Notices by 🇳🇴 Thor — backup account (thorthenorseman@octodon.social), page 64

They say that Lisp syntax is weird.

Let me tell you a story:

When I was maybe 15 years old, I used Pascal and hadn't learned C yet. People on IRC told me to learn C instead because it was much more powerful, but I refused.

What was my reason for resisting C? "It has weird syntax."

Having weird syntax is not a good reason for rejecting a language.

In fact, if you encounter a language with weird syntax, that's probably a sign that you should learn it.

😮

https://github.com/fukamachi/sxql

Wow.

This...

It's SQL with Lisp syntax. It's JSX but for SQL. It's beautiful.

I tried to accomplish something like this in JS using a JS expression string parser, but this is so much more elegant.

I've been feeling the urge to extend the languages I use, and Lisp lets you do that effortlessly.

I can see why Paul Graham says that startups should use Lisp now...

@Ricardus Oh, it's probably not a bad card.

@Ricardus Because I think I mixed up the Home panel with the Notification panel...

@Ricardus @tim Yes.

@Ricardus Yeah, a slow format is equivalent to writing a whole lot of data, so what you're testing when you format a medium is the write speed, whereas what you test when you copy files from it is the read speed. On flash media, the two tend to be very different. It could be that your SD card has faster write speeds than your CF card. It could also be that your recorder performs "erase block" operations on SD cards but "overwrite with blank data" commands on CF cards when it formats.

The only reason we don't have this stuff is because capitalism doesn't offer the incentives for it.

You could use the cloud for one thing: Off-site backups of your data store (with end-to-end encryption, of course).

These cloud/SaaS systems are only beneficial to the vendors, not the users. Yes, they are free, but where are the paid versions with the same exact functionality? In theory, a disk drive attached to my router could store a database, and there'd be a set of standards in place to auto-configure Dynamic DNS (ISP service) and static port forwards, so you could log into it from various software programs.

It bothers me that, because bits of the Norwegian Internet were wonky today (had issues reaching websites on both WiFi and 4G), I wasn't able to view my starred locations on Google Maps, or add new locations.

It's all a bit too dependent on the cloud. There should at least be the option of local storage, and preferably the option of not storing anything in the cloud at all, and just syncing against your computer (or a home NAS device) instead.

@Ricardus Good question. Did you test the data transfer rate both ways? It could be that the write speed is lower for the CF card. With a recorder, you're mostly copying files *from* cards to a computer, so I'd be interested in seeing if copying files *to* a card is equally fast on both.

The Emmy award isn't very hard to get. All sorts of mediocre stuff seems to get it.

@rice It's pretty accurate for Oslo, except the river has 4 syllables, and the fancy business area facing the water is near the sea, not the river.

@calvin JSON is the poor man's JS expressions too. It's only a subset of JS itself.

There's this certain lack of boundaries that scientists seem to have. What kind of ethical board would approve of those experiments? They probably concluded that the animals wouldn't suffer, but it's not like the animals themselves were asked...

Take for instance that experiment where they grew human ears on the backs of lab rats, or the ones where they implanted brain probes to control where the rats walked. They're like horror stories taken out of Frankenstein.

You get the impression that medical scientists and surgeons aren't very warm people. Scientists and doctors employed by the Nazis had few qualms about the horrible experiments they performed on humans, and cases of animals suffering for science routinely surface in the media. I realise that alternatives to animal testing don't exist in certain cases, but I can't help but find it unpleasant.

Ah, so here's one of the cases where JavaScript borrowed a concept from Lisp:

Lisp is such a pure language. There's no operator precedence, because all expressions are in RPN, not Algol-style, and the minute you understand boolean operators in Lisp, you also understand short-circuiting.