I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate.

hypothetically, mastodon, let's say that I wanted to use a chainsaw to saw a keyboard in half—like, a regular off-the-shelf qwerty keyboard for typing, made of plastic. how could this be done safely (while still having the keyboard connected to a computer of some kind)? by "safely" I mean of course my own personal safety and that of those observing but also I would like to do this in a way that doesn't damage the chainsaw or the connected computer

open source licenses, as texts that advocate for their own propagation ("The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software"), is a kind of chain letter and maybe by extension could be considered a kind of himmelsbrief, a "letter from heaven," granting protection to those who possess them (and, per the upthread link, "divine punishment for disbelief of their claims")

in conclusion, word processing was a bad idea

the only thing I really dislike about python is the lack of block-level scope. it's a bummer that you can (e.g.) accidentally wipe out a variable that happens to have the same name as your for-loop temp variable

(weirdly this makes python uniquely unsuited to jupyter notebook-style interfaces, where you can execute cells out-of-order and end up inadvertently wiping out all kinds of things. tbh if each jupyter cell had its own scope, I'd probably spend 50% less time puzzling over weird errors)

you ever look at the toc for a journal and then think to yourself "this all looks completely fascinating, I chose the wrong career" http://www.euppublishing.com/toc/cor/12/3

I wish more web pages still looked and worked like this http://www.uvm.edu/whale/

this whole line of reasoning explains why recent advances in creative computation with AI/ML are always framed as tools to augment or replace artists: it's an attempt to (further) reframe art as a kind of knowledge work which (like a bookkeeper or a secretary) can ultimately be replaced with automation.

oh wait I gave a whole talk about this didn't I http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/programming-forgetting-new-hacker-ethic/