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guenthert

1,699 karma · joined August 12, 2015

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guenthert··on Meta VR Glasses
> Everything in modern computing is slow

Nonsense. Embedded systems, often event driven, improved as did the rest of the computing landscape (perhaps at a tad slower pace). HST has been a major driver on low latency computing in the data center. And then there are of course robotics and military applications ...

guenthert··on Abandoning Scientific Linux Was a Mistake
> .deb is a really good package manager, and is arguably more sophisticated than RPM.

Perhaps. I wouldn't argue either way, but dpkg still maintains its "data base" of installed and available packages/files as plain text files rather than using a DB format like sqlite (which one might chose for such today) or Berkeley DB (back when). The performance difference is negligible today on fast hosts with NVMe backed storage, but fairly annoying when using lesser machines with slower storage, e.g. RPi with root fs on a SD card.

guenthert··on Small programming tricks
> I (a)sync everywhere by pushing git lfs commits to my home server.

Don't let IT hear that unless you work on FOSS.

guenthert··on A software thing I built: GPS on a 25MHz 486-SX
"real-time GPS-driven moving map display"

Not the IMHO more interesting analog tech which lifts signals out of thermal noise.

guenthert··on Devil's Arrows: Ancient builders hauled 55k-lb stones 11 miles for UK stone row
They could have said 3300 stones stones ...
guenthert··on The GDR and Vietnam: From Fake Coffee to Coffee Empire
I thought that was an invention out of necessity during the WW times, but no, it's much older: https://de.wiktionary.org/wiki/Muckefuck
guenthert··on A 386 PC for Your RP2350
Holy cow, a 386 with VGA and SoundBlaster on a $1 MCU?

I recall VICE emulating the Brotkasten on 386 PCs some thirty years ago, later UAE doing it for Amiga. How long til my currently running system (anno 2016) is being emulated?

guenthert··on Far-right AfD wins historic victory in German state election
Well, the Budesamt für Verfassungsschutz (office for the protection of the constitution -- not generally known for their left-leaning point of view) classified the AfD as proven right-extreme. On that ground outlawing that party has been considered; this hasn't been done yet, partly due to the popularity of the party in some regions -- there's the danger to further alienate the populace there, many of which are already disenchanted with the earlier established parties. Some consider it best to let them govern for a while and thereby demonstrating that they can't solve intractable problems either. Others fear that they will cause irreparable damage even in their first days in office, e.g. cancelling the contract for public broadcasting service.
guenthert··on Switzerland's Federal Government Is Replacing Microsoft on 3k Computers
> prefer IRL service, viewing and touching actual hardware.

That did Fry's in, didn't it? People coming in viewing, touching hardware in store and then buy it on-line (elsewhere) so that they could save 2.5%. Or worse, buying it in store and returning it two weeks later when they found a better deal or didn't need it anymore.

guenthert··on GPS glitched across the US by as much as 33 feet
iiuc, this is differential GPS (DGPS) and not only airports are doing that. At least in Europe there are quite a few such transmitters, see https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_von_DGPS-Sendern
guenthert··on Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope
Meanwhile it did launch and separated from launch vehicle.

Most recent status update can be found at https://science.nasa.gov/blogs/roman/

guenthert··on Creating Teensy ELF Executables for Linux (Or, "Size Is Everything") (1999)
Oh, ELF file manipulation. I thought this would be about getting Linux to run on a Teensy.

https://forum.pjrc.com/index.php?threads/linux-on-teensy-4-x...

guenthert··on Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"
If they can't be bothered to write the code, can they be bothered to maintain it?
guenthert··on Harvest (IBM 7950): Supercomputer for cryptanalysis at the NSA in the Cold War
> Creating the world's first dual instruction set CPU.

World's first? What about the VIA C3 (or earlier NEC V20)? I'm sure there are more / earlier ones.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternate_Instruction_Set

guenthert··on Everyone says assembly is untyped—everyone is wrong
Most architectures perform best in combination with a compiler of a statically typed language. SPARC at least still had rudimentary support for tagged data types.
guenthert··on Anthropic's ‘watermark’ text adulteration in Claude is a perversion of writing
> This manipulation of word choices virtually guarantees AI will always sound like a robot.

You make it sound as if that were a bad thing.

guenthert··on Clamiga: Common Lisp for the Amiga
How does Clamiga compare with the most recent CLISP which did support AmigaOS?

CLISP's maintenance status is mentioned, but I can't help wondering in which way that would be relevant.

guenthert··on Asus Bike Booster
> Have you ever ridden a bike with a geared derailleur, and forgotten to shift into low gear at an intersection, or had to suddenly stop before you had a chance to shift into low gear, so it's more difficult getting started again?

