xelxebar

7 ms·

61.
by xelxebar 4mo ago
The baseless log here is just a torsor [0]! Lots of things are torsors: position, currency values, calendar dates etc. the vales themselves are arbitrary, and translating/scaling them by some value doesn't make a functional differ
62.
by xelxebar 4mo ago
This could possibly be hinting at a hyperbolic geometry. The game HyperRogue[0] gives of similar feels: you'll be walking through a cat invite land and spot a small dot on the horizon, only to discover that it's yet another vast i
63.
by xelxebar 5mo ago
> I've spent the last decade in erlang / elixir / OTP. Do you have a blog? I would love a peek into your unique experience.
64.
by xelxebar 5mo ago
Eep. You're right. Evidently, I didn't even know what a sieve was in this context and wrote a search instead. You got me to do a bit of research. Actually, this discussion is exactly where I think APL shows one of it's streng
65.
by xelxebar 5mo ago
> At some point you get what APL is all about, and you can move on with life without too many regrets. Unfortunately, this seems to be a common experience. A lot of smart people only engage with APL via toy puzzles, like you did, and bou
66.
by xelxebar 5mo ago
> Pretty much write-only I've written and worked on real-world APL applications, and this doesn't fit my experience. APL allows writing some of the most readable code out there, specifically because it makes whole-application a
67.
by xelxebar 5mo ago
> So if I understand this right K is one of the more popular/recommended APL-derivatives nowadays. Only APL and K see real industry use. Both are actively developed. K is really a family of mutually incompatible languages, called K3
68.
by xelxebar 5mo ago
With an OR 2-scan, you can avoid the negation. Here's how I'd do it in APL: {⍵⌿⍨2∨⌿0⍪' '≠⍵}. In general, I find that boolean 2-scans pop up quite a bit in real-world APL usage. It's worth working through them. I hav
69.
by xelxebar 5mo ago
Maybe this should be another article, but there's a cool isomorphism between binary trees and forests of plane trees. Connects my article to the reason that you can count the number of ways to parenthesize n elements by C_n, the n-th C
70.
by xelxebar 5mo ago
> I think the first sentence is very confusing... Fair. You clearly engage with my article on a real level. More comments like yours will probably make my writing better. So, thanks! That said, the code does precisely define s_i, which i
71.
by xelxebar 6mo ago
> A quick google suggests ~18% FWIW, this figure looks to be the fraction of 20–69 year olds in the entire population who are unemployed[0]. Referencing the official definitions[1], the standard unemployment figure of 2.6 (as of 2026-0
72.
by xelxebar 8mo ago
> Hit is muchel to seggen all þat pinunge hie on me uuroȝten, al þar sor and al þat sorȝe. Ne scal ic nefre hit forȝeten, naht uuhiles ic libbe! My reading was "There is (too) much to say all that pain he wrought on me, all there so
73.
by xelxebar 8mo ago
Busy Beaver gets a lot of love, but the fast growing hierarchy is both constructive and can go way, way, waaaaay beyond current known BB bounds. This makes their size much more viscerally apparent than gesturing vaguely at BB(BB(BB(100))) o
74.
by xelxebar 9mo ago
The snapshot system in gefs is really quite nice. By default, you get snapshots every minute for the last hour, every hour for the last day, and every day into perpetuity. This is configurable. You can set as many cadences as you wish, with
75.
by xelxebar 9mo ago
IIRC, K rationalizes arrays and dictionaries with functions, e.g. you see arr[x;y] and fun[x;y]. Interestingly, this also highlights the connection between currying and projection, i.e. we can project/curry the above like arr[x] and fu
76.
Ridiculously Huge Numbers [video](youtube.com)
1 points by xelxebar 9mo ago|1 comments
77.
by xelxebar 9mo ago
Googol, googolplex, Graham's number, Ackermann's function, TREE, BB, Rayo's number ... For some reason big numbers seem to tickle some childlike fascination in me. I randomly stumbled across this series that incrementally wal
78.
by xelxebar 9mo ago
> This is by design. ... The federal government was never intended to lord over everyone's lives. So behavior of the system fails to meet its design goals? It honestly sounds like you kind of agree with the excerpt you quote. > T
79.
by xelxebar 9mo ago
Thanks for the improvements! Two small quality of life fixes over the original that I particularly appreciate: - Window resize works as expected, - Doesn't lose input focus on resize or move, and - *Dyamic* scaling. That las
80.
by xelxebar 9mo ago
Here's a nicely-designed tiling window manager, implemented in SWI-Prolog: https://github.com/Seeker04/plwm It actually has quite good UX affordances. More than that, however, I find the code imminently hackable,
81.
by xelxebar 9mo ago
The Slide Rule Museum tickles hard some 2000's web nostalgia: https://sliderulemuseum.com/ Last year I picked up a bamboo Hemi and worked through the (70yo!) workbook. The trigonometric scales are cool. Making a single
82.
by xelxebar 9mo ago
One of my favorite pieces of software is edbrowse[0]. Perhaps surprisingly, I find it quite useful: - Main developer is blind, so accessibility has priority; - Easily scriptable; think automating captive portal clickthroughs; - Read
83.
by xelxebar 9mo ago
Recently, this opinionated list of PGP alternatives went around: https://soatok.blog/2024/11/15/what-to-use-instead-of-pgp/ One use case I've not seen covered is sending blobs asynchronously with fo
84.
by xelxebar 10mo ago
> What do you mean Mandarin is simpler in this regard? Just to add context to a sibling comment, Japan's first "writing system" was literally just Chinese. I don't mean Chinese characters, I mean that if you wanted to
85.
by xelxebar 10mo ago
Oh, cool! SmithForth[0] is how I originally learned about x86-64 microarchitecture. It's a Forth that bootstraps off hand-coded x86-64 opcodes. I decided to go the other direction and decompile the binary by hand. It really is a beauti
86.
by xelxebar 10mo ago
> I'm not entirely convinced it actually helped me as a "tool of thought" This is so real. I had the same issue and was only able to break through by collabing with professional APLers. It's very non-ideal for the cur
87.
by xelxebar 11mo ago
My YAML loader[0] is a condensed example of the architecture and techniques I'm thinking of. It's a couple years old, so the code is dirty by my current standards, but the couple of times I've gone back to read it, I have fou
88.
by xelxebar 11mo ago
The author is clearly a novice who has just tinkered with array languages a little. Extrapolating from that to absolute properties of a tool seem a bit overeager, don't you think? For example, do you think you could design a legible an
89.
by xelxebar 1y ago
> The way to understand Arthur Whitney's C code is to first learn APL This is the main insight in my breakdown of the J Incunabulum: https://blog.wilsonb.com/posts/2025-06-06-readable-code-is-u... When I first
90.
by xelxebar 1y ago
I've used btrfs for 5-ish years in the most mundane, default setup possible. However, in that time, I've had three instances of corruption across three different drives, all resulting in complete loss of the filesystem. Two of the

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