It looks like the ⍼ saga has finally ended!

The unicode character '⍼' was a mystery first noticed in 2022: https://ionathan.ch/2022/04/09/angzarr.html. It's in the Unicode standard as a mathematical symbol. But no one could find any examples of it having been used, and no one knew what it represented. It was like the only record of an extinct species, fossilized in the Unicode standard.

But now someone has found the document it originally came from! It represents the angle 'Azimuth', and the symbol probably comes from the path light takes through a sextant. https://ionathan.ch/2026/02/16/angzarr.html

(@johncarlosbaez might appreciate this symbol!)

concept : stickerbombed robot

a bot sitting in public absolutely covered in various stickers

( it is considering paying someone to draw it like that , but also that must be an utter pain in the ass to draw.. @ artists? :) )

Your regular reminder that "the rich" aren't people who earn large paychecks. They are people with capital that generates returns: investments, property, company shares. "High income earners" are not an intrinsic enemy of "the working class" – many of them are a member of it!

Watched some more Dark Shadows yesterday night and just can't get that one gaffe out of my head.

A character said "microphone" instead of "microscope" in a sentence.

Then, a few scenes later, he came in so HOT saying "microscope" that you could tell he knew he'd fucked up earlier😆

making the UI is the worst part of making anything that has a UI

mmhmm mmhmmm

Shadowglass is looking like a visually beautiful Thief clone and I’m here for it. definitely going to give it a try when it comes out

I’m about ready to give up on Racket. the lack of LSP features and the often-unhelpful error reporting make it pretty difficult to work with - especially as a project gets more complex, and especially when refactoring (it’s so labor-intensive to track down what all broke because I changed a function’s signature)

Typed Racket seems to fix a lot of these problems, but creates so many more of its own - like the inability to use a ton of libraries that I had been relying on up to this point, including threading which is such an amazing threading library T_T

so I’m not sure what I’m going to learn next. I might go back to Python and learn some GUI programming instead - and remake my clicker game there. Python isn’t as nifty as Racket with its macros and Lisp syntax and its amazing threading library. but Python works incredibly well for me, has really good tooling, and I know it very well

here’s a great example of the problems that I always run into with static typing

so I’m playing with Typed Racket and I have a function called hash-invert which takes a hash table (a dictionary) and returns a version with the keys and values flipped:

(define (hash-invert [h : (HashTable Any Any)]) : (HashTable Any Any)
  (for/hash ([(k v) (in-hash h)])
    (values v k)))

currently I have it annotated as taking a (HashTable Any Any) and returning a (HashTable Any Any) - but that’s not as specific as I’d like it to be. because actually, if K and V are generic types then it takes a (HashTable K V) and returns a (HashTable V K) (it flips the keys and values)

but if I try annotating the function like this, Typed Racket complains because I guess it thinks that the result of (for/hash) must always be a (HashTable Any Any) for some reason?? and I don’t know how to convince it otherwise, or even why it thinks that at all. so if I were using a statically typed language right now, I would be screwed because I wouldn’t have Any to fall back on

https://www.keshetonline.org/movetothrive/

I just discovered this program: interest-free loans up to $10,000 for any LGBTQIA+ person in the US who needs money to leave their current home

I thought I’d post about it in case anyone can make use of it

In light of the continued enshittification of Youtube, I've finally scrounged together the energy to get files shrunk down and uploaded to a peertube account

@octaviaconamore@vid.northbound.online

It won't include any full streams since there's a 20GB total data limit, but I've uploaded every stand-alone book reading I've recorded Most of them are still waiting to be transcoded server-side, but the whole YT library will be up in a few hours~ oh, and despite the potato video quality (only 1500 kb/s), the audio quality is a full 320 kb/s

add. if you follow the peertube account from your Fedi account and turn on notifications, you can get a notification every time a new video is uploaded~

#ElderScrolls #Vtuber #Reading #Bookstodon #Books

the Racket LSP is pretty bad so I thought I’d try editing my Racket code in Emacs instead of Neovim, since Emacs has racket-mode

but unfortunately it seems like racket-mode is every bit as bad as the Racket LSP at figuring out wtf is going on in this language lol. it can’t even tell if I’m calling a function with the wrong number of arguments (which the LSP can’t either) and has a lot of the same quirks and missing features

so that’s a shame. it seems like you can’t really have a good editing experience when writing Lisp code. I wonder if the highly-dynamic nature of Lisp languages (macros, dynamic typing, etc.) makes most kinds of static analysis impossible. it’s pretty annoying though, I’m ngl

the main feature that I’m really missing is being able to press K on any function and pull up a bunch of helpful info on that function (contracts, arguments, and its docstring (which Racket doesn’t even have :/)). instead I have to search through my files manually to find the definition of that function, every time. super annoying

It’s a UNIX Linux system, I know this!

(Got the sources from https://github.com/mcuelenaere/fsv/releases/tag/fsv-0.9-1)

I’m pretty proud of myself for solving a problem that Racket folks apparently never even considered, or couldn’t solve on their own

https://pastebin.com/1tGydApd