G3rn0ti

I bought this on Steam last year and it is a great game! A lot of pace and impressive graphics and sound. The music is made by Yuzo Koshiro of Streets of Rage II fame.

You don't even need to buy the cartridge version if you own an SD card adapter.

I used Novell DOS 7 back in its day and squeezed > 70 MB on my 50 MB hard disk drive thanks to its Stacker disk compression feature. I remember it coming in a flashy red colored box. It also supported to move most drivers into extended memory to have much more conventional memory available on 386 machines. However, most cutting edge games used DOS protected mode extenders already, so for gaming you couldn’t use that feature.

Great times, anyways. ;)

This. I really wonder how trainees are supposed to grow in an age where they are asked not to code themselves but guide a machine doing so.

You can use code blocks for this and even specify the language so Emacs can provide proper syntax highlighting:

#+BEGIN_SRC html

#+END_SRC

If you are writing a technical document with a lot of code blocks you can have yasnippet to create the blocks for you by keyboard shortcut.

While there does not seem to be a maintained snap or flagpole package available, the company behind WPS Office releases DEBs and RPMs it seems: https://www.tech2geek.net/how-to-install-wps-office-on-linux...

> How do you make LSPs fast?

https://github.com/blahgeek/emacs-lsp-booster

The fundamental issue is Emacs its JSON parser is currently still rather slow (not sure why actually). But in LSP mode it needs to parse the LSP server's many JSON response messages very quickly. The aforementioned booster converts all JSON into ELISP byte code so Emacs can process LSP messages much faster.

I guess, the Emacs project will have to tune their JSON parser in the future.

While I agree with you, I think, having cognition is not black and white. There are animals with great cognition skills especially among predators. Our brains are essentially anticipation machines capable of predicting the future — a trait uniquely advantageous when hunting other animals. We just happen to have specialized on this trait to the extreme (and otherwise lack good sensory organs or impressive innate weapons).

Whenever this topic comes up I have to think about this octopus who escaped an aquarium. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inky_(octopus)

> bits like those variable prefixes ($@%)

Perl originated from shell programming and inherited some of its patterns. If you ever looked at a bash script using arrays you will immediately recognize "@" to access the array as a whole and the switch to the "$" sigil to access a single element from that array. Perl was designed to make it easy for shell script writers to pick it up.

> They threw away their user-repairable mantra when they made the Desktop

You forget the value proposition of Framework products is not only they allow you to bring your own hardware but they also promise to provide you with replacement parts and upgrades directly from the vendor.

In this case they could not make the RAM replaceable (it’s a limitation of the platform) but you can expect an upgrade board in about 2 years that’s actually going to be easy to install for much less cost than buying a new desktop computer.

I am working for a company maintaining an enterprise grade software system that is primarily driven by Perl 5 and Postgres. It generates about EUR 50 million in revenue every year.

To avoid creating new Perl code from scratch we created a REST API many years ok which new frontends and middlewares use instead of interacting with the core itself. That has been successful to some extent as we can have frontend teams coding in JS/TypeScript without them needing to interact with Perl. But re-writing the API‘s implementation is risky and the company has shied away from that.

Fixing API bugs still require to dive into a Perl system. However, I found it easier turning Python or JS devs into Perl devs than into DB engineers. So, usually, the DB subsystem bears the greater risk and requires more expensive personnel.

Of course, you can use TRAMP to edit files inside docker containers. You don’t even need to install anything inside them.

Site is down:

https://web.archive.org/web/20250107090641/https://www.scott...

What are you using it for? Is just Youtube and checking mails or can you decently type on its small keyboard, too?

> It looks like adding a defcustom that would disable macro expansion, and basically any attempts to eval the code being edited

Probably, yes. „org-babel“ can execute shell code inside an org document but always asks the user before it does. You can disable this if you want to. No big deal. Should totally work like this in elisp-mode, too.

> The onset of inflation correlates more closely with global energy supply shocks than with changes in QE policy or “printing” money in Covid stimulus.

Hmmm. [1]

> USA, the UK, Aus etc and haven’t had for a number of years at this point

Indeed, the US abolished the 10% reserve requirement in 2020. Crazy. I hope you guys also save in inflation hedges.