Yes, it's an annoyance, not an insurmountable obstacle. If one is bothered by it, there's the hub gear, invented more than 100 years ago.

guenthert··on Why Target Common Lisp for Code Generation?
Why not? The vulnerabilities you read about are due to oversights, not inherently lacking capabilities of the language. For every program exhibiting any given of such, you'll find thousands which don't make the same mistake at the same place. After all, most reported vulnerabilities are just a short patch away from being fixed.

Now human programmers might find it more difficult to get certain things right than others, but to a LLM only quantity of examples matters, no?

guenthert··on Because It's Not Fun Enough: why languages fail
> The killer feature used to be the REPL.

The killer (hah!) feature is arguably its homoiconicity, allowing to modify the language easily within itself ("macros"). This has the obvious advantage that you can add missing features (usually) easily yourself; and exactly that causes headaches for those tasked with maintaining other people's code.

> Nowadays with LLMs writing all the code

Oh, you came all the way from the future and that's what you bring us?

guenthert··on an ambiguity in C89 which will never be fixed
"because the problematic behavior was removed from the standard over 27 years ago, we'll never have closure on what the intended interpretation is."

Obsolete standard turns out to be insufficiently strict, news at 11.

guenthert··on Tail-call optimization in C is relatively recent (2025)
> Even SBCL doesn't do TCO at all times. Compiling at (debug 3) means no TCO.

Presumably one intends to debug the code, when setting (debug 3). Then it'll be helpful to see the stack, no?

> Another related footgun is deep recursion of other kinds, for example when recursively traversing down lists. For long lists it's easy to exceed the stack size limit. The common idiom is to recur on list elements, but iterate or map to go along a list.

Not going to argue with seasoned lispers here, but IMHO recursive code makes most sense when accessing recursive data structures.

guenthert··on Tail-call optimization in C is relatively recent (2025)
Only if they are using an insufficiently smart compiler. SBCL handles TCO just fine, as do a number of other implementations, see : https://0branch.com/notes/tco-cl.html
guenthert··on My server is a phone now
Hmmh. My Samsung Galaxy S4 doesn't boot w/o battery. Not sure, whether early in the boot process the presence of a battery is tested or whether there just isn't enough juice.
guenthert··on Making Postgres 300x faster for analytics: batching, operator fusion, and SIMD
If it is indeed 300* faster, I'm sure more rational corporations will rethink their license policy or be left in the dust.
guenthert··on Why Erdős Problems Are Falling to AI
And it's a huge distraction. Afaik (and I'm no climate researcher), the increased albedo of greater cloud coverage due to greater vaporization because of higher temperatures is the only known negative feedback effect. Everything else, be it reduced albedo due to less ice cover, increased release of Methane due to melting permafrost, increased release of CO2 due to more forest fires, etc. only accelerates global warming. So "more CO2 = more warmer" might be hilariously simplified, but it ain't wrong.

Only those who try to maximize profits while skirting the risk of a revolt care whether global average temperature will be 1.2 or 1.8K above pre-industrial average in ten years. For the rest it's already too warm, the damage is already plainly visible.

We don't need better models to predict future warming; we dragged our feet long enough that we can now look at historic data to see where it's going.

guenthert··on Windows XP 2002 for the Itanium: Unbridled rage
I'm rather surprised that they did end. After all, Itanium is one of few architectures (also the Russian Ebrus comes to mind) which doesn't exhibit the SPECTRE vulnerability.
guenthert··on Celebrating 45 Years of Kermit with the First New C-Kermit Release in 15 Years
C-Kermit? I (barely) remember tinkering with the FORTH version on a Epson HX20 (late in its life) anno 1995. The sources seem to originate (today) at https://atariwiki.org/wiki/Wiki.jsp?page=Kermit%20Protocol%2...
guenthert··on More German than many Germans
> In fact, I like most of the rules, rules are good because they ensure order, fairness and equality.

I'm sure some of the more entrepreneurial minds will argue that many of those rules stifle innovation and progress. But also on a personal level, at least to this returning German, some of the rules seem silly at best and at worst cause some underlying sense of oppression. Why, e.g., is there a Meldegesetz/Meldeamt? I survived for 25+ years in California without such.

There are safety/freedom tradeoffs and whether they are worth it, everyone has to decide for themselves (at least Germans are granted the liberty to leave, if they don't like it). Many Germans long for a more adventurous life, but in the end most prefer to visit, rather than emigrate to, foreign shores.

guenthert··on Sharing an X11 Server Across Hosts with FamilyWild
The proxy is needed for session management (specifically suspending sessions), no?
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