The Neon Kiosk

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Journals | Blogs

2025-02-11 - Interipelli's Journal

For the last three weeks and up through May, I've been acting as a teacher's assistant for a course introducing computer science and project planning fundamentals. This has been a highlight in between the more pertinent work of moving forward immigration affairs. It is fascinating to see how younger people relate to computers now, and to some degree I'm not sure that teaching has changed all that much. Yes, students can "cheat" with generative AI, but it wasn't all that long ago when the most visible solution online was Experts Exchange, a popular means to give folks (bad) advice absent useful reasoning, for a fee.

Events of the last month have reminded me that even family members I often look up to tend not to recognize trouble is brewing until it affects them. I am doing my best to be patient, as I try to move quickly when I can, when there is news to act upon.

2025-02-10 - Apropos of nothing

It's warm again in Bucharest at the end of January. The weather forecast says we'll have a winter without snow. That's unheard of. Even last year we had a little, a couple of times. Things are changing fast.

In other news, I'm still burnt out on coding, after doing way too much of it last year. Note to self, that can happen even with one's main hobby. That didn't stop me from releasing a new version of AntiWiki, because I'm using it more again, and it was lacking.

But mostly I've been working on my websites. Lots and lots of that. Learned all kinds of new tricks. Made some experiments, too, of which I can announce a couple at last: my redesigned photography website and my new blog.

Overall, I've been a lot more active again starting in December. It's obvious from the amount of notes I've been taking. That's a good sign.

February started with a cold spell for a change. Not even as much as last year, but I'm no longer used to it. Didnd't stop people from going out a lot, anyway, myself included. And now it's all sunny again.

2025-02-02 Goblins - a

It was a busy, cold month. I am doing my best to not read headlines, because the 24-hour news cycle only serves to overwhelm, and to distract. When things go to shit, art is and will always be a worthwhile refuge.

ARTICLES. I wrote a post detailing on why I stopped drinking alcohol: no alcohol.

ART. I participated in Goblin Week and drew lots and lots of goblins! My focus this month has also been into making a 1-bit version of oquonie for Playdate, I revisited all of the assets for the project. This version of Oquonie was shipped with the soundtrack from the original iOS game! This month I also designed some very cute two-headed beasts, which I've affectionately nicknamed Tchouni and Bombafu, for tote.

MOVIES. My sister encouraged me to watch Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga, and it did not disappoint. It has pretty shit ratings online, but I thought it was a super fun, and surprisingly addictive, movie. What is more interesting is that it was written by Will Ferrel and Harper Steele, long-time friends. Both recently starred in a documentary called Will & Harper, which follows the same two aforementionned people on a road trip across the United States, a trip that Harper had done many times in the past, but now it would be her first time doing it as a woman(having recently transitioned). It was a heart-wrenching, but important movie to watch.

BOOKS. I started reading How do You Live by Genzaburo Yoshino. It was a book I had tried reading aloud to Devine a few months back, but I had trouble getting into it because we found that the writing(Bruno Navasky's translation) was not especially good. I picked it up again the other day with the goal of finishing it to try and understand why it was so important to Hayao Miyazaki(the book was the inspiration for his latest film The Boy and the Heron). A young Japanese boy named Copper(Koperu) learns, through his family and friends, about social inequality, the value of hard work, and on how everything and everyone is inextricably linked, etc. How Do You Live invites the reader to be curious, and kind. I do like how the author uses storytelling to impart values, but it has the same issues as Sophie's World, in that I wish that these lessons were better integrated so as to not feel overly preachy.

QUOTESPlato imagined a class of rulers in his ideal Republic who would not own property at all. He proposed that no system of government could be just if the leaders were primarily concerned with their own personal wealth and the future wealth of their children. How can any leader successfully work for the health and prosperity of their society if they are simultaneously trying to preserve or grow the contents of their own purse? Property, by its unequal distribution in society, made people selfish. Plato believed that this selfishness weakened the state. He believed that petty concerns over the acquisition of material things distracted the mind from the pursuit of justice.From Everyday Utopia by Kristen R. Ghodsee

ARTICLES I READ AND LIKED

2025-02-01 Monochrome Oquonie and Neural Nets - Devine Lu Linvega's journal

Trying to bridge the gap between rewriting systems and interaction nets, I gave a second look at McCulloch & Pitts neural nets. I was curious to see if this would make for a fun and readily parallelizable language runtime, so I went ahead and spent the better part of the past few days designing one.

I haven't used it for anything serious yet, but already with as little as 150 lines of code it allows me to quickly prototype and evaluate tasks! My plan is to use it as a sort of coordination language.

2025-01-25 Handmade Conference Post-Mortem - Devine Lu Linvega's journal

Some months ago, attendees of the Handmade Seattle conference expressed their grievances with the conference in regards to its pivoting to include talks with mentions of social justice awareness and a slightly more diverse panel of speakers, at the cost of the usual guy-packs-bytes-in-the-right-sequence talks. Which I have nothing against as someone who tend to give talks of that exact flavor.

In any case, the conference organizer apologized for the poor selection of speakers which did not correspond to the expectations of ticket holders, promising to resolve the issue in the following year, and in passing, that free and open source software developers would no longer be welcomed as speakers.

I happened to be present in the chatroom when the apology letter went out and merely questioned whether the choice was really about the lack of low-level talks, and not something else. It did not take long for bigots of all sorts to come out and lament the good old days of the conference and soon the chatroom was ablaze with some pretty vile things against trans people, this went on for hours without intervention, the usual.

