Random violin teaching moment

One my favorite questions to ask is: “What did we do in here together that you wouldn’t have thought to do on your own?”

A primary goal for me as a teacher is to teach students how to teach themselves. I want them to be as independent as possible and have the tools to learn and play music on their own

💜

It is depressing if someone experiences hate on here, especially if it puts them off using this place.

I follow people that regularly raise these issues, to hear how bad it is and what the causes are.

Five things seem to come up most often:

- Lack of representation in software design
- Users not being able to control who can reply to their posts
- Moderation being reactive rather than proactive
- Allowlists vs blocklists
- Cultural problems

Let's look closer...

🧵 Thread - Part 1 of 7

People say you shouldn't compare apples and oranges but it seems to work fine for me in Python 3.14, I don't see what the issue is...

The Japanese Bee Fly mimics a bee, is super cute and was the inspiration for the Pokemon Cutiefly

Hey Fedi,

How are you doing today?

Everything okay? Do you need a hug?

I bet you could use a hug.

🫂

first impressions of #Racket seem pretty good! it has some stuff that I don’t like from other Lisps like:

• a weird pseudo-module system instead of a proper module system
• an unnecessarily large number of ways to compare values
• several forms that implicitly add new functions to the namespace

it’s also a very very complex language compared to Janet or Fennel. but the things that I really like about it are:

• the Racket folks clearly care deeply about people’s first time experience with the language and have made it incredibly smooth and easy in many different ways (they even have a nice, friendly little IDE called DrRacket that comes with every Racket installation)
• it has easy, out-of-the-box Windows support! (this is pretty rare with Lisps)
• the documentation is fantastic. it’s not just incredibly thorough and well-explained, it’s also split into {documentation for beginners} and {full and complete documentation for masochists} sections, and everything is heavily linked together with hyperlinks to more documentation that explains things even further

my overall first impression of Racket is that it’s the Python of Lisps: it’s very complex and full-featured, but it also cares deeply about being as easy and friendly for beginners as possible, and I think that’s one of the most important traits for a language to have

On the next episode of Sweaty Bearded Men Cussing a Lot While Doing Manly Jobs (only on the Discovery Channel): another mechanical failure threatens the livelihoods of the sweaty men! Can they overcome this equipment failure throw sheer force of swear words and turn a profit?

Reminder that I am currently OPEN for sugar cookie collar commissions!!

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#BSNM #handmade #leather #bondage #bdsm #TransArtist #QueerArtist #furryart #PupPlay #kink

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*claws on wood floor scrabbling sound*

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....

....

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🩵🩵🩵

#DragonPosting

reminder that Archipelago exists and is absolutely incredible:

https://archipelago.gg/

it lets you create “multiplayer games” where you and your friend play two completely different singleplayer games and find items for each other in your games

for example I could be playing Doom ‘93 and instead of getting the super-shotgun and a soulsphere, I might find the PokeFlute and some rare candies for my friend playing Pokemon

and then they might be exploring a cave and find the BFG and the red key for E1M4

I can’t believe that something like this can exist. and there are a surprising number of supported games too

https://www.gamedate.org/ this site is awesome this feels like how the internet should be
plain and simple ways to connect with people. i love it

I’m falling out of love with Janet. it seems to have a lot of very good ideas and design choices but:

• the documentation is missing a lot of important information and is sometimes just outright wrong
• it seems like nobody really works on the documentation except for small maintenance tasks, and I wonder if the whole project is petering out similarly
• it has some design choices that are either flat-out bad, or I just don’t understand the logic behind them

it’s been fun to work with it but I think I might try learning Typed Racket next

I’m ngl I’m starting to wonder if there are any Lisp languages that I would consider good enough for my hobby projects

it’s weird because I think that S-expressions and Lisp-style macros are incredibly good ideas, and yet exploring these languages feels a bit like exploring the fossils of an evolutionary dead end. like maybe there’s some fatal flaw in Lisps that I’m just not seeing, and that’s why all of these languages die. maybe the noisiness of the parenthesis and the potential for hard-to-diagnose syntax errors is a much worse issue than I think, and Lisps just aren’t worth it because of that alone. idk. but I still want to try Racket