oh on this subject I’d highly recommend “True Color” by Kory Stamper! just finished reading it and it’s excellent (and promptly sent a copy to a friend in Edinburgh)

From what I understand, historically, a lot of the great composers would copy out music by hand, both in order to have their own copy and as a means of study.

My reason for doing this is very similar to why rubber duck debugging works so well: the act of saying something in one's own words (or to type it out with one's own fingers) forces one to make a deeper level of mental contact with it than we normally would and greatly improves accuracy/quality

A tweet -- or whatever a tweet is called now -- saying that anti-trans locales will never displace Silicon Valley

I have been more or less silent on the dumpster fire formerly known as Twitter, and even though the algorithm will prevent anyone from seeing it, I felt this needed to be said...

Color in Color - Non-Retinal Tetrachromacy Citation

this person has figured out how to give people "functional tetrachromacy" using extensive training and glasses with a pair of dichroic filters with differing spectral response

www.color-in-color.info/tetrachromac...

My hair braided with daisies in it (done by partner).

** Speaker announcement ** Catch Kora & Cosmo Bobak's talk 'Writing a top-10 chess engine in Rust' at RustWeek 2026!
Info & tickets: 2026.rustweek.org/talks/chess/

See you in Utrecht May 18-23, 2026!

@affinelytyped.bsky.social

#rustweek2026 #rustlang

** Speaker announcement ** Boxy will walk us step-by-step through a hypothetical first contribution to rustc at RustWeek 2026!
Info & tickets: 2026.rustweek.org/talks/boxy/

See you in Utrecht May 18-23, 2026!

#rustweek2026 #rustlang

Very excited to open day two with @affinelytyped.bsky.social!

On the Effectiveness of Love Poems
(A Proof by Demonstration)

Von Neumann said,
per Fermi’s word,
that “four params can fit

an elephant,” elephant!
How absurd,
and there he didn’t quit:

“with five I’ll make
them wiggle their trunk,”
which shows to great effect:

with skill, an appendage
is easy to rouse
and even make erect.

Had an intriguing editorial discussion recently: how did people in the past talk about 'minutes' when they didn't have watches or standardised times? How does that affect your thinking?

Come down an Elizabethan/Jacobean rabbit hole with me.

1/

...accountant”) because... why would we bother? [I realize “identifies as” is used because there is contention whether sex or gender are inherent, immutable, chosen, or self-chosen; my point is that the phrase is unsubtly the expression of an opinion on the ultimate issue.]

...delegitimizing. We don’t say things like “they identify as (blood) type AB+”; we simply say “they are type AB+” because it is true, and we accept report of it on good faith. We don’t even say “identifies as” for obviously self-chosen identities (who on earth says “they identify as an...

...biologically categorized female rather than male by all reasonable standards. (Frankly, this ought to be neither here nor there; there are so few aspects of life where sexually dimorphic biology actually warrants differentiated treatment.) And “identifies as” is overtly patronizing and...

Phrases like “biological male who identifies as a woman” drive me up a wall. If by “biological male” you mean “assigned male at birth”, say that instead of pretending to be objective. Biology is not uniaxial, not discrete, and not immutable, and in most or all aspects a transfemme person may be...

thank you, annette!

hm “pierogies” is probably a better spelling

To clarify, this was when I was a child, not when my mother was a child.

TIL “pierogi” is plural! As a child, my mother would say, “we’re having pierogis for dinner”.

I am mildly (but genuinely) devastated to hear this. About a third of my lookups are to confirm hyphenation points!

(will I buy a copy nonetheless? well, yeah, but...)

Typing rules for existential types. The relevant rule is the last: if “p has type ‘exists α so that S’” and “x has type S implies e has type T” then “‘let ⟪α, x⟫ equals p in e’ has type T”.

This is incidentally the syntax I use in my personal notes!

(The older sense is surprising and interesting and I’m always tempted to share it, but anyone who’d be similarly interested already knows about it, and I’ve never actually seen use of the phrase cause confusion, myself.)

I’ve taken to avoiding the phrase altogether and saying either “implicity (or indirectly) assuming the conclusion” for the older sense and “raises (or invites) the question” for the newer sense. I’m not sure whether the latter works as well as “begs the question” for most people, though.

i do not think that nonhuman things have feelings to be hurt but i do think the intent to hurt feelings is bad for a person notwithstanding whether the object of their sadism is real

I know the intended meaning of this is “80% of people at hackerspaces are cool trans people” but I’m tickled by the idea of an “80%-cool person”, which... sounds pretty high actually. (That only leaves 20% for everything else!)

fuck that’s ABCB not ABAB

Fav’rite note place: in the margin
Fav’rite dash: most often en
Fav’rite glyph: the reference symbol (※)
Implement of choice: a pen

...in which case you can’t have one without the other – but I doubt we’ll ever be confronted with that question (it only exists in the limit, as it were). Put another way, I don’t think wanting contradictory things is contradictory, which for the longest time was my automatic, unconscious judgment.)

...but exist side by side in spite of each other. We can embrace and cultivate some aspects of our nature while trying to eliminate others, and although there may be some ultimate dilemma – if they come both part and parcel, then the ultimate and only question is existence versus nonexistence, ...