_peeley

Wow, that's super neat. How much fine-grain control do you have over the drone's control? I'm curious how much data these consumer-grade headsets are able to measure, I've always assumed it's just a single analog value for sensed "brain activity" (not a neuroscientist so I'm totally guessing).

I'm impressed at how much IDE-as-a-Service has advanced in the past few years, a lot of other students at my university do all their programming assignments exclusively via repl.it. I wonder if they'll become the norm and basically everyone will just be writing code in browsers, save for a few lone greybeards still running their ancient bespoke Emacs setups locally[0].

[0]: https://xkcd.com/1782/

Any good mice you could recommend? I used to use a Razer Naga during my MMO days and I've really missed the side button array, but I found myself replacing them way too often (they'd wear out and start double clicking in just 6 months on average).

From a high level, iterators are basically just generators (which themselves are just simple continuations). Rust is a good example since pretty much all looping is done via iterators, and most implementations of the Iterator[0] trait look similar to the examples in the article. If you squint hard, calling `iter.next()` in Rust is just like the Scheme example, where you're continuously calling the generator function to get the next value. So, the people who use Rust at their day job definitely use (a form of) continuations at their day jobs.

[0]: https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/iter/trait.Iterator.html

Dwarf Fortress consumed hundreds of hours of my life in high school, I have so many fond memories of it. Every year or so I come back to it and I'm always surprised that they've managed to add another mechanic or feature that just makes the game feel even more like its own little universe. After enough time in the game there really is a moment like that scene in the Matrix - "I don't even see the ASCII anymore. All I see is dwarf, plump helmet, magnetite ore."

That said, I've always wondered if Dwarf Fortress would be a more smooth experience if it had more developers or was just open source (understandable that it's not though since it's basically Tad's passion project). The biggest headache was always the lack of multithreading, since your fortress really starts to chug once you pass maybe 150 dwarves or do anything exciting with fluids. Regardless, it's amazing what one developer with a great idea and an enthusiastic community has been able to do with the game.

Honestly, I'm more than happy to see older/niche protocols removed from web browsers. God knows the average browser contains way, way too much stuff anyway[0], not to mention there are FTP clients that are likely far better for that use case than Firefox would ever be. I wouldn't mind if FF (or other browsers) tightened their scope a little more often and adhered to the Unix philosophy a little more closely.

0: https://drewdevault.com/2020/03/18/Reckless-limitless-scope....

Man, this would be my absolute dream. It would be so nice to have a totally declarative and identical environment across my desktop, laptop, and phone (maybe not totally identical given hardware differences, but almost). With Nix I can get close to that on my desktop and laptop, but my phone is still a 100% proprietary walled garden that's shoving upgrades and pre-installed bloatware down my throat whenever it feels the need.

I'd bet mobile Linux is still a few years away in the real world though. I got a PinePhone a couple weeks ago for tinkering and the user experience is nowhere near my Samsung Galaxy. Still hesitantly optimistic about the future of mobile though.

I also did a deep dive on Urbit a few months back (shameless plug: https://blog.janissary.xyz/posts/urbit), and I really agree with the author for the most part.

Definitely the most concerning part of Urbit, for me at least, is the obscurantism of Hoon. Much like the author says, it's totally incomprehensible to anyone who hasn't read through every bit of the (lacking imo) documentation. Even a domain-specific language with a familiar syntax would be better, since at least a first-timer could grok basic logic/structure at first glance. This only compounds the security concerns, since reviewing any Hoon code requires being a domain expert - I doubt any security/crypto researchers will want to take a few weeks to learn Hoon just to audit something as obscure as Urbit. Hoon even has a kind of Lisp-y feel to it and Lisp lends itself well to the purely functional goals of Hoon/Nock, so I don't see why they couldn't have just made Hoon a Lisp.

On the whole however, I'm hesitantly optimistic about the project. Most other works aiming to address Internet centralization just seem like band-aids (federated social networks still have problems with moderation/deplatforming, self-hosting just means running it in someone else's data center, etc.), and Urbit seems to be one of the few things willing to deal with the fundamental problems from the ground up.

Also, I'm kind of glad the author didn't mention Urbit's original author despite most other posts on the topic feeling the need to mention it. He's long since left the project but it seems as though it'll never be rid of his influence. At this point I just feel bad for the maintainers/users that will constantly be associated with the guy from now on.

I think this is a little too optimistic regarding what consumers are willing to pay for. The Original Sin of the Internet was subsidizing everything via advertising revenue, allowing businesses to present services as "free" to end users (in reality, you're paying with your personal privacy). This culture has taken root very deep inside mainstream culture to the point that the average person would think it ridiculous to pay money for something they've been able to do for "free" for decades now.

I don't really mind having less buttons to accidentally push on my phone or other devices that go in my pocket, but I can't stand this when it comes to car dashboard interfaces. Thankfully I still drive a car from before this trend but in newer cars where e.g. changing the radio station requires fiddling with a touch screen. With physical buttons or knobs I can do this almost unconsciously, but with a touch screen I have to take my eyes off the road to even see what I'm poking on the screen.

