They're still up, preparing for bed, watching a film, reading? I always wonder how anyone's evening is spent. I could peer inside, and I would know and they wouldn't see me against the night, but I would see them. Walking by, throwing the briefest of glances into this life, and that one. They're playing cards, a late dinner, they're talking to their dog and brushing their teeth.
I wonder whether any among them is haunted. Prime factorization feels ancient and inevitable, doesn't it. A passerby, peering through our window, would find equally nothing. Every positive integer is already a multiset and has always been one, it was all just waiting to be interpreted that way. Someone at a desk, balancing a pencil, putting it down to type something, erasing it, nothing to betray my visitation. Something so minimal has no right to be that powerful, it feels almost geological.
There's something unsettling about it in the best way, the feeling that numbers were always secretly a computational substrate, putting on a thick sweater, water to boil, they wouldn't know how much I'm haunted.
February is starting very slowly. Temperatures are back above freezing at least, and we have hot water. There were good moments too, such as spotting storks at the park, and even a big woodpecker, feathers a brilliant green. Been learning new things again, still without much of a plan.
After multiple attempts to host it on other websites, I synced my link directory to the latest version. This is where it took shape and where people expect it. And there's no point in duplicating work while this site is still online. Likewise for my programming language notes, where I just merged some side text that was lying around.
Other highlights include seeing a friend and printing out some writings, both for safekeeping and so I can more easily hand out copies to interested people.
As the winter is ending (and I'm still behind on writing my journal) another idea for a toy programming language pounced on me. This one is novel enough to be worth my time for a change, and as a bonus it pushed me to learn more on things like Python type declarations or JavaScript classes+modules. That, and it was a reason to finally join the young meta.lisp community. Which, by the way, could use more people if you're into that sort of thing.
In classical logic, bindings are inexhaustible, if a formula proves something from x, you can use x ten times, or zero times, it doesn’t matter. But programming doesn’t work like that, resources do matter. I don't say this to mean that copying a register is costing cycles, but that semantically speaking, closing a file or freeing memory should consume the access to that resource.
In catlangs, bindings are fuel, if you want two copies, you must duplicate. It becomes an operation, not a ambient assumption. Jean-Yves Girard wrote extensively about this, and his insight was that this linear logic was closer to reality, it makes logic reflect process. In other words, traditional logic is static and he wanted a logic of change.
I see Forth thrown left and right around permacomputing circles on vague notions of efficiency and human-scaleness, but I think what lies beneath these intuitions is that classical logic assumes infinite copyability. Which is unrealistic for memory, energy and just about any physical system. Stack machines expose the structural rules that classical logic hides, duplication and erasure are explicit instructions. This conservation law aligns logic with a finite natural world.
Programming languages typically hide duplication and lifetimes, or tack helpers on top as an afterthought. Values duplicate freely, things exist everywhere at once, names abstract away placement, this may activate one's linguistic thought process but keep the spatial system asleep. My experience with catlang has had less to do with fussing with names and symbols and more to do with something like weaving. On this loom, things don't have names but occupy spaces in a braid over time. If I had to guess, I'd say that probably triggers the same geometrically thinking part of the brain that tracks physical objects.
Today I fulfilled a childhood dream, I got to see a rocket launch in person and go to Kennedy Space Centre.
Woke up at 4am and drove an hour from my hotel over to Port Canaveral and saw Crew-12 lift off, the sound was unlike anything I’ve ever heard. I couldn’t stop smiling when I saw the gas halo when the stages separated.
Didn’t get to see Core B1101 (the Falcon 9 booster) return for landing though as a Disney cruise ship chose that exact moment to enter port and block the view across the water.
After that I drove back and slept for a few more hours before my co-worker drove us to Kennedy Space Centre. There we saw the rocket garden, walked around the gateway exhibit, went to the Saturn V visitor centre and got some photos of Artemis II on the stand at LC-39B. The scale of the Vehicle Assembly Building is almost to much to hold in your head, one metric quoted on the video on the bus was that the building could hold 250 Billion ping pong balls.
I was originally still going to be in Orlando for the launch of Artemis-II but they have pushed it back to March 3rd which is just after I leave. While that is unfortunate I’m glad I got the chance to see at least one launch with humans aboard.
Rek and I have just returned from a delightful couple of days deep in the wintry Spanish countryside, holed up in a labyrinthine medieval monastery with the Ink & Switch team.
It does my mood something good to sit among peers who are singularly focused on researching how to make the craft of computing more approachable, robust and playful. The activity of hand-crafting software seems unfortunately a rather radical and rebellious practice right now. But a sort of push back, or at least, willingness to challenge the prevailing narrative recurred in nearly every session I attended, at times lasting late into the night.
I especially enjoyed geeking out about Smalltalk & Self with Dan Ingalls, playtesting Lilith Duncan's game, reciting Ivan Reese's interminable list of four-letters words, sharing a day with folks from Merveilles whom I had been meaning to meet in person for the longest time, finding a zipline and calisthenics park among the olive trees and stuffing my face with bread.
It wasn't all good news tho, I experienced sopa de ajo blanco for the first(and last) time, and even after days of learning to operate these European light switches where the button is pressed down to light things up, I only ever managed the rocker correctly half the time.
It’s been a while since I started moving my site to Hugo. I didn’t want to change my sites style so I recreated it as a Hugo theme.
There is also a little web editor for it as well, written in Go. It’s basic but it really works well and I learned a lot putting it together. I didn’t want to deal with databases for user management though so I set it up with pocket-id which allowed me to create a PassKey and use that to login.
Everything is now running inside Docker served with Traefik on an Alpine Linux VPS. It isn’t using Ansible like I originally planned but I’ll find a way to recreate this setup in it eventually so that I can plonk it on any server and have it set up correctly.
