I can confirm the TT-RSS app (found on F-Droid) is very good. I have used it for years. On the other hand, the web app is not very good, and each time I wanted to read articles on my computer from the web interface, I encountered huge issues (for some reason, the "right click / mark as read" never correctly worked on my computers, or at least with huge lags of several seconds). When my free TT-RSS provider closed, I decided to switch to FreshRSS and could compare several apps for Android; I finally set up the following workflow: free FreshRSS account + "Read You" (found on F-Droid also), and managed to achieve a very similar workflow than previously (with a much better web app).
I’ve practiced array languages extensively myself, including for code golfing, and I fully understand the intellectual joy they can provide. But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to see a deep mismatch between what these languages present as “elegant” and what I find truly elegant from a computer science perspective.
Sure, realizing that the foobar of x is nothing more than the transpose of the 15th foo of x, combined via an inner product with the 7th bar of x raised to the power of baz, can be an ineffable intellectual delight. But actually computing that, rather than writing a “boring” loop, feels horrible to me. To my eyes, a “boring” piece of code written by Dijkstra in some Algol-like language contains more beauty than all these dazzling sleights of hand that hide zillions of loops under the rug while pretending that the actual computation doesn’t matter.
When you compute some nice and elegant result, dissipated heat is an undesired side effect. But let's face it: we are speaking about proof of work. Proof of work means that a computed has run during some "required" time. In other words, you have to prove that enough heat has been dissipated. Waste of energy actually is "by design" here.
I don’t want to argue about the overall trend based on a single example, but Terence Tao’s substantial use of Mastodon for communication does change the picture a bit.
As some readers may not be familiar with the name Xavier Leroy, I just want to emphasize that he is one of the people behind OCaml and a leading figure promoting Rocq/Coq.
Shameless plug: eight years ago, I created the following website for posting plots of complex functions using similar gradients: https://kettenreihen.wordpress.com/
I wrote the main application for my wife's business — she's a psychologist. That was only a few years ago, but as a senior lecturer in the more theoretical parts of computer science, I never really needed fancy UIs with flashy graphical effects. So I built a core engine and used the classic dialog tool as the thin user-facing layer.
At first, my wife was pretty disappointed — as a computer science teacher, wasn't I supposed to know how to build a “real” app? But a few years later, she doesn't want anything else. I even offered to have one of my students create a nicer UI without changing the engine or database, but by now she's completely used to the terminal menus.
The tool keeps a database, collects data through dialog forms, generates PDF invoices with groff, and launches Thunderbird when needed (to send invoices, etc.).
> It really is mind bending how fast this function grows.
While the BB function is obviously a well-defined function over the integers, I find it helpful to think of it as a function over qualitatively heterogeneous items—such as stones, bread toasters, mechanical watches, and computers. The key idea is to view the underlying computing devices not as “a little more powerful” than the previous ones, but as fundamentally different kinds of entities.
May I suggest the Greenchess website? https://greenchess.net/
It certainly has some huge potential: nice minimalist interface and probably about 50 or 60 chess variants for all tastes. Some of them are obviously more or less "recent". You can easily start a new game or accept a pending invitation. I would call the set of players quite "active" and certainly motivated.
But it is true that the pool of players remains small and you generally play against the same players again and again.