What if Putin is rational?

:: politics, doomed

Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is horrifying. As well as the awfulness of what is happening to the people of Ukraine, Putin’s apparent irrationality is terrifying. What if he is not being irrational?

Vector supercomputers

:: computer

There are apocryphal reports that Apple M1 systems are not as fast as people have been led to believe for general-purpose programs. That’s unsurprising.

The way out

:: politics, science, doomed

Many people would like to believe that the CV19 pandemic is over. Unfortunately viruses do not listen to what people want to believe: the CV19 pandemic is not over, and there is a significant possibility it may never be over. The way out is not to pretend that it is.

The endless droning

:: lisp, doomed

Someone asked about better Lisp IDEs on reddit. Such things would obviously be desirable. But the comments are entirely full the usual sad endless droning from people who need there always to be something preventing them from doing what they pretend to want to do, and are happy to invent such barriers where none really exist. comp.lang.lisp lives on in spirit if not in fact.

[The rest of this article is a lot ruder than the above and I’ve intentionally censored it from the various feeds. See also corrections and clarifications.]

The proper use of macros in Lisp

:: computer, lisp

People learning Lisp often try to learn how to write macros by taking an existing function they have written and turning it into a macro. This is a mistake: macros and functions serve different purposes and it is almost never useful to turn functions into macros, or macros into functions.