__d

I used Perihelion’s Helios on Transputers for several years. It was a cool system, and gets far less credit than it deserves. Plan9 and Helios were independently developed but have a lot in common.

Historically, there was a large population of FOSS prior to Linux, and its distributions (starting with HJ Lu, SLS, Slackware, etc) were mostly just uniform packaging and easy installation. This wasn’t entirely new: commercial Unix had packaging mechanisms, but lacked the motivation for gratis distribution.

Prior to Linux, autotools was a standardization that made installation easy across the many commercial Unix variants.

That’s now moved on. There are dozens of packaging and distribution formats, none of which is universally applicable (as the OP says). And users’ expectations have moved well beyond the autotools invocation.

It’d be great for both end users and application developers for a universal solution to emerge, but there’s no sign of it happening.

You’re forgetting blame: if an on-prem system has an issue, that’s 100% on you. If AWS/GCP/Azure has an outage, that’s just bad luck, and everyone else suffers too.

But the "actual thing" is presumably software too? Why is it any different to a dev tool? All software is now more-or-less available for the token cost, given a specification of what is required.

It's not just FOSS: the era of commercial software is equally over. Why pay for something that leaves you dependent on a third party for bug fixes or new features? Vibe it up yourself, and pay for only what you need, when you need it.

I don't know about the long term, but the medium term looks like "Claude, make a replacement for <software>, with the same functionality and user experience."

Code generation (by compiler) has one major difference: it's deterministic.

The Plan9 network API is an interesting successor to all of STREAMS, streams, and sockets.

There’s an interesting middle ground: not fully malleable software, where the end user has full customisation ability but requires full programming skill, but eg the Unix tool model where prebuilt utilities can be composed with a simple syntax.

Pre-existing (or importable) ELisp functions are kinda similar, just a slightly higher level of user skill.

That's not what Glynne said. The whole justification for Starlink was to create demand for Falcon.

Falcon9 has basically no market: the only thing that keeps it flying is Starlink.

The whole AI/orbital datacentres/launch thing is a giant grift.

I think this is an important point.

A time when a take-home, closed-book test, relying on the honesty and integrity of the students, was viable seems completely unrealistic now. I assume there were always some who cheated, but I can imagine that it was sufficiently socially unacceptable that many didn't.

That seems like a very different world.

The same logic applies.

At least where I live, universities used to run entrance exams. They didn't care about high school grades, or even if you'd ever been to high school: if you passed the entrance exam, you could enroll.

At my child's high school, phones are "off and away all day", and the punishment for being caught with a phone in your pocket (or hands) is pretty severe.

During an exam, it's an instant zero mark, on top of the after-school detention (the punishments escalate to suspension and expulsion for repeat offenses).

I'm hopeless at pure cursive writing. My default writing is a joined-up-ish kind of printing. Writing using it works really well for retaining information for me.

It's been clearly shown to be beneficial for some people. I too happen to be one of them.

For others, hearing stuff (and saying stuff) out loud is more useful. I had a friend who'd make nonsense songs of stuff to learn: just doggerel, but by singing it to himself when revising, he had a massive uptick in retention. He was so happy when he worked that out.

I imagine there might be other modes that work for other people too?

I would often do a bullet point summary/outline of my answer on the paper. That would have arrows and insertions and crossed-out stuff everywhere -- it was usually a mess.

But then I'd use that to write the actual text answer, and consequently, it was mostly clean. I'd still have to cross stuff out or add a phrase between the lines every so often, but once the basic structure was done, that was mostly unnecessary.

And if I was ever pressed for time, I'd usually get part marks for the outline anyway. Depending on the subject, I'd sometimes race through the questions doing just the outlines, and then come back to write the full text as a complete second pass.

To be fair, this wasn't creative writing. I think it'd be harder when the expression is the content.

My child's high school is doing the same thing: all exams are now handwritten on paper in a supervised room. Phones and smartwatches are always banned during the school day, but laptops are banned during exams. This is standard at state-funded high schools in Australia.

There will likely be a period where those who went through high school with computers struggle with hand writing stuff, but the next generation will have done it all their lives.

The fun part is that this all plays out concurrently with our destruction of the Earth’s climate.

That permanent underclass might easily end up a lot smaller than you think.

And then you think … maybe that’s not coincidence?

Yes. But. I imagine the others did not fail to learn from this.

Try gitolite?

https://gitolite.com/gitolite/index.html

It has fine-grained permissions but works with regular git clients.

Shoot the messenger. That’ll fix it.

The concept of a "job" can encompass many things. Some of those change when machines become more capable, some don't.

For example, one part of a job is the satisfaction, the purpose, the meaning of life derived from being useful. Not having that can be pretty bad for people. So, even if the machines take over a lot of what is done by people today, you'll probably want to find a way of being useful.

Hedonism and wealth are both remarkably bad at delivering the same contentment that being useful does. That said, of course, a bit of hedonism and capital is also good.

> let them run for a season/series and gauge popularity vs cost, and cut the under performers (why I don't watch a show until a couple seasons are live).

And so you don’t contribute to the selection of shows.

It’s a dilemma. I started streaming stuff I like the sound of despite the risk of being rug-pulled, because otherwise there’s no signal that they should fund series 2.

If I could afford that I wouldn’t need a social media app.

I have a heap of family and friends who live in a different country to me. I'd love an old school Friendster / early Facebook-style social medium where we could share posts, but the tapping mechanic makes this impractical for me.

I’m sorry to be harsh but this is 100% your fault, and attempting to shift the blame onto Cursor and Railway just doesn’t fly.

The onus is on you to make sure your system uses the APIs in a way that’s right for your business. You didn’t. You used a non-deterministic system to drive an API that has destructive potential. I appreciate that you didn’t expect it to do what it did but that’s just naivety.

You’re reaping what you sowed.

Best of luck with the recovery. I hope your business survives to learn this lesson.

Helpful video, thanks!

At about 1:20, the presenter says the BFS uses a different OS and hardware (not sure if that means a different instance, or a different class, so to speak).

Yeah, that was my guess too but the comment about separate implementation for the backup system made me wonder if there was a different OS, and the which was running where.

This is great!

Curious about the choice of toolkit: what led you to wxPython?

Does anyone have pointers to some real information about this system? CPUs, RAM, storage, the networking, what OS, what language used for the software, etc etc?

I’d love to know how often one of the FCMs has “failed silent”, and where they were in the route and so on too, but it’s probably a little soon for that.