jes

Thanks for the heads up! Looks great, will take it for a spin.

I'd like to play around a bit with Racket. I have been using Slime with Common Lisp for years. From what I'm reading, it sounds like Geiser[1] might be a Slime-alike package for Emacs.

Thoughts or advice?

[1] https://www.nongnu.org/geiser/

Yep, fully agree.

I live in Washington State, and I refer to that time of year as "headache season."

Apparently the Air Force is planning a new fighter program[1], which I guess is subsequent to the F-35 program.

I wonder where the money to pay for this program will come from. My understanding, which may be wrong, is that interest payments and social spending is going to significantly reduce what can be spent on defense. Corrections are welcome.

[1] https://www.defenseone.com/business/2023/05/usaf-opens-biddi...

Edit: Delete redundant phrase.

I wish you success on your journey, wherever it takes you.

Six years of practice for me, first in Mahayana Buddhism, then into Advaita Vedanta. Can recommend teachers like Rupert Spira, Francis Lucille, and the late Alan Watts.

I'll second this, but for Intel / Altera.

I started working with a Stratix 10 GX dev kit last year, and the Intel Quartus Prime Pro software. It's been a nightmare.

1. Unless you have a direct line to an experienced support engineer inside Intel, technical support amounts to pleading with new-hire support engineers who can't do more than try to look something up and regurgitate it back to you.

2. Sample designs don't work with the tools you have. A design might be for version 18 of Quartus and you have version 23. You can try to auto-upgrade the IP, and maybe 3/4 of the time it works. The other 1/4 of the time it's some obscure error you can't track down, so you're back on the "Community Site" begging for help.

3. Doing something like programming your design into flash on the S10 board involves lots and lots of research, including watching Intel produced YouTube videos.

I could go on, but the whole process is like running in wet cement.

I'm 63 and have been "working with computers" since the mid 70s or so. It's been a great ride and it's not quite over yet.

As to your specific question, perhaps you'd be interested in maintaining some existing open source projects whose mission speaks to you. If you can contribute and bring more value than pain in working with you, I'd expect they would come to welcome your help.

As regards the negatives and imagined negatives of being an older developer, I have to say that they just don't have any sting with me. Nothing has any sting with me anymore.

Kirkland, WA resident here. There is signage on the boat that uniquely identifies the #1 end and the #2 end of the boat. Can be helpful in finding your way back to your vehicle if you drove onto the ferry instead of being a walk-on passenger.

I don't think it will. I have fond memories of logging in to the old ARPANET from a Zenith Z-19 terminal in my basement, over 1200 baud dialup into the local university and prowling for Lisp sources on different machines. Finding the ISI-GRAPHER code and trying to make sense of it was a big thrill.

This is really great to see. I’m looking forward to learning from your work.

Thanks for making it public.

Long Live Lisp!

I have seen some posts on the Intel FPGA community forum about using Quartus Prime Pro (FPGA design software) on Apple Silicon. Apparently, it works, even though not officially supported.

I haven't had the time or the desire to take it for a spin yet, but I'd love to be able to compile FPGA designs on a nicely configured and quiet M2 system.

Sadly, that figures.

Thank you for bringing me up to date.

Any other sites you'd recommend for thoughtful discussion?

Just want to applaud and support your work.

In 1983, just out of college, I moved to Seattle with my wife and started working for a firm ("TOM Software") that was porting the Wang Basic-2 language to the then-emerging line of 16 bit microprocessor systems running some variant of UNIX.

I invested a lot of time and effort in the project. It was a great project and I learned a lot about language systems.

I hope this project is similarly rewarding for you. I wish you success and a lot of fun with it!

You might enjoy LessWrong[1].

1. https://lesswrong.com

Same.

I was impressed with the tooling as well. I worked at the University of Washington in Bio-engineering, and we collaborated with the Department of Radiology. They were building up the first PET scanner at UW, and the PI on my project was simulating mass transport and exchange in the tissues of the myocardium.

We all had a couple of MV/10000s, and I think four MV/4000s. Radiology ran AOS/VS, while we ran (first) MV/UX and later DG/UX.

I really admired the C compiler. It was a first class piece of work, in my view. I believe it was largely written by Michael Meissner.[1]

[1]. http://www.the-meissners.org/

I have been a student of TOC since the early 90s. I used to attend the various conferences that groups like APICS put on in the early years. I just got back a few weeks ago from the TOCICO conference in Orlando.

Eli really dug into the subjects that interested him. He always came up with interesting insights. At the conferences, from time to time, I'd join Eli with a few others for dinner or lunch. We didn't go out for beers, though, and I wasn't really in his inner circle.

He has published many good books, and usually, they are Socratic novels. They are fun to read, and I get something new out of them every time I read them.

His last book, "The Choice," was written with his daughter, Efrat Goldratt-Ashlag. In that book, Eli really lays out his general approach. I recommend it.

Eli passed away in June of 2011.

Interesting.

I sometimes look for a 990/10 or /12 on eBay but I haven't seen any in years. I think bitsavers.org has some software for the 990 series, like DX-10 and some language systems.

My former mentor-at-a-distance Eli Goldratt used to say "Yesterday's solutions are today's historical curiosities."

I think he might have gotten that from a better-known aphorism: "Yesterday's solutions are today's problems."

Thanks for your comment. It was fun and inspired other fun comments.

I never knew that TI's DS-990[1] series of minicomputers was created for Ramada Inns. It was one of the first computers I used intensively and I thought it was great. I think I wrote code in almost every language they supported. Good times, and the TI documentation was quite good, in my view.

Hit me with your WP (Workspace Pointer) register, baby!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TI-990

Good points - thank you.

Good points - thank you.

Why destroy the tooling?

I assume it's to ensure that a previous program can't be revived and thus threaten the follow-on program.

In my view, if the follow on program is truly compelling, it should live or die based on its own performance, but I guess that's not how the game is played.

I think this was done with the Saturn V, as well.

Thoughts?

I remember seeing such an article as well. Might it be one of these?

[1] https://www.long-lines.net/history.html

[2] https://www.bellsystemmemorial.com/longlines_book1.html

I was 14 and living in Cleveland, Ohio in 1973. My dad had our house converted from oil heat to a ground source heat pump, with resistance heat backup.

Our water well was 220’ deep.

It seemed to work fine.

Thank you. I closed my PayPal account tonight.

I have used Emacs for decades and TIL about undo-tree. Thank you!

It really depends on context. There are times when it's useful, and times when it's not. It's helped me at times in improving code coverage when developing software for medical devices, so I thought I'd mention it.

The technique is can also be generalized beyond just triggering malloc() failures under specified conditions.

While we are talking about dynamic memory allocation and de-allocation, a useful trick at times is to wrap your mallocator with a bit of code so that you can program it to fail after, say, n allocations, or on a random basis. In a testing context, this can help you systematically explore the set of possible allocation failures to see if the code handles them as expected.

I share your interest.

To speed up a process, I usually try to identify the rate-limiting step (the constraint.)

I would guess that one of the factors that affects the time required to see through the illusion of a separate, egoic self, is "How badly do you want a much better existence than the one you've been living?"

Invalidating a low-level assumption of the kind we are discussing has to trigger a lot of re-evaluation by a person. In other words, it really turns everything on its head. I think people are often very smart, in a sub-conscious way, and they can see where self-inquiry might lead, and they say to themselves, in essence, "Screw that. Too scary!"

On the other hand, if you're really suffering, you'll probably pay a high price to escape it.