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dave
@dthompson@toot.cat
mastodon 4.8.0-alpha.3+glitch.9f145e9a5Massachusetts trash. I mostly post about gardening, music, and free software development (not a techbro I swear please you gotta believe me)
he/him
1928 Followers
186 Following
49 Posts
Joined April 10, 2017
website:
RIP Debian 1993-2026
https://inference.debian.net/
all this talk about tokens this and tokens that. they turned my profession into chuck e cheese.
"Your Personal Blog Should Have Comments"
Counterpoint: No
Tried Beyond and Just brand "chicken". Beyond has a rubbery texture. Just is much better.
I'm a hobbyist woodworker. I use power tools for everything. some hand tool woodworkers look down upon power tool users. they're fine craftsmen and I am one step above ikea in their view. people that create using new, easier methods are often looked down upon by the old gatekeepers.
now people can just ask their table saw to make them a cabinet and it will approximately do so. at first the joints were not square at all and the doors fell off but now most of the time they turn out okay. that's fine for people who want the end result quickly. I don't want to be a gatekeeper but I enjoy the process of building and don't plan to change how I make things.
however, there's this constant background noise of people saying I'll be left behind if I don't start building with Large Lumber Machines. and I found out that those same people are making load bearing walls for multi-story buildings with them. I'm skeptical that they're fit for that task but the buildings haven't collapsed yet so I guess it's fine. I think I'll keep measuring twice and cutting once, though.
The Spring Lisp Game Jam is coming up quick! It starts on Friday! Grab a pile of parentheses and warm up your REPL!
The Spring Lisp Game Jam starts next Friday, the 15th! It's a relaxed, 10-day long jam where you can make a game in any flavor of Lisp that suits your weird little preferences.
Join up here:
looks like Guix GCD 008, "Commitments and policy on the use of “generative artificial intelligence”", is dead in the water because one person, on the final day of deliberation, voted against it.
Worked pretty hard on this one and I'm proud of the milestone! Lots more to do for a truly ergonomic dev experience but finally having the REPL in the browser is a huge deal.
Maylene had her daycare evaluation yesterday. It went well.
don't worry about bluesky getting a new ceo, atproto has credible brexit
My bet against vibecoding is a bet on the turtle against the hare. You can always add more mud to a ball of mud, but you can't add more slop to a tower of slop without it eventually collapsing. Work slow and outlast them all.
every time an llm assists in a math proof the AI boosters come out of the woodwork to shame the skeptics. okay but was it really worth making everyone's life worse for it?
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I use Scheme I basically need to implement everything myself and you will not stop me!!!
the last time I played a show was in early summer of 2022 before my band imploded due to silly drama. yesterday someone from said former band asked if I was interested in filling in on drums with their new band later this summer. looks like ol' davey gets to play a show, as a treat!
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@b0rk@social.jvns.ca @cwebber@social.coop you don't *need* Emacs but we use Scheme and Emacs is still the best editor for Lisp by a wide margin.
Napalm Death on Tiny Desk!!! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e81LZCHhNKQ
Napalm Death: Tiny Desk Concert
@cwebber@social.coop and I will be co-presenting "Spritely: Infrastructure for the Future of the Internet" at QCon London on the 18th!
We just did a practice run with @yonkeltron@jawns.club, the host for the "Architecting for Resilience" track.
https://qconlondon.com/presentation/mar2026/spritely-infrastructure-future-internet
elfeed, the emacs feed reader, is looking for a new maintainer.
https://github.com/skeeto/elfeed/discussions/563
the former maintainer said he stopped using emacs for good yesterday.
their personal use of elfeed has been replaced with elfeed2... a vibecoded standalone feed reader.
Cool post from @expede@types.pl about Wasm and Rust. All of my experience with Wasm is completely outside the emscripten/bindgen world so it was interesting to get a glimpse into what it's like to develop with those tools.
https://notes.brooklynzelenka.com/Blog/Notes-on-Writing-Wasm
it's Chuck Schuldiner's birthday (RIP) so I guess it's time to listen to some Death! my favorite Death album is Human, which features Sean Reinert (also RIP) on drums.
