Notices by Don Romano 🍹 (thj@mastodon.cloud), page 2

You can see a physical disability, but you can't see a mental disorder.

The funny part is that mental disorders are actually worse than physical disabilities. A disabled person can overcome his disabilities if he is determined enough.

A mentally disordered person cannot overcome anything, because the brain, the organ that has to do the overcoming, isn't working as it should.

Social intelligence: A person with profound autism treats humans as scenery, because a brain growth stage was stunted.

Executive function: A person with profound ADHD is unable to gather thoughts and execute plans, because a brain growth stage was stunted.

Growth is variable. Being short isn't a disease, but stunted growth is.

We aren't all the same height, and this is also true of brains. Countless variables affected how we all developed as children, but we ignore that every time we judge.

IQ is a thing that helps you solve difficult puzzles, but it's virtually useless on its own. Unless your IQ is markedly below average, it won't matter to your success.

What matters far more is your outlook on life, your social abilities and your executive function.

You can't open your mouth without insulting anyone.

"The person with the highest known IQ in Scandinavia is a carpenter." it would say in a regular column in one of the national papers.

Doesn't sound very controversial at first glance, but it strongly implies that carpenters don't have high IQs.

In probability theory, there is a concept called a probability space. It can describe just about anything.

You have a sample space Ω (set of possible outcomes), a set of events F (a set of subsets of the sample space) and a probability function P (a map of events to probabilities).

A dice has 6 sides, where 3 are odd and 3 are even.

If you cast it, then:

Ω = {1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6}
F = { {1, 3, 5}, {2, 4, 6} }
P(F) = 0.5

This could also describe branching in a computer program, for example.

This parallel timelines dialect of Lisp that I'm working on is taking me into probability theory.

I'm starting to see why game theory is so popular with mathematicians.

@clacke I'm frankly not sure yet if this concept would suit a quantum computer, but most people who have watched at least one documentary on quantum physics understand what I'm about to explain, so it's a useful analogy nevertheless.

Making Lisp dialects is great for trying out those all those ideas you get for programming languages.

My current idea is a form of inherently concurrent language shaped around the idea that expressions can have more than one value.

This is NOT equivalent to a list, array or iterator. Those come separately.

Think instead of fuzzy logic or the qubit of a quantum computer. If you use if-then-else to branch on a qubit, you evaluate two branches at once and there are now parallel code paths.

Novels always have a first draft. Authors are not expected to get a book right on the first try, nor are they expected to finish certain chapters on certain dates, and they are most certainly not expected to work with 5 other novelists on the finer points of the main plot line.

Today's software developer profession is perhaps more akin to journalism or television screenwriting than novel writing.

There's no time to create art when you're on a schedule, but you have to earn a living somehow.

The selection in Japanese content on Netflix is rather poor. They have Pokemon and and currently popular fare such as Sword Art Online, but nothing from critically acclaimed directors such as Hayao Miyazaki, Satoshi Kon or Mamoru Hosoda. They at least had the sense to include Neon Genesis Evangelion. It would be a truly tragic collection indeed if they had left that one out.

I'm watching a documentary called American Factory. It's about a Chinese company setting up a factory in the United States.

Result: The Americans are happy to have jobs again at first, but this quickly turns sour. They won't accept Chinese sweatshop conditions and start a union.

One of the union leaders says that Americans already fought these labour rights battles.

Not so sure about that. Why are unions still controversial in the US, but commonplace in Europe?

I feel that the stuff I'm doing with Observable notebooks might be very handy for my next job application:

https://observablehq.com/@thor?tab=notebooks

I keep turning to notebooks when I want to develop concepts I need in my code, whether they are work assignments or a side projects.

Not only is it extremely handy, but it builds a portfolio that demonstrates my programming skills.

Here's some exploratory code I did for work, to generate GLSL shaders dynamically:

https://observablehq.com/@thor/glsl-code-generator

After I learned that GLSL doesn't allow you to chain shaders of the same type together, and copy-pasting shared code from shader to shader seemed like a horrible solution, I decided to make a code generator.

I ended up writing a code generator based on token trees structured as a kind of prefix code.

Take a look. It's a carefully documented live demo.

@byllgrim It’s typically when I’m cooking, showering or walking. There’s a classic trick for constructing a joke where you start with the punchline and work yourself backwards.

In this case, it went like this:

“They say ‘allegations’ a lot on the news. What’s the verb for that? ‘Allegate’? Nope! Not in the dictionary. What about the person who brings one forth? ’Allegator’? Oh, ha! See you later, allegator! Haha! I have to turn that into a dumb joke for the Interwebs.”

The Norwegian word for workshop is “verksted”, cognate to “work-stead”. The noun “verk” typically refers to industrial facilities, such as glassverk (glass factory) or vannverk (water treatment plant) and is probably best encompassed by the English word “plant”.

There is also the noun “virke”, a vocation, and the verb “virke”, to work (with or for a particular purpose).

For a more human flavour, “arbeid” is often used, together with “jobb”.

Wouldn’t it be better if we could vote on individual ministerial posts in the government? I may want the environmental policies of the Green Party and the fiscal policies of the Conservative Party, for example.

I think there is an objective definition of maturity. It may not be so broad or narrow as to be convenient for the point you are trying to make, but I do think you can make a list. It gets easier with age, as you notice yourself taking on ever more traits that you thought were highly individual, but turn out to be subject to the bell curve, as so many other traits are.

If the Internet and my housemate didn’t endlessly remind me of its existence, I probably wouldn’t have many opinions on anime at this point.

Cartoons are ultimately cartoons. Even Disney’s Nine Old Men, the lead animators on their classics, looked up to Renaissance artists, who in turn were basically human cameras.

Man, i wish I had more nerdy friends. I want to talk about all the nerdy shit I’m doing to real people, not just the Internet.

They say Greta Thunberg is likely to get the Nobel Peace Prize.

I really hope she doesn’t.

She’s still young. She doesn’t need it. Let her prove herself. It would be even worse than giving it to Barack Obama.