A good follow up to Ink and Switch’s Local First Software, https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first/

This blog post records some thoughts on how to architect a real-time collaborative app when you do have a central server.

A collection of free, 8x8 fill patterns. Useful for tools like Bitsy and Pulp.

Yet what ultimately defines Exographer is not its intelligence, but its personality. However earnest or performative its ingenuity is, it is never less than a lovely game to spend time with, exploring its subject matter with a warm, empathetic tone and boundless enthusiasm.

What sets the Forth Dictionary apart is its pivotal role in facilitating one of Forth’s most celebrated features: its remarkable extensibility. This unique characteristic allows programmers to seamlessly define new words, effectively extending the language’s vocabulary and capabilities on the fly. As we delve deeper into the intricacies of the Forth Dictionary, we’ll uncover how this seemingly simple concept underpins the language’s flexibility, efficiency, and enduring appeal in various programming domains, from embedded systems to interactive environments.

This tool attempts to roughly simulate a final photograph given a particular set of camera settings. The simulation includes demonstrating depth-of-field based on the current f/stop, as well as image “noise” or “grain” that is introduced into a picture as you increase the ISO. If I ever find a good moving prop like a small fan, maybe I’ll also re-shoot new previews to demonstrate how shutter speed affects moving objects.

When you get into the business of making money off minors, you should be held to incredibly strict standards. It should be hard to make money off children, and punishments for screwing up should be scary. Right now, neither are true. It’s easy to exploit children and their parents, and there’s little protecting them beyond increasingly false promises from executives, the people profiting off the exploitation.

When I want information, like the real stuff, I go to forums. Over the years, forums did not really get smaller, so much as the rest of the internet just got bigger. Reddit, Discord and Facebook groups have filled a lot of that space, but there is just certain information that requires the dedication of adults who have specifically signed up to be in one kind of community. This blog is a salute to those forums that are either worth participating in or at least looking at in bewilderment.

A fun programmable timer from Ratfactor

There are no words to describe the opposite sensations of being at-our-job and being not-at-our-job even if we know the feeling of crossing that threshold by heart. But the most essential quality that makes a job a job is that when we are at work, we surrender the power to decide the worth of what we do. At-job is where our labour is appraised by an external meter: the market. At-job, our labour is never a means to itself but a means to money; its value can be expressed only as a number—relative, fluctuating, out of our control. At-job, because an outside eye measures us, the workplace is a place of surveillance. It’s painful to have your sense of worth extracted. For Marx, the poet of economics, when a person’s innate value is replaced with exchange value, it is as if we’ve been reduced to “a mere jelly.”

A blog post about a few ways to optimize looping constructs in javascript. Includes an interesting conversation about reverse while loops, and using hash tables instead of arrays.

A blog post walking you through how to implement brainfuck using APL

Standard ML is a general purpose functional programming language. It is statically typed, which prevents a wide array of common programming errors, but also features powerful type inference, requiring few type declarations, if any. This makes it easy to build software that is easy to understand, extensible, and reliable.

Scheme is a dynamic language which means that there is a limited amount of compile-time information that can be used by Guile to optimize the resulting bytecode. When we put on our optimizer hat, our job is to give the compiler a hand so the optimization passes can do their thing. I should stress that the level of code scrutiny we’re about to get into is usually unnecessary and the result doesn’t always look like the beautiful, functional Scheme you may be used to. However, most programs have some core loop or kernel, a small piece of the larger program, that would be benefit from being optimized to its fullest. In Chickadee, the most performance sensitive code is in the graphics layer, where lots of floating point math happens.

Making C Look ✨Pretty✨and Lua/Lisp/Python-esque

A website is, among other things, a container. The shape of that container both constrains and makes possible what goes within it. This is, I think, one of the primary justifications for having your own website. Not just so you can own your stuff (for some meaning of “ownership,” in a culture in which any billionaire can scrape your work without permission and copyright only protects the rich). Not just so you have a home base among the shifting winds of the various platforms, which rise and fall like brush before the fire. Not just so you can avoid setting up camp in a Nazi bar. But also so that you can shape the work—so that you can give shape to it, and in that shaping make possible work that couldn’t arise elsewhere.

A mailing list post from Sir Tim Berners-Lee where he outlines his desire for a programming language for the web.

You need something really powerful, but at the same time ubiquitous. Remember a facet of the web is universal readership.

Here’s an idea to improve the fun level of games that involve some degree of resource management, as e.g. Monopoly does. Like any amazing idea, it could either work out great or be a complete disaster. To be clear, I have not yet had the opportunity to test this myself, but I’d really like to some day.

React dot JS, or simply “reaked”, is a not inconsiderable amount of JavaScript, written by some self-styled engineers, to help a website called Facebook undermine democracy, foment genocide, and do whatever else is needed to sell virtual advertising space…

React is useful for making complex interfaces like Facebook’s or for making otherwise simple interfaces, and their underlying codebases, complex like Facebook’s. Rendering the text “hello world” without React requires one text editor and exactly 11 bytes of code. Doing the same with React, via the popular “create-react-app” command line interface, requires over 200MB of Node modules. The continual maintenance and expert calibration needed to run a React application has created a thriving job market.

The Green Web Directory is an open service that makes it easier to choose greener hosting providers that better align with your organisational values.