smallduck

Nasir Gebelli. Wrote Apple 2 games by dictating bytes typed into the mini-assembler, went on to write/co-design the early Final Fantasy titles. Legend.

The trouble is people have gained employment from doing the things he's pushing to totally automate. This shift goes way beyond inventing the technology but also re-inventing economics and society and from a glance at his website's mission statements it seems that he think this isn't his problem.

Governments are bad: long before now there should have been rules about applying 100%-automation to previously people-driven industries, public debate about the ramifications and proposed means to keep the resulting economy working for masses of people.

That's the purpose of economies and societies, after all, to enable the livelihood of the masses. Not to fulfill the fever dream of entitled asshats at the expense of billions of livelihoods.

So if governments are as bad, and woefully delayed, at acting to support the social transformations of these utopian dreams, its the responsibility to the industrial forces pursuing them to proactively drag governments into doing so. Any firm doing one without equally the other, I just cannot support or take seriously.

A smart phone's primary function is to initiate and receive phone calls, or arguably 1/3 of it's primary function if the metric is the Jobs iPhone launch presentation, however since "smart phone" and "iPhone" have "phone" in their names I'm going to argue its their primary function.

People have come to expect that phones nearly always work, and rely on them for critical communication with loved ones, services like emergency services. When these aren't dependable you don't have a phone but instead a toy.

The case made two decades ago is that running arbitrary software on a phone incurs a risk that malware can compromise the device and alter its dependability. _General purpose computers don't have this historical burden._ Phone and mobile OS makers sell their products with their purposeful limitations made fairly clear. You want a mobile device with different capabilities then seek out am alternate device, it's kinda obvious.

There's always communities of people who attempt to repurpose the products they own for purposes the weren't originally intended, and I would like to see that laws that make that hobby more legitimate and legal. I would love to see 3rd parties able to support these hobbyists, that would be great. But Apple, Google with their hardware partners have no obligation to do so, and justifiable positions for making repurposing non-trivial to do.

Portable Dog Killer

It seems all that sucking up hasn't completely payed off, has it Tim. Appeasing authoritarians is never the answer.

To anyone who thought Apple simply copied what they called at Xerox Parc, check this one out.

Are these subsidies to end users, contributing towards retail or perhaps discount service fees? This shouldn't be how it works. Services should be given free to qualifying users (at some service tier) and providers should be paid directly to offset their cost of that service.

Providers should not be making market-standard profits, or revenue that subsidize ventures other than the services rendered to those users, like media creation or M&A.

"Recent leaks from Meta show that executives there worried that if they didn’t censor accurate information that the Biden administration didn’t like, the company could face severe consequences." dead giveaway about this article's author bias.

I live in Metropolitan Vancouver, somewhere with very low vaccination hesitancy, and still someone in my circle only got vaccinated because of restrictions. Restaurants were re-opening and she couldn't join in without getting the vaccine.

How knows how many avoided infection at all, severe symptoms, or even death because they were similarly convinced by restrictions and mandates. In this light, I really don't have much sympathy for some people who felt a little discriminated against. A public heath emergency doesn't care about your petty feelings.

It would be nice if this was a common OS feature. For some platforms however, system APIs implement the undo stack by way of pointers into runtime objects. A macOS application, for example, has model functions for each kind of document change, and these end with constructing an undo stack item. This contains pointers to the model object and inverse model function, plus captured parameters for that function to perform the undo. (Elegantly, when the inverse functions are called during an undo, the undo stack items they make effectively build a redo stack)

To save this undo stack on this and similar platforms would also require changing the undo mechanism entirely, from using pointers into using static references having meaning across instances of the document model. The inverse model function would have to be identified by an enumeration, the object to change would have to be identified by a kind of search path. The details about saving the data, and where to save it, would be the tiniest part of this problem.

But even on these platforms, if an individual app wishes to implement a custom undo stack which supported this feature, that would be very possible. If cross-platform frameworks implemented support for this that could be a definite advantage over native APIs.

"I will soon start a series of posts about the Apple IIgs, the most successful of the series." This https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/a/498 claims the 2e outsold the 2gs by more than 4 to 1. The former was in the market for far longer, was cheaper, and thus was the mainstay purchase for many mid/late-1980s schools.

Indeed the intent, though not expressed in the Objective-C declaration through the type system, is that the format string is a string literal.

However the intent of the Swift call described in the article is indeed that of a string literal with 2 data "parameters".

