@jonmsterling It's probably because you're upgrading everything at the same time; OCaml version, opam repository, ppx? But ppx is always the biggest culprit: it's extremely complex and I just avoid a dependency on it unless I need it

When I was in my early twenties I read The Visual Display of Quantitative Information from Tufte and agonized over making charts great for users.

These days, Microsoft releases graphs like this

I believe in the sincere efforts put forward by an overworked team... I also believe in the promise of OCaml and the need for continued industrial and academic support of work on OCaml — both to evolve the language and to harden the toolchain.

The issues I repeatedly face can probably be addressed by various workarounds, discussing on the forum, etc. Maybe my current issue is yet another case of "user error". But it doesn't matter.

I am very busy. I need to invest my extremely limited time and attention in platforms where basic reliability is a high priority. OCaml toolchain's unreliability has been a problem for a number of years, and although numerous improvements to OPAM's functionality have been made (and Dune has brought many of its own improvements), this has not seen the overall papercut to "it's actually working" ratio decrease.

Perhaps OCaml should be thought of as the Arch Linux of programming languages. It's completely enlightened, extensively documented, all errors are user errors, and it is guaranteed that your system will break if you leave it unattended for more than six months.

Office Hours: What does the regime’s pullback from Minneapolis really mean? https://robertreich.substack.com/p/office-hours-what-does-the-regimes?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon

Every time I try to do literally anything with OCaml, I experience a new kind of toolchain broken-ness. It's always hard to say what the source of the problem is, who is to blame... Some weird interaction between my environment, ppx, and the general brokenness of the toolchain... In the end, it doesn't matter who is to blame.

The result is that I personally don't build new projects in OCaml until this changes... Obviously I have a lot of work invested in OCaml and Forester isn't going anywhere.

But I find the current situation so frustrating.

random annoying christian song stuck in my head curse my culturally normative upbringing

Remember when people thought “trickle down” economics actually worked? Perhaps if we give a lot more money to the rich it will start working one day, somehow? That seems to be the current plan, but I have another idea: what if we reversed it and used “trickle up” to give money to those most in need? All the data I can find, including our rgmii.org data and studies in progress, all seem to show that this direction works. ⬆️

@SJohnRoss @Taskerland I particularly use it to remind myself that I shouldn't expect to perform the whole process from bored sheep to well-dressed customer. I take cloth other people have made and adapt it to my purpose.

@Cadbury_Moose @tienelle A US measuring cup is 236.588ml, for no sane reason (a metric cup being 250ml). They're close enough for cullinary use that you can substitute the non-brain-damaged metric utensil if you've got one (they're about 5% larger).

RE: https://mastodon.social/@FeralRobots/116052828028311024

Yeah, this is the most parsimonious explanation:

Hegseth is an utter fool who thinks the military is about "fighting wars" and wishy-washy libtard stuff like keeping the civil authorities in the loop is useless fluff, so he axed the civilian liaison roles. And FAA runs on the precautionary principle ("avoid putting airliners at risk"). So the shutdown only got rolled back when it was escalated to Kegbreath's desk and he said "WTF? Not Like that!!"

As Roy Lilley (NHSManagers.net) points out the move to source around 30% off all diagnostic tests from the private sector (to reduce waiting lists) is yet one more indicator that the strategic intent of this Govt (as past Govt.s) is to shift the NHS from provider to purchaser of health care services.

Buts as Lilley points out:

this creates a free-ride problem in health-related training;

increases regulatory/oversight costs; and

undermines/fragments a coherent health service!

#NHS #health

@RogerBW @Taskerland "Tailored" is an excellent choice of terms in this context.

"GM-as-tailor" is something I really value from the player side of things (when I'm fortunate to have a GM who includes that in their sack of roles).

I’ve never tried a trackball. How efficient are they compared to mice?

As in, are tasks like selecting a range of text much slower to do? How about first-person camera aiming? Trackpads for example are at least 2x worse at both.

It's a lot easier to do the Fourier transform of the zeta function itself, without absolute values around it, since we can take

1/(1 - 3⁻ˢ)(1 - 5⁻ˢ)

on the critical line s = ½ + ix, and use the geometric series to write it as

\[ \sum_{j=0}^{\infty} \sum_{k=0}^{\infty} 3^{-j/2} 5^{-k/2} e^{-ix(j\ln 3 + k\ln 5)} \]

(Sorry, I had to use LaTeX there, which only Mathstodon users will see rendered here.)

So, the zeta function has power at *all* frequencies that are logarithms of numbers of the form

3ʲ 5ᵏ

But enough for now. Good night!

(10/n, n = 10)