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dave@dthompson@toot.cat

Massachusetts trash. I mostly post about gardening, music, and free software development (not a techbro I swear please you gotta believe me)

he/him

website: https://dthompson.us Joined: 2026-06-18 06:50:33 65 notes, 0 following, 1 followers

dave@dthompson@toot.cat boosted: @wingo@mastodon.social (2026-06-29 17:40:47) can't help getting astrology × audiophile vibes from llm enthusiasts: "oh no honey you can't use opus 4.8, it's so nerfed, try glm-5.2 or the codex 5.5, they have a warm gemini sound, very well rounded on details and tone. but don't use google's gemini models, they are really leos, they have good treble response but you can't trust their mid-range"

dave@dthompson@toot.cat (2026-06-29 00:12:17) Sub Pop implies the existence of Sub Snap and Sun Crackle

Reply to @dthompson@toot.cat dave@dthompson@toot.cat (2026-06-28 10:28:30) Set list:
Harvey Danger - Flagpole Sitta
Everclear - Santa Monica
Green Day - She
Lit - My Own Worst Enemy
Nirvana - In Bloom
Blink-182 - Rock Show
Misfits - Hybrid Moments
Nirvana - Territorial Pissings

dave@dthompson@toot.cat (2026-06-28 10:19:18) We did it! Porchfest complete! Some friends, family, and neighbors showed up! We thought we tripped our circuit breaker with two songs left to go but it turns out the neighborhood lost power for about 5 minutes. We did one song acoustic and sang with no mics, then the power came back and we finished normally. ---Attachments--- image: https://pool.jortage.com/tootcat/media_attachments/files/116/825/076/851/539/165/original/77dab2dbe7e42ce8.jpg

Reply to @adz@post.lurk.org dave@dthompson@toot.cat (2026-06-27 21:33:28) @adz the more permanent setup is a drum set, one guitar amp, and one bass amp so it will be ready to go for the future.

Reply to @adz@post.lurk.org dave@dthompson@toot.cat (2026-06-27 21:23:47) @adz yeah! first time I've played live music in YEARS

dave@dthompson@toot.cat (2026-06-27 20:22:48) My living room last night. Porchfest today! ---Attachments--- image: https://pool.jortage.com/tootcat/media_attachments/files/116/821/806/156/167/222/original/14220a8170ea5a10.jpg

Reply to @the_dot_matrix@mastodon.gamedev.place dave@dthompson@toot.cat (2026-06-26 12:26:44) @the_dot_matrix no I don't think so.

dave@dthompson@toot.cat (2026-06-26 11:29:20) Amtrak is ending the Providence to Worcester connecting bus service and I am bummed about it. We've been using it several times per year but there's never many other people on the bus.

Reply to @pkw@snac.d34d.net dave@dthompson@toot.cat (2026-06-26 06:23:53) @pkw better to do (append '(1 2) (list 3)). both are O(n) but the latter allocates less. singly linked lists aren't great if appending is a frequent operation.

dave@dthompson@toot.cat boosted: @cwebber@social.coop (2026-06-26 00:42:58) scheme programmers know the value of everything but do they know the cost of (values *unspecified*) vs (values) for operations run for their effect

dave@dthompson@toot.cat (2026-06-26 00:47:40) the problem with garbage collection is that you eventually run out of other people's heap.

dave@dthompson@toot.cat boosted: @cwebber@social.coop (2026-06-25 07:00:02) It was less than a week ago that @dthompson and I were discussing what to do about the accountant needing some very specific data and that it was going to be a huge headache to pull out what we needed, and that adapting anyone else's code with the Beancount stuff wasn't going to be trivial.

I off-hand'edly said "Well I did that Beancount to JSON exporter, I mean I *could* just write our own tools to go over it, but that seems absurd. I should probably just spend a few days trying to get all the individual pieces of information through Beancount, but it's so painful because the APIs are undocumented and I'd have to work with some imperative APIs."

Dave: "Sounds like you should just process it in Scheme, it'll be less painful."

