jordigh

Mercurial had a prominent role in the creation myth. It didn't influence git, but it was there at the same time, for the same reason, and at one time, with an equal amount of influence. Bitbucket was once seen as fairly comparable to Github. People would choose git or hg for their projects with equal regularity. The users were familiar with both choices.

Linus never cared about hg, but lots of people that cared about git at one point would also be at least familiar with some notions from hg.

The proper way to do that is say, something like "Olivia (Matt)" and then continue. You use the preferred name, and if you need to refer to the deadname to disambiguate, you do it.

If you can avoid the need to disambiguate, you do that too. The name really is dead. You shouldn't use it if at all possible.

Yes, Monotone partly inspired both. You can see that both hash contents. But both git and hg were intended to replace Bitkeeper. Mercurial is even named after Larry McVoy, who changed his mind. He was, you know, mercurial in his moods.

There’s something that bothers me about these sorts of recollections that make git seem… inevitable.

There’s this whole creation myth of how Git came to be that kind of paints Linus as some prophet reading from golden tablets written by the CS gods themselves.

Granted, this particular narrative in the blog post does humanise a bit more, remembering the stumbling steps, how Linus never intended for git itself to be the UI, how there wasn’t even a git commit command in the beginning, but it still paints the whole thing in somewhat romantic tones, as if the blob-tree-commit-ref data structure were the perfect representation of data.

One particular aspect that often gets left out of this creation myth, especially by the author of Github is that Mercurial had a prominent role. It was created by Olivia Mackall, another kernel hacker, at the same time as git, for the same purpose as git. Olivia offered Mercurial to Linus, but Linus didn’t look upon favour with it, and stuck to his guns. Unlike git, Mercurial had a UI at the very start. Its UI was very similar to Subversion, which at the time was the dominant VCS, so Mercurial always aimed for familiarity without sacrificing user flexibility. In the beginning, both VCSes had mind share, and even today, the mindshare of Mercurial lives on in hg itself as well as in worthy git successors such as jujutsu.

And the git data structure isn’t the only thing that could have ever possibly worked. It falls apart for large files. There are workaround and things you can patch on top, but there are also completely different data structures that would be appropriate for larger bits of data.

Git isn’t just plain wonderful, and in my view, it’s not inevitable either. I still look forward to a world beyond git, whether jujutsu or whatever else may come.

> copywritten

This syntactic mistake is driving me nuts in the article is driving me nuts. It's a fundamental misunderstanding of what the the word means.

It's "copyright". It's about the rights to copy. The past participle is "copyrighted", someone has already claimed the rights to copy it, so you can't also have those rights. The rights belong to someone else. If you remember that copyright is about rights that are exclusive to someone and that you don't have them, then you wouldn't make such a syntax error as "copywritten".

The homophone "copywriting" is about take a sales copy (that is, an ad) and writing it. It's about creating an advertisement. Copywritten means you've gone around to creating an ad. As an eggcorn (a fake etymology created after the fact in order to explain the misspelling or syntax error), I assume it's understood as copying anything, and then writing it down, a sort of eggcornical synonym of "copy-paste".

It also depends on what is "fun". Major glitches in Super Metroid make you skip too much of the game and that just isn't fun to watch.

Speedrunning is a spectator sport, so spectators ultimately determine which categories are the prestigious ones.

The square of the sum of two quantities equals the sum of the square of each quantity plus twice their product.

So much more readable! /s

We did try it. We tried it for a couple of millenia. It was much harder to understand and our collective mathematical output as a human species was much slower than it is now.

Shorthand is better.

> they can't be bothered to write more than 1 character

You try handwriting all of your code and let's see how long until you start abbreviating everything.

Mathematical notation is all abbreviations. We used to write mathematics without abbreviations. It was absolutely horrid. Try reading some 13th century mathematics, translated to your language (e.g. Fibonacci https://archive.org/details/laurence-sigler-fibonaccis-liber... ), and see how much of it you understand without the benefit of symbolic notation. We would even write aaa instead of a^3.

The point with mathematical notation is that it can all be sounded out and it's extremely general and abstract. Generally, x is not a measurement, a quantity with a unit, a meaningful anything. It's just a number, and x is a better name than front_server_count or whatever thing you're programming about.

I don't believe your 99.9% figure.

You surely know the syntax for multiplication, addition, and exponentiation. So you understand the polynomial in the opening paragraph. I'm sure you know function notation and division, so you understand that P(n)/k is always an integer.

You probably have seen the sigma notation before because that's usually taught in high schools around the world, so you know that the lemma which is not Burnside's is about adding and dividing. You probably have seen the notation |X| to mean absolute value, so perhaps we finally are reaching the limits of your knowledge if it has been a while since you've seen the notation |X| can also mean the size of a set (which is, in a way, a sort of absolute value, mathematicians love type-punning).

I'm sure you've seen function notation f: X -> Y to indicate that f is a function from the set X to the set Y, but I'll believe if you didn't know that [n] is the set {1, 2, 3, 4, ..., n}.

I haven't done a careful calculation here, but I believe as a moderate estimate that this already covers at least 30% of the mathematical symbols in this page.

My point is: the notation isn't probably the problem. You surely have seen these symbols before or can figure out what the individual symbols mean. I daresay the most esoteric symbol here is the Fraktur S for the symmetric group (here for the symmetric group of 6 symbols),

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraktur#Unicode

but I assume that if you didn't know what the symmetric group is, the more common notation of S_6 would probably not have helped you much.

