theOnliest's comments

This isn’t your main point, but FWIW, there is a draft in the IETF for JMAP over websockets. It was approaching trivial to implement; I think our (Fastmail’s) main Cyrus developer wrote it from scratch over a weekend.

(I also work at Fastmail, on the server side.)

It does describe APIs in general, and that is one of the reasons I like it so much. All of our internal APIs are JMAP: when you need to do something with a user, you call User/set; with a rule, call Rule/set, and so on.

JMAP makes it super easy to build new APIs because you can reuse most of the code; the only things you need to define are the data types (and any custom implementation for access controls, etc.).

Although Fastmail itself has much more legacy code (we’ve been around a while!), new things can start with a framework called Ix, which is available at https://github.com/fastmail/Ix. Ix is the basis for Topicbox (www.topicbox.com), which is built ground-up on top of JMAP.

It’s less the risk of them getting stuck together than it is the fact that they sound better if you don’t create that partial vacuum.

Yep; this was in Pennsylvania, which is apparently one of the more onerous states.

The stated purpose is so that you can't change your name in order to (for example) escape debt. So the way to do this is to pay to put an announcement in a legal periodical. She had to do it in two separate places: one was mandated (The Legal Intelligencer, which sounds like something out of Harry Potter), and she had the choice of a few others, of which she picked the cheapest one.

The ads themselves didn't cost $1000, but the whole process (including changing the name on her passport, etc.) came close to that.

Depending on where you live, changing your name can be much more of a hassle than this. My wife did it recently, and the whole process took several months and cost nearly $1000 all told. It involved filling out a bunch of paperwork, taking ads out in two legal newspapers, and a court date.

Hey, thanks! We've updated that to link to both the relevant blog posts.

We (FastMail) use it in production, and all backend development is in Perl for all the products. Booking.com, cPanel, Craigslist, and ZipRecruiter all have sizable Perl codebases, as do many others.

Perl has logical xor, which is occasionally useful. I usually reach for it when argument checking, where it makes sense to have either this param or that but not both.

All of FastMail is in Perl5 (minus the Cyrus parts, which are in C).

But this doesn't really need to be responsibly disclosed: it's not something someone can use to get into your machine, but rather a way you could accidentally broadcast your credentials somewhere unexpected.

Announcing on Twitter seems more like "hey be careful, make sure your password field is focused."

AucTeX in Emacs can do this, and it’s really nice.

They also removed your username/display name from your default highlight strings. We often just use names with no @, and this week we noticed that other people were no longer getting pinged for those. Now you have to go to your preferences and explicitly add your display name to the list of strings you want to be notified about.

You could use https://metacpan.org/pod/Amazon::Dash::Button, and write your own handler in Perl using an ordinary Dash button.

I've recently started watching woodworking videos on YouTube. I read somewhere that Matthias was one of the early employees of RIM (Blackberry) and as it turns out, he has a bunch of those patents in his name: https://www.google.com/search?tbo=p&tbm=pts&hl=en&q=ininvent....

My local taxes (county) do this. Whenever you pay property (house, car) taxes, it tells you $x goes to the county schools, $y to roads, and so on. (Usually including something like $0.67 to the county library!) It's really nice...sure, paying tax on my car every year isn't great, but I'm happy to give $150 (or whatever it is) to the public schools.

I have a very uncommon name (3 of us in the country, as far as I can tell), and this happened to me for the first time this weekend. Someone bought a stereo at Best Buy 500 miles from me and gave them my email (<firstname><lastname>@gmail.com) for the Geek Squad protection plan. I thought someone had stolen my credit card until I realized what happened.

I was being a bit hyperbolic; certainly it's not impossible to look at, and I quite like a lot of it. My experiences showing it to students is that people often find it foreboding on first glance, and part of that has to do with all of the accidentals used. It doesn't look like music they're familiar with, even though, as you point out, it comes from the same tradition.

> The idea that their music is not in a key is widespread, but incorrect. Inferential distance (https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Inferential_distance) precludes me from being able to explain this concisely in a non-misleading way, unfortunately.

I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on this. (I have a PhD in music theory, so the distance may not be as great as you'd imagined.)

Fair enough. It's still pretty common...it's hard to pin down any numbers exactly, but I'd guess it's probably half and half for solfege vs. other systems. We teach solfege at my school (although I prefer numbers myself). And you're right that it's used mostly in sight-singing/aural-skills classes; I mention solfege much less often in my written theory classes.

> Why does notation allow for seven pitches, not 12? Because music is at most built out of 7-note scales, not 12.

This answer is good, but I wanted to pick one tiny nit, which is that not all music is built out of 7-note scales. A lot of music is, but music that isn't doesn't often lie well on the staff. That's true, incidentally, whether there are more than 7 notes in the scale (12-tone music, lots of octatonic music from people like Stravinsky, Scriabin, etc.) or fewer (whole-tone music comes to mind, as does the slightly more esoteric hexatonic scale). Pentatonic music fits well on the staff because the pentatonic scale is a subset of the ordinary diatonic.

This is (sometimes) a legitimate gripe about the standard notation system, which is that it's optimized for music in a key.

Sometimes there is a difference between E-F and C-C#. In the key of F major, E-F is the leading tone moving to tonic, which is a diatonic interval (a diatonic half-step). C-C#, on the other hand, is a chromatic half-step: in F major, it represents an alteration of scale degree 5 (sol). If you see C# in F major, there's a good chance it's going towards D, as a temporary leading tone. This is a useful distinction! The E-F half-step in F major (or C major, or A or D minor) is completely typical and not at all remarkable, while the C-C# half-step is much rarer.

In musics where there isn't a key, you're right that it doesn't make any sense to draw a distinction between the two. This is one reason that the music of the 2nd Viennese School (Schoenberg, Webern, Berg) is so impossible to look at: the structure of the music is obfuscated by the structure of the notation. Schoenberg was trying to come up with a 12-tone notation system for a while, but ultimately abandoned it.