dave

Massachusetts trash. I mostly post about gardening, music, and free software development (not a techbro I swear please you gotta believe me)

he/him

Public Key

npub1rw3ux8q2c2spvxus80n5az5nhty728mgkgd2tnz78dhez58fj03sl6jm6v

NIP-05 Address

[email protected]

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsphg7rrs9v9gqkrwgrhe6w32fm4j09ra5tyx49e30rkmu32r5e8ccpz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0dsx2wqfl

Publishing to

relay.damus.io

nos.lol

Author Public Key

npub1rw3ux8q2c2spvxus80n5az5nhty728mgkgd2tnz78dhez58fj03sl6jm6v

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Last Notes

2026-04-23 16:27:38 GMT

I'm a hobbyist woodworker. I use power tools for everything. some hand tool woodworkers look down upon power tool users. they're fine craftsmen and I am one step above ikea in their view. people that create using new, easier methods are often looked down upon by the old gatekeepers.
now people can just ask their table saw to make them a cabinet and it will approximately do so. at first the joints were not square at all and the doors fell off but now most of the time they turn out okay. that's fine for people who want the end result quickly. I don't want to be a gatekeeper but I enjoy the process of building and don't plan to change how I make things.
however, there's this constant background noise of people saying I'll be left behind if I don't start building with Large Lumber Machines. and I found out that those same people are making load bearing walls for multi-story buildings with them. I'm skeptical that they're fit for that task but the buildings haven't collapsed yet so I guess it's fine. I think I'll keep measuring twice and cutting once, though.

2026-03-04 12:43:04 GMT

every day a new insult to life itself emerges
https://pool.jortage.com/tootcat/media_attachments/files/116/170/952/736/698/675/original/eb9a4f5273f0e3f1.png

2026-02-25 21:19:59 GMT

Worked pretty hard on this one and I'm proud of the milestone! Lots more to do for a truly ergonomic dev experience but finally having the REPL in the browser is a huge deal.
#nevent1q…ppm6

2026-02-25 14:53:29 GMT

@nprofile…4wz6 office hours are happening today! The meeting starts in 4 hours from the time of this post. Stop by and chat about all things Spritely!
Meeting details here:
https://community.spritely.institute/t/next-office-hours-on-2-25/803/1

2026-02-12 20:06:44 GMT

Good article from the Matrix folks explaining that switching to Matrix doesn't necessarily mean you can avoid age verification laws.
https://matrix.org/blog/2026/02/welcome-discord/

2026-01-23 15:59:18 GMT

guile-websocket 0.3.0 has been released https://dthompson.us/posts/guile-websocket-0-3-0-released.html

2026-01-16 14:31:31 GMT

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aaaand I just got geiser to connect to the browser repl! which means that loading modules over http also works because geiser needs to load its own extensions before it do its thing.

2026-01-16 01:40:34 GMT

so I've been working on a repl for hoot. today I was able to connect to a repl in the browser over telnet using a dev server that pipes text to/from a websocket. not far from here to emacs.
(let ((ws (websocket "ws://localhost:8080/repl")))
(parameterize ((current-input-port ws)
(current-output-port ws)
(current-error-port ws))
(spawn-repl)))

2026-01-08 15:35:05 GMT

this past weekend I extended guile-bstructs to support anonymous structs and unions that you sometimes find in C. I think it's a pretty comprehensive binary structure manipulation library at this point.
https://git.dthompson.us/guile-bstructs/tree/tests/test-bstructs.scm?id=00a8c1137eb976771ab9447a1d2fd343f570f756#n80

2025-12-23 14:00:50 GMT

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@nprofile…55j2 do you know if this occurs after markdown parsing or after page generation? would help to isolate the behavior you are seeing.

2025-12-12 03:51:13 GMT

Another year of Cirkoban getting snubbed by The Game Awards. What we made in 10 days is definitely better than whatever Jonathan Blow spent 10 years making that they showed earlier. Come on Geoff Keighley get your shit together!!
https://davexunit.itch.io/cirkoban

2025-12-09 19:58:02 GMT

@nprofile…6zz9 office hours are happening *tomorrow*, 12/10. come ask us questions or show us your cool goblins/hoot project!
check the forum thread for time and video call details: https://community.spritely.institute/t/next-office-hours-on-12-10/779

2025-12-05 01:32:17 GMT

tonight Andrea pointed out to me that JavaScript and Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness are both 30 years old now.

