@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: My hunch is that a little bit of logic makes config files a lot more readable (eg. arithmetic, string interpolation, conditionals), but a lot of logic makes it worse.
The idea that logic can fail at evaluation time and break your program isn't convincing, config already breaks p...
jmoiron plays the blues
@jmoiron.bsky.social Curious if anyone has experience with two of Pkl (pkl-lang.org), Cuelang, and Starlark in a production setting?
IMHO data encoding languages (yaml, jsonc) are limited for config because they can't encode relationships, but I'm not sure I'm sold on business constraints being in t...
@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: The L thing is excusable.
To make words like "Ill" readable, sans-serifs will often add serifs to the capital "i" (like Verdana) or add a tail spur to the lower case L (like Trebuchet).
Fun fact, googling corefonts like "verdana font" or "times new roman font" will show results...
@jmoiron.bsky.social I'm generally skeptical of govt regulations around technical requirements, but we _desperately_ need legislation that forces companies to provide device configuration, keys, and service specs to allow people to continue to run their devices after the company EOLs its backend serv...
@jmoiron.bsky.social NYTimes coverage has been terrible. 10x more on the legal challenge than the way that public opinion has been changing exactly in the way that advocates predicted. Then there's this fence sitting review they did after just 3 weeks of tolling.
www.nytimes.com/2025/01/26/n...
@jmoiron.bsky.social I just read that Rei's hair and eye colors are deliberate swaps of Asuka's to highlight how they are opposites, and I can't believe I never caught onto this or heard this mentioned before.
@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: The whole MvC2 soundtrack is fire. I remember thinking it felt very out of place in a fighting game at the time (when I was young and stupid) and now I weep for more jazzy fighting games.
There's some really wholesome and fun FGC youtubers out there worth checking out.
@jmoiron.bsky.social No mention of: carbon, climate, trains, public transport.
These types of developments are not economically or environmentally sustainable.
None of the places in the article can ever become urbanized without first being destroyed. It's such a waste.
@jmoiron.bsky.social Although I agree that a defective legislature is a factor in our current situation, the pandemic really eliminated any hope I had that enough Americans can evaluate their material conditions and vote in a way that would make the govt responsive.
@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: The retreat to Occam's Razor makes sense, because it's a tool you can use when you are missing data. Conspiratorial thinkers are impervious to new information, so it's always a refuge for them.
@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: It's impossible to persuade a conspiratorial thinker with evidence, because any gap in the evidence is space enough to fill with the conspiracy, and lack of evidence of the conspiracy itself is taken as evidence of its secrecy.
@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: I've long felt that Perl and esp. its long struggle to continue to ship anything for v5 was a pretty obvious and public counter-example to Postel. "The implementation is the specification" was like a badge of honor to some in that community, despite the way it led to its impendin...
@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: Came across this in its blog form around when it was written, Bret is a leader in the "Spartans were dumb assholes" discourse.
@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: There is a longer version of this on his blog acoup.blog/2019/08/16/c... and there's a lot of other stuff there worth reading
@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: Proto artists probably include Elliot Smith, Sufjan Stevens, Iron & Wine.. there was a lot of it around early 2000s.
Is Bon Iver a full realization of this? That would push it back a bit.
@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: Sean's videos are all very thorough like this one is, and they have a way of transporting you to the time and place in question. His Gulf War and Iran Contra videos are also excellent.
@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: I'd love to know more history of the SQL standard specifically, because I'm sure Oracle was a big player and they are not known for good faith.
I suspect that strict portability is not necessarily a goal because vendors also all need to differentiate and/or want lockin (same wit...
@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: As a result, while they could encode specifications very flexibly, what people actually want is a shared core of useful, portable primitives that they can use without having to specify or formalize them themselves.
So these fell way out of favor to REST & JSON over the course of...
@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: The Insufficient extensibility of some of these 80s standards was already understood to be an issue by the late 90s, so we produced stuff like XML-RPC/SOAP, WSDL, and (hot take) XML itself.
These are _so_ extensible and unopinionated that they don't provide enough up-front value...
@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: Essentially, I think this is an unintended expression of recency bias and doesn't lead to a good evaluation of standards on their own merits.
But that's a shame because there are some really valuable lessons that we could learn from how these things adapt over time.
@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: Strict reading puts TCP/IP and DNS in the failures column, but IMHO this reflects poorly on the criteria.
Post-hoc standards like POSIX and SQL (the late 80s vintages) are a bit rough, but they accomplished their goals. A more complete alternative could not have become universal...
@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: The affect AI has been having on people reminds me of Asimov's "Foundation", where the scientists in the stagnant and collapsing Galactic Empire universally eschewed experimentation and primary research because everything worth knowing was already in a book.