Artyom Bologov

Hi, I'm Artyom! Programmer (Lisps, ed(1), and Web Platform) and writer. And sometimes shitposter. 
Previously a maintainer of Nyxt browser (https://nyxt-browser.com/) and a passionate Lisper still. Founder of Brainfuck Enterprise Solutions (https://github.com/bf-enterprise-solutions). Writer of weird at https://aartaka.me

Bipolar, bisexual, binumeral. Russian war emigre in Armenia. 
Avatar adapted from Ulises Freitas (https://ulisesfreitas.itch.io/) Profile image alt: a pixelated (8x8) ghost

Pronouns: t?he(y|m)?, on(e)
Website: https://aartaka.me
Github (legacy): https://github.com/aartaka
Codeberg: https://codeberg.org/aartaka

Public Key

npub1dqws9t0fwwyr7svlzsl8cku28u038h2cttxexc6nmzeem7rtr2dqm2h4lu

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aartaka_at_merveilles.town@momostr.pink

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Last Notes

2026-07-27 12:31:37 UTC

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it is expensive, true. But I want to believe that a Linux phone from a European manufacturer would last more than my current phone (old-ish iPhone; one year in, already laggy as hell.)

2026-06-17 23:22:04 UTC

Having begun using paper for thoughts, writing, and information management, I started noticing the durability (or the lack thereof) of the things surrounding me. Paper is quite durable and can survive for centuries when preserved right. However, frequent use of a notebook thins and tears the paper. Use of pen rips it. Human hands bring moisture and grease. It’s not immortal.
Same for the external disk I’m currently dumping all my games to: it hangs precariously on its short cable, plugged into my laptop. And I realize: the cable experiences strain, and ports on both sides of it experience wear and displacement. It’s not eternal either, despite being all metal and rubber.
Am I becoming a permacomputerist? Permascriptorist?

2026-06-17 08:19:34 UTC

Bought an external SSD, downloading all my games from GoG in case they decide to ban me for being woke ✅

2026-05-15 19:14:46 UTC

Folx, what are the easiest ways to create GUIs? I want to steal ideas from there for my own UI toolkit 🙃
I don’t consider WYSIWYG/no-code editors for now, maybe later?
I mean, HTML is one of the big things and is fun to play with, but we have to acknowledge downsides: non-immediateness of the syntax, need for JS for “rich” GUIs, and inability to speak to the system directly from HTML.
#programming #GUI #HTML

2026-04-06 23:51:18 UTC

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I'm adding it to my list, where Armenian stenography and Interslavic already reside. Any resources besides Latin textbooks you can recommend?

2026-04-01 16:45:24 UTC

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the experiments with making a Turing machine in orca were definitely on my mind! And neural networks merge with CAs inti neural CAs, so yeah, it’s there.
Thanks for the reference!

2026-04-01 16:10:17 UTC

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like getting some information out of it. Calculating numbers, getting an image, proving a theorem.

2026-04-01 13:07:14 UTC

@npub1z8r…mrq6 are you by any chance aware of some work doing “useful” computation with cellular automatons?

2026-03-29 00:31:16 UTC

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it’s a lot of terminology to take in, thus my brain shutdown. Having more elaborate steps would probably help!

2026-03-29 00:24:29 UTC

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no I mean how does -6 turn into Increment?

2026-03-29 00:09:50 UTC

@npub1z8r…mrq6 how do you go from a ternary gate value to its function, e.g. -6 to INC in https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/ternary_logic.html?
I’m not sure this is explained anywhere, but it seems quite important to the argument. Is it some kind of ternary gate configuration that’s expressed by a number? Or is it an operation-encoding convention?

