Notices by Kartik Agaram (akkartik@merveilles.town)

@neauoire I suspect it's impossible to guarantee. You'll either disallow legal programs or let illegal ones through.

Srini Kadamati: "On January 1, Apple sunsetted the Dark Sky app (acquired in 2020) and integrated it into the Apple Weather app.

"But Dark Sky was much more than a set of “forecast technologies.” The design of the Dark Sky mobile application was a hallmark of information design."

https://nightingaledvs.com/dark-sky-weather-data-viz

Me: "Companies that don’t grow revenues get acquired by companies that do."

https://lobste.rs/s/nzsunh/meanwhile_over_androidtown#c_saohr6

UX is too often temporary. To make it permanent, focus on the DX. Open source and more.

@tomasp You might be interested in my current programming environment. All the code for a codebase lives in a 2D surface with persistent layout (unless you move things) and the ability to zoom in and out.

https://git.sr.ht/~akkartik/driver.love

I'm still watching to see how things evolve. Here's how the app's own source code looks inside it.

@neauoire I've tried a couple of times over the years to create an Apple Developer account. Each time, I create the account, then try to log in. And they say I have the wrong password.

I tried once to get Discord to send me notifications to a channel. It says the channel has too many people, I need to create my own server then forward messages to it, then subscribe to my own server. It never worked.

There's some subtlety of the market economy and natural selection that I just don't get.

Jeremy Bowers on Erlang mailboxes vs Go channels:

"It's really an intriguing study in how the solution to very similar problems can almost intertwine like an Asclepius staff, twisting around the same central pole while having basically no overlap."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34557116#34564228

Inspired by @ltratt's https://tratt.net/laurie/blog/2023/compiled_and_interpreted_languages_two_ways_of_saying_tomato.html, I spent some time kicking the wheels on my code map based programming environment by building a BF interpreter.

Next up: reproducing in Lua Laurence's results regarding the compiler-interpreter spectrum.

2022: A year of freewheeling apps

http://akkartik.name/post/roundup22

A map for code

In this video, I start up in quick succession:

* a simple test app
* the 'driver' programming environment showing the map for the app's code
* the 'meta-driver' programming environment showing the map for the driver's code

On initial load the driver (glitchily) zooms out over the whole codebase before zooming back in to the previous session.

https://codeberg.org/akkartik/driver.love

(Inspiration: early side-scrolling videogames that would often start a new level by panning across all of it.)

@alcinnz @zens I understand all this, no correction necessary. Notice that I'm using it when signed in. The goal isn't to avoid being tracked. The goal is to _exercise control over what runs on my device_.

Rather than corrections I'd appreciate alternatives. Yes, none of this is ironclad. You might call it threadbare. I call it defense in depth. Where would my efforts be better spent?

@zens These are often sites I'm logging into. (My first line of defense is to just avoid sites with poor Javascript hygiene. But that's not always possible.)

So the purpose is not masking my identity. The purpose is.. to be difficult? Clearly they're getting value out of certain practices. I want to minimize such value.

Putting it in an incognito penalty box also reminds me to periodically question my relationship with the site.

@zens I get that, but I definitely recall having access to downloaded porn after closing the window, back in the day.

I mean, downloading is a deliberate act. One wonders how far the browser would go to pretend the act never occurred. Let's uninstall the program installed from the download? Delete all files created by by the program installed from the download?

I don't think porn is the only use case for incognito windows anymore. Is it just me? 😅

PSA: If you download stuff in an incognito window, Firefox will delete all your downloads -- off the _file_ system -- when you close the incognito window.

I don't know how long this has been going on, but it can't have been always. Utterly inane and insane, particularly in a world where more and more work gets done in incognito windows.

#introductions

I got into programming for idealistic reasons, try hard to hold on to that feeling. In spite of everything, I still believe computers can be empowering. But you can't delegate their care to a mechanic, certainly not a mechanic with millions of customers. These days I try to create programs that run anywhere, show off their inner workings, are trivial to modify, let you make mistakes and help you understand what went wrong. I call these freewheeling apps.

http://akkartik.name/post/roundup22

"Networking is the place where I notice how tall modern stacks are getting the most." -- https://lobste.rs/s/xdre9p/golang_is_evil_on_shitty_networks#c_ll8ped

A Lua-based Markup Language

Demo of a structured text editor where you can edit multiple buffers arranged in nested rows/columns.

https://codeberg.org/akkartik/luaML.love

Doesn't save what you type in yet. This is just a demo for playing with.

I have no idea what attributes to include besides fg/bg/margin. So get in touch if this sparks ideas/suggestions.

This toot is dedicated to @nff.

luaML on an infinite surface

You can draw various graphics and edit text in arbitrary grid layouts, all on a pannable, zoomable infinite surface.

https://codeberg.org/akkartik/luaML.love

@nff The Readme still warns that commit hashes may change, but I'm hoping this one's for good. I finally understand how to cleanly update the viewport based on edits within a pane; that was the major mountain to climb here.

Implementing the Potluck system in LÖVE

https://www.inkandswitch.com/potluck

Research is awesome, but sometimes when you read a paper you just want to add it to your toolbox right now. In a way that fits in with your other tools.

Properties of my tools:

- minimal dependencies (no browser!)
- cross-platform; runs on Windows
- easy for anyone to modify (https://www.inkandswitch.com/end-user-programming)
- live; modify without restarting (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ab3ArE8W3s)

Done so far: Potluck annotations

@emenel @khinsen LoveFrames alert

A minimalist DOM in 50 LoC

Is there a better name for this than "DOM"? A notation for a tree of rectangles, often containing text, to be rendered to screen and united with mouse events.

Rects contain either text or rows/cols of other rects. Other attributes: fg, bg, margin. Margin is margin-top or margin-left depending on whether the rect contains rows or cols.

No inline styling yet (bold, span, etc.), that feels like a separate concern.

@emenel @khinsen @akavel

Black triangles for the umpteenth time.

I reimplemented my little box model atop a foundation of an infinite 2D surface that can be panned and zoomed.

@nff

I've been live-coding my Lua-based markup language luaML using a driver program. Now I've pulled luaML into the driver program so that I can open multiple buffers, move them around, zoom in, zoom out, etc.

(And yes, you can live-program the driver. Not quite using itself, but by copying it into a "meta driver" and making a handful of edits.)

Compare v1 of the driver: https://merveilles.town/@akkartik/109182295383555872; v2: https://merveilles.town/@akkartik/109420170803345855