DEATH - 'HUMAN' Reissue (Full Album Stream)
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@tomi@mamot.fr hell yeah! I think the ideal programmer to static site generator ratio is 1:1
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@abcdw@fosstodon.org omg this is a huge deal! and it seems that it works automatically without any additional configuration. amazing! can't wait to try it out.
one weird amtrak trick™️ that I learned from youtuber miles in transit recently is that if you are taking the maple leaf train to toronto it's actually cheaper to buy an amtrak ticket to niagra falls ontario and then a separate *via rail* ticket from niagra falls to toronto. it's the exact same train but via crew takes over once the train crosses the border. so strange.
@spritely@social.coop office hours are happening today! The meeting starts in 4 hours from the time of this post. Stop by and chat about all things Spritely!
Meeting details here:
https://community.spritely.institute/t/next-office-hours-on-2-25/803/1
The 2025 edition of the Autumn Lisp Game Jam begins on Halloween! 👻 🎃 Mull some cider, warm up your REPL by the fire, and make a little game with your favorite Lisp dialect!
Sign up for the jam now over on itch.io: https://itch.io/jam/autumn-lisp-game-jam-2025
I watched Speed for the first time over the weekend. it's funny to me that Jeff Daniels, whom I know as Harry from Dumb and Dumber, plays a character that is also named Harry. both movies were released months apart in 1994.
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as a counterpoint, the least used shinkansen station is okutsugaru-imabetsu in northern aomori, just before the seikan tunnel to hokkaido. the "build it and they will come" approach did not work at all here. the surrounding area is still very rural. it's just too far away from anything for even a shinkansen station to help it grow, I guess.
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one thing that the book goes into is station placement. when the tokaido shinkansen was being planned, they had some tough choices to make about stations.
should the line terminate at the existing tokyo station or should they build a new station on the outskirts? the latter would have been much easier, but they ultimately chose the difficult path of acquiring all of the very expensive land and building the necessary elevated structures to get the shinkansen into the existing station.
on the flip side, they did the opposite in yokohama, just outside of tokyo. rather than build in the dense part of yokohama, they built the station in a rice field away from the city center. because the shinkansen was successful as a whole, development sprung up around the station and caused an urban sprawl to encompass it, and soon enough the rice fields were gone.
the lesson I take from this is that it's worth the additional complexity and expense to get the train into the center of the largest cities being served so that it's a convenient service but there is some room for a "build it and they will come" attitude elsewhere, but be aware that you *will* be causing sprawl.
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good article with screenshots of each rendering shown. I had missed the dining car when watching the video. https://www.railwayage.com/passenger/intercity/for-amtrak-a-new-l-d-train-fleet/
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it will be interesting to see how the standardization around single level coaches plays out. they tried and failed to find a builder for bi-level coaches that met accessibility requirements. single level is the way to go but these are once a day long distance trains that already sell out regularly and I'm assuming these new trains will have lower capacity. I highly doubt they plan to increase frequency as that would require negotiation with the host railroads. is the plan just to make tickets even more expensive?
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EFF on the dangers of age verification: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/12/10-not-so-hidden-dangers-age-verification
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@polyfloyd@hsnl.social @cwebber@social.coop @spritely@social.coop can you name one that is any good? I can't. matrix probably comes the closest but it has fundamental issues that would be hard to fix retroactively.
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@ArneBab@rollenspiel.social @expede@types.pl it's almost like an entirely different world since scheme doesn't have borrow checking semantics. something we still don't have in hoot is the equivalent of bindgen, where the js glue is generated for you. how bindgen handles errors seems pretty useful to know.
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@touk@smores.town my high school band had "downright" in the name and had an upright bass player.
today is a title fight kind of day
Title Fight - "Head In The Ceiling Fan"
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hmm actually they're missing the lounge car shot, which looked pretty neat.
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@brennen@federation.p1k3.com lake shore limited and southwest chief are on my todo list.
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@brennen@federation.p1k3.com I don't know the specifics but these trains are already quite long so my guess is they are limited by platform length.