So if the notation isn't the problem, I wager that the concepts and the difficulty of absorbing these ideas is the problem. It requires you to compile stuff yourself in your own head.

With programming we are used to a machine doing this for us. We write the code, give it to a machine, the machine basically tells us if we're right or not. With mathematics we don't generally have that machine for all cases. You have to do the work in your own head. The problem isn't the symbols. The problem is that you have to think about them harder, work out what is being multiplied, what are the sets in question, what are the operations, and put them together yourself. You have to read something like not Burnside's lemma and understand what it's saying about permutations and sets and grouping and counting.

Reading mathematics is a special skill. It's slow. It requires you to take out pen and paper and work it out yourself. Yes, like that. You have to do input and output on your own as you do mathematics. It's a unique skill that sadly isn't usually independently taught except at the university level.

The concepts and the work required to understand them are the problem. Not the symbols. The symbols are superficial and easily dispensed with.

-f 140 is the right yt-dlp parameter to get just the audio.

With Spanish we have the added complexity that there are different linguistic traditions around the world. For example, in Mexico I learned "depurar", an existing Spanish word that closely fits the meaning of "debug". However, many Spanish speakers simply say "debuguear", just directly borrowing the English word. In Mexico I also learned "desempeño" to describe the performance of a computer or software, but in Argentina I've heard "el performance" to say the same.

I think the most common thing is to just use English loanwords without trying to find existing Spanish words that fit the meaning.

It bothers me so much that Paul Graham people thinks it's performative. He can't imagine anyone actually, sincerely holding those beliefs, because he doesn't hold them himself. If someone is trying to modify their beliefs and then their behaviour, say, by mild self-censorship, he's got a list of insults ready for that person trying to better themselves: prig, politically correct, woke.

It's not performative. We really do believe that there are injustices and that if we can begin by changing the language, we can change the behaviour.

Just because Paul Graham can't imagine himself sincerely believing in self improvement followed by social improvement doesn't mean we don't believe it in ourselves.

It's not my work. I'm just a script kitty.

There are some details in the description and comments here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPUYjDNks9Y

The pregnancy test was the greatest drama to ever hit the r/itrunsdoom community.

The tech demo that really made me fall in love with Bad Apple was getting it to run on the NES.

https://somethingnerdy.com/downloads/

Here it is running from my Everdrive.

https://inversethought.com/jordi/video/badapple.mp4

Yes, with full audio. It's about one gigabyte of data. On a system where the typical game size is no more than a couple hundred kilobytes, and your CPU only has three 8-bit registers for you to do any calculation with.

The shareware weapons. You had to fork out some real cash for the full version if you wanted the plasma weapons!

Aw, monster in-fighting kills don't count? That's my favourite kind of kill. In-fighting is a basic Doom skill, kind of forgotten in modern FPSes.

You kid but back during the XEmacs days, RMS did indeed argue a lot over the names. I think jwz wanted to call the original Emacs "FSF Emacs" and RMS was like, "no, it's just Emacs, and in fact, XEmacs is also just Emacs" or something like that, I don't remember.

Oh, so that's why this was so ragequit-worthy: the global elisp namespace is delicate, and unilateral changes like this without consulting the maintainer of the stomped-over package is a big no-no.

The important bit

> But the recent Mastodon upgrade has caused a significant amount of performance degradation, and I think the only way to really solve it is going to be to throw a lot of money into hardware.

I found the latest upgrade also making some odd UX decisions. Content warnings got a weird new styling and it's not clear anymore how to hide images separately from hiding the text.

Are the mastodons okay?

There are good things too, don't get me wrong, like grouping notifications instead of getting a notification flood on a popular toot. That's nice. But what's up with perf regressions and (in my opinion) UX regressions?

Do graphical games with text parsers count?

The Crimson Diamond is a recent release that is beyond the stellar.

Not to keep all of their copyright, just their commercial rights. I say if the thing has been out of print for say, 15 years, verbatim distribution should be allowed.

Copyright itself only lasted about 15 years originally, which is a reasonable amount of time to commercialise a work. If you haven't done anything commercial with it in 15 years, it seems reasonable to me to allow the public to enjoy the work.

Besides commercial rights, copyright also includes moral rights: the right the author has to the integrity of their work.

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

I kind of like the idea of allowing verbatim redistribution if the author or their estate is demonstrably not planning to make money off it, but attribution and integrity of the work should be preserved.

A browser-based game to teach how special relativity works.

Where does Foone keep finding this stuff?

Earlier, Foone finds a NUC:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41294585

No, "ordinateur" was a marketing term created for IBM that meant to evoke godliness, from the somewhat archaic phrase, "Dieu qui met de l'ordre dans le monde", God who sets the world in order.

https://www.lemonde.fr/planete/article/2005/04/15/16-avril-1...

Spain calqued the word into ordenador while most of Latin America calqued computadora from the USA.

I bought one of these toys pre-made from the kickstarter and they’re actually really fun. I am thinking of buying a soldering iron and using this toy as an experience in learning how to do it. I really like the DIY aspect of having a simple soldering project that ends up producing a toy that’s fun to use (and unintentionally annoying for most people around you).

Good news, ASCII has always had record and group separator characters that for some reason we have all forgotten they exist and nobody would ever use in non-binary data:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C0_and_C1_control_codes#Field_...

Uhh... it makes it worse.

We don't have all of the data because in the US companies are not generally required by law to disclose their emissions. But of those who do, it's been disastrous. Google was on track to net zero, but its recent investment and push on AI has increased their emissions by 48%.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/03/tech/google-ai-greenhouse-gas...