2025-12-03 21:23:16 GMT

I'm considering the possibility of doing weekly or biweekly twitch streams. possibly on thursdays. 1-2 hours of scheme/hacking stuff. would anyone watch this?

2025-11-28 16:22:15 GMT

Check out this AMAZING keynote by @nprofile…4xp5 about networks of consent and changing the defaults of social media! https://spui25.nl/programma/we-can-change-the-defaults-building-networks-of-consent-and-spaces-of-joy-in-the-ruins-of-social-media

2025-11-24 15:10:09 GMT

New post from me over on the @nprofile…6zz9 blog: Composing capability security and conflict-free replicated data types
Local-first apps often use CRDTs, but I'm not really aware of any that fully embrace capability security. This post is an attempt to show how the two can be composed using a simple group chat application as a case study.
https://spritely.institute/news/composing-capability-security-and-conflict-free-replicated-data-types.html
#spritely #localfirst #ocaps
https://pool.jortage.com/tootcat/media_attachments/files/115/605/312/628/096/818/original/6ae60b451e9f45de.png

2025-11-21 13:54:50 GMT

Women only want one thing for their birthday: a Fiskars X25 wood splitting axe.
https://pool.jortage.com/tootcat/media_attachments/files/115/588/011/009/480/707/original/88dd0ce473a09b54.jpg

2025-11-17 15:34:53 GMT

The results for the Autumn Lisp Game Jam are in!
https://itch.io/jam/autumn-lisp-game-jam-2025/results
This prestigious and highly competitive game jam awards massive prizes in the form of good vibes which many are saying is worth more than gold.
Top 3 overall:
1) https://the-dot-matrix.itch.io/fauna-otchi
2) https://not-articulated.itch.io/urbanity
3) https://mattly.itch.io/downfall
Congrats to everyone who participated!
#LispGameJam

2025-10-31 11:32:48 GMT

The Autumn Lisp Game Jam has begun! I wish all jammers a happy hack! May all your parentheses be balanced.
https://itch.io/jam/autumn-lisp-game-jam-2025
#lisp #gamejam

2025-10-27 13:48:45 GMT

The Autumn Lisp Game Jam begins on Halloween! Anything can happen on Halloween! Your REPL may turn into a bat! 🎃
https://itch.io/jam/autumn-lisp-game-jam-2025
#lisp #gamejam

2025-10-17 11:49:00 GMT

Just under two weeks until the next Lisp Game Jam! https://itch.io/jam/autumn-lisp-game-jam-2025
#lisp #gamejam

2025-10-04 03:00:58 GMT

Perfect example of why Guix just needs to include stock Linux and ditch Linux-libre: https://lobste.rs/c/mbtxry
New users have no idea why their wifi doesn't work and then detractors use it against us. Every Guix thread outside official channels since the beginning of the project has been dominated by this issue and it overshadows all the good things Guix does.

2025-09-30 17:02:50 GMT

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@nprofile…jrff @nprofile…zwgs @nprofile…z8rp sounds interesting! over at spritely we have been behind on getting a real repl built for hoot but we will be starting on that soon, so hopefully some components of that will be of use to you.
one nit: Dave Thomas is the Wendy's guy, I'm Dave Thompson 😉
one comment: hoot does indeed have the power of guile's psyntax macro expander now, as well as a runtime module representation, so you shouldn't need to devote any of your dev time to that (excluding any bugs that could be lurking)
one question: what does "Nested evaluation and evaluation session switcher" mean in practice? I can make guesses but I'm not sure what you mean there.

2025-08-27 13:55:08 GMT

@nprofile…fykc office hours are today at 2pm US eastern! (4 hours from the time of this post). hope to see some folks there!
https://community.spritely.institute/t/next-office-hours-on-27th-of-august/759
#spritely

2025-08-26 20:58:55 GMT

new deftones album is very good. bands this old aren't supposed to be able to make good music anymore! knock it off guys

2025-07-15 13:58:46 GMT

just scheduled the next @nprofile…fykc office hours. happening two weeks from now, on july 30th. this is *your* time to chat with the spritely team: ask us questions, make suggestions, share your goblins/hoot project, etc. meeting details can be found in the forum thread linked below. hope to see you there!
https://community.spritely.institute/t/next-office-hours-on-7-30/746
#spritely

2025-06-25 13:57:17 GMT

@nprofile…fykc office hours are happening today! see our forum for the details!
https://community.spritely.institute/t/next-office-hours-on-6-25/728?u=dthompson

2025-06-11 11:33:58 GMT

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@nprofile…33hd feels like fighting an uphill battle with a project that loves making the worst decisions possible on a regular basis but also I would like to not have to learn something new.

