@CGM@mastodon.scot
@CGM@mastodon.scot avatar

CGM

@CGM@mastodon.scot

Retired programmer, social justice worrier, London UK.
Move Slowly and Repair Things!

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CGM, to tcl
@CGM@mastodon.scot avatar

The second beta release of Tcl/Tk 9.0 is now available - https://www.tcl-lang.org/software/tcltk/9.0.html
#tcl #tcltk #programming

CGM, to random
@CGM@mastodon.scot avatar

Spending cuts are often false economies that end up costing society dearly - The Guardian https://apple.news/Apnz3oWv8QtaM36zPuEBwVw

CGM, to UKpolitics
@CGM@mastodon.scot avatar

"Sunak rejects offer of youth mobility scheme between EU and UK"
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/apr/19/sunak-rejects-offer-of-mobility-scheme-for-young-people-between-eu-and-uk
"Labour also turns down European Commission’s proposal, which would have allowed young Britons to live, study and work in EU" 🤮
#brexit #tories #labour #ukpolitics

mpjgregoire, (edited ) to random
@mpjgregoire@cosocial.ca avatar

One of my fundamental objections to is illustrated in this quote from @justinling's recent article about the current PM:

"He was vowing to replace Canada’s electoral system, which tended to give parties power disproportionate to their level of support"

PR advocates believe that each party should have a number of MPs proportionate to the votes that party has received; but the relationship between power and proportion of MPs is inherently nonlinear.

1/3

CGM,
@CGM@mastodon.scot avatar

@mpjgregoire Interesting point, but I think you're missing the fact that parties are not simply interchangeable. E.g. if party A is centrist, party B is far-right and party C is far-left, it's unlikely that B and C will cooperate to defeat A. Ok, it's not just left/right, but parties will tend to cooperate with others whose policies are similar. Also voters will tend to shift between like-minded parties, so in general, popular policies are likely to be implemented.

CGM,
@CGM@mastodon.scot avatar

@mpjgregoire Ok, in that scenario it would be more logical for the Liberals and Conservatives to cooperate, but of course politics is not always rational. There's no perfect system, but PR still looks much better than FPTP on balance.

sinza, to usenet
@sinza@bitbang.social avatar

What platforms were used in the 80s up to about 1993 or 1994 for Internet servers? It can be , , , , the , or anything else that was on the Internet in that era.

My research indicates Solaris was very popular for web servers until Linux took over, and so I suspect it (and SunOS before it) was very popular for the Internet in general, but I'd like to hear from anyone with this sort of experience.

CGM,
@CGM@mastodon.scot avatar

@sinza I was sysadmin in a UK university CS dept back then. We didn't get any kind of internet connection until about 1992-3. The first generally-available web browser, NCSA Mosaic, was only launched in 1993 and took a few more years to become widespread - https://home.cern/science/computing/birth-web/short-history-web . So I would say that period was not so much "oldweb" as pre-web. Even usenet, which existed before the internet, was still very slow and limited.

CGM, to Economics
@CGM@mastodon.scot avatar

"The Changing Shape of Great Britain" Gary's Economics - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMRSQ023yGo

jer, to Redis
@jer@hachyderm.io avatar

ok, after all that kerfuffle let's have some fun:

Who built a Redis-like cache/data store/database (maybe protocol compatible?) for fun or shit-posting?
May that be in bash, awk, storing data in DNS, ...
Share your silly project!

CGM,
@CGM@mastodon.scot avatar

@jer Perhaps it's worth pointing out that Redis itself started life as a prototype hacked up in Tcl, see https://gist.github.com/antirez/6ca04dd191bdb82aad9fb241013e88a8
#redis #tcl #tcltk

CGM, to UKpolitics
@CGM@mastodon.scot avatar

Taking Back Control turns out to involve a crippling amount of extra work - who knew???
Prof. Chris Grey's latest lacerating letter - "Brexit Britain’s ailing state" - https://chrisgreybrexitblog.blogspot.com/2024/03/brexit-britains-ailing-state.html
@ChrisGrey

davidallengreen, to random
@davidallengreen@mastodon.green avatar

The remarkable witness statement of Johnny Mercer

How a government minister tried and failed to get to the bottom of serious war crimes allegations

By me, at Prospect

https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/politics/65403/the-remarkable-witness-statement-of-johnny-mercer

CGM,
@CGM@mastodon.scot avatar

@davidallengreen Johnny Mercer's actual witness statement can be read at https://iiaweb-prod.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/WS-Rt-Hon-Johnny-Mercer-OZ_Redacted_-for-the-website.pdf

CGM, to UKpolitics
@CGM@mastodon.scot avatar

"What’s the point of Starmer’s Labour if it won’t stand up for poor, sick or disabled people?" - Frances Ryan - https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/mar/12/keir-starmer-labour-poor-sick-disabled-tory

CGM, to UKpolitics
@CGM@mastodon.scot avatar

Rishi Sunak: I’ll squeeze benefits to fund more tax cuts for workers - The Times and The Sunday Times https://apple.news/AIOcdm8iYQEuEG3UA47gFCw 🤮

CGM, to UKpolitics
@CGM@mastodon.scot avatar

@bbclaurak WTF is the point of interviewing Chancellor of Exchequer before the budget when he can’t tell you anything? You should do it afterwards when you can challenge him on the specifics of what he has actually announced! @BBCNewsUK

CGM, to tcl
@CGM@mastodon.scot avatar

The latest patch release of Tcl/Tk 8.6.14 is now available - http://www.tcl-lang.org/software/tcltk/8.6.html

markwyner, (edited ) to books
@markwyner@mas.to avatar

Grace Linn’s husband was killed while fighting nazis in WWII. She’s a centenarian who has witnessed the rise of fascism first hand.

