blippage

Also worth reading: The Year [2022] of C++ Successor Languages [0]

"interface" seems a step forward, amongst other things. I'd like to see Sumtypes (aka Algebraic Data Types) without the pain. And recursive data structures. And co-routines for mortals.

I'd be tempted to check out Carbon at some point. I am mistrustful of Google, though, what with their whole telemetry idea in Go.

A good outcome would be if Carbon pollinated some ideas into C++, acting as a testbed.

I think that C++ has steered itself exceptionally well, actually. It has aimed at stability rather than "move fast and break things". It has avoided the missteps of Raku (Perl 6), Python 3. The fact that people "hate" C++ is on balance more of a feature than a bug. The newer languages have projects which sometimes mandate nightly builds (I'm looking at you, Rust and Zig). It feels that you're trying to build a house on a sandbank.

I hope that C++ never gets a package manager/build system. I'm not convinced that they've ever really been done properly or stably (Python seems to have a plethora of install methods, for example), and it leads to the mentality of kitchen-sinking dependencies.

[0] https://accu.org/journals/overload/30/172/teodorescu/

> not the frenzy of bullish rallies.

One maxim I heard: in a bull market, the less you know, the more you make.

Brit here. I view tipping as dishonest. It's a trick to make something seem cheaper than it is.

They're your employees, you pay them. Don't expect me to be a charity. Give me the cost up-front. If I decide it's too much, then I should take my business elsewhere. "That's the price, cough up or piss off."

Be honest and straight-forward in your dealings.

A few weeks ago I was opining that companies were laying off staff because "that's what everybody else was doing." I'm glad to see to few folks concur.

Copycat behaviour is not uncommon, I think, and is swayed by market sentiment. If the (equities) market ( mean in a general sense) feels bullish, then Microsoft, Google, etc. start piling on employees. Because hey, we're tech companies, we have to justify our market ratings by pursuing (or at least looking like we are pursuing) growth, so that's what they do.

Then, when things sour, the mood becomes one of conservatism. Then it looks good to shed employees. This is all despite the fact that it may have little to do with the actual state of the companies.

Microsoft in particular is hardly a heavily cyclical company, so there is little need to behave like one. Not really. They could adopt a more even approach to hiring. If they tried.

Companies bleat on about how difficult and expensive it is to hire staff. And yet, here we are.

It's interesting to contrast this with Japan. Japan has some of the longest-lived companies [1]. Construction, hotels, sake and confectionery feature prominently. Meanwhile, the average company lifespan on the S&P500 went down from 32 years in 1965 to 20 years last year. [2]

I suspect that the difference has a lot to do with culture. The Japanese companies with a long life are probably smaller, family-run, and don't go aggressively for growth. When your company has been going for over 200 years, I imagine one feels a sense of "don't fuck it up." Compare that to the US, where it's always ever onwards and upwards, always going for growth.

The Japanese have some ideas which seem bizarre to the West. Like, companies in those positions might "adopt a son". Typically they're 25-30 year-old men who take on the name of their adopted families. They then run the business (although presumably not straight away). Seems weird, but look at the results.

These small Japanese businesses seem more in-tune with their regular employees, too, treating them like an extended family, to some extent. There's no hire and fire mentality that we've been seeing lately; with the likes of Microsoft scooping up a big workforce only to turn around a couple of years later and reverse it. It's a shitty way to treat people.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1259275/average-company-...

Geeks, MOPs and sociopaths in subculture evolution https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths

Gotta admit, PDPs look really cool, and even modern. The toggle buttons, the blinking lights, it's all so fascinating to watch. Then, after 5 minutes, it occurs to you "If only there was a more efficient way of doing this".

I've never used a PDP, mind. I'm not quite that old.