2025-06-04 16:36:09 GMT

everyone is going ham over deltarune but I haven't even played through runescape yet.

2025-06-03 21:17:52 GMT

ActivityPub is a brassica

2025-06-03 18:49:57 GMT

Just scheduled the next @nprofile…fykc office hours for 6/25. These meetings are *your* chance to chat with the Spritely team and community. You can ask questions, share a project you are working on that uses Spritely tech, or just listen in!
See our forum for details: https://community.spritely.institute/t/next-office-hours-on-6-25/728
#spritely

2025-06-02 12:27:34 GMT

I saw the Sully episode of The Rehearsal and I am a different person than before I watched it.

2025-05-19 16:58:34 GMT

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wrote up a little postmortem about how things went https://davexunit.itch.io/goblinville/devlog/948354/jam-postmortem

2025-05-19 15:13:50 GMT

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Goblinville is an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Animal Crossing

2025-05-19 15:04:06 GMT

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@nprofile…jmss unforgeable evidence
https://pool.jortage.com/tootcat/media_attachments/files/114/535/106/852/414/087/original/95558b2bd8f4c0e6.png

2025-05-19 14:21:52 GMT

Spritely's submission to the Lisp Game Jam is Goblinville: a multiplayer virtual world prototype built with Goblins and Hoot. we were very constrained on time and resources, so the result isn't really a game but more of a tech demo that could be used as a base of a real game next time. still, I'm glad we were finally able to publish a networked demo. I'll try to write up a little postmortem on itch later.
https://davexunit.itch.io/goblinville
#lisp #gamejam
https://pool.jortage.com/tootcat/media_attachments/files/114/534/935/521/177/933/original/49c9e9a9fbfd4085.png

2025-05-19 11:43:40 GMT

the spring lisp game jam got 26 entries! congrats to everyone that submitted or attempted to make something! https://itch.io/jam/spring-lisp-game-jam-2025/entries #lisp #gamejam

2025-05-07 16:59:56 GMT

@nprofile…fykc office hours happening in 1 hour! https://community.spritely.institute/t/next-office-hours-on-5-7/708/2

2025-05-05 13:01:57 GMT

the spring lisp game jam starts this friday 5/9! https://itch.io/jam/spring-lisp-game-jam-2025 #lisp #gamejam

2025-05-05 12:13:59 GMT

the next @nprofile…fykc office hours are happening this wednesday 5/7. join in!
https://community.spritely.institute/t/next-office-hours-on-5-7/708/1

2025-04-21 12:52:00 GMT

did some more amtrak api parsing. more parsing can be done but I have the data cleaned up pretty nicely. https://gist.github.com/davexunit/344bc07de699649787b5e47390abc2d9

2025-04-16 15:59:46 GMT

I'm so overwhelmed trying to keep up with the firehose of horrors in the greatest country on god's green earth that I am behind on things happening elsewhere. anyway I'd just like to use this opportunity to say fuck transphobes. they are sad little ghoulish beings that don't know joy and want everyone else to be miserable like them and one day society will leave them behind to die alone because they have no real friends.

2025-04-13 17:44:55 GMT

for fun I looked into how to process amtrak train location data. turns out they have no truly public api, but there are public endpoints with obfuscated data. fortunately, people have reverse engineered it (https://github.com/mgwalker/amtrak-api) which is why there are unofficial trackers out there. I translated some of the code into scheme using the industria/hashing libraries for hmac-sha-1 hashing and aes-cbc encryption. didn't see a readily available pbkdf2 scheme library so I rolled my own. took some fiddling but it's working!
here's what a snapshot of an acela from dc to boston looks like: https://gist.github.com/davexunit/5210776b7a47c39021cd7059ef0e1340

2025-04-09 13:54:05 GMT

the spring lisp game jam is happening in *one month* starting on may 9th! stockpile your parentheses and get ready to join in!
https://itch.io/jam/spring-lisp-game-jam-2025
#lisp #gamejam

2025-04-02 14:12:10 GMT

a lot of people talking about "switch to". switch to what???

2025-03-26 15:48:57 GMT

@nprofile…fykc office hours are happening in just over 2 hours from now! see https://community.spritely.institute/t/next-office-hours-on-3-26/696/1 for the meeting details

2025-03-17 20:15:03 GMT

figured out some improvements to deploying guix on linode compared to what is documented on the blog. rather than starting from a debian image and converting it to guix, I can now build images derived from 'guix system image' and directly boot to guix.