2026-03-24 16:24:44 UTC

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thanks for this elaborate comment, I really value it!
> I haven't dabbled in the math and shorthand stuff, but did switch to analogue for a while, doing a Zettelkasten-like system of my own, using folded A4 paper, with IDs, thread chaining, indexes, linking, etc. A pencil and a ruler plus the paper were all the tools I used. I used it for journaling, writing, keeping lists of books, writing reviews and notes, task management, indexing my collections of psychical objects, and other assorted uses.
That’s a lot! Much more than I currently maintain even digitally, but I see how that might emerge.
> My verdict is: analogue has definitely been more productive than digital for me. It is slower in every way, so /speed/ is not how it did it. It was more through /focus/, friction making switching away from things more expensive, more accurate estimation and prioritization of tasks, and some kind of psychological effect from the meditative effect of preparing the documents, lining the paper manually, and drawing some flourish and some attempts at calligraphy in the titles; having beauty and care imbued into the work; craftsmanship of sorts.
I see. That ties into the “AI”-generated code discourse too: We don’t need to barf code out fast. We need better code applied in necessary points.
> I tried it even on other people, for example helping my wife with a long-term project by dedicating a paper to record her achievements, writing them down very carefully and slowly, with some ornaments around the paper, etc. It had a very visible effect on her excitement and dedication to get to her goals, and she was always coming back to ask me to write down the next thing she's proud of. I don't think this effect would be achieved by writing a bullet list in a plain text file.
Aesthetics are important indeed! I’m not the visual type of person, so I want to try paper information management because of persistence and intentionality. But beauty is there for sure, human-made and home-grown!
> The negatives of analogue are overblown usually. Most governments ran on paper machines, but too many salesmen wanted to sell us the "Digital Transformation" the past few decades.
Yes! I keep being surprised at Armenian government jumping on hype trains and destroying systems that worked for decades, all to digitalize and restrict the possibilities of these. We lose humanity and redundancy in that.
> Search is not a big issue, because you can have an index, and write keywords in it [...] Hyper-linking does not require a digital tool; you can have IDs and use them as links, and finding the right document can be fast if you have a good ID schema to sort your documents by. Even copy-paste works in analogue if you really want, by... you know, copying with a printer, and then pasting with some glue. Or just link using IDs.
This linking part feels really hard. Especially given that my thoughts are extremely unstructured and domain-permeating. Thus resistant against indexing approaches. But I think that keyword indexing might work there!
> I use simple nylon plastic sleeves as folders, give folders IDs too, and link to them from an index page that explains what things are in that folder.
That reminds me of https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/john-lockes-method-for-common-place-books-1685. I long wanted to make a Commonplace book with such kind of smart indexing, but had no use-case for it. Your analogue adventures fill me with determination to finally use one!
> For example, it takes me a few minutes to search online maps to make a trip plan to where I wanted to go, but since I'm using analogue instead of digital (I got rid of my phone completely too, by the way) I had to write the directions down on a paper and take it with me, as I couldn't access them on demand whenever I needed them otherwise. Well, not for long, because my brain suddenly started remembering the roads for next time
I have the same effect, just looking at a map once and then trying to not look it up on every crossroad. Helps in exercising memory. So yeah, I get that!
> I was just remembering the phone number off the top of my head. Much faster than searching any digital tool :D
Oh, that sounds extremely hard to achieve, ahah
> After a year or so, I went back to my digital systems to see if the lessons I learned can be helpful there. [...] The results so far, around 3 months in, are not very good.
That’s unfortunate. Being a digital kid, I really like optimizing my workflows. But now that I want to try out the paper life, I might come to the same conclusions 😢
> I recommend the book Paper Machines by Jacques Derrida, which I found very interesting (though I haven't finished the entire book yet).
Oh, will read it. Sounds exactly like my kind of Critical Science reading!

2026-03-23 00:34:24 UTC

So if I move to #Gregg #shorthand for my writing, #Kaktovik numbers for calculations, start using a Commonplace book and physical #Zettelkasten notes, will I have any chance against digitized workflows’ speed? I actually want to try that life to see how far computerless life can get one.
Spreadsheets on paper anyone? Abstracting numeric operations by remembering the graphics of them (reminds me of the #APL #ACM paper by Iverson?)
#theWorkshop

2026-03-18 11:11:24 UTC

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this is fair. Writing this post made me think that my approach is structured too, just in a different way!

