In my last rant (https://devrant.com/rants/5523458/...) I regaled you lovely folks of how I had to diplomatically yet firmly defend my work/life boundaries during off-work hours for non-life threatening affairs (a frustratingly common occurrence), and concluded the thread by mentioning that I still had a job, but would make a note of my frustration of that for whatever exit interview happens.

Well, no need for those notes any longer.

I and half of the engineering force, along with several senior managers were laid off this morning in the form of a "mandatory on-site all hands".

I live and work in NYC. Several people took trains and booked rooms from as far away as Boston to be here (or at least I know of specifically two people who commuted up here on Sunday to be here for the "all hands"). I presume those people used their travel benefits to get here and back.

We were dismissed before the meeting even took place, and according to a coworker I became friends with (yes, despite my snarky comments in other threads, I *do* actually have coworkers I became friends with lol) who survived at least this round of layoffs, once the actual all-hands commenced, the company first disclosed the layoffs, then announced being awarded a major contract with the very client the entire org had been working on overdrive to win for the last nine months. He had already been looking for a new job and got an offer last Friday, had been mulling it over, but told me once we were off the phone he was calling them up and accepting. He had three people reporting to him, and lost two. Even he had no idea it was coming until one of his now-former subordinates asked him to come outside and told him they'd just been let go.

I knew going in to this startup that "it's a startup, anything can happen, just mind the gap". That's why I asked on numerous occasions and tried to get time with our CFO to ask about revenue and earnings; things that in my years at this place were never disclosed to the rank and file, I'm not a professional accountant or CPA by any means, but I did take a pair of corporate accounting classes in community college because I like the numbers (see my other rants about leaving the field and becoming a math teacher), and I was really curious to know how the financial health of the business was.

It wasn't so much a red flag as it was an orangish-yellow that no one ever answered those questions, or that the CFO was distant but not necessarily cagey about my requests for his time; other indicators were good while interviewing--they had multiple fully integrated, paying customers (one of which being a former employer from years ago, which aided me in having strong product familiarity during the job interview), but I guess not enough to be sustainable.

Anyway. I'm gonna use the rest of the week to be a bum, might get out of the city and go hang with friends Pittsburgh, eat some hoagies and just vibe for a while. I've got assets and money stashed up to float pretty easily for a while, plus a bit of fun money so losing the job isn't world ending. Generalized anxiety because everything is going to shit worldwide, but that quickly faded into the backdrop of the generalized anxiety I always have because existentialism or something like that.

Thanks for reading. Pay the teachers.

Creating a stripped down version of a product is a big red flag to me (e.g. "easy/light mode").
It means the main product is too complicated; it handles too many things. Instead, shift the focus back to the core of the product by removing features.

In the our day-to-day it is completely normal to stumble upon things that used to work but now have been changed: they have been deprecated.

Deprecating and removing features should be added to any product iteration. Thus being "normal" and a common occurrence in any changelog; just like features and bug fixes.

This gives non-tech product owners "permission" to remove bloat. Devs stop whining about "the big rewrite". And end-users don't suddenly have to learn yet another tool with "basic" features missing.

I think the best example is google (https://killedbygoogle.com/) and the worst is the amazon shopping website (what a mess!).

!rant

For all of youse that ever wanted to try out Common Lisp and do not know where to start (but are interested in getting some knowledge of Common Lisp) I recommend two things:

As an introductory tutorial:
https://lisperati.com/casting.html/

And as your dev environment:
https://portacle.github.io/

Notice that the dev environment in question is Emacs, regardless of how you might feel about it as a text editor, i can recommend just going through the portacle help that gives you some basic starting points regarding editing. Learn about splitting buffers, evaluating the code you are typing in order for it to appear in the Common Lisp REPL (this one comes with an environment known as SLIME which is very popular in the Lisp world) as well as saving and editing your files.

Portacle is self contained inside of one single directory, so if you by any chance already have an Emacs environment then do not worry, Portacle will not touch any of that. I will admit that as far as I am concerned, Emacs will probably be the biggest hurdle for most people not used to it.
Can I use VS Code? Yes, yes you can, but I am not familiar with setting up a VSCode dev environment for Emacs, or any other environment hat comes close to the live environment that emacs provides for this?

Why the fuck should I try Common Lisp or any Lisp for that matter? You do not have to, I happen to like it a lot and have built applications at work with a different dialect of Lisp known as Clojure which runs in the JVM, do I recommend it? Yeah I do, I love functional programming, Clojure is pretty pure on that (not haskell level imo though, but I am not using Haskell for anything other than academic purposes) and with clojure you get the entire repertoire of Java libraries at your disposal. Moving to Clojure was cake coming from Common Lisp.

Why Common Lisp then if you used Clojure in prod? Mostly historical reasons, I want to just let people know that ANSI Common Lisp has a lot of good things going for it, I selected Clojure since I already knew what I needed from the JVM, and parallelism and concurrency are baked into Clojure, which was a priority. While I could have done the same thing in Common Lisp, I wanted to turn in a deliverable as quickly as possible rather than building the entire thing by myself which would have taken longer (had one week)

Am I getting something out of learning Common Lisp? Depends on you, I am not bringing about the whole "it opens your mind" deal with Lisp dialects as most other people do inside of the community, although I did experience new perspectives as to what programming and a programming language could do, and had fun doing it, maybe you will as well.

Does Lisp stands for Lots of Irritating Superfluous Parentheses or Los in stupid parentheses? Yes, also for Lost of Insidious Silly Parentheses and Lisp is Perfect, use paredit (comes with Portacle) also, Lisp stands for Lisp Is Perfect. None of that List Processing bs, any other definition will do.

