It's been quite a week on Mastodon eh.
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Ethan Hein on the Ghostbusters theme with a collection of links to Ray Parker, Jr's other stuff
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Fuck Your Magical Antisemitism an entertaining zine on problematic aspects of the Western occult tradition
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Interaction vs. Abstraction: Managed Copy and Paste, a paper by Jonathan Edwards and Tomas Petricek which argues that tooling for managing copy-and-paste would be a better solution than functions for people who aren't professinal or full-time developers. This is heresy from a mainstream programming point of view, but it really isn't that different to how we used IDEs to help us negotiate refactoring, and lately I've become very interested in how we support people like researchers whose primary discipline is not programming but who need to learn how to do it to get stuff done. Edwards and Petricek's proposed solution seems to me to be more complicated than just writing a function, but it's still interesting. Thinking about this made me wonder if "abstraction" is the wrong metaphor for what we are doing when we take multiple instances of code and turn them into a more general-purpose tool called a "function". We don't think of a swiss army knife as being more abstract than each of the individual tools it contains.