2026-03-18 00:51:20 UTC

I realized that I need no notebooks, todos, calendars, nor #wiki. Thus my surprise at people making elaborate #Obsidian systems, using smart topic-based indexing, or maintaining a digital garden.
Because my workflows are artifact-based, uni-dimensional, and queued. I either produce an artifact (be it blog post, piece of software, or an art piece) right now. Or I don’t. And if I need to do something, then there’s an (often physical) artifact reminding me of that. It’s not a structured #TODO, it’s an unread instant message awaiting an action. Or a scrap of paper with LAUNDRY in huge letters lying on my table. Or a call someone will make me in the future.
I peddle in evocative images and scraps, not in bullet lists and weekly charts.
Am I misunderstanding life or am I too privileged to not need a calendar?

2026-03-17 19:11:06 UTC

#TIL (not really, I knew about it for some time) about Kaktovik numerals <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaktovik_numerals>, and I like their graphicality and ease of arithmetics.
@npub1z8r…mrq6 it reminds me of the intersection-based multiplication example on your wiki article about paper computing. Any chance you'd be interested in Kaktovik numerals?

2026-03-16 14:59:23 UTC

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thanks! Your wiki sure is a treasure trove!

2026-03-16 10:54:40 UTC

@npub1z8r…mrq6 what’s the link on your wiki for simple RISC paper computer? I only found “paper computing” article, but it’s not there.

2026-02-26 23:16:19 UTC

“So what if this #Lisp program shelled out to #ed(1) to parse this string” and other totally-non-ed(1)-head thoughts today.

2026-02-26 11:26:51 UTC

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textuality of the format is why I picked HTML for my slides. It’s an important point!

2026-02-21 17:58:46 UTC

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yeah, pretty much https://aartaka.me/scrollbar.html

2026-02-15 22:31:31 UTC

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(I remember akater sharing some more of their projects somewhere, but this is the one that came in DuckDuckGo listing first.)
@npub1tw9…za5q [@ramin_hal9001](https://fe.disroot.org/users/ramin_hal9001 ) [@vidak](https://social.solarpunk.au/users/vidak )

2026-02-15 22:26:08 UTC

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there’s this small project that handles Elisp reading into Common Lisp. Which is halfway there to bringing stuff to a more neutral environment.
https://framagit.org/akater/cl-el-reader
@npub1tw9…za5q [@ramin_hal9001](https://fe.disroot.org/users/ramin_hal9001 ) [@vidak](https://social.solarpunk.au/users/vidak )

2026-02-14 22:05:45 UTC

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for me, the other direction is more important and difficult.
I read most of the long-form stuff on my phone, but I’m writing things on my laptop. So I need to transfer links and quotes from what I read from my phone to the laptop.
I tend to do this via DMs in messengers, but that’s suboptimal.

2026-02-13 12:22:42 UTC

I am anxious about adding a “No AI” badge to my site, because I slipped once.
While testing different models, I had Claude generate me an ed(1) meta script to read a file based on the file name on the current line. The script was not perfect, but the approach was much more simple and readable than the monstrosity I had before. So I polished it and used it in my website build script.
Is my website slop-contaminated now?

2026-02-12 14:12:54 UTC

I’m uneasy about chaining / threading operators, be it #Haskell’s $, #Wisp colon, #Clojure arrows, or my own #CommonLisp #/ operator from <https://codeberg/aartaka/lin-edi-table>.
These seem to restrict the code in what it can do. With dirty imperative or functional code, you can insert new forms literally everywhere. But with these operators you have to come up with strategies to compose things properly.
Which is not a problem with Clojure, because at least built-ins are designed with threading in mind. But it’s much harder in brown field langs like CL.
This post was brought to you by refactoring a complex seven-stage threading in Clojure.

2026-02-09 00:12:32 UTC

So I have a really high rubric for my projects: “does the world need new software?” one.
The more this “#AI” craze drags, the more convinced I am that the world actually doesn’t need more.
True, a person with spare $1K can buy a #Claude subscription and slop up a “product” scratching their own itch. The necessity of scratching either itch aside, I doubt that this product will be innovative and useful, with all its single-purpose undocumented APIs and flat faceless #Tailwind design.
There are projects solving all kinds of issues already. The problem is not creating them. The problem is learning and extending them. That’s often a hard, but nonetheless important part. Because if we invest in good #FOSS projects that are flexible and useful enough, we’d get better foundations to solve problems on. Without the need for slopifying a new project every time there’s some difficulty we encounter.
The world doesn’t need more software. It needs better software.