2025-03-17 19:48:26 GMT

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@nprofile…jmss @nprofile…8s8k these days I prefer using guile-lib's htmlprag module to parse html that I can then splice into an sxml tree so that I don't run the risk of generating a broken document, but a 'raw' sxml tag works if you're confident in yourself and aren't handling user data. :)
I consider that old article superseded by the (haunt html) module. https://git.dthompson.us/haunt/tree/haunt/html.scm
all the escape char stuff in that blog post is silly. what I wanted was to emit utf-8!

2025-03-15 13:58:29 GMT

The Spring Lisp Game Jam is happening once again! Join us for 10 days of consing up little games starting on May 9th!
https://itch.io/jam/spring-lisp-game-jam-2025
#lisp #gamejam

2025-03-15 13:42:17 GMT

wow, a tool that integrates both hoot *and* haunt? love it! https://www.freakingpenguin.com/blog/haunt-and-hoot-and-blocks-oh-my.html

2025-03-13 22:44:50 GMT

I've been working on packaging forgejo-runner for Guix and the lesson I've learned is that the Go package ecosystem is a fucking disaster. Cargo and npm are worse, but it's not good.

2025-03-11 14:35:16 GMT

happy 311 day to all who celebrate
play a track from your record collection
it's your mix, congratulations

2025-03-10 12:57:33 GMT

So fuck GitLab. Two options I can recommend:
1) For teams/orgs, Codeberg seems the obvious choice right now
2) For solo or mostly solo personal projects, go forge-less and self-host your repos
I have hosted my own personal projects for years and it has worked well. The tools aren't glamorous but gitolite + cgit + laminar can take you quite far. Here's my Guix config for all of that and more:
https://git.dthompson.us/guix-config/tree/dthompson/machines/takemi.scm
I don't like self-hosting any of the available forges. I think they're all too complex at small scale.

2025-02-26 12:26:29 GMT

Spritely office hours happening today! see our forum thread for the details! https://community.spritely.institute/t/next-office-hours-on-2-26/678/1 #spritely

2025-01-11 14:25:55 GMT

ahhhhh we are *so close* to hitting our fundraiser goal!!!!! huge THANK YOU to everyone who has donated so far!! (we're working on those game credit updates btw!)
https://pool.jortage.com/tootcat/media_attachments/files/113/810/173/896/809/170/original/9954103f46b2f960.png

2024-10-22 16:48:09 GMT

the lisp game jam is starting this friday! if you are interested in making a game in scheme using hoot, spritely is here to help!
https://spritely.institute/news/make-a-game-with-hoot-for-the-autumn-lisp-game-jam.html
#lisp #gamejam #scheme #guile #spritely

2024-09-06 18:39:09 GMT

At last, Hoot 0.5.0 has been released! This time around we've got an interpreter, fibers for lightweight concurrency, more Guile compatibility, backtraces, and more! We've even got a simple little Scheme REPL embedded in the blog post for fun. Check it out!
https://spritely.institute/news/guile-hoot-v050-released.html
#scheme #lisp #wasm #spritely
https://pool.jortage.com/tootcat/media_attachments/files/113/091/991/154/945/625/original/70adaf4425ed0e87.png

2024-08-02 14:44:58 GMT

I just don't understand people that would go through the trouble to make a sales listing for something that costs around $1k and just... not respond when someone wants to give them that money.

2024-07-27 15:53:47 GMT

suddenly have an urge to buy a p bass because we have a lot of other instruments in the house but no bass.

2024-07-19 21:32:10 GMT

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apparently this had the unfortunate side effect of breaking guix pull and was reverted! I did a guix pull of my own afterwards that was successful. 😞

2024-07-19 17:19:36 GMT

just pushed a commit to update guile-3.0-latest to 3.0.10 in guix, finally

2024-06-14 22:53:47 GMT

putting together an absurd 90s cover set to play in a week with little to no rehearsal with people from a couple different bands I used to be in. it might be a Beautiful Disaster.

2024-06-04 11:53:47 GMT

sometimes it takes all of my energy to not make snarky replies about the latest nix-like that is trying to replace the nix language with something else and start from scratch.