Which is what I wanted to do, but it seemed unlikely it could be a time-efficient choice.

But it ended up being *incredibly* time efficient! I can't imagine such success so quickly in anything other than a lisp'y language, for all the "Lisp is Clay" reasons.

dave@dthompson@toot.cat (2026-06-25 07:09:08) finally read the rrb tree paper thanks to it being posted on lobsters. biggest takeaway for me is that it's an *add-on* to hamts to improve the time complexity of concatenation, not a replacement for them. very neat.

dave@dthompson@toot.cat (2026-06-25 05:16:03) This post is dedicated to Phil Bagwell. Thanks for all the cool data structures!

Reply to @cwebber@social.coop dave@dthompson@toot.cat (2026-06-25 04:07:48) @cwebber @spritely all-timer meeting for sure

dave@dthompson@toot.cat boosted: @cwebber@social.coop (2026-06-25 04:05:50) Wow what a cool @spritely community meeting! Really one of our best, if not the best?

Also I learned about Sacr3d, a WebGL 3d graphics / visualization / shader library written in Hoot? Holy heck! https://teddd.srht.site/sacr3d/

And it got NLnet funding! I had no idea!https://nlnet.nl/project/sacr3d/

dave@dthompson@toot.cat boosted: @evan@cosocial.ca (2026-06-25 01:16:12) (let ((coffee "☕️"))
(lambda ()
(string-append coffee " is for closures")))

dave@dthompson@toot.cat (2026-06-25 00:45:45) all my tokens gone

dave@dthompson@toot.cat (2026-06-24 21:55:37) @spritely office hours are happening today in approximately 5 hours! come ask questions and chat about all things spritely!

details here:

https://community.spritely.institute/t/next-office-hours-on-6-24/836

dave@dthompson@toot.cat (2026-06-24 08:06:37) @spritely office hours are happening tomorrow! see you there!

https://community.spritely.institute/t/next-office-hours-on-6-24/836?u=dthompson

dave@dthompson@toot.cat (2026-06-24 07:53:28) I picked up a neat tabletop game during Toronto Games Week called Black Mass. haven't played but wanted to share because it's cool looking and witchy https://willjobst.itch.io/black-mass

Reply to @jfred@jawns.club dave@dthompson@toot.cat (2026-06-23 04:28:12) @jfred @roboguy I do find this interesting! verrrry interesting. I'm restricting myself to textual representation in my current experiment but this is very relevant to a conversation I had at Toronto Games Week. Nodes-and-wires is a useful rendering strategy, but a textual representation can often pack more info into less space, so wouldn't it be great if you could render different chunks of the program in different ways? glad to see that being explored here!

On this subject, @cwebber just showed me a video of a Blender user that developed a formula node so you can more quickly input compound math expressions in plain text. Same basic idea in a different context.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GvP5xV_et28

dave@dthompson@toot.cat (2026-06-23 03:48:31) upon first listen I think Warning's new album Ritual of Shame is cool but not as good as Watching from a Distance.

dave@dthompson@toot.cat (2026-06-23 03:41:58) I'm adding the parentheses back to rhombus. introducing parallelogram

Reply to @withoutclass@mastodon.sdf.org dave@dthompson@toot.cat (2026-06-23 03:30:53) @withoutclass all hardware is too expensive right now, it's true.

Reply to @ridley@hachyderm.io dave@dthompson@toot.cat (2026-06-23 03:19:35) @ridley I mostly play older stuff too so the hardware I have is fine but the steam machine would be a nice replacement for my ps4 as the main living room computer.

Reply to @ste5e@mastodon.social dave@dthompson@toot.cat (2026-06-23 03:17:58) @ste5e it's very impressive! it's just a terrible time to be making computer hardware.

Reply to @alex@dads.cool dave@dthompson@toot.cat (2026-06-23 03:16:51) @alex I hope to do this again next year and you are on the VIP list

dave@dthompson@toot.cat (2026-06-23 03:11:05) this saturday is my town's porchfest. I will be playing some mostly 90s covers with my wife and two former bandmates and then we're having a cookout!
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