Day 15: Procedural Generation of Nested Places
The very understanding of spatiality as paradigmatically a concept of physical theory, and so as primarily tied to physical extension, must represent a fundamental obstacle to any attempt to arrive at a view of place as a philosophically significant concept. … the analysis of place must encompass a broader analysis of space that does not restrict space merely to the sense associated with notions of physical extension and position. Arriving at an adequate account of place, then, requires a rethinking of space also.
Today’s Progress
Community
I was lucky enough to enjoy 2 wonderful pairing sessions today.
- In the first session, we got to practice Haskell while working over some good foundational algorithms on lists. I had a bunch of fun, and learned and relearned some important principles.
- In the second, we made tangible initial progress on implementing a procedural dungeon generator. This was a blast and very illuminating. I’m going to keep working on this as a fun and instructive side project.
PLT: 1ML
- Got the remote repo up to date with changes I’ve been making on my fork
- Moved my project planing notes into the fork. You can see them here.
- I made some actual progress on the 1ML type checking bug that’s currently in my cross hairs. I’ve been documenting the bug hunt pretty carefully, so I’ll be able to reuse the debugging techniques I’m discovering along the way later with ease. Documentation is Automation!1
Writing
I received some very encouraging feedback on this log.
The feedback came along with a great suggestion for a missing feature: a way of tracking what reported progress is contributing to which project. I suspect I can achieve such a thing with some basic use of org-mode tags. I’ve added the idea to my todo list.
We also discussed difficulties around writing in general, the risks of writing publically, and the ambiguous nature of mixing genuine self-expression with instrumental self-promotion.
This rambling mess of a log a manifestation of my own attempts to develop a writing practice, and to overcome the stifling forces of unrealistic expectation and scope creep. So far so good, in that writing is happening. However, I’m still very far from feeling confident in my abilities to write λ needs .[what needs to be written to communicate what needs to be communicated]2. Perhaps once I feel more confident in my ability to write coherently towards a particular purpose, I’ll try to summarize how well this method of bootstrapping such a habit has worked for me (or hasn’t).
In the meantime, I am very grateful for the people who have shared insight into their own writing process, shared their own writing, encouraged writing in general, offered feedback, or invited the opportunity to give feedback.
Tomorrow’s Program
PLT
- Focused work on the 1ML type checking bug
- Discussing CT prior to Wednesday’s meeting
Community
- Signed up to give a non-technical talk on critical theory. I’ll need to prep for this!
References
Footnotes:
A jokey experiment in parameterizing the value of a word without the usual boilerplate phrase: “for some value of x”. Probably a failed experiment.