biased opinions on subjects that scarcely matter
Steve Wozniak interviewed for CBS:
"I gave all my Apple wealth away because wealth and power are not what I live for. I have a lot of fun and happiness. I funded a lot of important museums and arts groups [...] I never look for any type of tax dodge. I earn money from my labor and pay something like 55% combined tax on it. Life to me was never about accomplishment, but about Happiness. I developed these philosophies when I was 18-20 years old and I never sold out."
He turned 75 4 days ago.
@Lana while I agree that arts education is important, the idea that art is not discovered is not true. Aoidoi are merely vessels through whom the muse speaks. If the world hadn't seen Beethoven, it would've seen a Radishoven.
It's parentheses double trouble next Tuesday in London! Come and meet us for a drink and a chat at the Barbican's Lakeside Terrace:
- 6PM onwards
- Barbican Centre, Silk St, EC2Y 8DS
Two #Lisp events running in parallel:
#Guix: https://www.meetup.com/guix-social/events/309290507/
#Emacs 'M-x drinks': https://www.meetup.com/london-emacs-hacking/events/310360735/
No talks planned, it'll be an informal get-together to chat about our beloved operating system and editor in front of a drink.
My post for the #EmacsCarnival on writing experience. Mostly on how I use #Emacs as a humanities educator.
https://randyridenour.net/posts/2025-07-28-emacs-writing-experience.html
Gaslight of the century that we made programming totally inaccessible to huge portions of the population and now we're told that the reason is programming can only emerge from the innate genius of the brilliant few
@zrzz the first symbol in the file. possibly the generation gone (somehow) wrong. It didn't recur (yet) so I have no idea what have gone wrong
I'm joining the carnival! 🎪 🎡 🎢 🤹 🍭
"My decade with Org" is my post for the Emacs Carnival
https://xenodium.com/writing-experience-my-decade-with-org
Thank you @greg for hosting this month
Have you learned something exciting about #Emacs or used it for something interesting? Share your knowledge at #EmacsConf 2025! Submit your proposal by Friday, September 19, 2025: https://u.fsf.org/486
Weird... spent some time debugging my #emacs suddenly errored on `package-refresh-contents`, even with a clean config. Turns out, somehow a slash "/" was inserted into `~/.emacs.d/url/cookies`. This file is evaluated inside `url-retrieve-synchronously`, and the slash tripped the eval.
The only question is, how tf did the slash end up in this file at all? 🤔
This is a spectacular image of a Sprite-like Gigantic Jet taken by astronaut Nichole Ayers from the ISS on July 3, who wrote -
"Just. Wow. As we went over Mexico and the U.S. this morning, I caught this sprite.
Sprites are TLEs or Transient Luminous Events, that happen above the clouds and are triggered by intense electrical activity in the thunderstorms below. ... scientists can use these types of pictures to better understand the formation, characteristics, ...."
https://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/SearchPhotos/photo.pl?mission=ISS073&roll=E&frame=281502
1/n
Yes, I love traditional watches. Guilty as charged. But even if I didn’t, I’d still think smartwatches are one of the dumbest tech trends out there.
https://kevquirk.com/blog/i-don-t-see-the-point-of-smartwatches
#CommonLisp sturdy, industrial
#Scheme elegant, academic
#Emacs lisp the only actually useful lisp
#clojure if it weren't JVM-based... there's always one bad apple
A big mistake I made was thinking I could learn purely by reasoning; by ingesting the material and thinking about it. But no, you have to _do_ stuff. Maths: solve problems; language: write texts, speak. Cliché but I was arrogant enough to doubt it.
@november I use #XMPP as my sole chat and call medium, and find it pretty good. (I don’t use centralized/proprietary/unsustainable/NIH services like #WhatsApp, #Telegram, #Discord, #Signal, #Threema, #Matrix, etc)
It’s often the case that people with the worst impression of XMPP used it ages ago, and did so with some terrible clients (Pidgin, Thunderbird)…
I’ve written a guide that helps new users stick to the best clients and servers of the ecosystem, and avoid the underdeveloped parts. Perhaps it could help you?
The Quick and Easy Guide to Jabber/XMPP
(Either way, I’d love to hear about recent experiences and pain points in using XMPP. I don’t doubt there’s a lot to be improved.)
I know I sound like a broken record, because I’m so reactive to things I see on my timeline vs just sharing what I do and have less of a chip on my shoulder.
But To have on the one hand these kinds of experiences over and over, have people regain control of their silicon, create tiny software without dependencies that works locally, actively make life better for friends and local communities, and then read the whole “ai is garbage and only produces shitty code and software should be painstakingly produced by programmers” narrative prevalent on here is splitting my brain.
It’s not just reasonable discourse, it’s active hostility, for what? It’s legitimately easier for me to reach people on twitter and have them start building software outside of the sv hustle mindset than it is to get people who put these goals on their mastodon bio.
It’s like “we want software for the people! No, not like that”
@mdcory @tao woa, who would've thought that my comment would result in petty ad hominem attacks? I pointed out that your argument is made by an llm (your edits can be seen, there was no "typo" there, you just changed the wording) which of course does not invalidate it, but makes refuting the argument futile: what insight could be possibly generated from debating the LLM-written post that I couldn't have got just by prompting the LLM myself? This is the antithesis of a "productive" discussion
One potential bulwark against such politicization of mathematical truth is the broader adoption of formal proof verification, though even here there are some (fortunately still quite theoretical at present) potential "exploits", for instance through subtly altering the definitions of key concepts in Lean's core "Mathlib" library. (See this recent talk https://www.newton.ac.uk/seminar/46706/ "Can Mathematics Be Hacked? Infrastructure, Artificial Intelligence, and the Cybersecurity of Mathematical Knowledge" by Fenner Tanswell.) Still, I view an increased acceptance and deployment of formal methods as a net positive in this regard, even if it is not a "silver bullet".
More generally, I think it is important to acknowledge just how precious the consensus objective standard of mathematical truth is, and how important it is to defend it. (This is not to say that such foundational matters should be completely immune from criticism or debate; but such discussion should be in good faith and grounded by genuine philosophical concerns, rather than driven by some external political agenda.) (6/6)
@mdcory @tao@mathstodon.xyz @tao mate did you just post an output of chatgpt prompted to critique @tao's message?😆
People are shocked to discover they need to fact-check ChatGPT and I'm having the uncomfortable realization that they never fact-checked their uncle's Facebook posts, their friend's medical advice, or literally anything Google's top result told them, and suddenly the last decade makes sense...
