Notices by Don Romano 🍹 (thj@mastodon.cloud), page 8

@thomasfuchs It's Catzilla!

0-18: Indifferent to politics
18-35: Extremely interested in politics
35+: Indifferent to politics

Is it just me who went through these stages?

@blaha In my language, we ask "What's the clock?" and the joke answer is "Round."

@blaha He fortunately understands the more basic figures of speech, but there are definitely certain times when he's taken a metaphor literally. Metaphors are extraordinarily disruptive to conversations with him, actually, because when he hasn't heard a particular metaphor before (this happens often), he'll take it as a joke and spend the next couple of minutes having fun with it.

My somewhat autistic cousin is also good at not providing any context before he starts talking about something. This lack of context happens on multiple levels:

1. He'll walk up to you to talk about some random game, movie or show he's into, yet he never wants to know what you're up to.

2. He'll launch into these monologues without providing any sort of context, and doesn't really emphasise or spin his story to pique the interest of his ever more confused conversation partner.

My cousin borders on answering "What's the time?" with "I don't know." instead of actually checking the time and reading it to you. Not because he's lazy or unintelligent, but because he has autistic traits.

He's not intuitively aware of the mental states of other people, so it doesn't always occur to him that a question could express an instruction to carry out a task, as opposed to merely inquiring about his immediate knowledge of the current state of affairs.

@philcolbourn Suppose you could type

const foo = f('a,b,c', 'a (b c)')

where

f(an, e) => {
an = an.split(',');
const fn = math.compile(e);
return (...av) => {
const sc = av.reduce(
(p, n) => ({...p, [n]: av}), {});
return fn(sc);
}
}

this would let you define functions using math.js pretty coveniently. If you then made, say, a plugin for VSCode that looked for these and rendered them with TeX...

@philcolbourn A math.js expression isn't Turing complete, so I'm not sure I'd call it code.

TeX syntax itself isn't the goal. Proper display of math expressions in code is the goal.

math.js expression nodes have a built-in toTex() method, but I ended up overriding everything in in a custom handler, and then I didn't need it anymore.

math.evaluate('vec1 (vec2 + vec3') is better than math.multiply(vec1, math.add(vec2, vec3)) and displaying that in correct notation would be even better.

Smoked and peppered mackerel is great in sandwiches, but I wish it didn't have those damned bones in it. They basically ruin an otherwise good experience.

My little math expression parse-evaluate-render thing is coming along nicely. It's far from complete and the codebase is chaotic, but it does let you perform a fair bit of stuff, such as trigonometry and linear algebra.

I keep it in an Observable notebook for now, but it could easily be standalone.

The expressions are processed using the facilities in math.js, plus my own code, and is rendered with KaTeX.

Link:
https://observablehq.com/@thor/math-js-to-tex

When it comes to steel, gold, brass, bronze, silver or wood, you can find people who have warm and fuzzy feelings for any of them. Steel makes good knives and machines for example, and there are long traditions for those things.

Plastic? It's a material that's always trying to be something other than itself, and is loved by no one.

Exurb1a more or less uses love as a crutch in defeating nihilism. If love stories didn't figure in his video essays, their outlook would be far starker.

I began to think about this as I was contemplating my own life, which seems rather devoid of significance.

I share my flat with my cat, and my roommate, who is also my second cousin (cousin once removed), so I'm not alone as such, but I do wonder who I live for, now that my mother has passed away.

@byllgrim If the gendered form was "vellykken", as in "en vellykken mann", the adverb could have been the neuter "vellykket".

@byllgrim "Oppgave feilet riktig" is perhaps the closest you can get.

Proper adverbs are quite rare in Norwegian, and when they're not about time or place ("gå tidlig", "se opp"), they are often constructed from the neuter form of an adjective ("se langt", "spise tregt").

"vellykket" creates a conflict, because it itself was formed by adding affixes to the noun "lykke". Further, the adjective "lykkelig" has no neuter form (compare "høy", "høyt").

The Media Devices API is designed around the assumption that users must explicitly and interactively grant websites access to cameras and microphones.

Imagine if the cookie and Local Storage APIs were designed with the same assumption.

Independently of what GDPR was meant to do, the end result is that you click the Accept button to make the box go away. If there is a Decline button, the urge is to avoid it, in case being tracked is a condition for using the website.

In retrospect, having a DOM API where cookies may be set without granting access was a huge mistake. Forgivable, because we didn't know any better.

Local Storage is less forgivable. We were privacy conscious at the time.

Working on a fun little thing for live rendering and evaluating typed math.js expressions and rendering them in TeX:

https://observablehq.com/@thor/math-js-to-tex

The goal is to make a little tool where I can write math functions that can be embedded in JS programs, but also automatically get them nicely typeset in TeX with proper notation, for documentation purposes.

You can't really say "Task failed successfully" in Norwegian, my mother tongue.

You can say that a task "failed", "was successful" or "was accomplished", and even that it "failed in a successful way" but there is no adverb "successfully".

The word is "vellykket", well-lucked.

You could attempt to invent an adverb "vellykkelig" (well-luck-ly), but it doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, does it, and also, "lykkelig" means blissful or happy, so that alone breaks it.

@Fergant Nope!