The Boston Diaries

So my blog [1] generates an RSS feed (early 2000s), an Atom feed (2009), a JSON feed (2017) and a Gopher [2] feed (2018). None of these formats were hard to add, and of all four formats, the JSON feed has the least use. Yes, the Gopher feed gets more use than JSON. If I go by "same client picks up feed at least one per day" then the results are: RSS: ~20 [3] Atom: ~25 [3] JSON: 1 gopher: 7 I don't think using JSON is any help towards a decentralized system of blogs. It's just another format to generate. [1] http://boston.conman.org/ [2] My blog is also available via gopher, gopher://gopher.conman.org/ [3] Unique user agents---probably not the best metric, but for a quick scan, easy enough to check. Edit: formatting

I don't think this is a "loveletter". It's at least 23 years old and is still maintained so it seems to be a serious project with people using it. https://boston.conman.org/2023/01/19.1

Can't try on an Android right now, did watch the YouTube and looked at the examples. First, it looks awesome. You should do a Show HN sooner than later. Having a few decades of experience under my belt, I'm sure I'm blind to some things newcomers/starters would see, but what I did notice: - Camel case is bad for mobile typing, and bad for non-coders in my experience; underscore is better for the latter but not for mobile typing, so that's not really a solution unless you can add an underscore or some other character (non-minus-dash? center-dot?) that can be pressed directly. - Case sensitivity in general is best avoided in beginner languages, which if adopted might make the above point moot. - I personally find the pairing of "end" and ":" confusing, possibly because of years of "begin/end", "{/}" and "indent: dedent" experience. Most people seem to have a better intuitive grasp of the indent/dedent than any other block scoping, but for mobile I guess ":/end" is acceptable although "{/}" might be better. - What is the distinction between "let" and "variable" ? - The "#number" syntax is not intuitive - I goess it's a replacement for function names or line numbers, for refernece purposes? - One of the conceptual problems that some people have is with the "=" sign for assignment, as it conflicts with its use in mathematics. All overcome it sooner or later, but when I've shown APL ( where assigment of 3 to a is written A <- 3 ) or Pascal ( A := 3 ) to non-programmers,…

Okay, the book they wrote is at http://moodle.anoka.k12.mn.us/mod/resource/view.php?inpopup=true&i… and I started reading it. Don't. No one should take a course from that book. The authors of the book don't know the subject. That book won't be a prerequisite for anything important. So, if want a first course in probability and statistics, then get a college textbook and/or just go to college. More generally, in college in the US, in math, physical science, and engineering, quite good texts are easy to find, and the best texts are excellent. Moreover, the prerequisites for college are quite basic, essentially just the '3Rs' where for 'rithmetic' we do include algebra and plane geometry (trigonometry and solid geometry would also be good). So, in K-12, just get the 3Rs and then start with college texts and/or just college. In particular, for anything much past the 3Rs, just f'get about K-12. Bluntly, as illustrated by the book of this thread, the K-12 system is rarely able to teach anything worthwhile much beyond just the basic 3Rs. This conclusion is not new: Once I looked at AP calculus. Don't. The people who wrote the AP calculus materials don't understand calculus. Instead, for calculus, just get a good college text and dig in. I learned from Johnson and Kiokemeister, taught from Protter and Morrey, and have seen several other good college calculus texts, e.g., from Thomas. When I was studying and, later, teaching calculus in college, there was no…

In the Atari 2600 cartridge, BASIC Programming, ← is the assignment operator, rather than "=". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC_Programming#Sample_code The cartridge requires Atari keypad controllers, and was bundled with overlay templates to indicate the key functions. https://boston.conman.org/2015/06/16.1

The following is the best I could collect quickly to provide backup to the statement. Unfortunally it's not the high quality first instance of raw statistics I would have liked. But from what I have read time to time the crawler acted magnitudes outside of what could have been accepted as just badly configured. https://herman.bearblog.dev/the-great-scrape/ https://drewdevault.com/2025/03/17/2025-03-17-Stop-externalizing-your-… https://lwn.net/Articles/1008897/ https://tecnobits.com/en/AI-crawlers-on-Wikipedia-platform-danger/ https://boston.conman.org/2025/08/21.1

I googled and found this: > Over the 23 year history of mod_blog, I've given up on the notion of anyone other than me using it. There was only one other person who used it for just a few months before deciding blogging wasn't for him and that was way back in 2002. So it was completely by surprise that I recently received a bug report on it. That was written a year ago. Source: https://boston.conman.org/2023/01/19.1

you are of course correct on all points, but the article links to his previous article https://boston.conman.org/2023/11/19.1 which links to this dumb meme at https://linkedrecords.com/the-big-tdd-misunderstanding-8e22c2f1fc21 originally saying > Originally, the term “unit” in “unit test” referred not to the system under test but to the test itself. This implies that the test can be executed as one unit and does not rely on other tests running upfront which is historically incoherent. the author has weakened their post to now say > Rumors have it that the term “unit” in “unit test” originally referred to test itself, not to a unit of the system under test. (...) which is still reckless disregard for historical accuracy but now at least it's deniable

# Observed spamming large amounts of https://en.wikipedia.org/?curid=NNNNNN # and ignoring 429 ratelimit responses, claims to respect robots: # http://mj12bot.com/ User-agent: MJ12bot Disallow: / Coincidentally, I've just read more negative things about MJ12bot last week: http://boston.conman.org/2019/07/09.1

Wonderful article showing the uselessness of this technology, IMO. > I just realised the situation is even worse. If I have 35 sentences of circumstance leading up to a single sentence of conclusion, the LLM mechanism will — simply because of how the attention mechanism works with the volume of those 35 — find the ’35’ less relevant sentences more important than the single key one. So, in a case like that it will actively suppress the key sentence. > I first tried to let ChatGPT one of my key posts (the one about the role convictions play in humans with an addendum about human ‘wetware’). ChatGPT made a total mess of it. What it said had little to do with the original post, and where it did, it said the opposite of what the post said. > For fun, I asked Gemini as well. Gemini didn’t make a mistake and actually produced something that is a very short summary of the post, but it is extremely short so it leaves most out. So, I asked Gemini to expand a little, but as soon as I did that, it fabricated something that is not in the original article (quite the opposite), i.e.: “It discusses the importance of advisors having strong convictions and being able to communicate them clearly.” Nope. Not there. Why, after reading something like this, should I think of this technology as useful for this task? It seems like the exact opposite. And this is what I see with most LLM reviews. The author will mention spending hours trying to get the LLM to do a thing, or "it made xyz, but it…