Notices by Adrian Cochrane (alcinnz@floss.social), page 53

According to this source on GitHub, before James Gosling invented the #Java programming language, he had implemented his own clone of #Emacs in the early #1980s written in C. This was done because an Emacs-like editor had not been ported to proprietary Unix systems at the time (this was before GNU was a thing). The code is now "open sourced," but the licensing is unclear. Still, might be worth a look for anyone who is interested in #TextEditor and programming languages.
https://github.com/bobbae/gosling-emacs

(EDIT: correction, thanks to @carcosa -- ML is "MockLisp", not Standard ML.)

I find myself beginning to plan an #ArgonautStack component for applying animations. Seperate from Haskell Stylist or CatTrap.

(Since I'd need to apply it during CatTrap's computations)

First order of business: What do I call it? I'm thinking an early animated cartoonist?

Fleischer seems to be sticking! After the studio who brought us Popeye The Sailer, Betty Boop, & Superman shorts.

I'm happy to take other suggestions?

@nckx Incidentally my tip for enjoying writing Haskell: Avoid monads!

Can't entirely, but some people really seem into discussing them...

O.K., poll results! Didn't get too many respondents though.

Asking about interest in a highly privacy-respecting (differential privacy, aggregated) platform independent app analytics: Half of respondents would be interested in using it. A sizable number have no personal interest (which would include me). A couple were interested in building it, & using it themselves.

I'll leave this at: I'll be excited to see something like this become reality! But I'm too busy to do so myself.

Workbench has been accepted as a #GNOME #GSoC internship project ✨

The title is "Make GNOME platform demos for Workbench". I will be mentoring with the help of @andyholmes and @tbernard (thanks!).

https://gsoc.gnome.org/2023/#gnome-platform-demos-for-workbench

You can find the eligibility criteria here:

https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/get-started

If anyone here is interested – feel free to get in touch.

:boost_ok: :gnome: ⚒️

@jacksonchen666 I'm Haskell fan, & have made great use of the http-client-tls, aeson, & happstack packages!

Though I'd want to ask you want to use it for before giving a fullhearted recommendation.

Otherwise, Julia & Lua look nice. I believe they've got good HTTP & JSON APIs...

@TechConnectify Fair enough. Maybe I just read one too many opinion pieces which annoy me?

@TechConnectify Well, your comments do go beyond cars... But that's a big part of it!

@TechConnectify But you're talking cars! There's no rationality to be found here!

I still cannot get over how people equate extracting resources to build a thing which will let us do something for decades to come with extracting resources which we promptly set on fire so we can do something for a moment.

Frankly, you'll see this attitude all over the place if you look for it. Social activities, plumbing, cooking, relationships, electricity, finance, all sorts of things where sometimes serious caution is the right approach, but it might not be obvious once you're already capable in the area.

I make fun, but, this is a serious thing for a lot of people. I myself felt like this a lot back when I first started using a computer as a kid. And It's not entirely unreasonable - if you don't know what you're doing, it is entirely possible to cause yourself all kinds of problems and make your life much more difficult, maybe even take serious financial damage if you're particularly unlucky.

Instructions: "Now, open the settings menu and-"

User: *Gasps, widens eyes, grips arm rests, looks around nervously* "Whoa whoa whoa, you want me to open the *settings menu*? Isn't that *Dangerous*? What if something *Bad Happens*?"

The best description I've ever heard of AI is the following. I heard this in the 80s, and it has held up since:

AI is magic.

1: You see a magic trick. You are amazed by the magic.

2: You are shown how the trick works. You are impressed by the technique.

3: You learn how to perform the trick. Now it's not magic, it's sleight-of-hand, or mirrors, or misdirection.

This is why "AI" is always bullshit: once you understand it, it's not AI any more, it's something else.

Some things that used to be AI but aren't any more:

- production systems
- expert systems
- semantic networks
- theorem provers
- Bayesian inference
- putting parentheses around data and calling it "knowledge"
- computational linguistics
- genetic algorithms
- machine translation

I will again defend the idea of using algorithms on mastodon. To put it simply, the effort and expertise required to maintain ones feed with the existing tools of Mastodon is more than most people are interested in investing, and rather than telling them they need to work harder and learn more until they leave, I think we'd be better off offering better tools.

What do I mean by "Argonaut Stack" vs "Argonaut Suite" vs "Argonaut Constellation"?

The Argonaut Stack is a suite of modules which can be easily hooked together to form a browserengine whilst remaining independently reusable.

The Argonaut Suite are browsers, etc built on some subset of The Argonaut Stack targeting different mediums. I give these greek names.

The Argonaut Constellation refers to everything!

@emmah I'm sure I'll hear some of this tonight, it's hard to find devgroups without it! This one's better than most...

But they're really not the sort of tech which holds my interest. They're the result of massive investment, not of programming skill! With very little upsides despite what tech-fetishists want to believe.

Lines are cloned. Conics are recursively subdivided based on a computed split-point, or allocating two new edges in the base-case. As for cubics, ofcourse computing splitpoints differently.

Results are collected into a new contour.

P.S. The mainloop for handling overlaps contour orientation is taken into account, so there's a function to compute that.

P.P.S. The bounding-box computation differs based on edgetype.

P.P.P.S. There's a method table to interpret paths.

4/4 Fin for FreeType SDF!

Generating the bounding-box, after initialization & validation, involves iterating over the contours & their edges. Foreach it computes a bounding box whose pixels it iterates over, to compute edge distances according to a choice of (often nontrivial) tweening functions & squareroots them. A final pixel iteration fills in missing values. Literal corner-cases are handled specially.

Splitting a shape involves iterating over a contour & their edges handling each edge-type differently.

3/3.5?