2026-02-02 00:45:57 UTC

I still have to wrap my head around @npub1fp0…54p5 ‘s “deep learning in #Lisp” post <https://screwlisp.small-web.org/fundamental/a-better-deep-learning-algorithm/>, but I’m already hyped up:
• I we can do deep learning without numbers, only doing symbol/tree transformations
• And if there are systems that specialize on tree transformations and don’t have native numbers
• Then we can use these systems to do deep learning without actually needing any of the “modern” scaffolding for it!
Things that come to mind:
• @june@june@social.nouveau.community ‘s Modal and maybe Nova?
• @npub1z8r…mrq6 ‘s experiments with neural nets as embedded notepad connections
• ed(1) as a symbolic playground. C’mon, have you thought I’d go even one post without mentioning ed? Hell no! I’m going to understand this symbolic neural nets thing and start doing deep learning in ed! 🤩

2026-02-01 21:19:52 UTC

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have you considered multiple-hole templates? Emacs Yasnippet has that, and it’s quite useful for filling C function signatures argument by argument.
@npub1cp3…39ww

2026-02-01 20:09:30 UTC

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thank you for making this post. I feel home here, with all these people seeing Markdown for what it is and enjoying the tool-enabled power of HTML.

2026-02-01 20:08:09 UTC

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oh, so all of your setup is a t/ directory with tag-specific template files? This is smart!
@npub1cp3…39ww

2026-01-29 19:20:08 UTC

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oh, right, that’s where I’ve seen this programmer pic!
@npub10pc…2slm

2026-01-19 17:22:01 UTC

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good, then I'm not that early on the burnout bandwagon! Thank you for normalizing my state 😌

2026-01-19 17:03:15 UTC

So y’all (not all really, but a significant part of my follows) are in tech for, like, decades. And I’ve only picked up programming in 2020. So I’m basically 5 years into my programming career—it’s a long time, but doesn’t compare.
Yet I’m extremely tired and want to retire into a shack in the mountains. Is that normal? I thought the disillusionment with tech and search for oneself should start in, like, fourties, decades into the career?

2026-01-06 20:56:19 UTC

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it’s so stylish, like a lot of your software 🖤

2026-01-06 20:53:44 UTC

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what’s the program with icons behind the player?

2026-01-04 20:56:18 UTC

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noticed it when we were iterating on viewport/overflow problems, and yes, it’s beautiful 😌

2026-01-04 13:50:26 UTC

I keep being the person that pings people’s emails and asks them to set overflow-x on code blocks and tables to the right values to be any readable on mobile. Am I annoying? Maybe, but I try to be nice. Am I making the reading easier for those after me? Yes. Totally worth it.

2025-12-30 11:29:02 UTC

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oh, right, Fractran is super fun, at least from a safe distance reading @npub1z8r…mrq6 ‘s posts!
I’ll check out the other two 😌

2025-12-25 18:31:30 UTC

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how does one express naughtiness without eyeliner and leather jacket? 🤔

2025-11-09 15:22:19 UTC

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lack of ‘l’ sound, mostly. That’s the example I use.

2025-11-09 15:16:28 UTC

I am afraid of being ostracized for my upcoming post claiming #Japanese phonetics are incomplete, especially compared to #Armenian.

2025-11-07 21:37:13 UTC

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ed can do that too 😌

2025-11-06 21:08:34 UTC

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you have a perfect idea of how my neck strains in multilingual bookshops (= all bookshops in Armenia) from all this tilting to one side and then the other

2025-11-05 20:39:39 UTC

@npub19ua…53cv what did you use ed(1) script for in your Pagefind cleanup?

2025-11-04 11:54:18 UTC

Types are useless… at least the way we use them.
Most of the typed functions (thinking TypeScript here) deal with numbers and strings, and that’s not enough information to catch the actual mistakes. Anything can be a string! “email” type would make much more sense, but no one bothers to make/use it, and most type systems don’t really support it anyway. Mandating types is busywork, even with automatic type inference. One does not protect their code with it, they’re merely stating the obvious.
OOP and structural typing are something, but they still don’t allow selectively narrowing on values allowed and the fields restrained.
We need better types, if any.