I used to like Ubuntu, but gave up on it for similar reasons. I have an old machine, so I find Ubuntu too bloated. I've been on Debian Stable for a few years now, using MATE. It's fuss-free. I don't find the software too old, but I use a few bits that I've compiled myself. Linux Mint has a good reputation, so I would consider that if I was thinking of moving away from Debian.

Interesting. Although I've no immediate plans to use it, sixel support seems pretty cool.

I've thought about this, and I agree, and I'm no lover of any of the FAANGs. It makes Apple look like they know what they're doing, whilst the others are just following others and going in and out with the tide. I think it all boils down to Tim Cook. Tim always seemed analytical and strategic in his thinking, and Apple's behaviour in this matter only serves to underscore that. As an operational guy, I think Tim is the best that any company has ever seen.

Those guys really took the "Universal" in "Universal Serial Bus" to heart. Let's multiplex every conceivable connection device known to man into one giant standard, and throw in the ability to power the devices, too. That should really make things simple.

I seem to recall that there was some proverb about systems becoming so baroque that they eventually become rubble.

It seems that USB is sewing the seeds of its own destruction. No doubt that within 20 years they'll decide the whole thing is so complex that they need to replace it with something simpler.

And I'm still puzzled as to why plugging a keyboard into a keyboard port was considered such an inconvenience in the first place.

I think that USB is an object lesson in why you can't reduce inherent complexity, only shuffle it around.

> Why couldn’t one simply build on top of existing HTTP infrastructure, throw away all the baggage and instead implement a new Content-Type, which existing browsers then could parse?

"Just use HTTP" is something I've thought about, and the idea does have merit. Python includes an HTTP server, so for getting a site up in less than a minute, it's a thought.

I'm not sure how easy it is for a browser to recognise and render new content type. I imagine it's quite difficult.

I guess I have something in mind like "gopher, but fixed".

I like gemini, and have a "capsule" hosted over on sdf. Gemtext files are great for writing technical documentation.

I have a capsule hosted privately on my desktop, for speedier access. The SDF site often runs slowly.

Setting up the whole TLS security stuff is a chore, mind and will likely take awhile if/when I upgrade my system.

One thing I do have is a proxy server that serves gemtext files as gophermaps. It's a pretty simple perl script, and I've ironed out most of the bugs. That took a little while, because there were a lot of corner cases to get right.

There's an alternative protocol called Spartan, which is very very similar to Gemini, but without TLS. I wrote a little Spartan server in Go, so when I want to get an internal site up quickly, I can just "go run sss.go" and bam, there we are. I think there's also another protocol, called Mercury, that is Gemini without the TLS. I haven't heard much about it, though.

One of the best explanations of monads I saw was actually using Python.

Here's my explanation: think of linear regression. Now ask yourself, what if I applied the idea of correlation/regression to a sine wave. An (audio) signal can be broken down into an addition of sine waves having different frequencies and phases. That, conceptually, is what we're trying to do with the Fourier Transform. What frequencies is the sound wave composed of, and of what amplitude. Phase angle is a consideration, but we are less interested in that.

OK, that's a paragraph instead of a sentence, but it does motivate the whole raison d'etre of "why would I care anyway?"

And kids these days think that Firefox taking up 8G of RAM is perfectly fine.

The site seems responsive, even though HN must be generating a fair bit of traffic. It's quite impressive what that little machine is doing.

I had a ZX81, with 1k of memory. After university I went to work as an accountant. So, mid- to late- 80's. The firm was going all techie, and some of the accountants were issued laptops. I was astounded to learn that the laptop contained the required software and was capable of storing the client's data.

It gives me inspiration to keep pressing ahead with my RP2040 retro-computer.

Little update: in the early 90's I started my PhD and did a little computer lab assistance work. One class was a bunch of nurse trainees. Floppies were ideal for storing their work on. They also made great coffee mats. I suggested that perhaps the floppies should be treated with a bit more love and care than that. Privately I mused what would happen if I fell ill, I jokingly wondered what treatment I would receive if I were a patient. The operation was a failure, but on the upside, he makes a great doorstop.

