franek

> Fun fact: Jansson illustrated The Hobbit and drew Gollum as a giant. Tolkien realized he never described the size of Gollum and made adjustments to later editions.

For those curious like me, here are some low-res images:

https://zepe.de/tjillu/hobbit/index.html

And here an article about the illustrations (haven't read) with a a few images in higher resolution (including Gollum):

https://tovejansson.com/hobbit-tolkien/

This sounds like what RNode devices for Reticulum networks appear to be able to do. (I haven't tried it for myself yet.)

> RNodes can be made in many different configurations, and can use many different radio bands, but they will generally operate in the 433 MHz, 868 MHz, 915 MHZ and 2.4 GHz bands. They will usually offer configurable on-air data speeds between just a few hundred bits per second, up to a couple of megabits per second.

> [...]

> While speeds are lower than WiFi, typical communication ranges are many times higher. Several kilometers can be acheived with usable bitrates, even in urban areas, and over 100 kilometers can be achieved in line-of-sight conditions.

( https://unsigned.io/rnode/ )

> Reticulum is the cryptography-based networking stack for building local and wide-area networks with readily available hardware. Reticulum can continue to operate even in adverse conditions with very high latency and extremely low bandwidth.

( https://reticulum.network/ )

> Sure, in some cases, when the network has fewer announces to deal with, the 2% limit has less effect, the best way Reticulum can deal with this is with a network made out of more specialized node types connecting the lower speed links (http://reticulum.network/manual/interfaces.html#interfaces-m...)

I see. So it seems that optimizing a complex network can be a little more hands-on, not completely automatic (which would be a bit too much to ask, thinking about it). I guess my hypothetical path via outer space would have a "boundary" mode node somewhere on the way, although I am still fuzzy on how exactly this would affect things.

And your point about the announce queue with saturated 2% bandwidth is clear.

Thanks so far! This makes me want to read the rest of the manual and possibly start tinkering with Reticulum myself at some point.

That does make a lot of sense, at least in terms of latency: I imagine that when a one-hop announce comes back from outer space, the faster multi-hop path across town will have already been established.

For bandwidth, however, I don't see it yet. If all relevant nodes are idle at the time an announce comes in (so the 2% limit doesn't come into effect), a low-bandwith route might be established before one with a much higher bandwidth, no? (Prioritising latency over bandwidth can be the right thing to do, of course, depending on what the network is used for. But it might not.)

Thanks! I had thought it would make sense to post this chapter of the Reticulum manual separately, as the other post is about Nomad in particular. But since my post here didn't get traction, I repeated my question over there now.

Does Reticulum routing always prefer the path with the fewest hops, even if a path with more hops might have higher throughput or lower latency?

That's how I understand the manual (https://reticulum.network/manual/understanding.html):

> Once an announce has reached a node in the network, any other node in direct contact with that node will be able to reach the destination the announce originated from, simply by sending a packet addressed to that destination. Any node with knowledge of the announce will be able to direct the packet towards the destination by looking up the next node with the shortest amount of hops to the destination.

> chapter 4 of the manual

To me that chapter ("Understanding Reticulum") was a very pleasant read a few weeks ago, and inspiring too. I would love to get some HN expert opinions on it, especially about routing, so I posted it separately:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41257619

> Once an announce has reached a node in the network, any other node in direct contact with that node will be able to reach the destination the announce originated from, simply by sending a packet addressed to that destination. Any node with knowledge of the announce will be able to direct the packet towards the destination by looking up the next node with the shortest amount of hops to the destination.

Do I understand correctly that routing always priorities the path with the fewest hops? With Reticulum being "medium agnostic", I imagine this would not always be fastest in terms of ping or throughput: A destination might be reachable via a single hop via Mars, even though three hops across town would be faster.

I fully support the recommendation of Le Guin's short stories! Too bad they are easily forgotten over her novels. (I guess a novel, as a product, is easier to review and to advertise?)

My favourite collection is "The Birthday of the World", especially the stories "Solitude" and "Paradises Lost". (Maybe skip "Old Music and the Slave Women". It builds on other books and is incomprehensible without them; or at least it was to me.)

Personally, I like to use wajig, which combines several (most?) Debian packaging operations in one tool.

https://wiki.debian.org/Wajig https://github.com/gjwgit/wajig

While not built around CSV, two terminal spreadsheet tools I have successfully used in the past are sc-im and the (neo)vim plugin vim-table-mode:

https://github.com/andmarti1424/sc-im/

https://github.com/dhruvasagar/vim-table-mode

Back then I stopped using sc-im because it could not import/export XLSX, if I remember correctly. Apparently it can today!

vim-table-mode always felt a little fragile and I don't want to be bound to vim anymore. That said, it still feels like a small miracle to me to have functional spreadsheet formulas inside markdown documents – calculation and typesetting all in one place.

I didn't know about DMXIS and tried to look it up, and it seems that there is a software and a hardware component (the latter not being produced anymore), see here:

https://www.dmxis.com/dmxis/

I don't know about the software, but as for a DIY hardware solution, you can just connect a USB-DMX interface (like the Enttec DMX USB Pro) and a USB-MIDI device to a laptop and "just" have to code something to translate MIDI input to DMX output. Or use an Arduino, an RS-485 module and a few other components, that's what I once did.

