abricq

I happen to work in Oberon pretty much every week. At my company, we program OS for mobile robots and have been carrying Oberon code since 25 years. The code base is huge, and it works really well. It’s been under production for all these years and we know it’s robust. It’s definitely not fast, but most applications don’t require the speed offered by modern languages. That’s why it was never translated in C++ or Rust or any « better languages ».

In my daily practice, I find the following limitations to be the most challenging ones.

* No generic type : that’s extremely limiting, especially when implementing math libraries.

* The garbage collector (using the XO2 real-time OS) does not collect array of primitive types, only array of pointers are collected. Honnestly it would be much easier to not have the garbage collector.

* extremely small standard library (but this is to be expected for a niche language …).

* the only tooling that you have is the tooling that you build yourself (editor, completion, debuting, etc …)

I often wonder how many other people work in Oberon. I’d love to share with someone else than me that does !

I just tried it on my work project, 100 MB of sources. It's insanely fast !

Not quite the same application, but in computer vision and visual SLAM algorithms (to construct a map of your surrounding using a camera) embeddings have become a de-facto method to perform place-recognition ! And it's very similar to this article. It is called "bag-of-word place recognition" and it really became the standard, used by absolutely every open-source library nowadays.

The core idea is that each image is passed through a feature-extractor-descriptor pipeline and is 'embedded' in a vector containing the N top features. While the camera moves, a database of images (called keyframes) is created (images are stored as much-lower dimensional vectors). Again while the camera moves, all images are used to query the database, something like cosine-similarity is used to retrieve the best match from the vector database. If a match happened, a stereo-constraints can be computed betweeen the query image and the match, and the software is able to update the map.

[1] is the original paper and here's the most famous implementation: https://github.com/dorian3d/DBoW2

[1]: https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=Bags+of+B...

Of course, I agree that taxing kerosene is what makes the more sense. There are so many great uses of airplanes ! I also really hope that one day, net-zero aviation will work, and for that to happen we must not discourage the research. I was just pointing out that it's false to say that aviation is not a problem.

> Focusing on "solutions" that address less than a percent of a percent of emissions is a distraction

A "percent of a percent" is of the order of scale of 0.01%. Airplanes account for 2.5% to 3.5% of all global emissions [1] and are emitted by only 11% of the population [2]. That's an error ratio of 300. If you're advocating for awareness in picking effective solutions, I think numbers should matter.

> Push any non-carbon energy source you like - nuclear, solar, wind, geothermal, it doesn't matter.

Yes,but all of these sources produce electricity, that's great for EVs, but planes don't run on electricity, they use carbon-energy (and this is not ready to change for commercial flying). Even if every country gets equipped with top quality nuclear plants, it will change anything for airplanes. Electrical and oxygen airplanes are very far from any real proposition.

I completely agree with you in being effective and very rational when picking solutions and advocating for them. I also think that we must be fair to future generations and to lower social classes. In this view, I think that we should (at least) stop encouraging flying and start encouraging trains, or just more local activities. Whether we must discourage it is another question, for which I have no answer.

[1]: https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions-from-aviation [2]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095937802...

"only the 1% fly" is not true, but "only the 11% fly" is a fact [1].

About the 1%: "1% of the population emits 50% of the commercial aviation's emission". You can keep going like that to show that it is indeed reserved to an upper-part of the society. Maybe the ultra-rich are not the only one flying, but they are responsible for a bigger part of the problem than the upper middle class.

Maybe the misunderstanding comes from the fact that we're looking at the global population. Global warming being a global problem, looking only at the population of your region is not a sufficient reasoning. I live in Switzerland, I guaranty that it's a lot more than 11% of the population that flies. At the end of the day, it's a question of moral and of fairness: do we want to live a life-style which can't be generated to the entire global population and which will ultimately lead to extreme conditions for future-generations and poorer social-classes than ours ? Is it fair that 1 person out of 10 gets to fly while the 9 others will have to pay the same consequences ? My personal answer is that it should not be a personal decision, but that politicians should keep these numbers to start making laws such as taxing kerosene to the same level as cars' fuel.

[1]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095937802...

