Actual question: Say you're building a piece of software; the exact details are unimportant here other than to say it's an application, that it runs on a server and talks to a database while providing a service over the network. You want to write it in a language that's reasonably modern and has reasonably uncomplicated memory management (so, C++ is right out). At this point there are dozens of options, but here's another constraint: you want to be able to eventually hand this codebase off to a programmer whose background is almost certainly going to be in the games industry, not software engineering more generally. So you don't necessarily want to do it in, say, Haskell where you'll struggle to find a guy who can deal with that down the line.

What do you use? The obvious answer is C#, but let's also say that you don't want to ever touch anything with Microsoft's stink on it ever again. Lua? Is the answer here Lua? As much as I like Lua I don't know that it fits here. Is there another clear answer I'm missing?

Tempted to start a silly little project: a sort of anti-RSS reader. Program that just takes in as input a list of feeds and spits out a static website that is essentially just a fauxsimile of a newspaper, with 'cont. on page 13' replaced with links to the actual original articles. You'd plop that on a server, make a cron job to run it daily or twice-daily, and it'd generate a "morning edition" for you every day that you could read and then be done with.

orteil42 on Tumblr:

unconvinced i'll ever find "the vitamin" that makes me all better so i can get real work done but i do expect they'll elucidate whatever my deal was post-mortem, after which what i did manage to accomplish with my life will be regarded on the level of Beethoven composing despite being deaf or Gordon Ramsay cooking despite being british

A year and a half out from Failbetter my body is finally unlearning the schedule. I spent a long time kind of doing a poor impression of a morning person because of the time differential between here and London; now I'm finding myself being up at 1-2AM writing, and honestly it's a joy I completely forgot about. I missed the dark, which given what my previous job was, is kind of ironic.

From Laura Michet's blog, a post about an abandoned project to catalog Los Angeles' "No Pedestrian Crossing" signs:

The main thing I'd want to communicate is that the places where these signs go up are uniformly miserable. It sucks to be a person on foot in a place where the state has to warn you that it's too dangerous to cross a regular city street. These streets are terrible, loud, dirty, and they smell bad. A crowded urban street with a "no pedestrian crossing" sign is a place created by infrastructural and institutional failure and it sucks that we have any of them in these busy neighborhoods.

I have never seen a sign trying to ward off pedestrians from crossing the street in São Paulo—not exactly the shining beacon of pedestrian infrastructure. There are rights of way in the city that you can't really cross as a pedestrian, but those are on the "road" side of the street/road divide—things like the Marginal Pinheiros, where there's nothing to cross to anyway; or expressways that are grade-separated. Those often have walkways, and if you wanted to cross them on foot you'd have to jump a median concrete barrier. The idea of a regular ass street with regular ass sidewalk and a sign that goes "no, fuck you" to pedestrian crossings is nuts.