John Clements @jbclements@types.pl

a thing i am pleased about, progress on the guile-to-wasm compiler: https://gitlab.com/spritely/guile-hoot-updates/-/blob/main/design/log.md. basically we have a proof that the target code can work (even with delimited continuations), a scheme compiler, and a wasm assembler and disassembler; now to bridge the compiler to the wasm backend.

Beautiful 10-day sequence of Venus and Jupiter drawing together in the western sky. The variety of twilight colors is a sweet bonus.
Photos: Soumyadeep Mukherjee
https://earthsky.org/earthsky-community-photos/entry/56315/ #astronomy #conjunction

Would you like a 20-minute documentary about the earliest history of spreadsheets?

“The Story of VisiCalc” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDPD7U_M8yw

Washington state might actually ban single-family housing zoning. That deserves a toot! https://app.leg.wa.gov/billsummary?BillNumber=1110&Initiative=false&Year=2023

@regehr @stevecheckoway Like, it's 1945. You are a computer technician. Your workplace is incredibly hot, filled with poison, and sounds like you are surrounded by people making incomprehensible noises.

Want to understand the landscape of gradual typing? Greenman, Dimoulas, and Felleisen have written a 50-page TOPLAS opus on typed-untyped interactions. See blog post, then follow link to paper to read directly from the masters.
https://blog.brownplt.org/2023/02/06/typed-untyped-comparison.html

Racket 8.8 is out! https://blog.racket-lang.org/2023/02/racket-v8-8.html

This is actually in a textbook...

Boost if you see it.

microsoft should have named their thing "bong"

What you're missing on the bird site

POPL paper: Ta-daaaaa! Look at this huge problem we solved! (200 citations)

Workshop paper, same people, four years later: uhhhh so actually it turns out that that doesn't work, here's what to do instead (7 citations)

This hits a little too close to home.

Workers should not feel pressure to be scrutinized in their workplace or in their own homes to keep their jobs. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/12/eff-agrees-nlrb-workers-need-protection-against-bossware

Works entering the public domain include:

Written work by: Agatha Christie, Baroness Orczy, Hermann Hesse, Marcel Proust, Upton Sinclair, and Virginia Woolf

Art by: Ansel Adams, Edward Hopper, Georgia O'Keeffe, René Magritte, Salvador Dalí, and Tamara de Lempicka

Films including The Jazz Singer, Metropolis, Napoléon, and Trolley Troubles

Music by Béla Bartók, Ira and George Gershwin, Igor Stravinsky, Irving Berlin, Louis Armstrong, Ruth Etting, and Sophie Tucker

Read this and understand why Twitter and Facebook are failing. They’re run by people who fundamentally hate what those sites are, hate the people who use them, and so they keep trying to make them be something else.
https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/what-can-we-learn-from-barnes-and

@arjun Also a reminder that TurboTax is one of the main reasons we don't have a much simpler tax filing system, where the IRS simply tell us what we/they owe based on the info they already have — as some other countries do.

Fun fact: one of the main advocate for it in the US, who even spent his own money trying to get that legislation passed, is Joseph Bankman, father of SBF.

Here's his interview where he explicitly calls out Intuit:
https://www.npr.org/2017/03/29/521954033/stanford-professor-loses-political-battle-to-simplify-tax-filing-process