2025-10-22 22:09:08 UTC

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I haven't researched that, but MIDI seems to be supported by Linux natively and interfacing with synts is a matter of a socket connection I think. Orca can be gutted to find the exact way to talk to synths, but that's beyond my projects for now.
I had pleasant experience with yoshimi (a synth) in connection with Orca, though. So some day, maybe.
@npub1sfp…f0ge @npub1nwt…n7m0 @npub1ckx…8e3n @npub1gnu…0jmx @npub17lx…475e @npub1fny…lkuy

2025-10-22 21:59:24 UTC

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no, I was stuck due to lack of reasonable audio libraries in CL (tried cl-alsa—abandoned and does not accept patches, cl-libmixed—has no raw data playback.) I tried to open my patch files in PD itself, which worked for small prototypes, but was too awkward for more complex things.
Now that I think of it, my experiments with Orca (https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/orca.html) hint at a fact that I can use MIDI instead of raw audio channels, and that would probably work much better. That’s reinvigorating!
@npub1nwt…n7m0 @npub1ckx…8e3n @npub1gnu…0jmx @npub17lx…475e @npub1fny…lkuy

2025-10-19 23:53:28 UTC

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god, now I want to make one 😃

2025-10-19 23:34:33 UTC

Is including #Kpop girl group references in my #CommonLisp libraries’ documentation too childish? 🤔

2025-10-15 21:30:44 UTC

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the last one reminds us all that languages should have a way to drop down to their implementation level. Because this gives programmers the power to change and upgrade their software in unanticipated and amazing ways.

2025-10-05 16:27:17 UTC

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phahahah, yeah. It is still different though, more resembling Haskell’s do syntax with values going after functions still. But yes, the pipeline is real 😉

2025-10-05 02:20:55 UTC

#Clojure corrupts me with its readability and threading macros. Inevitably, I want to use them in my #CommonLisp projects and non/not-exactly #Lisp projects. Like Lamber, where I recently added piping/threading combinators without using macros! Here's a #blog writeup on how these work, ‘Functional Threading “Macros”’
https://aartaka.me/threading.html
#theWorkshop

2025-09-18 15:39:14 UTC

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this is fair. It’s not what I have in mind exactly, but it’s a good thing to keep in the back of my head!
(Might be because I got a billion dollar startup idea with these micro-backends and don’t want to give it up 🤣)
@npub10jj…82vv

2025-09-18 15:31:19 UTC

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JS is a hard requirement for Varvara-hosted programs, it seems. So it’s not fitting my use-case because I want graceful degradation when JS is not there.
Still, I see a virtue in your (emulated/VM-ed executables independent from the Web and runnable everywhere including the Web) approach and I totally recognize it as valid!
@npub10jj…82vv

2025-09-18 11:40:52 UTC

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this always an option, yes. But one additional point about my situation is that I _want_ to do it on the Web. Because Web’s the most democratic and universal programming target with a reasonable declarative GUI built-in. But yeah, I’m asking for a lot I guess.
@npub1z8r…mrq6 I like your code listings after each app/language post! These are even better than binaries, because they can be compiled on almost any platform having e.g. a C compiler.

2025-09-18 11:34:16 UTC

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I’m not sure I got the point on mini-app binaries, and you expand on that?

2025-09-18 11:05:53 UTC

What’s worrying me as an #HTML extremist is the inevitability of either #JavaScript or backend:
- I can craft beautiful apps that’d work client-side and bring value. But these will require #JS and will inevitably exclude a fraction of people with JS off or on non-mainstream browsers.
- But the alternative to that is having a backend doing the work and sending pre-rendered pages to the user. Which means I have to rent a server somewhere, which to me, a Digital Bum (https://aartaka.me/digital-bum) is too much of an investment (not monetary, but ideological.)
For now, I’m leaning towards client-side JS. Because it means self-contained mini-apps rendered client-side. But it also means progressive enhancement will suffer — no way to utilize HTML forms and backend processing.
Chat, anyone aware of a service for (declarative?) mini-backends? No, #CGI is not an option, because it’s simply dangerous and recless to expose unstructured scripts to the #Web and I don’t want to inadvertently #DDoS my backend provider 😰

2025-09-09 16:20:14 UTC

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there's ed-museum (https://github.com/Sasquatch-Labs/ed-museum) with some historic implementations converted to modern C. These are pretty dated and lack some POSIX features, but are a reasonable basis for re-implementation.

