(November 2015)
Returned home from my afternoon walk by the seashore... to find this in my mailbox (Tap/click images to zoom):
Huh? "Intelligence alert"?
Oh, right - I had this check set up years ago, in case I receive more than 1000 visitors in a day. Nerd Pride! :-)
Let's see who visited us, and why.
Logging in Analytics...
Oh, it's my silly little Score4 solver - the one I wrote back in 2011 in 6 languages (while discovering the functional-style of coding).
What, people found it again?
How? Why?
"vk.com" ?
Google tells me that it's a "Russian Facebook"... ( hmm, the plot thickens! I'd never expect any kind of Facebook to mention anything about nerds - only to employ them :-)
The answer came from lower in the list, from good old Reddit...
That link there in red, indicates that someone talked about my Score4 lisp macros (code generation, at compile-time, done in the same language as the algorithm itself, and checked by the same compiler... Lisp allows you to do this kind of Deep Dark Magic ... which I used to automatically unroll my code's loops - something traditionally done by compilers).
I am guessing that this post in /r/lisp was then shared in "Russian Facebook" Lisp forums...
Realization - things have REALLY changed...
And here's the kicker - I remember adding this section in the post, 4 years ago... and thinking to myself...
No-one is going to understand this part... and even if I do blog about it, no-one's gonna read it.
Only nerds like me understand the power of this ancient magic... It's doomed, destined to be lost (sad sigh)
I was wrong ( Hint: Clojure ).
4 years later, "The Internet" found my rant... and more specifically, the only people that COULD grok this, FOUND it.
And naturally, had suggestions to improve it! :-)
This is why our age is TREMENDOUSLY different, compared to any other time in human history - heck, compared to even 30-40 years ago... I am not referring to my silly Score4 solver, of course - but to the accessibility of this kind of "long-tail" knowledge... that the human race has always, till now, been doomed in all previous aeons... to invent, then lose (because the people that would care for it could not find it), then re-invent... again, and again, and again...
Not anymore.
And this... This makes me feel really good :-)
| Index | CV | Updated: Sat Oct 8 11:41:25 2022 |