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  1. I’m getting too used to (puredata.info) — I just right-clicked a python class and expected a hypermedia “help” option with params, example usage etc.

    Jetbrains PyCharm does have an inline documentation feature, which (when invoked via a complex keyboard “shortcut”), produces this gem:

    Even when this feature does work, it shows code “documentation” in a monospace font, typically with no usage example or links to other relevant documentation, as is standard in puredata.

    Our tools are inadequate.

    Update: added puredata documentation for comparison:

    In case it’s not clear from the screenshot, that usage example is live code — it can be interacted with, changed, copied and pasted, played with, experimented with. We typically can’t do that with existing text-based code, let alone mere usage examples.

    More thoughts I want to add to this, but I will write them up as a full article.

  3. Completed thomaswasalone.com. It’s a really beautiful game — perfect narrative, perfect gameplay, wonderful voice acting, excellent music.

    Most multi-character co-op games simply treat the different characters as providing different abilities, but Thomas Was Alone creates meaningful, believable relationships between them, despite them being non-marked, non-emoting rectangles. I enjoyed it even more than Home Sheep Home (the iOS Shaun the Sheep game), which is saying something (I was in the Game Centre top 5% for HSH2 for quite some time).

    Another plus: it can be scaled up to retina-display resolution, making those rectangles extremely crisp despite the subtle tilt placed on every level.

  4. : bitcoin is simply a random number generator. In every other alternate reality, it went wrong and was de-bunked almost immediately, but we’re in the one where the random numbers always match our expectations, providing the illusion of causality.

  6. Packing in preparation for moving next week. Any aliens watching would be forgiven for assuming I’m a monk following some cable-worshipping religion.

  12. tradition.is was thoroughly enjoyable and filled with excellent music+dancing — met new friends, learned new tunes+dances+singing styles and generally had a good time. Longer blog post upcoming, for now here’s my post-festival :

    Not all necessarily related to the festival, but learned about in the duration. Amusingly, last.fm/music/BLM has a big photo of the BLM which performed at tradition.is, but is about someone completely different!

  15. The Finnish Karelian coat of arms looks like an Adventure Time character:

    The Russian one is a fire-breathing bear with knuckledusters (pawdusters? clawdusters?), which might also make a good Adventure Time character:

  18. ↪ Aaron Parecki: @barnabywalters now this I would like to see!! I was thinking about building a soundcloud-like player as well actually. Even found some libraries to do the mp3 -> png waveform thumbnail generation! #music

    @aaronpk oooh really? Which libraries? I looked a while ago and couldn’t find any, though it looks like it can be done with the new Web Audio APIs…