brown/green

On Wednesday night, IU administrators changed a long-standing policy that use to allow tents to be set up in Dunn meadow as part of a protest. (Dunn Meadow is a dedicated space at IU for protests.) They changed the policy to disallow tents. 1/3

what's a good word for the exact midpoint of fun and terrifying?

('exhilarating' is too far towards fun, eg)

little-known fact that historically, most cave paintings used s-expression syntax

The <h1> tag is 55 years old.

This is GML (1969), which led to SGML, which led to HTML. And all the other tags (ol, li, p) have the same name as in HTML. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Gener…

what is or would be a good, immediately grokkable demo for an implementation of incremental computation?

one where you could actually see/feel the impact; where 're-execute from scratch' is too slow

(build systems, IVM, Salsa, spreadsheets; anything like that counts)

The single most frustrating thing in software is when you press a button

and absolutely nothing happens.

no spinny wheel, no error message, no sound, no color change

No way to tell what went wrong; nothing useful to search for; no handle on the problem at all.

doodles

hell is other people
(all of whom you like)
arguing online
(all of whom now hate each other)

not enough folklore in CS gets clearly exposited and published

this may be downstream of not attaching enough prestige to / not making it easy to publish clear explanations of known things

I am not convinced this problem is limited to CS

Simone de Beauvoir, asked about her extremely hard-working, highly disciplined creative habits, which involve:

+ 2-3 months of vacation per year
+ Starting work at 10am, and going until 1pm, then taking a four hour break for friends
+ She does work in the evening, but she also…

data GrowBool = Now | Never | MaybeLater GrowBool

moderately effective altruism

the skill of finding nice places to be in
vs
the skill of making places nice to be in