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amszmidton Autism is genetic – and why this information matters now

There are ways to predict a child’s height as an adult that are very accurate.

Most countries track growth curves, and ask parents about what their height is to correlate data with. One can also use bone age assessment.

amszmidton Indirect Calling of Nested Functions on GCC Without Executable Stack

Don’t think TeX ever did that, that was a “simple” Pascal program.

Lisp Machines though.. updating the operating system was by loading bunch of compiled files that replaced currently loaded functions in memory.

Then again, Lisp Machines where very proud of self modification — the CADR had a fun feature where it could modify the next instruction depending on things…

How the world has changed.

amszmidton Why does Opus 5 feel worse to work with?

You need to go back a few more hundreds of years, hunk is an old term that just means "small piece of something larger".

It has been in common usage in computing since long before 1985 .. for a really interesting and obscure way hunk has been used:

https://www.maclisp.info/pitmanual/hunks.html

amszmidton Iceberg Collapses and Flips over in Ilulissat, Greenland (July 25, 2026) [video]

How cold is cold? :-)

Water below ”sea” level tends to stay around -1C (salt water) to 4C. Below that, water becomes ice…

Ambient temperature can drop to -40C … internally these ice blocks hoover around -10C.

amszmidton Frame – Linux X server in Assembly

Only because the X Window System is very heavily documented, e.g., in the excellent "The Definitive Guides to the X Window System Series".

amszmidton How Has Roman Concrete Lasted for Millennia? 1,900-Year-Old Latrine Offers Clues

The key here is “based on Portland cement”, which is generally has water repellent added to it making it water proof.

Normal cement, concrete .. Is a different story.

amszmidton EU to legislate about Chat Control behind closed doors

Would love to see some statistics on that.

amszmidton Chaosnet (1981)

It is also capable of doing it over the wire.

amszmidton Even more batteries included with Emacs

Fun fact. DIRED pre-dates EMACS.

DIRED on ITS is also similar enough to today’s DIRED.

amszmidton Roman Letters

But it is. There is a link to the original text at the bottom of the translation.

amszmidton RaTeX: KaTeX-compatible LaTeX rendering engine in pure Rust

The details of lexical scope where defined in Algol 60 (1960), nearly 2 decades before Rabbit (1978).

People did know how to implement things back then, and TeX is a great example of that. It is just our definitions have changed over the years of what we consider better.

amszmidton Filing the corners off my MacBooks

This a common thing shared with the Nordics. The English term would be “meteorological spring”.

https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/V%C3%A5r_i_Sverige

The definition would certainly work in English countries, seeing it is just 0 to 10 degrees Celsius average over the course of a week (and after 15th of February).

amszmidton Spanish legislation as a Git repo

Would be nice if someone did it with Swedens laws too!

amszmidton Meta’s AI smart glasses and data privacy concerns

In Sweden, you're allowed to film/photograph in public without the need for any consent.

There is (in general) no expectation of privacy in public in Europe. How you can use the material though, is a different matter ...

amszmidton Start all of your commands with a comma (2009)

Not if it is an alias.

amszmidton Start all of your commands with a comma (2009)

It was suggested by Tom Lord (RIP), who used it heavily long before he wrote GNU Arch.

File names or directories starting with a comma where considered “junk”, and ones with a plus sign I think where considered “precious”.

amszmidton FFmpeg has issued a DMCA takedown on GitHub

Thanks for the link; sadly none of the links to the repo can be viewed to see what exactly occurred.

To those downvoting, curious why? Many of the links are not viewable, since GitHub hides them, so any discussion becomes quite tricky.

amszmidton FFmpeg has issued a DMCA takedown on GitHub

Incorporating compatible code, under different license is perfectly OK and each work can have different license, while the whole combined work is under the terms of another.

I'm honestly quite confused what FFmpeg is objecting to here, if ILoveRockchip wrote code, under a compatible license (which Apache 2.0 is wrt. LGPLv2+ which FFmpeg is licensed under) -- then that seems perfectly fine.

