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emmelaich

8,284 karma · joined September 10, 2009

I'm a beardless unix greybeard who loves dabbling in new computer languages.

I'm also fascinated in the psychology of belief.

Philosophically a skeptic, but I don't attend their services :-)

email is my hn username at <popularprivatemailservice>.me

meet.hn/city/au-Sydney

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emmelaich··on Waymo robotaxis are now giving rides on freeways in LA, SF and Phoenix
If it doubles your efficiency, that's one less employee required.
emmelaich··on Four strange places to see London's Roman Wall
There is a London Wall Walk, starting at the Tower of London. Text copied from the plaques at the postern: (thanks Google Lens)

>The London Wall Walk follows the original line of the City Wall for much of its length, from the royal fortress of the Tower of London to the Museum of London, situated in the modern high-rise development of the Barbican. Between these two landmarks the Wall Walk passes surviving pieces of the Wall visible to the public and the sites of the gates now buried deep beneath the City streets. It also passes close to eight of the surviving forty-one City churches. The Walk is 134 miles (2.8km) long and is marked by twenty-one panels which can be followed in either direction. Completion of the Walk will take between one and two hours. Wheelchairs can reach most individual sites although access is difficult at some points.

emmelaich··on FFmpeg to Google: Fund us or stop sending bugs
Best response would be to drop this codec entirely, or have it off by default. At least distros should do that.
emmelaich··on MAHA Is Embracing Elizabeth Holmes. Here's Why.
Recommended: https://www.thesocialradars.com/episodes with Tyler Schultz, the Theranos whistleblower.
emmelaich··on IRIX Introduction
XFS was/is astonishingly fast. When I had a an Indy in early 1990s I ran `find /` and it ran so fast (on a 4gb disk) that I thought it was an error.
emmelaich··on Ironclad – formally verified, real-time capable, Unix-like OS kernel
In djb's course at UIUC, I recal he said that students were required to find a vulnerability as part of the course requirements.
emmelaich··on Venn Diagram for 7 Sets
Agree, I think the linked Upset diagram is better.
emmelaich··on New gel restores dental enamel and could revolutionise tooth repair
Using gold as the core would help but of course would be somewhat expensive.
emmelaich··on New gel restores dental enamel and could revolutionise tooth repair
Interesting. We have a Novamin-containg toothpaste in Australia, but you have to hunt it down.
emmelaich··on SPy: An interpreter and compiler for a fast statically typed variant of Python
There are even older languages with similar goals. At least three are called viper and are older than 6 years. Two linked below and much older one with ocaml-ish features that I could not find a link for.

https://github.com/pdarragh/Viper

https://github.com/appcypher/viper

emmelaich··on The grim truth behind the Pied Piper (2020)
It comes from the same place as the i in Munich.
emmelaich··on This week in 1988, Robert Morris unleashed his eponymous worm
You can't judge his behaviour without knowing his intent, and the culture of the late 80s and early internet.

Everyone hacked. When the internet was connected to Sydney University early 90s, all the students were grabbing Stanfords /etc/passwd files and peeking at the open X displays of people in Sweden. Etc. All for fun / curiosity.

You can be sure that even rtm's Dad did similar, perhaps confined to his lab / peers.

emmelaich··on Robert Hooke's "Cyberpunk” Letter to Gottfried Leibniz
'exercise' makes more sense to me but you're right it doesn't look like exercise. Perhaps course and exercise mean the same in this context.

BTW, the lines appear about halfway down the scan.

emmelaich··on WebAssembly (WASM) arch support for the Linux kernel
That is excellent!
emmelaich··on Paris had a moving sidewalk in 1900, and a Thomas Edison film captured it (2020)
There's one in Sydney, from a carpark to near the city centre, of 207m.

Quoting wikipedia:

> The walkway has been the longest continuous moving walkway in the world since its construction in 1961.

emmelaich··on Hard Rust requirements from May onward
They need to do this carefully and with adversarial testing. There are safety measures in e.g. gnu tar that really should be replicated. But they are not to do with parsing, but the semantics.

IOW, what's your specification?

emmelaich··on Pomelli
I've heard of a little cost cutting at Canva. Some point to a possible IPO next year. But also I wonder if AI generally and products like this are causing increased competition.
emmelaich··on Lording it, over: A new history of the modern British aristocracy
Andrew Mountbatten Windsor I believe.
emmelaich··on Uv is the best thing to happen to the Python ecosystem in a decade
https://linuxsecurity.expert/compare/tools/linux-auditing-to... shows a few.

I've used Tiger/Saint/Satan/COPS in the distant past. But I think they're somewhat obsoleted by modern packaging and security like apparmor and selinux, not to mention docker and similar isolators.

emmelaich··on Uv is the best thing to happen to the Python ecosystem in a decade
And it loses money. And doesn't it have time reliability issues?
emmelaich··on Tips for stroke-surviving software engineers
All excellent advice even if you haven't suffered some health issue like stroke.
emmelaich··on Why do some radio towers blink?
mentioned in the article
emmelaich··on 10M people watched a YouTuber shim a lock; the lock company sued him – bad idea
Add metal for extra fun: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_lance
emmelaich··on An overengineered solution to `sort | uniq -c` with 25x throughput (hist)
I often add `head` with `sort -rn` because I'm only interested in the largest.
emmelaich··on Asbestosis
If it's intact and below surface the risk is far lower. You have to worry about airborne asbestos.

Not saying you should ignore it but don't dig it up without knowing what you're in for.

emmelaich··on Carmack on Operating Systems (1997)
Possibly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A/UX but then again probably not.
emmelaich··on The Gypsy Life of Robert Louis Stevenson
My understanding is that it's considered a slur by some when used to refer to the Romani people. According to Wikipedia, "Some Roma use and embrace this term"

As it's used here to just mean nomadic or itinerant it seems ok.

emmelaich··on Servo v0.0.1
Agree, 'servo' suggests serving whereas this is oriented to being a web client?
emmelaich··on Original C64 Lode Runner Source Code
I'd love to play a LodeRunner with the same feel as the original. No version I've tried has the right feel. It's subtle.

Is this good? I downloaded but Virustotal said 1/66 vendors gave > "MaxSecure Trojan.Malware.300983.susgen Acronis (Static ML) Undetected"

Probably a false positive but enough for me not to try it.

emmelaich··on The early Unix history of chown() being restricted to root
Yes, in SysIII and SysV. Per the article.

It was possible to chown/chgrp as non root in Solaris up to some version that I forget.

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