Quoted from the page:

> To my knowledge, Gnomon* is the first font ever to respond to the user’s actual time. The shadow of Gnomon* changes location throughout the day in relation to the time. Come back and refresh this webpage every couple of hours and watch as, like magic, the shadow moves to the sun!

I haven't seriously tried any of them, but have a look a the list at:

http://lilypond.org/easier-editing.html

Maybe Denemo: http://denemo.org/

> As an untrained but interested bystander/hobbyist, the scores engraved by Lilypond are orders of magnitude better than those produced by the mainstream WYSIWYG editors, in the same "I deeply care about typography" sort of way that you get from documents produced with TeX but not Word or Google Docs.

This deep care is documented in the "Essay on automated music engraving" in the Lilypond docs:

http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.23/Documentation/essay-big-page.h...

Previously discussed (I guess -- different title and dead link):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1515262

The title is indeed ambiguous. It could just as well refer to sound-coding systems/languages like Sonic Pi, or to what you imagined. (Which would be an oddly specific kind of music, but cool! The operation of a compiler turned into music, somehow?)

That said, I am not disappointed. But then I am also the one who posted this link in the first place. I started using Lilypond last year for transcribing the melody voices from complex sheet music and automatically transposing them into different keys when needed (which is immensely useful). Just recently I discovered that it can also generate MIDI output, so in addition to having a convenient tool to get beautiful sheet music in whatever key I need, I can now easily have my computer play the melodies and memorise them by listening (which for me, on my current instrument, is much easier than playing from notes directly).

I'm a freelance performance and theatre artist. This means (in my case) that I stage/create performative works of my own, perform in other people's pieces and sometimes build special effects using electronics and programming.

I used to study physics before I got serious about theatre, and my dad is a programmer. I think he introduced me to HN at some point a few years ago, and today I am using it daily to indulge my curiosity, laziness and procrastination. (;

This is an awesome thread to read, thanks for posting the question!

Ursula K. Le Guin, "Solitude", from the collection "The Birthday of the World". Speculative story about a society whose adults spent the majority of their lives alone. Told from a female perspective. One of my favourites, to say the least.

This is pretty similar to what is described in Stanisław Lem's "The New Cosmogony" (a work of fiction, included in the book "A Perfect Vacuum"). Only there the terrarium-like isolation of intelligent species is a self-imposed restriction: The earliest civilisations of the cosmos engineered the laws of physics that way.

Sure! I'm assuming if we have the means to fake the one turbulence, we can also cancel the other. Or the arrow is just not moving, thus no "natural" turbulance to cancel.

I'm not saying that air turbulence wasn't a very strong indicator for motion! And I am not sure the technology to fake them completely does exist. But I don't see why it shouldn't be possible, maybe with a very elaborate set of fans, air ducts and loudspeakers.

Turbulence and length compression are good evidence, but in theory not sufficient to infer the speed of the arrow: The arrow could have been squeezed and air turbulence induced some other way. These alone then would not make the arrow fly in the suspected direction.

Thanks for the explanation and correction!

(I'm neither a physicist nor a philosopher and happy to be corrected.)

I don't believe you can. Given a snapshot of an arrow suspended in air, how do you know its direction and speed (or if it has been shot at all rather than just been let go in mid-air)? That's basically Zeno's paradox of the arrow[0]. A snapshot description without speed doesn't tell you anything about speed.

In the case of light-waves, their propagation is governed by Maxwell's equations, which have have a dynamic component (induction).

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeno%27s_paradox#Arrow_paradox

(Edit: typo.)

I'm a student at that university, though I don't have any contacts to the IT department or other sources of inside information.

I went to collect my new password already. The process was pretty smooth with only a little confusion where the queue split up alphabetically (not quite enough room, although it took place in a large gym; I guess they rightly prioritized giving the people behind the desks enough room to work).

It's interesting to see which systems of the university are more or less robust to the network blackout. Email is down, which has the nice side effect that people who would otherwise only communicate in written form now make calls or physical visits (as they cannot look up phone numbers on the web) to each others' offices. The library catalogue is not working, though apparently they successfully switched to a paper-based system for lending books after a few days (haven't tried it yet). The electronic payment system of the canteens appears completely unaffected. (I read on a sign recently that it is considered "obsolete" and subject to renewal – good thing they hadn't done that yet, I guess). The web platform with reading material for seminars is down. In some cases seminar presentations have to be given without slideshow projection because the designated presentation laptop got a red sticker. I don't now how labs with data on the central servers are doing (I'm in the humanities).

Wow, I was completely fooled by the serifs and my excitement. Thank you for clearing that up!

The option to use proportional fonts is a very rare feature in vim-like text editors (the only other way I know of is to use terminal vim in mlterm), so for people who want this the screenshot is good advertisement.

In fact, after reading you comment, I promptly startet to install it (still compiling as I type this). My use-case is creative writing: I'm very used to vim keybindings from coding, but prefer to have a variable-width fonts for writing.

There is a continuation to sc, called scim:

https://github.com/andmarti1424/scim

> If there is a way to structure LC like Python

There is Wisp (Whitespace to Lisp):

https://bitbucket.org/ArneBab/wisp

http://draketo.de/light/english/wisp-lisp-indentation-prepro...

(I have never tried it.)