With this kind of stuff, it always makes me wonder why it's there in the first place. Surely there's not much demand for touch screens in cars, and it must be more expensive to produce than analog buttons and knobs. Why has it become so ubiquitous?

I remember my first job in tech support where I'd have to walk 40-50 year old white-collar workers through basic tasks like opening files in folders, connecting to WiFi, resetting passwords, etc. I have no problem whatsoever helping people with that sort of thing when they truly need it, but it would always irk me when they'd just giggle and say things like "Oh, I'm just not a computer person!" This would blow my mind, like, could you imagine a carpenter having to constantly be told how to use a cordless drill and justify it with "Oh, I'm just not really a power tools person!" It's one thing to grumble about technology these days, but refusing to learn the basics of the thing you use to do your job is ridiculous.

I see a lot of parallels between Emacs' problems now and Vim's problems a few years ago: opaque maintenance/contributions, poor performance inherited from core design decisions made decades ago, the burden of backwards compatibility for legacy systems, etc. I think Emacs users and the community would benefit from a ground-up modern rewrite much like Neovim did for Vim, especially compared to this project which adds even more layers to maintain. It certainly addresses performance issues, but Emacs seems to have enough problems with things breaking spontaneously - I don't think adding a JavaScript runtime to the mix will do any bit of good there.

Word of warning to anyone that might give Neon Genesis Evangelion a watch after seeing this - a lot of people include it in the "mecha" genre but if you're looking for a light-hearted, Saturday-morning, big-robots-punching-each-other kind of experience that's definitely not what Evangelion is.

It certainly includes big robots as a plot point, but that's really just a backdrop for the character drama and deeper (and pretty heavy at times) emotional themes of the story. Things get very avant-garde towards the end, and the studio producing the series basically ran out of money to animate the last few episodes so you'll have to jump between the movie adaptations if you want a complete experience. I'd still probably recommend at least giving it a try sometime, as it's personally one of my favorite anime series and a landmark work in the medium as a whole.

Everytime I see mainframes/COBOL mentioned, there's always anecdotes on how constantly short-supply COBOl programmers are[0] and that a surefire way to get a job is to learn about COBOL and mainframes. I'm always curious - are there any people here who have deliberately gone into a career with mainframes for salary/job security reasons? How has it worked out?

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/06/new-jersey-seeks-cobol-progr...

I have yet to find a satsifactory way to disable them - it's pretty easy to disable notifications from userspace apps like Instagram or Snapchat or whatever, but disabling notifications or altogether uninstalling vendor apps is a huge pain in the ass.

Most advice I've gotten has been flash a custom Android kernel or a de-Googled distro. This would definitely solve my problems, but this removes the ability to install Play Store apps which are a necessity for me. Not to mention that it gives the possibility of bricking my phone, which is way outside my risk tolerance for just getting rid of some annoying ads.

I agree with this so much. It would be so convenient if I could just flash Arch Linux or something onto a modern smartphone and be able to use all the applications and settings and data I use on my desktop, but on my mobile phone. Android is markedly better than iOS when it comes to customization, but it's a far cry from a (real) Linux distribution. I've started getting OS-level push notification ads from Google News and other bullshit on my Samsung Note 9, and it makes me want to set the thing on fire.

It also makes me pretty pessimistic when it comes to privacy. I can uninstall Windows/MacOS on my laptop, coreboot it, use FOSS/privacy-centric software, etc. but it doesn't really mean much when my phone (which is basically attached to my body 24 hours a day, and is my main conduit of communication with others) is a privacy/security nightmare.

One problem with this (and a common misunderstanding of crypto as an "anonymous currency" by the general public) is that it would allow everyone to see exactly how much money everyone else has in their accounts, what they're spending their money on, etc. With Bitcoin there's at least a degree of pseudonymity if you're careful about publicly linking your wallet to your identity, but I could imagine that's not really possible for state-sponsored currencies.

Having a cryptographically verified history of everything my government is spending on would be cool, but due to the nature of the distributed ledger it would require private citizens be put under the same microscope. At least with the alternative of one central bank controlling one central database, there's some degree of restriction to personal information (I'd imagine the bank wouldn't let any average Joe request ledger data on their neighbor just for fun, but public interests would be fair game).

Interesting, I've always loved this feature. I guess in my use cases, whenever I go to click the URL bar I'm intending to copy/paste it more often than edit. Either way, it's deeply ingrained into my muscle memory by now to go click -> pause -> click to edit.

This has easily been the worst thing I've seen this week (other than the disaster itself, of course). The way that I've seen so many centre-left urbanites talk about people in "red states" is outright genocidal at times - how could any sane person see someone with differing political opinions lacking power, water, or heat and think, "Yes, punishment!"? Somehow it never crosses their minds that if there are people in the South committing various wrongdoings (racism, voter suppression, draconian criminal justice system, etc), there are even more people in the South suffering from these wrongdoings.