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL

> Today, we control inflation with changes in interest rates, not changes in the quantity of money.

That is also not quite correct, I believe. The FED can invest money created out of thin air any time it wants („fiat money“ — „there shall be money“), usually it buys government bonds to help the federal government run its deficit. Sometimes this scheme is called „quantitative easing“ which is a charming euphemism. This is what drove and still drives inflation directly and indirectly (through the effect of our fractional reserve system private banks amplify this about tenfold by lending out 90% of their customers‘ deposits).

The interest rates everybody is obsessed about are just the target rates for the interest earned or paid for for money in the account of private banks at the FED. It is just a secondary adjustment. At least during major crisis.

> I really don't need bad hinges

The hinges were changed a long time ago and affected only the first generation laptops AFAIR.

> weak USB ports

Never had these issues. But the ports are little modules you just slide out and replace by sliding in. No screwdriver necessary. I have seen bad USB ports on laptops you had to re-solder if not placed on a separate board ...

> operating system worries

Well, Linux remains Linux. You can run Windows, too. But Framework has fully-fledged Ubuntu support and even provides UEFI firmware updates via the Linux vendor firmware service. I had one for my Framework 13 AMD (although no UEFI related problems as far as I was aware) and the update worked like charm.

> By the mid-'90s, NSFNET was formally dead, after years of accepting commercial traffic.

Mind you: Your statement says nothing about profitability. Until 1995 the NSFNET was the most important backbone of the American internet and it was paid for by the US government. Of course, other countries lagged way behind the US' development where the Internet still remained primarily a research network until the late nineties.

The German Telekom e.g. was still pitching its BTX service in 1995 (kinda like teletext for modems) that could be used for shopping, online banking and stuff -- stuff which you could not really do on the WWW yet. I remember my first experiments in browsing the WWW happend over a BTX gateway and it was awfully slow even by the standards back then. The first DSL service only started in 1999/2000 in Germany in the form of a test program where you were required to answer market research question to get a cheap, subsidized service.

(I mean we are talking about the _World Wide_ Web, here, not the _American_ Web.)

Furthermore, your argument also says _nothing_ about how commercial Internet services where financing themselves back then which was the original topic of this thread. GeoCities, Yahoo, AltaVista, Google -- all those sites featured adds back in the 90s. If I remember correctly, Netscape Navigator also featured a "what's cool" button that -- I believe -- brought you to sites that payed for being advertised that way. So even back in the Internet's infancy it was largely commercialized using advertisements. This has never changed. And this was my original point.

I am not saying I am big fan of ads. But this is largely a problem of news agencies that work around a clock to bring you news (or rumors) and are currently unable to finance their services by subscriptions alone. This is the sector where ad spam is most visible. Despite all that the Internet has become a tremendously important part of our lives bringing real value: We get the news from there, we go shopping there, we watch live broadcasts there, watch movies, stay in contact with our friends, hold meetings, apply for jobs or housing and even work in there. The Internet was a toy in the 90s. These days it is central to our social lives. Saying the Internet is "broken" today and we have "skrewed it up" just because of its advertisement sector is a bit naive ...

> The internet functioned fine for over a decade, profitably, without invasive adware like we see now

What time period are you even talking about?

In the mid nineties the Internet was largely a research network between university computers and paid for by tax payers. The internet only started growing exponentially with commercial services appearing in the late nineties. This was the time when people started to demand high speed Internet connections (ASDL) and were willing to pay for that. But this was not the case for its services. Google's primary business model way back in 2000 was already showing ads related to your search terms. Even back in 2003 Google introduced the free GMAIL service that showed ads based on your email content. That's 21 years ago.

IMHO it is your view on the Internet history that is being "revisionist" and "gaslighting". Take this from sb who had his private Internet access as early as 1998.

> I so badly wanted that future of the Internet, but somehow we ended up in a place where corporations ate it all.

The high bandwidths we got today are exactly the result of a full commercialization of the Internet. If there was no money to earn here, we would still be stuck with dial-up connections and had no YouTube and Netflix.

I understand that advertisements and online tracking suck but it’s the result of consumers not willing to pay a penny for many online services. But I think that’s already changing with all those subscription models and SaaS businesses out there.

