Fixpoint

From #trilema: 2019-12-30.

MP clarified for trinque that nobody's proposing all software be installed everywhere, and his own point was more about making gradual code and design cleanups so the mess becomes much smaller. A V tree could grow in different directions for different purposes, with a GUI environment likely being an early such split.

He weighed in on the Lisp critique thread. The latest ASDF was wrecked by Francois-Rene Rideau aka fare when the elder Lispers were no longer around to stop it. MP's experience with Lisp code had been that most ended up being Python anyway. He cited the late Erik Naggum on the trouble with free Lisp implementations lacking the more powerful features, but lambasted him for checking out of life before he could do anything useful, along with recent TMSR dropouts. He formulated the purpose of Lisp as for solving closed problems in the most efficient way, once problems are adequately understood.

In computer graphics, the nonsense of "XML shaders" was more popular than diana_coman knew.

Hanbot noted the use of Scheme scripting in Gimp, apropos of both practical Lisp usage and bypassing large dependency trees as seen in ImageMagick.

Mocky said he'll catch up.

MP and diana_coman picked up a discussion from blog comments about Eulora work, wherein various parts are stalled; the project outgrew the world it came from, in terms of both tools and artists. MP explored the art question by comparing valuation of a lone fighter aircraft, to a black-box Go-playing AI, to a cube of colored pixels: all being piles of accumulated tinkering, results of another's process, useless on their own without access to the process. Maintaining infrastructure to cater to the current crop of artists would be costly; growing new talent likewise. Hanbot had once done some Blender character modeling work but got stuck on the last step of exporting to a usable format; unfortunately she didn't recall documenting the struggle. MP posed the practical options as either trawling the entire Internet for artwork and sorting out what's usable, or machine-generating it and doing similar, at least knowing it's in a usable format. Diana_coman wasn't enthused by either. MP was interested in doing the first anyway, inviting unemployed readership to talk.

For the first time ever, MP found himself struggling with recent publication volume. He and diana_coman pointed out some kinks in trinque's blog setup; trinque started looking into it.