If you're an Emacs user, I'd really recommend checking out elfeed (https://github.com/skeeto/elfeed). You can subscribe to RSS feeds just by adding a line to an org-mode file, and then organize and tag all your feeds with all the usual org-mode features.

Also, I think the author is being a little pessimistic about the state of RSS. It might not really be "mainstream", but almost every blog I visit has a feed, also Substack offers feeds, YouTube channels, Reddit, etc. I only just started writing my own self-hosted blog, and within a week or so I got an email asking me if I have an RSS feed. RSS is very much alive and well, if niche.

I've also had something similar happen to me. When I was a university student staying at the campus dorms, I'd park my car outside my dorm building for most weekdays until I'd use it on the weekends to drive home, run errands across town, etc. Once when I came back to my car after a week of it being parked it was totally dead and reeked of gasoline - someone had snuck under my car, drilled into my gas tank, and drained the fuel into a gas can below. Getting the gas tank replaced was about USD$1,200 worth of damages and I doubt the campus police ever tracked down the person that did it.

However, the circumstances were probably different than most gas thefts. This took place during the winter in a place known for brutally cold winters, so if you're living in your car then having gas is the difference between freezing to death or not. Apparently it was not that uncommon, the campus police seemed like they were dealing with a pattern of these kinds of thefts.

I agree, although there are IMO more optimal and explicit ways to handle errors - Rust and Haskell come to mind. When dealing with a Result/Either/Maybe or some other functor, you have to acknowledge the context of the value, i.e. that the value could possibly be an error. This way the error handling is baked into the type system in a way that's hard to replicate in languages that just return error codes or exceptions.

"The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong." - Scott Alexander [0]

[0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservativ...

Looks like there's a typo in the link for Urbit, should be https://urbit.org if anyone wants to take a look. Personally it seems like vaporware to me, there's not much based on the lofty promises of a new OS/language/social network.

Probably the only reason anyone has even heard of it is because it's the pet project of Curtis Yarvin aka Mencius Moldbug, known (somewhat infamously, a few of his talks at conferences have been pulled) for his association with the neo-reactionary political/philosophical movement.

As someone that's had a bullshit job[0] where I might as well have been paid to stare at a wall, it's really not what it's cracked up to be. Considering you're spending 40 hours a week (1/3 of all your weekday hours, and half your weekday waking hours) at your job, the creeping realization that you're wasting your life and labor gets unbearable after a short while. It's even more miserable when you have to pretend to your boss and coworkers that your job is Making A Real Difference (tm).

I think it's best to just settle for a healthy medium between the outlooks of "who cares as long as I'm paid" vs. "my job is my life and identity".

[0] Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber is a great book on the topic.

Minor (and probably not intentional) thing I like - comments are loaded manually rather than by default on page load. For more popular blogs/sites that have comments on posts like Slate Star Codex or Less Wrong, there can be literally hundreds or thousands of comments on a single post. This makes scrolling through the post or judging the amount of content in the post via scroll bar basically impossible, but just loading comments with a button click fixes that in such a simple way.

I'd also like to know the reasoning behind this. It seems like every reason behind supporting decentralized communities would lend one to also support decentralized financial infrastructure like cryptocurrencies. Also strange that one would be specifically opposed to cryptocurrencies, as any criticism of crypto (abuse, kind of communities it attracts, etc) applies just as much to decentralized software in general.

Go, according to its creator Rob Pike:

"The key point here is our programmers are Googlers, they’re not researchers. They’re typically, fairly young, fresh out of school, probably learned Java, maybe learned C or C++, probably learned Python. They’re not capable of understanding a brilliant language but we want to use them to build good software. So, the language that we give them has to be easy for them to understand and easy to adopt." [1]

[1] https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Lang-NEXT/Lang-NEXT-2014/Fr...

It's seriously astonishing how much progress has been made in the past few years regarding gaming on Linux. When I first made the jump to using Linux as a daily driver circa 2016, I had to keep a Windows partition to be able to play any game in the Steam library that wasn't native on Linux. With steady improvements to Wine and Valve's release of Proton however, I can play most games out of the box or with a minimal amount of tweaking.

However, the games industry is still largely hostile to gaming on Linux. I've always had the best experiences with indie games or FOSS projects, and the only trouble I've had is with newly released AAA titles. I wouldn't even bother with newer multiplayer-only games or MMOs, as anti-cheat on Linux is a pretty reliable way to be falsely detected and instantly banned (not to mention requiring kernel-level access, which is utterly ridiculous).

Unfortunately the upcoming legislation doesn't make psilocybin available to casually try out - it won't be available for over-the-counter purchase like marijuana/alcohol, but rather during therapy sessions with a therapist specifically licensed to administer psilocybin. Possession of small amounts of it have been "decriminalized" (you need to pay a fine or go to rehab, but you don't go to jail) along with cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine, etc. but it still isn't fully legal to purchase and possess per se.