I consider myself very much an ecologist, and also struggle to understand anti-nuclear ecologists. However there is one anti argument that I think is worth sharing, one friend exposed to me and that I think it is very pertinent: "One should be against nuclear energy because their lobbies encourage a society where energy is not limited. Having clean and (relatively) cheap energy is not the best way to go toward sobriety. And it is easy to confuse having a carbon-free energy source with having a new way to produce more cars, planes, phones, content, etc... which will only help capitalism to grow stronger"

I think there is a big part of truth here, and we (the pro-nuclear ecologist) must address an answer to this worry. My opinion is that we should separate this in two fights: (i) we must go for a more sustainable society by reducing our needs in energy and our general consumption; but it is irrational to think we will ever reduce our energy consumption level to a level sufficiently low that nuclear would not be the best option, hence (ii) we must keep learning how to build and maintain nuclear plants.

I had a course named `Deep Learning` by François Fleure at EPFL, and he is a really an amazing professor, able to share his passion alongside explaining very advanced topics. It does not surprise me to see that his books are of very high quality !

The course was focusing on all of the mathematical aspects of Deep Learning, starting from the simple understanding of the gradient descent algorithm to (trying to) understand how transformers work. There was also quite a lot of computer science involved and lots of practical assignments. One of the 2 projects of this course was to design from scratch in Python or C++ a DNN framework (roughly an API like pytorch or tensorflow) which required to really think properly about which architecture to use for your code. The minimum requirements only asked to implements a few activation, normal layers and convolutional layers but you go beyond that and implements all kind of layers. Lots of fun. This course remains as one of my favorite courses.

That's not completely false though. These radars have been used lately in Robotics as ways to provide speed measures in localization and Mapping algorithms (SLAM, or lower-level algorithms like VIO + radar). Providing a speed measure on top of images and IMU often greatly increases the precision of the result. Some of these algorithms are actually Deep Neural Network, so you could argue that these have been 'adopted' by AI.

This news literally makes me so happy. I can't wait to see it propagating around the world ! Riding a bike it better for your health, for the environment, makes cities much safer places, better for your mood as well & even better for your wallet. For people who have the chance to work reasonably close to their work, it's THE perfect solution.

I bike to work every day since 4/5 years, in Switzerland. Since roughly 18 months, I have seen a huge change in the behavior of car drivers: they are much much nicer to interact with. Before COVID, I had dangerous interaction with drivers several time a week, and had to be in constant vigilance for them not considering me as part of the traffic. Now, it has been reduced to maybe once a month. Sometimes I don't even believe how well people respect us now, considering how it was just 3 years ago. And most of the time when I confront people that did something dangerous, they are sorry and feel bad about it (it really wasn't like this a few years ago...)

This concerns me and saddens me a lot. Major changes are required in the near future, and the more I look at the news the less it seems like any of these changes are happening. If at some point I actually get to the conclusion that "it's all bullshit" (i.e. climate change is all bullshit) to those in charge of making these changes, then I have to see how to change those in charge. But really, the options are limited... It's a scary problem. But yeah, it seems like corporations have (often) a lot more to say in this that the what the majority of citizens want.

Yes that's what I meant, it could be taken from it. But it's not taken from the movie, it's actually happening (that's what I meant)

> The process outlined in the study — known scientifically as eutrophication — is remarkably similar to modern, albeit smaller-scale, phenomenon currently fueling broad “dead zones” in the Great Lakes and the Gulf of Mexico, as excess nutrients from fertilizers and other agricultural runoff trigger massive algae blooms that consume all of the water’s oxygen.

Meanwhile, the next COP28 (United Nations Climate Change conference) will be held by United Arab Emirates's minister for industry and CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company. As much as this seems like a joke, or a "Don't look up" moment, it is not one ...

Thanks for sharing that, it's super cool ! Loving to see that there is this effort done. I will definitely try it out.

This french company sells 'Bob', a miniature restaurant-like dishwasher: https://daan.tech/ch/discover-bob-mini-dishwasher/

Can you think how much less 'new bikes' could be required if students in schools (10 to 14 years old maybe ?) were to learn some basic bike fixing skills and bike maintenance ? I feel like I have so many friends who have no idea how to do the most basic operations, like changing a chamber. This could have such a big impact.

> For my usage weight savings is secondary to overall durability.

