jules22

Must be his browser settings, his may not be putting tabs to sleep. I am under 3 GB on a Linux machine with just browsing.

No. It's the fact that it is a great 12 year old machine that makes it notable. I would not be surprised if it was usable as a 20 year old machine. These things are comfortable and they last.

I got mine for $100, about 4-5 years ago. Only 1 USB port seems to work. Great keyboard, only 720p screen, did not upgrade the HDD. Works great as a secondary machine. I expect to use it for at least another 5 years, likely more. I love old machines and how repairable they were.

I wish they would not make the new laptops that tight and thin. I like low weight, but would not mind a little thickness, if I can open it and clean it easily, change the paste, upgrade easily, have external battery, more room for venting and so on. These are very practical features.

On a related note, I just don't understand the madness of having battery inside the laptop in gaming laptops these days. The heat kills them. These are mostly portable desktops and I can't find any new gaming laptops that have external batteries anymore so that I can use them on just external power. In the rare occasion, it ends up as a very premium feature. These things were basic features in the past.

The glaring omission in the article is Visual Basic for DOS. It had a visual TUI designer in DOS. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vDpzoYgNd0

Even Visual Basic for DOS had a TUI designer. Wasn't addressed in the article.

I used it. The user experience is not remotely close to Delphi, but it has WYSIWYG. The closest Python had to Delphi was Boa Constructor, but it stalled quickly, decades ago.

VB5/6 had native code compilers. Performance wise, the gap was reduced. But it still was only object based and not full OOP, VCL was much better in all respects, so were the GUI builders. The component ecosystem was much better, despite having a much smaller user base. I prefer not to use Object Pascal today, but back then, it was superior to using VC++ or VB.

Same. I learnt VB because VC++ with MFC was too complex for what I needed it for then. Hated VB after seeing Delphi.

I liked Delphi's anchors. They were extremely simple, visually defined, and met all of my layout needs.

> Of course there can be language extensions like C++ Builder did for C++ but they'd need to maintain their own compiler (or fork).

This is exactly what I hope would happen, except this time with Rust or Go. They don't need to integrate fully. I am not hoping for the ability to write Go/Rust for GUI code, just to be able to call into them without the clunky foreign functions.

I leave out Pascal now because besides the GUI part, the value isn't there anymore. The language is archaic otherwise.

> Personally i get the impression that Visual Basic and Delphi's language features were added in tandem with the underlying framework (if not deciding first how the framework and IDE features will look like and then deciding on the language features to support those) whereas modern UI stuff are made with whatever the target language has in place.

I agree. But the features stabilized, more or less. IDE experiences have not gotten better in a long while. It's not much of a moving target.

VB6 was primitive compared to what Delphi gave us. It had live design time data binding, visual form inheritance etc. VB and VC++ were primitive compared to that. VCL vs MFC? No contest. The API was powerful, fast, great to extend by inheritance, best in class layout management. There were about 8000 third party components at web sites like Delphi Super Page. Half of those were free, rest were affordably priced for commercial use.

Much of the 90s experience lives on in FPC/Lazarus, but it did not get much better after that, and few use it. I wish they aligned themselves with a more popular language like Rust or Go for a more cohesive experience, while keeping Object Pascal (built with IDE experience in mind).

I still prefer the GUI building experience in Delphi 6/7 than anything that was produced since then. C#/Winforms is fine, it was designed by the same person - Anders Hejlsberg, but I wanted something native.

It's unbelievable that something modern like Flutter still fails to capture the design convenience of Delphi, from decades ago. Yes, the design markup is great, but I don't even want to look at it most of the time.

The later Swing/SWT editors never came close. Even Qt, which was inspired by it, never provided the component market experience of Delphi, and it was much more bloated in runtimes.

I fell in love with GUI design with Delphi, but otherwise hated it since.

Sure, not in the traditional sense. Since it does not make small standalone libraries, even though possible, I would not make a native extension with it. But juliacall works fine for Python and R. Quite seamless.

What does a modern Fortran bring that Julia does not? Small binaries?

Nim/Julia, IMO.

However....

Nim is unlikely to go mainstream. It's not the next Rust and not for technical reasons.

Julia won't budge Python out of the top slot anytime soon, although it should in many scenarios past simple scripting.

With the right distro, 4GB with just a HDD is quite fine for Chromebook style usage.

They seem to have edited out "open-source" now.

Still, a free for personal use model is better than none. Hopefully, we will soon have some adaptation from Llama 2 that matches it, fairly soon.

I am using a 12 year old Thinkpad as a secondary device. I don't see why it won't last me another 10. It runs a responsive and quite good looking modern Linux desktop environment from a HDD and I am not even using 40% of the RAM I have on it. I am obviously not encoding 4K video, running AI or AAA games on it, but for most things that people do on computers, it's perfectly fine.

This wasn't the case in 20-25 years ago when stuff would outdate real fast. 90% of people don't really need new computers.

I'd take a Delphi/Lazarus UI over most Electron apps. They started fast, took little RAM or disk space, used very little CPU, had fast response times, supported standard UI conventions.