So is the correct use of NSLog in this case is this:

    NSLog("%@", "Failed to get modification date at URL: \(url) - \(error)")

This should really be the behavior of NSLog in Swift, that it expands not to the variadic

    NSLog(format-string-parameter, objc-object-parameters..)

but to

    NSLog(@"%@", string-parameter)

Pure B.S.

"Most Software developers also can skip the 2021 lineup since compilation and build of most languages happens in a single core and thats what consumes all the time."

First of all: "that's".

Secondly, anyone using modern tools has build pipelines that are capable of maxing out all available cores, including most developers targeting Apple platforms using their Xcode app. In those situations one also needs lots of RAM and fast I/O.

I found clang multi-core benchmarks on geekbench.com:

M1 Mac Mini 8145 = 63.5 Klines/sec https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/10517829

M1 Max MBP 13442 = 104.7 Klines/sec https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/10496766 (similar for M1 Pro, which should be the ideal model for most developers as they rarely need top GPU performance)

As soon as you refer to Russia's involvement in the 2016 election using Trump's dismissive terminology, you lose all credibility.

The question is, how cheap might this make it to build Tokomacs compared to the cost of, say, ITER?

This article largely misses the point on these reactors. Liquid fueled, low pressure fission reactors make sense, solid fuel, water cooled, high pressure reactors are stupid. This is the key factor, not Thorium.

Thorium is good to use for nations without much Uranium supply (in a reactor its turned into Uranium which is what fuels the reaction), but some of the small modular reactor designs inching towards the market today are designed for Uranium molten salts too.

Cooling isn't the point of the liquid fuels. Energy is extracted from running the fuel salt through heat exchangers, so that's cooling I guess. However the reactor and fuel are engineered to maintain optimal conditions by design not by brute force cooling. High temperature without pressurization, mixing to allow burning all the reactants, easy extraction of by-products, and simple means for walk-away safety as a backup are all more important aspects of liquid fuels.

This video is a great intro and explains most of that better than 3 paragraphs can https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7baTdyHv8g most everything on that channel is related to Thorium or next-gen reactors in general.

This reads like fiction, reminiscent of William Gibson maybe, is it for real? Or "was it" is maybe the right question, perhaps it all crashed and burned.

From the Commodore PET wikipedia page: "A series of problems meant that production versions did not begin to arrive until December 1977, by which time the TRS-80 and Apple II had already begun deliveries."

As far as I could ever tell, nobody had these older Commodores, well maybe some schools. IIRC I only saw one years later when they were already retro. Although one could justifiably say there were retro the year of release, looking like they were from some 60's sci-fi movie.

I'm surprised to see how much cheaper they were than the Apple ][ according to wikipedia, although I shouldn't be. A school paper I did in 1994 was to compare and contrast the different computers my family considered before buying a //e that summer. It was only then that I realized how unaffordable the Apple computers were in comparison to everything else, especially the Commodore 64. I couldn't find anything justifiable for my paper to justify the choice. Even back then being an Apple fan was more about style and intangibles. And Ultima III.

Repeating the quote: "experts warn that the COVID-19 shouldn't be .. compared to a bad case of the flu". Contrasting the victim counts literally implies the comparison this article warns against.

There will someday be games supporting TiltFive AR (tiltfive.com) that will be a great for this use case.

For something like chess, for example, the player on each end could have physical pieces, something that would work well for non-gamers/techies.

Similar notions from a few years ago:

https://speakerdeck.com/akosma/cocoa-is-the-new-carbon-the-f...

https://smallduck.wordpress.com/2015/11/17/the-new-carbon/

I would think it's because Xcode uses the implementation of SwiftUI present in the OS to render the preview, which is only present in Catalina and not in Mojave. I presume they didn't think it worth the effort to re-implement SwiftUI rendering within Xcode itself just to support the older OS.

re the apple 2 font, yes i instantly recognized the space invaders page in the book to be exactly, or nearly so, the upper case 40-column character set used on the apple 2.

ha, i used the condensed (ie. 80-column) version of this font in my terminal too, and for coding as well. see the xcode theme i made... https://smallduck.wordpress.com/2015/06/03/throwback-xcode-t...

A launch from a balloon of course.

You're wrong.

Certainly true that more horizontal spacing between sentences is good for readability. Certainly false that hitting the spacebar twice, like a caveman, is the way to achieve this.