eichin

> with AI I imagine ...

I think that might be just imagination - android autocorrect in particular got sufficiently worse that I finally turned it off (I still use it as a "typing assist" - it only displays choices that I can tap to replace, or (more often) ignore.)

I saw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tohImHa4f5U (Hoarder Sam, "I'm building a drone for the DARPA lift challenge") the other day and it was a pretty good discussion of the "shape of the envelope" of the problem (and what kind of lift ratios actually exist in modern air vehicles), and particularly how they've set up the constraints to eliminate a bunch of "easy" approaches.

It also reminded me that for the first round of the self-driving grand challenge, none of the vehicles even completed the course :-) They really are trying to encourage "out of the box", or at least "not in the obvious box", designs...

2016 - so, generic upsides of global capitalism, but nothing specific to the AI bubble?

wasn't some of that smoothness because it ran at a 100hz tick without any way of adapting it (and still running existing code)? That was the complaint I kept hearing from people attempting to make flash on phones viable (this led to ludicrous battery consumption)

A long time ago I was doing some on-site programming at a swiss bank, and the only available editors were vi on a Sun, or EDIT on a VMS machine (the project involved both.) I learned rudimentary vi on the fly while waiting for ftp-by-mail-over-uucp to deliver GNU emacs sources :-)

also, not instead of.

Arguably they (we :-) were right at the time. Around Ubuntu 16.04, the journal was Hot Garbage - to keep a production system working (as in, "didn't randomly stop logging, didn't regularly corrupt logs, didn't uncontrollably fill the disk because none of the limit options actually worked") we eventually backported about 30 fixes from newer versions - by 22.04 or so it was "fit for purpose" out of the box, but earlier than that it earned every bit of hatred it got.

hmm, when did that get added? Last time I checked, the only timezone you could specify was UTC (which was one more than cron supported, but still insufficient.)

"We do not want your data. Please keep it to yourself."

(I find that a refreshing perspective.)

it's tridge rsync; samba is another project by the same guy. (rsync was originally a PhD thesis...)

It's a big source of confusion with cp. One of the UI reasons to use rsync (for mundane non-remote copying) is that it doesn't do different things based on what's present on the target.

Ah, the name is a near-miss vs https://secuso.aifb.kit.edu/english/105.php (the SECurity USability SOciety research group at Karlsruhe) that makes the "Privacy Friendly Apps" suite for Android. (I don't think there's any actual confusion, it was just a "why did that sound familiar" reflex :-)

We formalized that as "if you didn't find a kernel bug yesterday, you didn't find one today either" (while implicitly glaring at the java developer who kept blaming everything but his own code.) The funny thing is that we actually had one guy who found two kernel bugs (spread over a couple of years, but still) while hunting down weird product issues - we didn't think the kernel was perfect, just that "you need to have exhausted the possibilities in your code before considering blaming the kernel" was well supported by evidence...

or that the comments themselves are AI/bots? (not meant as a criticism, other than of youtube itself)

I read the point as: if it's an existential threat that you've got principled objections to - why would it even matter that it's useful?

In the associated video, she explains exactly that - a Debian Trixie VM specifically for screenshotting https://youtu.be/E7vFdy4BEAY?si=WVBxmCPLVEdRBbtU&t=114

I'd suggest reading the Connie Willis novel by that name - no idea if it will actually help, it's just really good writing :-)

yeah, part of my current writing push was made more successful by two things:

* I am not allowed to use a blogging system I wrote. (Really, I've written three or four at this point and need to stop, and there are plenty of existing systems that still align with my idiosyncratic constraints.)

* The blog must not have any meta content about blog tooling.

(I cheated a little on the latter by having an extra "site" blog for that - which lets me get the words out but doesn't "count" for the writing goal. A useful outlet, but it meant an extra month or so before "real writing" outnumbered meta writing :-)

Anybody remember "cram"? From about 10 years ago, https://bitheap.org/cram/ basically a markdown syntax (making heavy use of code-blocks) for documenting and writing tests as "shell commands and expected output" (with a bunch of the sharp edges filed off, like line endings and partial matches.) Was particularly good for easy-to-write, easy-to-review tests of unix utilities. (It's the kind of thing that you only stumble on if you've been working with doctests but they don't really fit well for shell/unix stuff...)

That's not the same thing - with a pty in line mode, you get one line that you can edit, and when you hit enter, it gets sent. With Domain/OS, you still get to edit your last line until you hit enter... but if the process is otherwise blocked and doesn't consume it immediately, you can up-arrow and continue editing the earlier bits too. (Pretty sure it didn't work with telnet in particular, the common cases I remember were issuing a foo;bar;baz commandline and "working on" the input to baz while foo and bar were still running.)

pipes buffer, and you don't know when the child is actually reading? (Maybe you could cook something up with ptrace, since it would be a blocking read in this case...)

Ah, not related to Hans Boehm of the Boehm GC though (the Barry Boehm page even has a "not to be confused with" header.)

I hadn't realized Domain/OS emulation was viable these days. It's one of the few systems that has actually "lost" features - the terminal-window-like thing (called pads, I think?) when in line mode had a dividing line at the bottom where your unconsumed typeahead was visible and you could continue to edit it until it got read - not just one line, the entire unconsumed input. (Not that it's a particularly desirable feature - it's just one that I'm pretty sure you can't implement with ptys...)

Just because there's actual virtue doesn't mean there isn't also virtue signalling going on... especially when it might be (in your particular circles) more taboo to talk about the actual numbers than the "doing it for the environment" part.

When I last did it, there were two wins for a tech startup incorporating in delaware:

* it's easy and well-documented - the main thing you have to remember is to check the boxes that say this is an actual company, and not a holding company for a boat (where the real tax dodging is)

* it was reported to make acquisitions easier (as the company acquiring you would either also be a Delaware corp or it would be more straightforward even if they weren't.)

That's actually a useful test page for "did turning off everything in chrome://flags that says gemini actually work?" (it's reporting 148 and "unavailable" for me.)

Given how often younger people find my typing speed startling, I think it has been somewhat forgotten (US high schools had "keyboarding" classes at one point but that seems to have fallen off...)

Yeah, betterplace made it from 2008 (wired) to 2013 (bankruptcy.) Nio is trying again and it looks like they hit wired in 2018, again in 2023, and are still active today...

powernapcomic (maritza campos) is a surreal dystopian version of this (with the corporate part turned up to 99). Excellent sci-fi and very weird...

https://www.thedecafproject.com/ (Dec 2024) let you order matching swiss water, CO₂, and Ethyl Acetate (sugar cane byproduct) decaffeinated coffee from the same batches of beans. The EPA banned methylene chloride earlier in that year, but because of toxicity to workers, not because of risk from the resulting coffee itself (and it looks like the FDA didn't ban it.) So I guess you couldn't make decaf with it in the US but you could probably still import and sell it?