boffinAudio

Very cute language ..

     match x {
        is table {
            print(indent_this + "{")
            for pair in pairs(x) {
                write(indent + "   " + to_string(pair.key) + ": ") 
                pretty_print_internal(pair.value, indent + "   ", false)
            }
            print(indent + "}")
        }

.. okay, you got my attention (long-time Lua fan) .. will have to give this some workbench time and learn it ..

>You find growing tomatoes in a closet to cause great suffering and injustice? (that's what dystopian means)

As a gardener, I would for sure suffer if all I could do is grow plants in a closet.

Gardens are a truly valuable treasure. Grow wherever you possibly can, but please don't ever take away the sunshine.

Lua can be quite performant, so this isn't really a thing, imho. Perhaps its just a matter of using familiar tooling.

I'm a parent, I have researched it, and found it not great because it still involves third parties and doesn't promote local control/anonymity without involving some external entity - i.e. Apple requires accounts, Google still gets its metrics, etc.

Unless you've got some specific better examples?

I dunno, I think I would've preferred Lua bytecode as a deliverable executable target, rather than WebAssembly. The tooling would be simpler, more efficient, and would allow a far wider ranger of interoperability with other engines.

This is a failure of Operating System Vendors, in my opinion.

If Operating Systems had a way for parents to adequately monitor/administer the machines of their children, this would not be such a huge, massive hole, in which to pour (yet more) human rights abuses.

Parents have the right to have an eye on their children. This is not repressive, it is not authoritarian, it is a right and a responsibility.

The fact that I can't - easily, and with little fuss - quickly see what my kids are viewing on their screens, is the issue.

Sure, children have the right to privacy - but it is their parents who should provide it to them. Not just the state, but the parents. And certainly, the state should not be eliminating the rest of society's privacy in the rush to prevent parents from having oversight of - and responsibility for - the online activities of their children.

The fact is, Operating System Vendors would rather turn their platforms into ad-vending machines, than actually improve the means by which the computers are operated by their users.

It would be a simple thing to establish parent/child relationship security between not just two computers, but two human beings who love and trust each other.

Kids will always be inquisitive. They will always try to exceed the limits imposed upon them by their parents. But this should not be a reason for more draconian control over consenting adults, or indeed individual adults. It should be a motivating factor to build better computing platforms, which can be reliably configured to prevent porn from having the detrimental impact many controllers of society have decided is occurring.

Another undeniable fact, is that parents - and parenting - get a bad rap. However, if a parent and child love and trust each other, having the ability to quickly observe the kids computing environment in productive ways, should be being provided, technologically.

When really, we should be building tools which strengthen parent/child relationships, we are instead eradicating the need for parents.

Unpopular opinion, I know: but Thats The Point.

>programmer discipline that cannot be relied upon

This is the crux of all computerization and will never be eradicated.

Nice project! I have a couple of the Transcend SD-WIFI cards in my studio - one thing that I really like about them, is the Lua-based interface that allows programmatic control, remotely, of the filesystem. This has been quite useful.

Do you have any plans to support similar functionality?

Your Grok and my Grok should meet.

Its appropriate, inasmuch as they are an apex predator, and spend a majority of their lives hunting for food - as opposed to many other whales which filter-feed as a harvesting mechanism ..

In the context of ocean plastic recovery/harvesting, I don't know that the purity is all that important - the more important factor is, collection. Being able to take plastic bottles and turn them into a kind of string, for example, seems more viable - if a hopper could be designed which takes a plastic bottle, rotates it around a stripping knife, and the output is a long twine - this could then be fed into the knitting machine.

I imagine this rube-goldberg'esque strandebeest-like contraption sitting out there harvesting wind and waves, slowly turning every bottle it gorges on into a finely woven matte of materials .. maybe even reproducing itself, who knows ..

EDIT: I asked Grok to design a self-replicating ocean weaver, and I have to say .. it seems like a viable idea to me. Perhaps we will see this kind of plastic harvesting in the near future .. at the very least, were I to be stranded on a plastic-laden island, I'm pretty sure I could work out a way to build a raft with sails ..

This is a great idea .. I wonder if it can be adapted to using recycled plastic threads, so that a fleet of these could be deployed into the ocean to recover plastics, turn them into nets, and use those nets to .. recover more plastic?

If I were shipwrecked on a tropical island, I'd make it my daily task to work out how to build something like this, into which I can feed plastic bottles, and get a brand new material that could be used for more construction.

Sure, knitting scarves is neat. But knitting a weather-proof shelter? Hell yeah!

Yeah, I think this factoid has changed significantly in the decades since I learned it during a visit to Pinjarra. ;)

Still, bauxite is pretty weird business.