Today, we have endless options. But most are not as comprehensive as what Delphi is/was. I'd rather write a UI in Delphi/Lazarus (LCL/VCL/FireMonkey) than any other UI framework even today. The trouble is, I don't want to use it for anything else other than the UI.

UI design and data binding should be a simple mouse driven activity. That's adequate for most designs. Why do we need code? It's like expecting everyone to use LaTeX than RTF. Sure, it's more flexible, but an overkill.

I wish there are more integrations with modern languages than 20 types of grids with overlapping functionality. I'd write my code in a language appropriate for the task and just use Lazarus for the UI. Currently, Python (Python4Delphi) seems to be the only one with components for that, but even that needs more polish (and largely stagnant for over 20 years). Most I can do is do shared libraries and call in.

The best IMO was in Delphi. Lazarus captures that spirit well today but is mostly unknown.

Netbeans GUI builder was more powerful than VB's in some ways but just made simple things complicated.

VB 5 and 6 were where things worked. They both had native compilers.

Me too. But it just was never enjoyable creating those UIs. I have tried almost all of them. The closest Python had to VB was Boa Constructor. It never really took off.

https://boa-constructor.sourceforge.net/Screenshots/

Python is light years ahead of VB6 in productivity in scripting, except when it comes to putting together a quick database frontend or just any other GUI app. My favorite was Delphi over VB. Nothing ever came close in Python in GUI building, even 25 years later.

I don't disagree with most of that. I studied a fair amount of science, including psychology and cognitive science. I know you can cause unusual states with meditation and you have a right to.

Choosing to experience an out of the body experience or a lucid dream is fine. But believing that you are actually visiting or seeing a remote location is a delusion. Quite a few meditators think they are getting psychic powers with meditation, not just unusual states of consciousness. Look up siddhi.

Fine. I accept that the Army contracts everything out.

In which case, my point is that you were ascribing scientific credibility to the Army because they make stealth bombers and I was arguing that the engineering expertise is a.) not pertinent, b.) not within the institution.

I don't consider Annie Jacobson to be an unbiased source.

Here are some glaring criticisms of her past books in terms of her competence.

Leading space historian Michael J. Neufeld, gave a negative review of the book: “Jacobsen concentrates on the scandals, which inevitably leads to an imbalance in presentation. Little is said about the substantive contributions of von Braun.”

Space historian Dwayne Day, for instance, called Area 51 a "poorly-sourced, error-filled book" in which the author makes an argument that "defies common sense" and is reliant on one anonymous source. Jeffrey T. Richelson and Robert S. Norris, critiquing Jacobsen's factual errors on the blog Washington Decoded, stated that "[t]here are so many mistakes that it is hard to know where to begin ... Area 51 is a case study of how not to research and write about top-secret activities." Historian Richard Rhodes, writing in The Washington Post, also criticized the book's sensationalistic reporting of "old news" and its "error-ridden" reporting. He wrote: "All of [her main source's] claims appear in one or another of the various publicly available Roswell/UFO/Area 51 books and documents churned out by believers, charlatans and scholars over the past 60 years. In attributing the stories she reports to an unnamed engineer and Manhattan Project veteran while seemingly failing to conduct even minimal research into the man's sources, Jacobsen shows herself at a minimum extraordinarily gullible or journalistically incompetent." The book was sharply criticized for extensive errors in an essay by a senior fellow at the Federation of American Scientists and a senior fellow at the National Security Archive.

I will accept it when mainstream psychologists and neuroscientists acknowledge it as something that exists. Not one or two of them, but most of them.

> The very fact that functional brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) have been created demonstrates the brain is indeed a transceiver.

That is not a sound argument. I think you can see why anyone would disagree.

"You humans"? Have you been meditating so hard that you are now hallucinating yourself as beyond human? I can't say I am surprised.

I studied cognitive science. I know cognitive biases. I also know how meditators around me are basically drowning in them with ridiculous psychic beliefs, laughable arguments and no evidence.

I'll leave you to your imagined irony.

If it's around for 3000 years, show the plentiful "non-physical evidence". If you still need to talk about the "possibility", it's just flim flam BS.

If you think testimonies are evidence, and are making appeals to antiquity/tradition, you just aren't thinking in an educated way. None of that is "evidence".

Quite possible. We might also be talking about different kinds of meditation. Mindfulness meditators seem to have a healthy attitude. TM meditators start talking psychic things pretty quickly. The people around me are all TM types.

According to wikipedia:

"Hoffman notes that the commonly held view that brain activity causes conscious experience has, so far, proved to be intractable in terms of scientific explanation"

That's just a fringe position. It may look good on Youtube or a TED Talk. But it has no scientific backing. It is certainly not a "movement" in science. They produced no evidence or even proposed any experiments. It's just idle speculation, not science.

The esoteric/mystical stuff always turned out to be little more than woo. So all the more reason to do "research" in a rigorous way. Individual research ends up little more than making up things. It cannot really be called "research" at all.

The "spiritual experience" is in fact rather common. Nothing esoteric about it, only the wacky explanations of it are. There is a lot of mainstream research about it that "individual researchers" just ignore.

> Philosophical concept that emerged during times when western people were still stacking shit like rocks on top of each other

And which European historian furnished you this tidbit?