Hard labor

I had a dumb argument recently with my dad's wife, it was around various aspects of illegal alien workers. One of the retorts against me was something like "You have no idea how hard they work", to which my knee-jerk reply was something like "I've done hard labor" and her reply was a "When have you ever? *laughs*".

It's mostly fair in the sense of criticism against me that, especially as an adult, I live a soft life. (I know very well she thinks quite poorly of me in multiple ways, most of them unfair and ignorant, some of them fair.) But that's not really valid as an argument for anything. I readily conceded that no, I haven't done hard labor in any full time capacity. Or even part time job capacity. I've not harvested sugar cane or cotton or worked on a farm for money or on a crabbing ship or in a coal mine. I can only imagine how difficult it must be through others' reports and however much I can extrapolate from my own experiences.

Nevertheless I think some of those experiences count as hard labor. But perhaps it's just sparkling labor, and true hard labor can only be experienced if you're forced to work in near slave conditions for a long duration. (The slavery aspect is part of my arguments around the issue of illegal aliens, but it is also admittedly rhetorically over the top, but I don't think by that much. As an imported underclass they lack so many protections and opportunities that legal immigrants and citizens enjoy, and are frequently exploited on that basis, so for many it's not that much higher than slavery. Some slave owners treated their slaves well, too.)

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The futility of one million words

I've had a word count tracker for this site for quite some time. It's nothing special, just counts every "word" in posts and in comments by me, defining word as a string of symbols not including a space. A bit of logic filters out quote blocks or code blocks. (I had previously forgotten to filter code blocks, but duplicated the logic for span blocks so that should be good now...) Some quotes/code blocks probably should be counted (I think there might be some cringe poetry in pre tags...) but whatever, accurate enough.

As of today, ignoring this post, there are 482,117 words.

In 2021 I decided to count how many words would be added if I added up my HN comments, which is the other place I write the most at. That gave me another 400,000+ words, naively counted with wc -w, essentially the same logic as for my blog. Though some of those words are also quotes from others, or code, and I didn't try filtering them out. And every comment is separated by a bunch of dashes and wc counts those as words too, adding one extra word per post. In other words, it's an overestimate.

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Briefly revisiting Land of Lisp

A couple months ago I was surprised to read in a couple places that the book Land of Lisp was "much maligned". This was surprising because it has high reviews on Amazon and GoodReads, and I personally liked it overall too. I remember getting it not long after it came out, Christmas of 2010, but I didn't really make time to read it much. I was busy with college and my job, and at some point I got more hooked on Clojure and didn't want to look at things through the "old and crufty" CL lens. I wish I kept track better of my progress milestones. I remember going through a section of it years later with my cat occasionally resting on a page. For various outside the book reasons though I just didn't get around to making the final push to finish it until 2018.

I had one major critique, which was the author seems to have a stylistic preference that I don't share. Namely, his Lisp code is more "Scheme-like" than Common Lisp-like, and more emphasizes functional programming (mostly in the closures + higher order functions sense, not so much the immutability sense, and ignores the static typing sense). To quote from my own thoughts after reading that I still agree with:

The main critique I'd offer would be that perhaps functional style was emphasized too much, much of the code felt like what I'd expect to see if a Scheme or Clojure programmer was forced to write in Common Lisp. (So it didn't actually feel "sticky" to the brain and writing Lisp afterwards I still look basic things up.) Specifically, the over-frequent use of inner functions via 'labels for closure benefits rather than separate helper functions with a couple extra params (or generic methods on objects...), recursion (and often not tail-recursion) instead of various looping facilities, and raw car/cdr and their (admittedly useful) mutant forms rather than some structs or CLOS objects to help hide that. I just can't remember that the caddr of our "data structure" is always some particular thing, I'd like a get-thing that does the caadr/caddr/whatdr.

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You might not need ECS

So around May of 2024, I finally got around to reading this article on lisp gamedev with ECS. It's very good and explains things really well. The author created a nice ECS system and if it fits your development style, by all means, use it and let's have more Lisp games!

However, I've been fairly skeptical of the ECS idea since I first came across it however long ago. Now, to be fair I'm just a nobody with no commercially shipped games and only a few relations with people who are in or have been in the industry, but I'm not the only one who is skeptical. Check out this short article from the creator of Godot explaining why Godot isn't ECS-based.

To grossly simplify that post, and arguments made by others elsewhere, the reasons for being skeptical about ECS mostly boil down to two things:

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Hammock bye-bye

According to Amazon, I purchased my first hammock in October 2013. I've been sleeping in one since, trying out a few different types over the years or just replacing one as it wears out and gets a rip.

I've sort of wanted and claimed to want my next "bed" to be a waterbed, but that should happen only after I move. Plus I'm renting and it might technically be forbidden in the contract, I don't remember...

But last month, I purchased a made-in-Japan Japanese style futon, and a small raised all-wood and slats bedframe to raise it on (about 12 inches) instead of on the floor directly. It's a twin XL for the extra length as I'm tall.

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Feature request to self: draft posts

I should really add some draft post functionality to this blog. Over the years I've had several and some of them I even finish but the way I keep the drafts around is just keeping the new post tab around as one of my hundreds of tabs. This used to be a lot more flaky and I'd lose some drafts that way, as the new post page is mostly just a simple textarea tag.

I also think I lost a few drafts when I did a tab migration from my old computer to my new computer and didn't think about some of the implicitly saved form state before I closed all the tabs on the old computer.

Anyway, it's just dumb to keep drafts around forever like this... And some I realize I should probably not post ever, or at least not for a long time, but I don't want to delete them, and I don't want to just stuff them in a corner of my file system....

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Japan Trip 6

Previously.

Had another good trip to Japan from December 6th to January 9th. I didn't need to be gone so long, but I wanted to be available on the 7th for reasons. (An extra reason ended up being a tekken tournament I went to, which was cool.)

A bunch of day to day details are in my Happenings post so I'll just very briefly summarize some things here I guess.

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