nik9000

It'd be fun to talk shop with the fast code in slow languages folks. I do that for a living. I remember three ways, but I'm sure there's more:

• "Just use a better data structure"
• "My language is a DSL for a faster language" (Polars, Numpy, etc)
• "My compiler is surprisingly good if I'm careful" (Julia, JVM, etc)

As a work of conceptual art, it consists of a certificate of authenticity with detailed diagrams and instructions for its proper display.

I love it.

My first thought was that it'd be a great oracle for randomized testing.

And without Han and Chewy. Who are pure skill.

And, retconned, without the Rogue One and Andor people. I love you that even star wars came around to a revolution needing help from all kinds.

I get US robber baron vibes too.

Fair warning for those who decide to read it, the book doesn't treat women particularly well. And it's the best propaganda I've read for capitalism. Read it with eyes open and it's fun. Great villains. Fun world building. It ends well. And trains!

And it's like a 1000 page long novel split into two books.

I'm not good at this but that's never stopped me from making a fool of myself before.

Iterators are monads because they have a flatMap on them. It takes each element and spits out a new iterator which is merged in to the result.

Option is a monad too. Same reason. You can map the contents to another option. And you won't get called if there's nothing inside.

Promises are monads too. You can map the result to another promise. The wrinkle here is that you don't get to know when the map happen. Or it might not get called at all if the promise errors out.

IO can be a monad because you can ask it for input and wait for the result. It's just the same as a promise.

See how these different things share a common behavior? That's monad. Or, maybe it's monoid. Names are hard and I'm busy making a fool of myself.

Monads are nothing more than a useful abstraction. Haskell is famous for them because they couldn't make Haskell do imperative stuff without them so they spread them all over the language.

We all use them every day in regular programming. We just don't think of them as a class of thing.

In the Commonwealth Saga it's trains! It's portals with hugely demanding power consumption. They mostly have to stay fixed to one place and open. So they run choo choos. Their world is commerce and economics. And trains are a lovely symbol of that.

In The Final Architecture it's jaunty. Unspace helps you go fast but you are always alone. Crewmates gone. When you come out they reappear. When you inside there is something coming to get you. Something that lives in unspace and doesn't like that we use it for travel. The terror of its hunting you drives everyone to suicide. So instead they sleep. Magic "you sleep now" pods for everyone.

Except. You can only sleep if you are on a known route. Some rare people can feel out new routes. And they have to say awake. Most shows just follow normal routes. But the special ships with these other folks can go all over the place! At the cost of route terror.

The books are about coming together in the face of adversity cosmic horror. And unspace is a foil to that. You are alone. But we do what we can anyway. Your alone now, but not forever. Unless the monster gets you.

There I am. 149. Wild it's still up there after the license stuff.

I say this with all appropriate irony: as the guy that deployed it at for Wikipedia, yes.

I have absolutely no idea when I expect the y axis to be inverted or not. Every new game I expect the opposite of how it is.

Did, I guess. For the past ten years. All 3d games make me too sick to play them these days.

I don't think you have to change. But if you want a new hobby, try Arch. I got it just the way I like it years ago and haven't had to change anything. I picked Arch because I always ended up on their wiki anyway.