2025-09-09 16:14:18 UTC

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ed is an extremely easy target for implementations, so why not 😉

2025-09-09 16:11:23 UTC

I keep sticking with ed(1) and discovering new ways to (ab)use this ancient program. And, inevitably, I end up customizing, wrapping, and finding forks of it. So I decided to catalogue a (pretty modest) collection of all the ed(1) scripts and implementations I use, in my new My ed(1) Toolbox:
https://aartaka.me/my-ed.html

2025-07-03 22:20:10 UTC

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I mean, I had it coming with my BA thesis literally inspired/named by his Garden of Forking Paths. But yeah, it's good to finally read him in a structured way!

2025-07-03 21:10:29 UTC

Reading #Borges too much messes with my brain. Mere act of going to a different room entails going through a small hall that starts echoing the steps and growing-mirroring in irregular patterns, infinitely warping the silhouettes of familiar items swirling and slurping the thoughts and words, creating new worlds out of random permutations of mundane scraps…
Wait, I was supposed to go get some water!
Borges is too good to not get influenced by his writing.

2025-07-02 20:50:13 UTC

“Hume remarked once and for all that the arguments of Berkeley were not only thoroughly unanswerable but thoroughly unconvincing. This dictum is emphatically true as it applies to our world; but it falls down completely in Tlön. The nations of that planet are congenitally idealist. Their language, with its derivatives—religion, literature, and metaphysics—presupposes idealism. For them, the world is not a concurrence of objects in space, but a heterogeneous series of independent acts. It is serial and temporal, but not spatial. There are no nouns in the hypothetical Ursprache of Tlön, which is the source of the living language and the dialects; there are impersonal verbs qualified by monosyllabic suffixes or prefixes which have the force of adverbs. For example, there is no word corresponding to the noun moon, but there is a verb to moon or to moondle. The moon rose over the sea would be written hlör u fang axaxaxas mlö, or, to put it in order: upward beyond the constant flow there was moondling. (Xul Solar translates it succinctly: upward, behind the onstreaming it mooned.)”
#Borges, Ficciones, TLÖN, UQBAR, ORBIS TERTIUS
God this is beautiful. And then... it kind of is like radical #FunctionalProgramming, where you don't have nouns/variables, only compositions of actions applied to inputs. If you're successful in that, there's not a single name mentioned. But I digress, my being a programmer makes it an extremely shallow commentary to a captivating idea.

2025-06-26 14:45:58 UTC

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that's an approach too! My #Lisp propaganda limits me in this regard!

2025-06-26 14:07:16 UTC

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So #TypeScript has:
- Types
- Interfaces
- Regular classes
- Anonymous classes
- Abstract classes
- Probably something else I'm not aware of yet
Why have all these, especially given that most of them are the same thing but with different restrictions? You can just do classes well enough and ditch most of it. #CommonLisp has classes that can easily dub as interfaces or abstract classes, why not just steal the idea and cut the amount of terms to learn and differentiate in, like, three times?

2025-06-26 12:31:43 UTC

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> If you need to protect values in your class from malicious actors, you should use mechanisms that offer hard runtime privacy, such as closures, WeakMaps, or private fields.
I mean yeah, but doesn't that expose the public/protected/private propaganda as shallow? I know that there are other reasons to use public/private (like building a more parseable and granular #API), but the main thing there is still the subliminal desire to protect the precious secrets of the object. Which never happens with public/private, actually. We've been lied to. Like with many other things about #TypeScript.

2025-06-26 12:09:34 UTC

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Wait, #JavaScript (and, by extension, #TypeScript) is a single inheritance language??? #Java certainly was a bad influence...

