I also really don’t like compiled languages just because they seem much more pragmatic and utilitarian than scripting languages. I would love to learn a compiled language with the same minimalist philosophy as Lua or Fennel but instead it seems like there are maximalist languages (or at least languages crammed with strange legacy behavior) like C, C++, C#, and Java

one of the worst things about compiled languages is that there’s no REPL. if you want to build an intuition for any feature of the language or any unfamiliar API you have to hand-write and trial-and-error some simple example code that you then compile and run multiple times. and there might not even be a pretty-printer built into the language

Rust, as much as I hated using it, is actually somehow able to have an unofficial REPL? I have no idea how that’s possible but it was actually very very helpful when I was trying to learn the language

holy shit is this a cool video. it’s not just satisfying from a technical standpoint - it’s also so aesthetic?

You should play Wordle wrong by Ellie Rasmussen

Please forgive the Amazon link, but this is the kind of thing I wish was a little less sketchy and a little more commonplace. Hostile interoperability is *good*, actually, as is finding uses (modulo safety concerns) for a product outside of what the manufacturer finds profitable.

Power tool battery systems are infuriatingly proprietary, and I can hardly think how much waste that creates.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08X1PDGS3?ie=UTF8

das ist mein papa

@nonfedimemes don’t worry bro I got you. you can use my web 3.0 fork of ffmpeg with an Electron frontend and AI-assisted transcoding support for just $3000/year

what I’m trying to say is that mainstream big-budget media is not something that’s open and vulnerable. I don’t think anyone is expressing their hopes and dreams through Star Trek: Discovery character arcs. and that lack of vulnerability and passion means that it probably isn’t especially painful for the people involved to hear criticisms of their work: because it’s a job to them and not something that they put a piece of their soul into

and even it is painful for them to hear criticisms, me complaining about their work on Fedi is not going to hurt them because they’re never going to even notice my existence. if someone can make a convincing argument for why me posting like this would cause meaningful harm then I’ll try to stop but I don’t think it’s harmful at all right now

compare that to calling someone “cringe” and laughing at them for posting hand-drawn art of their OC. that is dramatically more likely to cause real, lasting harm. and that’s the distinction that I’m trying to get across

in the past I used to be so worried about all of Wikipedia’s complicated rules about grammar and sounding formal and etc. to the point that it scared me away from editing at all

but now I just don’t care. someone else can edit my writing to sound “formal” and “professional” if they want but what matters is that I’m taking text that was impenetrable to laypeople like me and making it (I hope) dramatically easier to read

now that I’ve gotten slightly more comfortable editing Wikipedia, I’ve found a fun way to hopefully make small bits of Wikipedia pages easier to read and understand

whenever I’m on a Wikipedia rabbit hole and I’m having trouble understanding what a section is trying to say, (usually because it’s very terse and using a lot of jargon) I’ll try to figure it out by reading other articles or other stuff on the internet, and edit the article as I understand more. it’s like I’m taking notes as I read, but it also (hopefully) helps others too

I don’t have a lot of attention span though so I usually only edit like 1-2 paragraphs per page, but still. I’m pretty proud of how much I cleaned up some of the text that I’ve edited idk

@Shivaekul omg yeah one thing that Lua is terrible at is giving you feedback on anything that you’re doing. I had to do so much trial-and-error with TellMeWhen in order to get my very very basic Lua to work - but none of that would’ve been necessary if I just had a decent REPL to explore WoW’s Lua environment

but I hope that you can figure it out eventually, if you want to!

“kas you literally just said not to criticize art”

with some exceptions, TV shows and movies are not art - they’re content. content is the result of a corporate assembly line. art is something that was created with love and passion for no reason other than to bring it into the world. when I say not to criticize art, I’m talking about the art of random people online, not the “art” of a massive media conglomerate

we’re at a point now where these defense mechanisms against internet assholery have even leaked into TV and movies. there are so many TV shows, for example, that are terrified of unironic sincerity or positivity or optimism in any form. any time a character expresses any affirmative value whatsoever it’s usually the show going “lol look at this fuckin loser having morals and ideals”, or at the very least it’s presented ambiguously enough that the writers can claim that that was the intent

the result is a whole bunch of storytelling that has nothing to express other than criticism, contempt, cynicism, and ridicule

“I had a dream that…” is internet-speak for “y’all fuckers will clown on me if I show the vulnerability of admitting that this came from my daytime creativity”

and you know what? I’m glad that there are workarounds for showing vulnerability and creativity online without the risk of getting absolutely blasted for it

but I do wish that internet culture as a whole could just, grow up enough that people don’t have to frame everything as coming from their subconscious or whatever

what a utopia we would live in if artists felt safe to share their vulnerable selves completely online, without any trace of irony or self-deprecation or any other defense mechanism at all. imagine how much more art we would have, and how much more varied and beautiful it would be

@Shivaekul hehe - I’m using WinCompose which is one of my favorite pieces of Windows software ever. it emulates the functionality of the compose key on Linux, so I can press a configurable key (for me it’s the menu key) followed by a sequence of other keys in order to type special characters

for example I can type a lowercase lambda with [compose]*l (the compose key, then asterisk, the lowercase l) and uppercase lambda is the same except capital L. all of the Greek letters are like that - for example π and Π are *p and *P

a lot of the key sequences are really intuitive, too, like u + " = ü, and you can configure your own sequences - like for me bh is a [b]lue [h]eart: 💙

anyway enough evangelizing it lol. but I do love it a lot

and yeah that’s totally fair! I love that Lua is designed to be {the minimum number of concepts needed in order to be a somewhat comfortable scripting language}. it constantly recycles concepts in new contexts and clever ways so that it’s extremely easy to conceptualize the entire language, and there’s very very little magic… but it’s also Very Painful to work with on Windows unless it’s embedded in something else. and even then it often asks you to reinvent an entire usable standard library from scratch lol. though it’s much much better on Linux, which is why I’m playing with it through WSL