> In a cheap money environment you take the money and you gamble for growth,

It's a classical Austrian economists nightmare. The argument is that cheap money stimulates malinvestment. That is to say that corporate projects that would not have made adequate returns on capital under normal circumstances seem to look feasible.

It's all fun and games until the tide turns, and then the whole edifice collapses like a house of cards because it was built on shaky premises that no longer hold.

I share his sentiments.

We keep layering more and more gloop on the web. It will always be a game of wack-a-mole.

It's like Windows requires TPM, but then gives itself permission to snoop at your files. Or we have oauth, but then github is cracked to reveal the private keys. And so on and so forth, etc. ad nauseam. The clowns at Microsoft, Facebook and Google simply can't be trusted. They've proven that time and time again.

Security is better obtained "via negativa" (to quote from Taleb). Be parsimonious in what you allow. Keep things simple. If you don't really need security, then don't have it.

I discovered some weird thing: our brain seems to have "taste memory", separate from "regular" memory. If you have the same dinner several times in a row, for example, you become averse to it. You then have to stop having it for awhile so that the brain "forgets" what it tastes like.

> This is a brilliant prompt, for discussion / thought provocation.

The web is such a complicated mess right now that I wish we would revert to it being just a document-based format. That's why I'm interested in things like gopher. Gopher pages can look surprisingly good.

I ye olden days there were BBSs (Bulletin Board Systems). It is stateful and all the heavy lifting is done server-side.

A concussion is just a sign of weakness leaving your body.

If you think people don't care if you live or die, try missing a few car payments -- Woody Allen.

> It’s also quite affordable. The x5000 model (which is the power system) retails at around €1650,

I think there's the problem right there. 1650EUR seems like a lot of dough to me to tinker around with a toy system, basically. Show me it running on a Raspberry Pi or something like that, then we're talking.

It's a shame that Pi is not used more for Operating System experimentation. We should see an abundance of toy OSs for Pi, but we never do.

We are entering an interesting phase wrt to microcontrollers and RISC-V systems in general. Maybe one day someone will put together a cheap system that is readily accessible that people can pick up and say "hey, I can build my own system with this." It doesn't even need to be a particularly powerful system.

I did try out Aros (a free AmigaOS clone) earlier this year on an x86, but installing it was rather ponderous. That in itself is a barrier to entry.

What I find impressive is that Aminet is receives new packages on a daily basis. So clearly the spirit of the Amiga lives on.

Moore often talks about being a "1X" programmer, as opposed to a "10X" programmer. By which he means that he writes only a fraction of the code that others do.

I think it all boils down to specificity vs generality. Moore is specific. He solves one problem, not many. If he has a different problem, then he uses a different solution. By being tightly focussed on his one specific problem, there's many things he doesn't need. Like, he doesn't need a file system. He just stores data and code in blocks in the disk. You end up with a system that is small, tight, minimalist, does what it needs, and then stops.

That approach doesn't work if you want to make something more general-purpose, like a Linux kernel. It's not like Linus Torvalds is a nincompoop that somehow didn't realise that 90% of the code was unnecessary. Linux is popular because it solves a broad range of problems to a broad range of people.

Forth systems are unpopular because they solve the problem of one man. Not only that, that one man must have a mental model of how his whole system works. The upside is that the system is much simpler than a general-purpose one.

One could say that Forth is not just a language, but a whole philosophy as to how and what programs should be constructed.

Some guy once said that Forth's fragility is its strength. It forces you to think in very simple terms.

"Zen" is a good way of describing Forth. Charles Moore often says things that seem like zen riddles in themselves, like Operating Systems are obsolete, you don't need local variables, you don't need structures, and a whole host of other things. It's very difficult to know what he's talking about without context, or why he thinks what he says.