2025-06-26 11:30:43 UTC

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> When inferring from a type with multiple call signatures (such as the type of an overloaded function), inferences are made from the last signature (which, presumably, is the most permissive catch-all case)
I mean, it's likely quite true and reasonable in practice, but why not infer the actual signature from the existing ones? #TypeScript has a freaking Turing-complete type system and supposedly as state-of-the-art type inference engine, so why not do something as simple as function overload type merging?

2025-06-26 10:50:08 UTC

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> In addition to generic interfaces, we can also create generic classes. Note that it is not possible to create generic enums and namespaces.
So... arbitrary opinionated restrictions in #TypeScript? Why not generic enums, actually?

2025-06-26 10:37:04 UTC

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Oh, so "const" type assertion on #TypeScript tuples means they are "readonly" and "this" in interface definition means the object that interface methods are used on. So TS uses protected keywords for its own purposes without considering how confusing this is. As someone who's into API poetry, I'm infuriated.

2025-06-25 15:44:52 UTC

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Okay, so hear me out: literal types (typing the value as literal "foo") are cool, but... providing literally the same value to a literally typed variable might error out because the type of the provided value will be "string" and not ""foo""?! So they just introduced literal types and gave everyone the reason to never use them. I looooooooooove #TypeScript 👺

2025-06-25 15:06:08 UTC

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> The solution is to narrow the union with code, the same as you would in JavaScript without type annotations.
So they literally gave up on typing in a minutely complicated case. Applause to Microsoft!

2025-06-25 15:00:36 UTC

Okay, one more #TypeScript hater post: override functions are useless. Their selling point is that you can provide multiple (supposedly compatible) signatures for a function and then process whatever comes in being certain of its type. Except... it only allows one implementation body. So you may have five override signatures, but only one implementation function. And this implementation is doomed to re-invent type/value dispatching, even though TS was supposed to help. To illustrate, here's a simple "take string or int, convert it to int, and print it out" function in #CommonLisp, #JavaScript, and #typescript
(defmethod foo ((x string))
(foo (parse-integer x)))
(defmethod foo ((x integer))
(format t "~&X is ~d~%" x))
-----------------------------------
function foo (x) {
if (typeof x === "string"){
foo(parseInt(x));
} else {
console.log("X is " + x)
}
}
------------------------------------
function foo(x: number): void;
function foo(x: string): void;
function foo(x: string | number): void {
if (typeof x === "string") {
console.log("X is " + parseInt(x));
} else {
console.log("X is " + x);
}
}
- CL generic function is short and strictly typed.
- JS function is short-ish and does its own type dispatching.
- TS function is LONG and DOES ITS OWN TYPE DISPATCHING. Useless, in other words.

2025-06-17 17:34:24 UTC

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god, you sure are making crazy cool stuff!

2025-06-11 19:25:01 UTC

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only heard of it, gotta read now!

2025-06-11 19:22:39 UTC

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your version sounds much better, ahah

2025-06-11 18:05:24 UTC

So I'm an ecologically conscious person. And this projects onto programming too. Like... avoiding computation/state loss and trying to preserve and reuse it as much as possible. I don't tolerate Lost Computation, and neither should you
https://aartaka.me/lost-compute.html

2025-05-14 18:49:01 UTC

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so uxnbook is happening?

2025-05-05 16:15:15 UTC

Thanks to y'all here, I have a huge list of #Malleable software that bridges the gap between the UI and the underlying state. Not that I used it wisely, but I still wrote a #blogpost relying on these ideas, so enjoy!
https://aartaka.me/transparent-ui.html

2025-04-30 23:19:41 UTC

So I, uh, implemented a toy #ed (1) again? This time in Merveilles' favorite language, #Modal: https://github.com/aartaka/ed.modal
#theWorkshop

2025-04-17 22:43:30 UTC

God this phrase from Malleable Systems forum (http://forum.malleable.systems/t/caring-for-the-environment/132/2) is profound:
> The free software movement is not about the freedom to change the software, but to change ourselves through software.

