@lproven@theregister I got tired of jumping through '90s-era hoops to get a GUI login up on current FreeBSD on my Thinkpad and switched to MidnightBSD.
Reading about LISP machines has given me the sad realisation that Unix is RISC.
LISP machines were as CISC as you could get, closing the "semantic gap" by all the way up to LISP primitives.
RISC was "don't do that, don't make assumptions about the high-level workload, just provide fast machine-aligned primitives".
LISP OSes aligned with LISP. Unix may align with C, but in a fairly generic way. Really it's an OS trying to be dumb and hardware aligned. Push the clever up the stack.
@lproven@theregister I have a server at work that needs an upgrade but I'm holding off until OPS can approve Noble Numbat because ant-eating marsupials are cool. So this is good news.
Watching YouTube videos to get some tips on how to do better soldering and I cannot get past the ludicrousness of the way Americans say "SODDER".
I bet they go on confidence courses to get BODDER. And put the heating on when the weather gets CODDER. Then filing the heating bills in their FODDER which they hang in their file HODDER.
WHERE THE WEB IS GOING: The convergence of LLMs and web advertising will lead to "ads" consisting of several hundred gigabytes of javascript containing a (weighted) neural network designed to generate unique per-user video advertisements—generated on your computer at your expense to ensure the imagery is unique and evades AI-based ad-blockers.
"AI spam" is an entire AI, squatting on your CPU and making it glow dull red as it works out how to capture your attention.
A social media app based around me sending 2-min long voice messages is definitely a really cool idea that will take off
Naval Ravikant's Airchat is a social app built around talk, not text | TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2024/04/13/airchat-launch/
> Airchat is a new social media app that encourages users to “just talk.”
Like everyone, I took a moment on Monday to marvel that our sun and moon are just the right relative size for the magic to happen the way it does. And then for the first time I wondered if that coincidence was necessary for human-level consciousness to arise, that uncannily perfect shadow strobing over the surface of the earth on a billion-year scale gradually making animal brains bend into themselves, a missing letter in the Drake equation. #eclipse
It's a crime that Asimov's collection of excellent essays that includes one that goes into great detail about this, "The Tragedy of the Moon" is out of print.
I think my next project along the lines of VGAPride might be writing programs to display a trans pride flag for as many platforms as possible.
Like, a simple c64 program, qbasic, win32, js, etc.
@foone@richardloxley@brouhaha@BRicker We did a hack on the PDP-11 to speed up testing FIG-Forth code. Since a core dump and an a.out had almost the same structure, we created a Forth word that just did a fork and a SIGABORT which created a core dump, and patched the core dump with the header from the original binary and set it executable... so it started up Forth with all the code you'd already loaded already loaded.
@foone@richardloxley@brouhaha@BRicker Oh yeh, it also patched the initial values of the user variables with the current values of the user variables before it aborted so it wouldn't reset the heap and dictionary at restart.
One of my writing tics (that is somewhat a conscious decision most of the time) is that I have my older characters speak informally, with a lot of slang and off-kilter quips. And my younger characters, especially teens, tend to speak in a more straightforward, even formal way. This feels right to me, for various reasons. #amwriting#writing
@charliejane Back in the 50s and 60s a lot of SF writers were using beatnik slang as the language of the future and teenage me in the '70s thought they sounded funky as hell. I kind of recall John Brunner was particularly bad at future slang. Particularly in The Stardroppers but even in later works like Shockwave Rider. Sweedack?
@leyrer I kind of hate the video, though. I gave up watching it halfway through the "I'm too leet to care about affordable hardware" bit.
Those keyboards do not look like each other. There are dozens of exploded 75% keyboards, some with 13 F keys, some with 12 F keys, some with 3 keys in the column on the right, some with 4. If it's a "clone" of anything it's the Keychron Q1 or the Ajazz AK820 Pro which both have exactly the same key arrangement.
@josh@kfury I started off asking chatgpt questions about pgtcl, that I'm currently a significant maintainer for, and its answers sounded like they could be quotes from the manual... but were often as not completely wrong.
It’s 30 years this month since PERMUTATION CITY was first published. But of course, all the same letters had been present in other books for centuries before, they just hadn’t been read in that order.
@GeePawHill It's like if you have a research community spending decades writing software to fool a "Turing test" judge they eventually get really good at writing software to fool people.
the sci-fi community is dedicated to publishing about one omelas riff a month, so here are some ideas to turbo-charge your sci-fi author career:
• what if omelas but VR and actually everyone is living the shitty sad life outside the simulation (make this about social media dogpiling for bonus points)
• utopia minus? no, utopia plus! if you replace the omelas child with elon musk then it's, like, the good utopia
• "nobody asks whether the omelas child has bad vibes"