Wolfram explains the basic concepts of neural networks rather well, I think. He trains and runs a perceptron at the beginning und then a simpler network. Then he dwells into replacing the continuous functions they constitute into discrete binary ones — and ends up with cellular automata he thinks emulate neural networks and their training process. While this surely looks interesting all „insight“ he obtains into the original question of how exactly networks do learn is trained networks do not seem to come up with a simple model they use to produce the output we observe but rather find one combination of parameters in a random state space being able to reproduce a target function. There are multiple possible solutions that equally work well — so perhaps the notion of networks generalizing training data is perhaps not quite accurate (?). Wolfram links this to „his concept“ of „computational irreducibility“ (which I believe is just a consequence of Turing-completeness) but does not give any novel strategies to understand trained machine models or how to do machine learning in any better way using discrete systems. Wolfram presents a fun but at times confusing exercise in discrete automata and unfortunately does not apply the mathematical rigor needed to draw deep conclusions on his subject.

Yeah, if you compare with the prices set by large manufacturers you are right, of course. But note the company behind this machine is like a two persons shop. They lack the economy of scale. And from a large hardware manufacturer you do not get "open source" hardware for which circuit diagrams are available to you for all major parts. If you do not care about that then this thing is not for you.

As an outsider of any reasonably large application can you really ever expect to grasp 200 random lines of code in any language?

Maintenance programming is all about understanding the software‘s context and implicit design or a model thereof — even if it is a 20 year old patch work.

Young developers tend to be amazed when I find the source of an obscure bug in our 1M lines of Perl code application as a senior. But the thing is, I just happen to „get the application“ and developed intuition about its inner working. It’s rarely of knowing Perl particularly well. The thing could have been written in TCL or even Brainfuck — with a working model of your software in your head (not with the memory of the total code base, mind you) you will eventually find the problem in a piece of software written in any language.

It sounds more like the refactoring started with creating tests for the old code base. We do this with our legacy code base, too, sometimes. Of course, it’s always the high risk code of an application that‘s never been accompanied by automatic tests.

I remember that puzzle from Monkey Island 3. I mean, yes, the game is tricky but think about all the hints the game is giving you: „gold tooth“, „jaw breaker“ and I think in the dialog tree with Blondebeard you could compliment him about the gold tooth … and the mud puddle where you dig for gold using a pan like like gold diggers did in the clichés about the gold rush. So I mean it could be worse.

You get the hang for these kinds of puzzles once you played a couple of them.

On the other hand what I hate most in adventure games are random logic puzzles to open a door or find out where you need to go next. This is usually a cheap way to slow the game down. Lucas Arts was guilty of this kind of thing after Ron Gilbert left in „The Dig“, too, which still was a great game nevertheless.

Well, however, it’s still the Wall GmbH building public toilets. So what’s your point?

Berlin has a work force of about 2.2 million people. 305k of those work for the public sector. That’s about 13.8% so above Germany’s average. However, it’s not only important how much people work for the government but also how much it pays them. And Berlin pays much better salaries than other eastern German states. 24 years ago salaries in Eastern Berlin were increased to match those payed to western Berlin employees (instead of meeting in between). So for many years the city payed waaay more than its surrounding German member state to its staff. This financial issue is amplified by the fact Berlin now has to pay much higher pensions on average for its retired personnel.

All of Berlin‘s district heating plants provide heat AND electricity. So the government owns a huge share of all electricity producers in this city now, too (about 60 % of the total production capacity).

Whether this constitutes a monopoly is beside the point. Berlin paid 1.4 billions is does not really have (after it sold it 20 years ago when it had even less money and could not sustain a profitable business operation) and which does not solve a problem we really have. And now it will need to invest even more money to future-proof this acquisition.

> „Public spaces“

Usually buildings have private property owners. They agree to putting a bill board on their wall or they don’t. Graffiti sprayers usually don’t ask for permission — and that’s where the difference comes from.

In Europe you don’t usually have huge bill board on buildings. Rather you have lots of advertising columns on the side walks (here in Berlin we call them „Litfaßsäule“ named after the local inventor Paul Litfaß in 1854). You could argue they being a nuisance for sure but before the internet and even before radio and tv it was an important place of public communication. Actually they were an improvement because prior to advertising columns advertisers were wildly plastering anything with posters.