1. Experiencing serious Article Abstraction Addiction — what started as a simple post about code documentation has become this unwieldy epic which is trying to look at the big picture of how tools and materials evolve and affect each other and how each generation of tools embeds some of the assumptions from the ones used to create it, and will probablly never get published.

    At least I managed to impulsively write waterpigs.co.uk/notes/4Xu9i0 so that there’s something useful there.

  2. Marcus Povey: Spying on a website using Webmention and MF2

    @mapkyca good point, I hadn’t considered this problem with hotlinking profile photos before. I think some webmention implementors have started doing this, and I intend to do it within Shrewdness.

    It’s worth noting that the attack is not at all limited to profile photos though, rather any photo or otherwise automatically loaded content in the comment e.g. images or audio. Whilst caching profile photos is feasible, caching any media in comments is more difficult, and therefore a good reason for text-only comments.

    Text-only content is not an option in Shrewdness, but perhaps instead images could be cached, and other media loaded upon demand, removing the ability to arbitrarily spy on people.

  3. 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.

  4. 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.

  5. : 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.

  7. 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!