The repository in question is of course gone. Is it that ILoveRockchip claims that they wrote code that was written FFmpeg? That is bad, and unrelated to any license terms, or license compatibility ... just outright plagiarism.

amszmidton The current state of the theory that GPL propagates to AI models

I think maybe you're mixing up distribution and running a program, at least taking your initial comment into account, "if you train/run/use a model, it must be open source".

amszmidton The current state of the theory that GPL propagates to AI models

In the context of Free Software, yes. Freedom one is about the right to study a program.

amszmidton The current state of the theory that GPL propagates to AI models

That is not really correct, the GNU GPL doesn't have any terms whatsoever on how you can use, or modify the program to do things. You're free to make a GNU GPL program do anything (i.e., use).

I suggest a careful reading of the GNU GPL, or the definition of Free Software, where this is carefully explained.

amszmidton The current state of the theory that GPL propagates to AI models

Because it would violate freedom zero. Adding such terms to the GNU GPL would also mean that you can remove them, they would be considered "further restrictions" and can be removed (see section 7 of the GNU GPL version 3).

amszmidton The current state of the theory that GPL propagates to AI models

It isn't the difficult, a license that forbids how the program is used is a non-free software license.

"The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0)."

amszmidton NSA and IETF, part 3: Dodging the issues at hand

An employee doesn’t act as an official representative of their employer nor do they speak for the employee in any official capacity. That is what the message says.

The informal also didn’t cloak their identity (implies some malicious intent), they simple did not use their work email. Nothing wrong with that.

amszmidton NSA and IETF, part 3: Dodging the issues at hand

”No association” and “I am not a representative” are quite different things to say.

amszmidton Core Devices keeps stealing our work

> Wait a sec. IANAL, but if I license something to you under the GPLv3, you may not license it to someone else under AGPLv3 or a commercial license.

Not exactly the above case, but from the GNU GPL version 3 (https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.txt):

      13. Use with the GNU Affero General Public License.
    
      Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, you have
    permission to link or combine any covered work with a work licensed
    under version 3 of the GNU Affero General Public License into a single
    combined work, and to convey the resulting work.  The terms of this
    License will continue to apply to the part which is the covered work,
    but the special requirements of the GNU Affero General Public License,
    section 13, concerning interaction through a network will apply to the
    combination as such.

amszmidton This week in 1988, Robert Morris unleashed his eponymous worm

https://github.com/arialdomartini/morris-worm/tree/master

Has the decompiled version.

amszmidton Design of the SCHEME-78 Lisp-based microprocessor (1980)

Correct, neither did the Lambda. The article though references the Explorer II, a later version of the Explorer I ("Lambda").

amszmidton Design of the SCHEME-78 Lisp-based microprocessor (1980)

MIT System 99 was made after the first LMI release, which was based on MIT System 98 (and even slightly older releases) - which removed the flag bit. See the release notes here https://tumbleweed.nu/lm-3/sys-msg/sys98-msg.html

programs.

    ] Pointer Fields Now 25 Bits; Flag Bit Gone.

    Each typed data word in Lisp machine memory used to have one bit called the "flag bit" which was not considered part of the contents of the word. This is no longer so.  There is no longer a flag bit; instead, the pointer field

of the word is one bit larger, making it 25 bits in all.

    This extra bit extends the range of integers that can be represented without allocation of storage, and also extends the precision of small-floats by one bit.

    On the Lambda processor, the maximum size of virtual memory is doubled. This is the primary reason for the change.  Unfortunately, the CADR mapping hardware is not able to use the extra bit as an address bit, so the maximum virtual memory size on a CADR is unchanged.

    The functions %24-BIT-PLUS, %24-BIT-DIFFERENCE and %24-BIT-TIMES still produce only 24 bits of result.  If you wish to have a result the full size of the pointer field, however wide that is, you should use the functions %POINTER-DIFFERENCE and %POINTER-TIMES (the last is new), and %MAKE-POINTER-OFFSET with a first argument of DTP-FIX to do addition.

    The functions %FLOAT-DOUBLE, %DIVIDE-DOUBLE, %REMAINDER-DOUBLE and %MULTIPLY-FRACTIONS use the full width of the pointer field.

    The values returned by SXHASH have not changed!  They are always positive

fixnums less than 2*23.

amszmidton Writing an operating system kernel from scratch

    > If Stallman had started with a kernel, there would be very few people who had the legal right to run any utilities or apps on the new kernel

That is really not true, one of the most important things when it comes to the GNU project and the whole Free Software movement is the ability to run _any_ program, be it non-free software or free software. This has been parroted for more than 40 years now ...