Are there any other books? Yes, the famous online text Practical Common Lisp can be easily read online for free, I would recommend the Lisperati tutorial first to get a feel for it since PCL demands more tedious study. There is also Common Lisp a gentle introduction. If you want to go the Clojure route try Clojure for the brave and true.

What about Scheme and the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs? Too academic for my taste, and if in Common Lisp you have to do a lot of things on your own, Scheme is a whole other beast. Simple and beautiful really, but I go for practical in terms of Lisp, thus I prefer Common Lisp.

how did you start with Lisp?
I was stupid and thought I should start with it after a failed attempt at learning C++, then Java, and then Javascript when I started programming years ago. I was overwhelmed, but I continued. Then I moved to other things. But always kept Common Lisp close to heart. I am also heavy into A.I, Lisp has a history there and it is used in a lot of new and sort of unknown projects dealing with Knowledge Reasoning and representation. It is also Alien tech that contains many things that just seem super interesting to me such as treating code as data and data as code (back-quoting, macros etc)

I need some inspiration man......show me something? Sure, look for a game called Kandria in youtube, the creator, Shimera (Nicolas Hafner) is an absolute genius in the world of Lisp and a true inspiration. He coded the game in Common Lisp, he is also the person behind portacle. If that were not enough, he might very well also be Shirakumo, another prominent member of the Common Lisp Community.

Ok, you got me, what is the first thing in common lisp that I should try after I install the portacle environment? go to the repl and evaluate this:

(+ 0.1 0.2)

Watch in awe at what you get.

In the truest and original sense of the phrase (MIT based) "happy hacking!"

It's 2022 and mobile web browsers still lack basic export options.

Without root access, the bookmarks, session, history, and possibly saved pages are locked in. There is no way to create an external backup or search them using external tools such as grep.

Sure, it is possible to manually copy and paste individual bookmarks and tabs into a text file. However, obviously, that takes lots of annoying repetitive effort.

Exporting is a basic feature. One might want to clean up the bookmarks or start a new session, but have a snapshot of the previous state so anything needed in future can be retrieved from there.
Without the ability to export these things, it becomes difficult to find web resources one might need in future. Due to the abundance of new incoming Internet posts and videos, the existing ones tend to drown in the search results and become very difficult to find after some time. Or they might be taken down and one might end up spending time searching for something that does not exist anymore. It's better to find out immediately it is no longer available than a futile search.

----

Some mobile web browsers such as Chrome (to Google's credit) thankfully store saved pages as MHTML files into the common Download folder, where they can be backed up and moved elsewhere using a file manager or an external computer. However, other browsers like Kiwi browser and Samsung Internet incorrectly store saved pages into their respective locked directories inside "/data/". Without root access, those files are locked in there and can only be accessed through that one web browser for the lifespan of that one device.

For tabs, there are some services like Firefox Sync. However, in order to create a text file of the opened tabs, one needs an external computer and needs to create an account on the service. For something that is technically possible in one second directly on the phone. The service can also have outages or be discontinued. This is the danger of vendor lock-in: if something is no longer supported, it can lead to data loss.

For Chrome, there is a "remote debugging" feature on the developer tools of the desktop edition that is supposedly able to get a list of the tabs ( https://android.stackexchange.com/q... ). However, I tried it and it did not work. No connection could be established. And it should not be necessary in first place.

Heres a fairly useless but interesting tidbit:

if i = n
then
r = (abs(((((p)-(9**i)-9)+1))-((((9**i)-(p)-9)-2)))-p+1+1)

then r%a will (almost*) always return 0. when n = floor(a/2) for the lowest non-trivial factor of a two factor product.

Thats not really the interesting bit though. The interesting bit is the result of r will always be some product with a *larger* factor tree that includes the factor A of p, but not p's other larger factor, B.

So, useless from what I can see. But its an interesting function on its own, simply because of what it does.

I wrote a script to test it. For all two-factor products of the first 1000 primes, (with no repeating combinations, so if we calculated say, 23*31, we skip 31*23), only 3262 products failed this little formula, out of half a million.

All others reliably returned 0 for the following..
~~~
i = floor(a/2)

r = (abs(((((p)-(9**i)-9)+1))-((((9**i)-(p)-9)-2)))-p+1+1)

r%a
~~~

The distribution of failures was *very* early on in the set of factors, and once fixed at the value of 3262, stopped increasing for the rest of the run.

I didn't calculate if some primes were more likely to cause a product to fail or not. Nor the factor trees, nor if the factor trees had any factors in common between products, or anything of that nature.

All in all I count this as a worthwhile experiment.

If you want to run the code yourself, I posted it to pastebin here:

https://pastebin.com/Q4LFKBjB

edit:

Tried wolfram alpha just to see what it says, but apparently not much. Wish it could tell me more.

Is ECMAScript a dialect of Lisp?

"JavaScript has much in common with Scheme. It is a dynamic language. It has a flexible datatype (arrays) that can easily simulate s-expressions. And most importantly, functions are lambdas. Because of this deep similarity, all the functions in [recursive programming primer] 'The Little Schemer' can be written in JavaScript."
— Douglas Crockford

An interesting discussion on SO (https://stackoverflow.com/questions...)

Which favicon sizes do you use? Most sites I see still use 32x32 as the default.
Plus a list of higher red icons with and an apple-touch-icon at 192x192 or 180x180 being the most common.

Reason I'm asking is Google recommended anything divisible by 48. https://developers.google.com/searc... First example is 48x48, which is not even generated by most favicon-generators and I rarely see.
And from what I can tell Google Search shows 32x32 for most sites.