2024-06-02 23:38:00 GMT

holy moly Selaco is a new FPS built on... GZDoom?? Incredible https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bFI1QSd4T2g

2024-06-02 01:07:23 GMT

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@npub15fe…x47v I posted about it but thanks for the additional mention :) https://toot.cat/@dthompson/112543205156042046

2024-06-01 20:17:07 GMT

new blog post:
Lisp: Icing or Cake?
https://dthompson.us/posts/lisp-icing-or-cake.html

2024-05-29 18:02:23 GMT

foxglove season
https://pool.jortage.com/tootcat/media_attachments/files/112/525/685/762/755/256/original/5abaf1400e83fd02.jpg

2024-05-28 15:16:50 GMT

some compiler people should get together and form a death metal band named Elided

2024-05-28 14:11:44 GMT

gonna figure out some absurd backronym for a guile game engine named "g'dough"

2024-05-26 13:55:57 GMT

I tell myself I don't like Korn but when Twist/Chi comes on the radio I don't change the channel.

2024-05-24 23:00:05 GMT

sneak preview
https://pool.jortage.com/tootcat/media_attachments/files/112/498/544/026/913/262/original/d6f64b1ac10615a6.mp4

2024-05-13 11:36:30 GMT

we did it! 100 registered participants for the lisp game jam! it starts this friday btw!
https://itch.io/jam/spring-lisp-game-jam-2024
#lisp #gamejam #gamedev

2024-05-12 19:46:29 GMT

adult fern finder

2024-05-11 03:54:38 GMT

And as I tuck myself into bed I notice that there are now 96 people registered for the lisp game jam. At this rate we're gonna exceed 100.

2024-05-08 00:12:53 GMT

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@npub1w66…rc58 so teeny! I'd like a "normal" keyboard, either full or tenkeyless, but with open, reprogrammable firmware and cherry switches. mx brown preferably.

2024-05-08 00:04:14 GMT

> notices system76 sells keyboards
> uses open firmware
> firmware can be customzied to remap keys
> firmware configuration tool is gplv3 licensed
> written in rust so it will be a nightmare to package
so close! still looks cool, though. wonder if they're any good... uses kailh switches which I'm not familiar with as I've always used cherry

2024-05-07 13:11:15 GMT

"we're moving continuous integration back to developer machines" okay I await the follow-up post a year or two from now where it gets moved back to a server.

2024-05-02 22:10:11 GMT

if http is so good why isn't there http2

2024-04-21 11:21:24 GMT

51 registered participants for the lisp game jam!

2024-04-18 13:02:11 GMT

*tony soprano voice* I'm in project management

2024-04-09 02:47:25 GMT

some of these cloudy eclipse photos are just the In Keeping Secrets of Silent Earth: 3 album cover

2024-04-08 17:10:12 GMT

can't find them damn glasses. maybe we threw em out. bummer.

2024-04-08 12:08:45 GMT

https://pool.jortage.com/tootcat/media_attachments/files/112/235/517/208/777/185/original/1409e3cb33bd1063.png

2024-03-28 11:31:46 GMT

The Spring Lisp Game Jam is on! May 17-27. Get ready to snuggle up with your REPL and make that mech dating sim roguelike you've been thinking about!
https://itch.io/jam/spring-lisp-game-jam-2024
#lisp #scheme #gamejam

2024-03-26 13:19:34 GMT

guile on windows... with jit and threads? can it be real? seems promising! https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guile-devel/2024-03/msg00033.html

2024-02-26 13:31:29 GMT

wrote a little blog post with some tips and examples for optimizing guile code https://dthompson.us/posts/optimizing-guile-scheme.html

2023-07-13 12:43:26 GMT

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@npub1w66…rc58 building them is the fun part!

2023-07-13 12:28:55 GMT

haven't built a desktop computer since 2009. maybe it's time.

2023-06-16 20:00:02 GMT

Failed! At the CI pipeline

2023-06-15 18:24:10 GMT

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@npub1w66…rc58 yeah, it's very pretzely. I've also found that it's one thing to be able to manually write some code in cps, but it's another thing to take a program as input and transform it automatically into that form. I've had and will continue to have lots of brain contorting moments doing that.

2023-06-15 17:09:31 GMT

I have been learning about continuation passing style lately and I'm trying to think of ways to capture the process in blog form that could serve as a stepping stone for other novices. currently mulling over the idea of a "baby's first cps" blog post that walks through compiling some tiny simple language (like maybe a 4-function calculator language) to cps and interpreting the result. the point would be to show how to linearize a very simple expression tree that you can easily implement for yourself in a safe place far away from the gnarliness of real world compilers and then point towards resources for leveling up.