Recently she took on a school board in Florida against their book bans. She made a quilt in protest and reminded people where book bans lead:

“Banning books and burning books are the same. Both are done for the same reason: fear of knowledge.”

https://pen.org/grace-linn-book-ban-martin-county/

#BookBans #Fascism #GraceLinn #Knowledge #Books #Florida

CGM,
@CGM@mastodon.scot avatar

@markwyner
s/centurion/centenarian/
🙄

CGM, to Medicine
@CGM@mastodon.scot avatar

"The mothers fighting a scandal bigger than thalidomide: ‘We were told the medication was safe’" - https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/feb/22/the-mothers-fighting-a-scandal-bigger-than-thalidomide-we-were-told-the-medication-was-safe

amoroso, to programming
@amoroso@fosstodon.org avatar

Can you recommend any general learning resources on coroutines?

I'm looking for tutorials, books, or other non-video sources that are largely language independent (or introduce a few primitives clearly) and, most importantly, explain how to program with couroutines and for which problems or situations they're typically used. I'm looking to learn the concepts, not features of specific languages.

I'm not interested in other control or concurrency primitives.

CGM,
@CGM@mastodon.scot avatar

@amoroso "Revisiting Coroutines" by the Lua people is perhaps more theoretical than you want but might be worth a look - https://www.inf.puc-rio.br/~roberto/docs/MCC15-04.pdf

johncarlosbaez, (edited ) to random
@johncarlosbaez@mathstodon.xyz avatar

If our civilization collapses, extraterrestrial archeologists can look at this and be impressed. Three satellites following the Earth in an equilateral triangle, each 2.5 million kilometers from the other two. Each contains two gold cubes in free-fall. The satellites accelerate just enough so they don't get blown off course by the solar wind. The gold cubes inside feel nothing but gravity.

Lasers bounce between each cube and its partner in another satellite, measuring the distance between them to an accuracy of 20 picometers: less than the diameter of a helium atom! This lets the satellites detect gravitational waves — ripples in the curvature of spacetime — with very long wavelengths, and correspondingly low frequencies.

It should see so many binary white dwarfs, neutron stars and black holes in the Milky Way that these will be nothing but foreground noise. More excitingly, it should see mergers of supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies as far as... the dawn of time, or whenever such black holes were first formed. (The farther you look, the older things you see.)

It may even be able to see the "gravitational background radiation": the thrumming vibrations in the fabric of spacetime left over from the Big Bang. These gravitational waves were created before the hot gas in the Universe cooled down enough to become transparent to light. So they're older than the microwave background radiation, which is the oldest thing we see now.

It's called LISA - the Laser Interferometric Satellite Antenna. And we're in luck: ESA has just decided to launch it in 2035.

CGM,
@CGM@mastodon.scot avatar

@johncarlosbaez LISA - it sounds like one of the improbable structures that Iain M Banks used to dream up!

CGM, to usenet
@CGM@mastodon.scot avatar

Newsgrouper - a web interface to Usenet Groups - https://cmacleod.me.uk/newsgrouper

This is a little project I've been working on for a few weeks. I think the basic functionality is now working, though there are still many aspects I hope to improve. Of course much of usenet is now a wasteland inhabited only by spammers and cranks. But there are still worthwhile corners, such as comp.lang.tcl, so I think this may have some value. 🙂
#usenet #tcl #tcltk #programming

CGM, to environment
@CGM@mastodon.scot avatar

Brexit, the gift that keeps on giving (well, taking away actually) - "Brexit divergence from EU destroying UK’s vital environmental protections" - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/jan/19/brexit-divergence-from-eu-destroying-vital-environmental-protections

CGM, to programming
@CGM@mastodon.scot avatar

The first beta release of Tcl/Tk 9.0 is now available - https://www.tcl-lang.org/software/tcltk/9.0.html

New features include general conversion to 64-bit architecture allowing very large data structures, support for the full range of unicode characters, ability to mount zip archives as virtual filesystems, etc.
@tcl @tcl

CGM, to UKpolitics
@CGM@mastodon.scot avatar

Prof. Chris Grey @ChrisGrey - "The Brexit self-punishment machine " - https://chrisgreybrexitblog.blogspot.com/2024/01/the-brexit-self-punishment-machine.html
@brexit

kyonshi, to bbs
@kyonshi@dice.camp avatar

so, idea I have been working on the last few days: on my old , small server including web gateway, all geared towards stuff.
lets see what else a pi can run at the same time.

kind of a fool's errand, but it should keep me busy for the next two weeks.

CGM,
@CGM@mastodon.scot avatar

@kyonshi Interesting, I’m working on writing a usenet/web gateway just now myself. What do you plan to use for that?

gisgeek, to linux
@gisgeek@floss.social avatar

I'm old enough to have begun using before , and in the first years, I used *nix (well, SunOS, Solaris, and Digital OSF/1, to say more precisely) for so long. I'm what nowadays is considered a Veteran Unix Admin or . I'm still curious enough to stay updated about current tech, but I wonder how many people out there in the are still passionate about tech novelties but even cultivate legacy knowledge such as #C, , , and , and above all why?

CGM,
@CGM@mastodon.scot avatar

@gisgeek You call it legacy knowledge, I call it appreciating the classics. 😀

An awful lot of wheels get reinvented in the computing field, and often end up square. The number of genuinely useful innovations is quite small.

So I'm still hacking with because I find it more productive than the newer alternatives.

CGM, to UKpolitics
@CGM@mastodon.scot avatar

What the UK wants for Christmas is to get Brexit undone - The Guardian https://apple.news/A4M3xBjrETX6Z7iOh3NKAUg

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