Toots for acowley@mastodon.social account

Written by Anthony Cowley on 2025-02-05 at 13:50

Steel is pretty cool looking #Scheme implementation designed to be usable on its own or embedded in Rust applications. Has some contract and transducer pieces from Racket and Clojure. https://github.com/mattwparas/steel

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Written by Anthony Cowley on 2024-11-21 at 13:39

It is incredible how hard it is to get help with minor-medium home renovation work. Everyone we talk to wants to go all-in, leaving the home borderline unusable for 1-2 months. I understand how larger jobs simplify their scheduling and budgeting, but I didn't appreciate how hard it would be to find someone willing to take on something smaller.

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Written by Anthony Cowley on 2024-11-20 at 14:23

An article about scientific research being better received when the authors demonstrate intellectual humility leading to a comment section dominated by voices blaming the public is an interesting bit of self-commentary.

I worry a lot about anti-intellectualism trends that you see signs of whenever folks decry precision, rigor, or something that resembles a science experiment, but there is still room for self-awareness here.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/11/nearly-half-of-us-thinks-scientists-are-smug-study-finds-humility-helps/

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Written by Anthony Cowley on 2024-11-18 at 13:43

Something I’ve been thinking about for a while is what a version of, “Heard, chef,” recently re-popularized by The Bear, could be in an engineering setting. We sometimes use “ack” or “copy that,” but that’s only half the communication. Any ideas?

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Written by Anthony Cowley on 2024-11-18 at 06:00

Forgot to post these last week! #photography #SilentSunday

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Written by Anthony Cowley on 2024-11-13 at 15:22

Cool examples of combination legged and wheeled robotic traversal of rough terrain. #robotics

https://youtu.be/iL833P0Vino?si=xUC9rTPUiNKbxNnD

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Written by Anthony Cowley on 2024-11-01 at 14:14

I really can’t decide what to think about people like LeCun choosing to put so much time into arguing on Twitter. https://sigmoid.social/@garymarcus/113408094553055138

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Written by Anthony Cowley on 2024-10-27 at 23:20

Pretty perfect fall day in NJ! #SilentSunday #photography

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Written by Anthony Cowley on 2024-10-25 at 14:49

No matter how advanced technology gets, I can misspell “bureaucracy” and related words badly enough that spell checkers conclude that I’ve switched to another language.

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Written by Anthony Cowley on 2024-10-25 at 12:46

Something interesting about trying to lock down the environment in which some software is built — be it with #nix or #docker or I suppose anything else — is that those environments tend to grow barnacles of tweaks and fixes over time until you’ve got 10 year old foundations with a collection of ad hoc backports that have significant downsides to an updated respin. Stability is great, but you don’t want to get to a straw breaking the camel’s back point in updates.

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Written by Anthony Cowley on 2024-10-21 at 00:43

A little NJ fall foliage for #silentsunday #Photography

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Written by Anthony Cowley on 2024-10-14 at 13:42

A reaction I have when reading a new-to-me #haskell library that I don't like is that my interest tends to shut down when I see template haskell. One reason for this is that generally you can be navigating a library, following the types to understand what's happening, and then you hit something whose type is Name -> Q [Dec] and you don't know what you're getting. If the TH is going to break with the next GHC, you don't know what fixing it yourself will involve.

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Written by Anthony Cowley on 2024-10-13 at 14:20

That #SpaceX catch... what can you even say about the audacity of that engineering?

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Written by Anthony Cowley on 2024-10-09 at 12:57

Deep #space missions take so long, even after they’re built and launched, that it can be hard to get excited about them, but this article on the Europa Clipper spacecraft launching soon does a fantastic job motivating some level of excitement and telling a story about the struggle of any long-term project.

https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/10/were-finally-going-to-the-solar-systems-most-intriguing-but-unexplored-frontier/

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Written by Anthony Cowley on 2024-10-09 at 12:42

Standup comedy is really interesting as a creative endeavor that is extensively shaped by broad public review. Are there other things where the author cedes so much control to the audience over an extended time? With things like movies, say, people like to extol the courage of a creator who stuck to their vision no matter the buy-in from others. But comedians are out there every night dropping things that don’t work with an audience and refining the things that do.

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Written by Anthony Cowley on 2024-10-07 at 03:00

When I see ads on video streaming sites, they tend to be offensively irrelevant. Yet there are new local businesses that could benefit from getting ads in front of me so that I know they exist. Where’s the disconnect? Is advertising too expensive for most local businesses, or is targeting that much worse than it was when we had local affiliate TV stations? Or both?

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Written by Anthony Cowley on 2024-10-06 at 22:35

Autumn weekend ✅

[#]photography #SilentSunday

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Written by Anthony Cowley on 2024-10-02 at 13:54

What video games have a good approach for helping out people who’d like to continue playing after some time away from the game? It seems like a hard but soluble problem, yet most games don’t make any effort to assist that situation.

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Written by Anthony Cowley on 2024-09-30 at 12:54

My young son crafts these elaborate TTRPG-style gaming scenarios, and has been on a sci-fi kick of late because we’ve dipped back into No Man’s Sky on screens. He employs a lot of toys in the physical gaming, and now I’m the player in this saga with upgradeable ships and characters like Luke Slime Walker (using a crocheted Dragon Quest Slime my wife made for him) and Carth Vader (a toy car with a cape).

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Written by Anthony Cowley on 2024-09-30 at 00:18

Apropos of the earlier posts about the MicroHs #haskell compiler, you can try it out using #nix with:

nix run github:acowley/microhs-nix

I haven't done much more than make that work at https://github.com/acowley/microhs-nix, but I let out an audible sigh of relief at all the standard language extensions enabled by default when playing in the interpreter 😅

I pushed an aarch64-darwin build to cachix, but haven't setup GHA so there's no linux cache yet.

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