I completely agree with that ! Even when bike touring, weight is so much less important than reliability of your gear... It's particularly surprising and sad to notice that older gear is more reliable and of better quality than most new bikes. I guess some brand still provide super high quality and reliable bicycles, but probably it could be hard to maintain yourself (which is definitely another of my requirements)

In times such as now where there are strong forces acting to push for more production and consumption, for less thinking about the quality & sustainability or impact of our consumption, I applaud their efforts !

This kind of act is simply great, it questions about the meaning of our productive system: do we produce because we simply want to sell more / becoming richer ? Is it possible that we produce for the sake of keeping a tradition alive, or to share what is locally available without disrupting the locality ? These monks have just made clear answers to these questions.

I rather see functions as transformations, in the mathematical sense. A function receives an input and produces an output, according to some logic that only the function is responsible for. A small logical block that can be reused into somehow bigger logical blocks (i.e. programs). I think it is much more realistic, lead you to good programming practice, and also much more fun.

I have tried to teach that and students have always (seem) to like & understand this approach. It was for student at university level, so maybe more able to understand this 'functional' view of functions.

Or how to apply communism to software engineering. I like that.

More seriously, the risk that a few companies become even more powerful thanks to their restricted access to such NN is very frightening. The worth is, without legal restrictions, there is nothing that we can do against it. And I doubt that legal restrictions come in the next months / years.

"The Allies were able to learn a great deal about the location and density of German radar stations along the channel coast thanks to this one single act, which helped to convince Allied commanders of the importance of developing radar jamming technology. "

I wish this was true but unfortunately, I must disagree with saying that it is different in Europe. In France, 10 years ago, high-school was a constant lookout for who's the 'popular' kids (literally called like that). And reversely, nerds kid would often be made fun of, or socially excluded from breaks / activities. However, i have talked about this before with my wife who's from Italy and said that she never experienced this in Italy, apparently it was like you described: groups of friends, into studying and trying to make it to the next year. I wish it was like that in France.

However, I very much enjoy the original's post analysis about 'being into things', I think it's just brilliantly exposed !

I personally enjoy a lot more when things are manually customizable, but honestly I also don't think that I represent the majority of users ! So yeah, I think that the option to trigger a full manual ordering of the columns would be another great feature :)

- The possibility to select which column is present

- The possibility to add a column for google search with flags, such as `site:stackoverflow.com`

- the poossibility to rearrange the order by which columns are displayed

Thanks a lot for the heads up and congratulations on creating such a cool UI ! I showed it around at work and everyone loved it ;)

I understand your point, I also enjoy a lot interactions with my colleagues ! I am quite surprised to hear that in the Berlin startup scene, home office is becoming the norm. I have been working (and still am) in startups in Lausanne (Switzerland) and home office has been very much reduced since the 'end' of Covid restrictions.

Most companies would allow for a day or 2 per week, but not much more. And I did not hear many complaints about it: my colleagues are also all happy to be here together. It was the same in my previous company.

Maybe it's heavily dependent on your company and I just got lucky (to our terms) where I was.

If OP implements these changes, I might actually start using this for real ! It is true that it is brilliant.

For the curious ones, this is a cool page that presents the basics of lambda calculus: https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/lambda-calculus/

Absolutely impressive project !

I really like your views on this problem. Never thought about it that way. I had some experiences where what you described was perfectly illustrated. It seems to me that the agile framework allows for each level within an organization (that perceives some sort 'control') to send the responsibilities to the level above, while making the decisions for the level below. Of course there are the daily meetings where this feeling of hierarchy is mitigated since everyone is included, but at the end these meetings really just focus on implementation details of the framework; and not on decisions to make the overall product better.

It seems a little optimistic, if not misleading, to say about Bitcoin "Bitcoin, Ethereum, and many disruptive applications [...] that have positive impact in numerous sectors, including [...] environment [...] to name a few".

You can think of many advantages of Bitcoin (I surely think so), but please do not include "positive for the environment" as one of them, especially in the abstract of the paper.

On iOS, the word "Siri" can be detected at any time (if set so).

Maybe (just an hypothesis) there could be a set of other keywords also listened for, that once detected could start another more complex routine. Like that, you could limit the battery impact, and yet be able to listen to the users for advertising purpose.