2025-04-15 21:16:13 UTC

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sounds like quite a hack, but does make perfect sense! Right now, I'm thinking of re-implementing (a subset of) HyperTalk and adding an HTML front-end for it. (Because HTML is probably the most accessible GUI framework there is.) Will have to ponder on that some more, but it seems relatively doable.

2025-04-15 20:42:48 UTC

Reading on HyperCard. Want to create a clone with keyboard controls. Which is kind of antithetical to HyperCard as this graphical event-driven system, but I want it anyway.
Still, need to read more to understand whether it's the system I'm ready to invest into.
#theWorkshop

2025-03-28 16:00:21 UTC

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I remember my friend asking ChatGPT to write an OS in Brainfuck. It hallucinated sooooooo bad, not even close to industry leading OS.bf https://github.com/bf-enterprise-solutions/os.bf

2025-03-25 19:53:29 UTC

@npub1z8r…mrq6, reading your page on donsol (https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/donsol.html) I recalled there's an Android game called Card Crawl (http://cardcrawl.com/) that does similar suit-based monster-potion-shield etc. encoding. Any reason you'ven't mentioned it?

2025-03-25 18:00:10 UTC

Prompted by @npub1z8r…mrq6, made myself an HPDA. Now to the hardest part: actually using it 😂
https://assets.merveilles.town/media_attachments/files/114/224/372/456/012/959/original/b49863927d15424f.jpg

2025-03-23 17:36:41 UTC

I'm pretty sure most of y'all here know that #AI (in scare quotes, of course) is a poison pill, but here's my new #blogpost explaining why one doesn't need e.g. #ChatGPT or #Cursor for #programming. Because if we make programming better, we'd need no "AI". Just use #Lisp lol.
LLMs, But Only Because Your Tech SUCKS
https://aartaka.me/llms-suck.html

2025-03-23 15:56:02 UTC

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that's all I needed to know 😌

2025-03-23 15:49:53 UTC

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does Brainfuck count? 😀

2025-03-23 15:45:35 UTC

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I'll gravitate towards unx eventually, just you wait 🙃

2025-03-23 14:17:34 UTC

Okay, #BASIC is not for me. It has too many GOTOs per typical program. I have several ideas on how to handle that (macros, indentation styles, labels), but why should I care if the system itself just doesn't scale? Unlike #Lisp and #ed, there's no meta-evaluation and extension points. If I were to pick BASIC, I'd have to stay with just that—BASIC. And BASIC is not the best language by modern standards (said a passionate Lisper 😜)

2025-03-11 16:34:14 UTC

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oh, so actual physical synths, I see!

2025-03-11 11:52:23 UTC

@npub1z8r…mrq6 how do you connect Orca to synths? Which synths work with it? I can't find it anywhere, so I must be missing something.
I do want to use Orca. It seems to be the only livecoding tool that's fully keyboard-enabled. But I am totally clueless about the setup. Any suggestion welcome!

2025-03-07 20:56:15 UTC

Looking into VSCode configuration before installing it. Trying to find whether user CSS/JS is allowed. It's not, with this phrase:
> basically this makes all of our CSS class names API (in the same way all of our themable colors have become API).
You, cowards, are making a (quasi) Open Source program based on (mostly) Open Source tech. Why try clinging to authority? Just let the people make the best they want out of your editor. The people are a productive bunch and you'll reap the fruit of it later. Whyyyyyyyyyyy?!
#theVent

2025-03-07 16:14:51 UTC

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ahahahah, exactly 😂

2025-03-07 15:57:11 UTC

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I am all too familliar with this genre of thought, unfortunately 😥

2025-03-07 15:26:17 UTC

I have two dangerous thought today.
1. What if I start using #VSCode? I mean, it actually is my dream editor, being a browser applied to text editing. And I'm a browser-everything person.
2. What if AI buggle doesn't burst? And we will actually need/have to use the "AI", especially if it improves?

2025-02-15 17:08:51 UTC

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totally makes sense, thanks for elaborating!

2025-02-15 17:04:03 UTC

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how do you handle the need for multiple pages used similtaneously? Unclipping and putting them somewhere? Flipping the pages and losing a couple of centimetres due to a clip? Using two sides of the HPDA?
And how do you approach search of info there? Or is it rather something for throwaway information?