I've toyed around with his colorforth, and given up. I doubt I'm the only one. It has cool stuff like you being able to change the fonts on the fly. It has a keyboard consisting of 25 keys (because 25 keys should be enough for anyone, apparently), which don't map onto a Qwerty keyboard (maybe Dvorak?) and has different modes based on colour. So I'm like "how the living fuck am I supposed to use this thing"? It's like trying to figure out the controls of some alien spacecraft.

It clearly works perfectly for Charles. He's clearly on some whole different level than the rest of us.

Forth is really fun to play with; before going back to using something that is a bit more practical. It has macro-like facilities. I find them very difficult to reason about. Forth seems like Lisp in terms of power, but at the opposite end of the spectrum in terms of size. Lisp is a complete language. Forth gives you a boxful of atoms that you assemble yourself.

I wrote a barebones Forth. Little plug: https://gitlab.com/mcturra2000/cerbo/-/tree/master/forth/v3 I haven't touched it for a year or two, though.

It incorporates the notion of a token type. The idea is that you could write a recursive-descent compiler using it, although I hadn't pursued the idea much.

To give you an idea of the malleability of Forth: I got bored with creating variables one-by-one, so I defined a word called "vars:". Now I can create several variables at once, e.g.: vars: foo bar baz

Here's an implementation (that works in my forth): : VARS: begin parse-word dup while $create 0 , repeat drop ;

I simplified the implementation and made the idea more composable: : VARS: line( $create 0 , )line ;

Done right, Forth looks like haikus. I'm not at that level, though.

One solution for the few, not the many, would be a resurgent interest in protocols like gopher or more recent protocols like gemini.

"intuitive and feature rich formal verification frameworks for the major programming languages"

I doubt that such things are really possible. I see two problems: 1. computers in general don't have domain knowledge, so they can't really say what "correct" means; 2. computers don't have a conceptual model of what it is a human is trying to do, so they can't determine if that way is correct.

I thought about this when I was playing with microcontrollers. There are all sorts of bizarre flags and ways and means of configuring and controlling a peripheral. If there was only one correct way of doing things, then it wouldn't make much sense to give such fine-grained control.

In one particular case I was writing to a peripheral. Normally one would block processing until the transfer was complete. However, I needed the operation to be done frequently, and blocking would have consumed much-needed computing cycles. My solution was to simply write to the peripheral. I knew that it would be complete by the time I made the next transfer.

Well, the thing is, a checker just can't reason in that way. It takes a human to do that. Humans can of course be wrong, and often are, but thems the breaks.

Formal checking may be able to establish a few things, but as a general exercise, there is no more chance of some kind of AI proving your program to be right as there is of solving the halting problem.

I've been trying to befriend crows, but it's a slow process. When I go for a walk I usually take a rich tea biscuit with me. I put it on a post where a crow sometimes rests.

At first, it was more-or-less luck as to who and when a crow found it. But they began to catch on, and I'm pretty sure at least one was waiting for me. They were either on the post, or nearby. They fly off when you approach, of course. But they get the idea, and I know they're watching. I try to step back, but they need quite a large distance before they'll try to take the biscuit. Crows seem to know that humans are always up to something. The probably know that it's always plans within plans when it comes to those damn hairless apes. Is he really being generous, or is he running some inscrutable psyop?

The problem is that I haven't been consistent the last few days, so the crows lose interest.

A few days ago, mind, there was a crow sitting on the fence a few feet from the house. He flew off as I left the house, but he didn't seem particularly alarmed. He flew up to the top of a conifer quite a few yards away. But I knew he was watching. So I put a biscuit on a post and went for a walk. When I came back the biscuit was gone.

I guess what I like about crows is that they're really smart, so you're always left wondering as to how much they've cottoned on to and how much of it is just blind coincidence.

It seems he made it to 70, and then decided to just stop ageing.

Sounds like when Russia is finished doing what they're doing, China is next up to bat. Happy 2023, everyone.