What I did not expect was for the conference organizer, who ghosted me for months, to finally break radio silence to slam me for speaking out and partially blamming me for the unraveling of the conference organization, and decided against covering the agreed upon travel stipend. I have since requested for the talk videos to be removed.

So why is software so terrible?
We made it terrible.
The Handmade Manifesto

2025-01-22 - Freewheeling Apps

A single-file html page you can save locally, fill/replace with text to read, highlight and annotate, then save again with annotations to your local device.

Thanks Cristóbal Sciutto, m15o, Eli Mellen, Tom Larkworthy and others in the Future of Coding community for inspiration.

Previously.

2025-01-19 - Freewheeling Apps

Infrastructure for graphical debugging

audio/video; 4 minutes; 25MB; scroll down for shorter clips

Transcript

For a while now I've been trying to improve the way I program. I've made some progress. I can edit my programs live, and the tooling that enables it is not much code.

Here is the template I create new apps from. It starts out with something silly: every time I click with my mouse it draws a random rectangle.

30KB

Here is the code for this app.

There's not much right now, but it grows from here and in principle the app continues running as it evolves.

But debugging is still hard. It takes a long time to streamline my thinking about each new problem. I often print information to the terminal, and then struggle to visualize the text my program is printing. And if I draw debug information on the canvas, it competes for space with the app.

So I think I need new infrastructure. There are probably tools I could use that are too hard to build while deep in something else. One such tool is a windowing system. As my app runs it can dump things to other windows, and I can show them separately from my app.

Here's a window where it just prints text like I would otherwise send to the terminal.

Here's a window that plots what I draw to a 2D surface very like the app, except I can add instruments like these axes and dimensions.

180KB

The metaphor for the space is also different. My actions can have different meanings. Where the app uses mouse clicks to add new rectangles, here I can pan around.

Here's another view. This time I have some splits and multiple windows in them.

240KB

Each of these windows is a log I can scroll around in. But the stuff in the log is graphical. This one shows each rectangle drawn separately. This one focuses on just their positions, this one on just their dimensions. This one shows just widths, and this one just heights. All these windows have the same metaphor, and actions have similar meanings. But the data in them is different.

Finally, here's yet another debug view of this app. This time it's showing the sequence of actions in time rather than space, looping back when it reaches the end. I can also adjust the replay speed.

90KB

The code for this windowing system lives with my app, and this is all there is. I have some event handlers to choose from over here, and I can compose them together to create windows here. Then I compose layouts from the windows here. My app will grow downward and to the right, and lower level infrastructure will be easy to ignore above and to the left.

Hopefully this infrastructure will be helpful the next time I dig myself into a hole. It's easier now to create new places to draw debug information.

2025-01-16 - Freewheeling Apps

I've been trying some new stuff lately:

Anyways, here's a little program I made to try to stretch Decker to more of the sort of procedural graphics I tend to gravitate towards on LÖVE:

This is dancing letters, a fixed piece of text except we're constantly switching the case of each letter at random.

Here's the code, to give you a flavor for what Decker's quite elegant mix of Lua and APL looks like:


local s: "abcdef"  # put in whatever text you want

on view do
  if ! 5%sys.frame
    me.clear[]
    local y:each c in s random["%u","%l"] format c end
    local margin:15
    me.text[y margin,margin,me.size-margin*2]
  end
end
And here's that code along with the surrounding card (you need a canvas widget to be present just so) in a less readable form that you can copy and paste into a deck of your own:

%%CRD0{"c":{"name":"home","script":"on view do\n \nend","widgets":{"canvas":{"type":"canvas","size":[300,200],"pos":[48,51],"animated":1,"volatile":1,"script":"local s: \"Call me Ishmael.  Some years ago--never mind how long precisely--having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world.  It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation.  Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off--then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.\"\n\non view do\n if ! 5%sys.frame\n  me.clear[]\n  local y:each c in s random[\"%u\",\"%l\"] format c end\n  local margin:15\n  me.text[y (margin,margin,me.size-margin*2)]\n end\nend","border":1,"scale":1}}},"d":{}}

2025-01-16 - journal @ keet.lol

i'm doing a 15-day self-directed "art residency" in which my main goal is to draw rough drafts of comics i've been wanting to flesh out for a while. one of the main rules of this residency is that i don't go on instagram. i started doing 10-day breaks from it during july last year (when i was conveniently on vacation elsewhere and therefore easier to follow through new behaviour) and this is my first attempt at doing a half-month break. what has worked: if i'm on the app, i'm on the app. i look, like, comment, react, whatever. i get updated. i socialize as far as socializing there entails, so when it's time to plug out, i very much welcome the break. i've done it a few times that i feel like i've found the sweet spot that works for me.

it still takes a while to acclimate to the silence of those social media breaks, but even that process is enjoyable because then i start to think of my projects and actually take a stab at them. i also take the time to listen to new music as i do it to help stimulate the flow of thought. right now i really love doechii and cindy lee and revisiting joanna newsom. one added plus is that without social media, there suddenly seems to be a bit more time to think.

2025-01-15 - Apropos of nothing

On holiday season I have cloud apps on my mind. Most people seem to find them a boring subject, but they're important tools nowadays, for sharing files with each other and between devices (short version: use CryptPad, it's the best right now).

I also wrote a story between Xmas and New Year, kind of a very short fanfic. It's my first in over a year, and it sucks, but still better than nothing. Didn't expect I would show it to anyone, but my friends actually thought it was fun! Go figure.

January lived in bullet points:

Now to see what happens next. Looks to me like a perfect storm is coming for the world, and pretty soon at that.