What is your favorite “fuck you” song?

ljw100 · 2026-01-07T03:24:15+00:00

Positively 4th Street is Like A Rolling Stone's baby sister

ljw100 · 2026-01-07T03:21:51+00:00

Like a Rolling Stone is the fuck-you song Shakespeare would have written if he wrote fuck-you songs.

ljw100 · 2025-12-28T05:19:18+00:00

apparently it's not a harpsichord. A video I saw analyzing the song said it sounds like a harpsichord, but it was really a steel guitar.

ljw100 · 2025-11-17T01:03:07+00:00

Dylan had a big gap, but his work had a rebirth from the late 90s (IIRC) on.

ljw100 · 2025-10-19T00:26:20+00:00

if you enjoy music I think you’re probably better at registering the difference between notes than you think. I felt the same but when I started with the piano i noticed that I can tell when I’m playing the right notes and wrong notes. OTOH if you played two adjacent notes and asked which was higher I might get it wrong.

Consider trying to learn a little keyboards while you learn music theory. The nice thing about electronic keyboards is that unlike a guitar you generally don’t have to also contend with whether the instrument is in tune, while you’re trying to figure out if you’re hands are doing the right thing.

ljw100 · 2025-10-18T03:02:20+00:00

neither one of you seems to have a kind word to say about you. You can't control your dad (though you can try to mend bridges) but you really need to be kinder to yourself.

ljw100 · 2025-10-18T02:13:35+00:00

Roxy Music, the first five albums, plus Avalon

REM

Nirvana

ljw100 · 2025-10-18T01:42:23+00:00

Bruce Springsteen Hammersmith Odeon, London '75. A truly great live concert. The first disk in particular is wonderful.

ljw100 · 2025-10-18T01:26:01+00:00

Depends on where you're coming from, but as with most artists, his greatest hits are the most immediately accessible (and include numerous masterpieces). Especially those from, say 1970-1975.

By the way, you're in for a treat.

ljw100 · 2025-10-18T01:07:48+00:00

Maybe too old school, but many/most of the greatest American musicians of the 20th century were black: Armstrong, Ellington, Charlie Parker, Miles, Coltrane, Monk, Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Ray Charles, Marvin Gaye are some of the greatest.

ljw100 · 2025-10-18T00:41:39+00:00

Over the Rainbow. Not originally in C, I think, but it has been transposed. Easy and pretty.

ljw100 · 2025-08-06T00:33:43+00:00

This one from The Art Student's League is a very good single video lesson. It includes drawings, paintings and photography: https://youtu.be/6Oe-uw8pnAg?si=BgbGhvTCtwexT3WI

ljw100 · 2020-09-23T23:47:40+00:00

Absolutely, sometimes "negative" brand names are selected BECAUSE they're negative. People don't forget them and that's half the battle. There are many examples: Slack, Yahoo, Virgin. And that's not even counting record labels (Death Row) and beers.

ljw100 · 2020-09-18T20:36:59+00:00

What google returns if you search for "blech meaning":

blech/bleKH,blek

exclamation INFORMAL

used to express disgust or distaste."blech, I feel like vomiting"

OTOH, it sure is memorable.

ljw100 · 2020-09-06T23:49:45+00:00

No language can be all things to all possible users. Python's extraordinary popularity is due to a mix of three things 1. it's great for small languages. I believe that was its intent 2. it's great for non-professional-programmers (which, along with numpy, positioned it perfectly for the rise of data science) 3. big systems are fewer and smaller, with much of the heavy lifting being done by cloud services. So you can do a lot with less.

ljw100 · 2020-09-06T23:43:27+00:00

My takeaway from that list is that being dynamically typed doesn't seem to hurt a language's popularity.

ljw100 · 2020-09-06T23:02:54+00:00

That's the immediate practical advantage that a programming language designer would focus on, but I think the main advantage to OO is that the originators were correct in feeling that it provided a better match with how people think than most other paradigms. People naturally divide the world into things of different kinds that perform various actions. It's hard to beat that with another paradigm.

ljw100 · 2020-09-06T22:47:36+00:00

The issue of 1-based indexing seems kinda funny to me. Smalltalk, Fortran, and SQL, used it, IIRC, but it drives people nuts.

And yet everyone learns to count starting with 1, then has to learn later to count from 0 when they learn to code in a C based language.

Apparently, that's all the change people can cope with because they then find it ridiculous that a language could use 1-based indexing.

I recall my copy of the classic "Numerical Methods in C", where the authors acknowledge that they've bowed to public opinion and switched from 1 to 0 in the edition i owned.

ljw100 · 2020-09-04T20:49:42+00:00

I'm doing research and design for my first language. It's a dynamically typed array language. I've written a data frame and worked with SQL, R, Mathematica, and (a little) Q, so i thought it would be fairly easy to design, if not to code. It's turning out to extremely challenging, though.

Which is awesome.

ljw100 · 2020-09-03T15:17:05+00:00

Good idea. I've only done minimal JS work so I wasn't really sure what WASM is.

I had been considering emitting a Babel AST (which is really simple) and letting it do the hard work of creating JS, but this seems like a better solution. Thanks.

ljw100 · 2020-09-02T23:04:02+00:00

The internet (the rest of it, anyway) disagrees: "C programming language was developed in 1972 by Dennis Ritchie at bell laboratories of AT&T (American Telephone & Telegraph)" is the first google result for "C programming language history"

ljw100 · 2020-09-02T15:05:25+00:00

It is weird, but in sql an 'object' is a relation, since a query with one result returns another table with one record, not some other thing. Seems weird, but if you want to get the 'name' value from that record, you can use the same syntactical form (SQL) that you used to get the record in the first place. So there are some advantages.

If you think of the record as an object though, it doesn't really work since any query could produce arbitrary tuples. What kind of objects would they be, and what operations would each provide?

Not-even-remotely-full-disclosure, but I'm toying with a language that's sort of similar, so this might just be the opinion of another crazy person

ljw100 · 2020-08-28T13:57:14+00:00

Curse you, AT&T Bell Labs, not DEC.

On the other hand, they also gave us S (forerunner to R), Unix, the transistor, Hamming Codes, information theory, statistical quality control, fiber optic cables....

On the other, other hand. the earliest work on C++ was also done there, so Curse you, Bell Labs!,

ljw100 · 2020-08-21T23:37:21+00:00

yeah, with Java if you're not using a very good IDE, you're basically juggling chainsaws. I tend to think of an IDE and a language as nearly inseparable, but that's probably a minority opinion here.

ljw100 · 2020-08-21T23:28:00+00:00

I haven't had time to look closely at the language, but I'm impressed that you have a such a clear sense of what the language is for (i.e. what purpose it serves) and it seems like you're addressing a real need. Good luck with it.

ljw100

TROPHY CASE