Notices by Don Romano 🍹 (thj@mastodon.cloud), page 11

My preferred programming paradigm has changed profoundly since the 1990s. I used to be of the opinion that C (and later C++) was the bee's knees.

In systems, embedded and game programming, they do dominate, and the low level memory access and raw performance they offer is a powerful tool.

They do not, however, encourage you to express an idea as consisely and elegantly as possible.

- Beethoven! It's 2 AM! Why are you still up, and what the hell is that loud rock music you're listening to?!

- I am enjoying die feine Musik of diese gentleman, who I think hast been schtealing from my notes!

- Beethoven, you've been dead for nearly 200 years. Everyone has seen your notes!

- You have ein point, but that does nicht mean that I have to like it!

- Let me see that playlist... This is black metal!

- Ja. Symfonische swartzemetall.

- You're nuts!

- Ja, naturlich.

I would once again like to extend my sincere gratitude to the person who invented bag clips, to which we owe the preservation of countless snacks.

const v = new Array(8);
for(let i = 0; i < v.length; i++) {
v[i] = [
Math.pow(-1, i),
Math.pow(-1, Math.floor(i/2)),
Math.pow(-1, Math.floor(i/4))
];
}

Here is a piece of code I wrote that generates the coordinates for the 8 vertices of a (±1, ±1,±1) cube.

Can you tell how it works?

@philcolbourn Ah, yes, I am a follower of his channel, and a bit of a language geek...

It's still fucking weird and sad that my mother's gone now. I've lived far away from my parents for many years now, so I was already used to seeing her rarely, but...

...having a choice is very different from not having it, even if you rarely make that choice.

Even if you rarely go outside, you're still going to object if that choice is suddenly eliminated because someone locked you up and threw the key away.

It took her death to make me realise just how significant she was to me.

Right behind the forehead sits a thin layer of tissue called the prefrontal cortex, thought to be responsible for the executive functions (EF) of the brain:

- self-directed attention
- planning and deciding
- solving problems
- improvising, rehearsing
- handling danger or challenges
- resisting habits or temptations

EF is like a battery, and can be depleted, commonly known as "feeling lazy."

A broken battery is called ADHD, and looks like irresponsible behaviour despite knowing better.

Waiting for my lunch order at a McDonald's in Oslo, Norway.

Now that I take ADHD medications, the problem isn't to maintain concentration, but rather the opposite: To interrupt it at the appropriate time.

@philcolbourn Yeah, I was changing it last night and this morning, to make the cube look at the mouse cursor.

Not sure if you're able to view the edit history, but if you can, the old version is still there, and I didn't remove the rotationX and rotationY functions, so you could stick math.multiply(func1, func2, point) back in there if you wanted.

There's also a button to fork a document, and if you do that, you can keep your changes.

Stoners have their ganja time at 4:20.

Hackers have their leet hour at 13:37.

American mathematicians have Pi Day on 3/14, and if they wanted, they could celebrate the Pi Fractional Second at 3:14:15.92 every day.

3.141592 are the digits i can reliably remember. On a good day, I can remember 3.1415926535.

I don't remember the digits. I remember

"three point fourteen
fifteen ninety-two
sixty-five thirty-five"

like a poem. Looks like I could add another line to it, to get a regular metre.

Poster I saw on the bus, for a Norwegian cancer education web game. The Japanese influence is palpable.

I've been watching a YouTube series about various ancient myths, and most of them have lived up to that name:

* Simple fable-like storytelling
* Bizarre characters and plots
* Blood, gore and violence
* Minimal dialogue

Then came a video on biblical myth, and the contrast became apparent. Real humans, real dilemmas, plenty of dialogue and more layers of storytelling.

The O.T. leans more toward myth than the N.T., but even the O.T. looks sophisticated next to a typical myth.

JavaScript spinning cube code running in a notebook, with editable source code for you to toy with:

https://observablehq.com/@thor/cube

Why do I bring this up? Because whenever video games attempt to do realistic humans, it always ends up looking like someone brought a corpse or a dummy to life.

Video games are the only medium where entire productions are based exclusively on CG that attempts to mimic live action footage.

Think about it.

When films are fully CG, they are made to look like cartoons.

When live action films use CG, it's almost always to add special effects to live action footage. When it's used to replace an actor, that's considered news.

In general, CG is rarely used when it can be avoided, yet the interactive nature of video games demands it.

Fuck whoever installed the roll of toilet paper the wrong way around at work. I urgently needed to do my business, and spent ages trying to find the end.

I ended up opening the lid to check, and it was installed anticlockwise.

I would normally have no problem with that, except for the fact that they always installed it the other way around before.

I became aware of notebook interfaces a couple of years ago, but they didn't pique my interest until I had to open a Jupyter Notebook sent to me by an engineer customer at work.

I like the concept, but I don't care for Python, and running a web server on your desktop computer every time you want to use an application feels clunky.

I looked around online and found Observable, which speaks HTML5 and modern JavaScript fluently.

I wish mathematical expressions in code appeared as TeX-like output in my text editors.

Some screenshots of a notebook I'm working on that documents the mathematics I've been doing for work.

I mostly worked this stuff out along the way as I was implementing the code for it, but it's nice to have it in proper notation.

For context: I'm a high school dropout and I'm fully self taught.