thanks sbcl maintainers!), but those standing on the platform are off doing their own thing, almost always.

Okay, the #HumbleBundle thing is just changing the subscription service (with their Windows-only client), not the stuff you already own through them. False alarm.

It's still pretty uncool.

Humble Bundle got bought out and now the coolness to money engine is sputtering to life. Eventually all the coolness will be gone, converted to money.

It's common knowledge that girls mature faster than boys. That's why I tell my two boys that they should look up to girls their age, respect their wisdom, and strive to emulate them.

I didn't invent this idea but it's working well.

This is a neat idea regarding concurrency primitives, with a lot of historical tidbits to give context. https://vorpus.org/blog/notes-on-structured-concurrency-or-go-statement-considered-harmful/. The author has a library in Python, but I'm wondering what a language specifically designed around this might look like.

After a lot of hemming and hawing, I went and got a #Framework laptop. A few things bumped this:
- It looks like a solid piece of kit
- Explicit support for linux and working on support from open bootloaders.
- I'd like to see more of this sort of project.
- Long term, it might actually cost less and be less wasteful to upgrade a part than to get a whole new laptop.
- Hope for third party expansions. Wouldn't it be lovely to have a Pixel Qi screen again
- Cosmetic customizations via 3d printing

I've been poking around FOSS-friendly laptop alternatives. The Framework looks cool, obviously. There's the usual System76 and Dell XPS models. The Apple M1 laptops look like they could be extremely cool once Linux works on it.

About to give up on the #PinebookPro as my daily driver, in any case. I can handle slow. I can even handle (with some wincing) 4GB of memory. But the bootloader never got into a fully working state and as far as I can tell has since been abandoned.

I don't mind some rough edges, but fixing a bootloader is well beyond what I can find time for.

Gave up trying to use #Guix on my #PinebookPro. It's just too slow for this old potato. Every operation takes forever.

Not sure why this would be. Some combinatorial process?

Found on device manual: "Plug and play after one-time driver installation"

PSA for getting a booster in the US: If you go to the CVS clinic website and click "schedule a vaccine" it accesses a different set of slots than if you "schedule an in-person visit" and then select "get a C-19 vaccine" for the visit reason. Despite having no appts available on the first flow, I got an appt using the second in just a couple of days at a convenient time.

I'm not entirely sure this uses log4j, but I've turned off ElasticSearch (which runs on the JVM) on my Mastodon instance until I find out otherwise.