smartmic

> For the first time in my life, I’m suddenly wary of meeting other "computer programmers" in the wild. I feel like there’s a decent chance we won’t actually have much in common, let alone values or morality.

Maybe the social group the author is referring to has split up (forked)? For example, I wouldn't call anyone producing vibe coded AI stuff a "programmer". That noun will be reserved for the original group.

It is at the core of the SQLite test suite and also a first-class citizen in interfacing to it.

For those interested in learning about the inner workings of computers, I also recommend the book Code by Charles Petzold.

https://codehiddenlanguage.com/

I agree. But at least in a democratic system, the "each and everyone of us" are politicians that each and everyone elects. So it starts from the basis, IMHO.

It is important to keep reminding ourselves that climate change is a real problem for humanity and that each and every one of us contributes to its intensification or mitigation through our decisions. It is a problem that requires solutions, but implementing these solutions involves so much inertia that it can sometimes be painful.

And let's contrast that with the AI hype. It's more the opposite, a kind of solution to problems we didn't really have, but are now being persuaded we do. It would be sensible to invest an equal share of the resources currently being pumped into AI with uncertain outcomes into the complex issue of climate change. And, no, AI won't solve it; unfortunately, it only makes it worse.

It's a pity. It's also a step back from valuing the Unix philosophy, which has its merits, especially for those with a "learning the system from scratch" mindset. Sorry, but I have no sympathy for systemd.

From the article:

> I am also deeply sick and tired of maintaining large Python scripts recently, and crave the modularity and type safety of OCaml.

I can totally relate. Switching from Python to a purely functional language can feel like a rebirth.

Cool, I like these kinds of projects. When it comes to embedding a scripting language in C, there are already some excellent options: Notable ones are Janet, Guile, and Lua. Tcl is also worth considering. My personal favorite is still Janet[0]. Others?

[0]: https://janet-lang.org/

Same for me. I would love to use it on my Sway desktop, but never managed to make it run there.

And Void Linux. And Gentoo. And Alpine Linux. And Slackware. And others.

I use Fossil extensively, but only for personal projects. There are specific design conditions, such as no rebasing [0], and overall, it is simpler yet more useful to me. However, I think Fossil is better suited for projects governed under the cathedral model than the bazaar model. It's great for self-hosting, and the web UI is excellent not only for version control, but also for managing a software development project. However, if you want a low barrier to integrating contributions, Fossil is not as good as the various Git forges out there. You have to either receive patches or Fossil bundles via email or forum, or onboard/register contributors as developers with quite wide repo permissions.

[0]: https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/rebaseharm.md

Not all reading is the same. In other words, I wish this article had differentiated between different types of reading. For example, I read that many young adults have picked up reading "new adult" genre books. They enjoy the physical experience of an analog medium and consume one edition after another of popular series. This sounds fine at first, but the content is problematic. These books are not literature, and they may convey problematic views of behavior. For example, they may perpetuate outdated views of relationships between men and women, portraying them as unequal and reproducing clichéd stereotypes from the last millennium.

In short, the article focuses only on the amount of reading, but the content is also important. This should be part of the equation.

> Every bad day for microsoft is yet another glorious day for linux.

Nah. If that were the case, Linux would dominate personal computer statistics. The reality is that most mainstream users just don't care. But, of course, that won't stop us.

I spent a long time tinkering with the tooling, which meant that writing always took a back seat or was put off. As a transition, I decided to use Bear Blog [0] for writing, and when I eventually find a self-hosted solution that works for me, I'll just switch over. And Bear Blog is in line with my values, unlike so many other platforms.

[0]: https://bearblog.dev/

You make a good point. From a philosophical point of view, abstractions should hide complexity and make things easier for the human user. It should be like a pyramid: the bottom layer should be the most complex, and each subsequent layer should be simpler. The problem is that many of today's abstractions are built on past technology, which was often much better designed and simpler due to the constraints of that time. Due to the divergent complexity of today's abstractions and unavoidable leaks, we have a plethora of "modern" frameworks and tools that are difficult to use and create mental strain for developers. In short, I always avoid using such frameworks and prefer the old, boring basics wherever possible.

Let me expand on this with a link to the article "Rebase Considered Harmful" [0].

I also prefer Fossil to Git whenever possible, especially for small or personal projects.

[0] https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/rebaseharm.md

Repo: https://github.com/kaorahi/patched-historical-atlas

Yes, that is also my feeling. But comparing an interpreted language with a compiled one is not really fair.

Here is my quick benchmark. I refrain from using Python for most scripting/prototyping task but really like Janet [0] - here is a comparison for printing the current time in Unix epoch:

    $ hyperfine --shell=none --warmup 2  "python3 -c 'import time;print(time.time())'" "janet -e '(print (os/time))'"
  Benchmark 1: python3 -c 'import time;print(time.time())'
  Time (mean ± σ):      22.3 ms ±   0.9 ms    [User: 12.1 ms, System: 4.2 ms]
  Range (min … max):    20.8 ms …  25.6 ms    126 runs

  Benchmark 2: janet -e '(print (os/time))'
  Time (mean ± σ):       3.9 ms ±   0.2 ms    [User: 1.2 ms, System: 0.5 ms]
  Range (min … max):     3.6 ms …   5.1 ms    699 runs

  Summary
  'janet -e '(print (os/time))'' ran
    5.75 ± 0.39 times faster than 'python3 -c 'import time;print(time.time())''

[0]: https://janet-lang.org/

I am a Gnus user. My 2 cents…

concerning (1): I have no offline sync in place, all my emails stay on the server. The IMAP protocol has a decent server-side search included[0], combined with Gnus unified search syntax[1], I enjoy a hassle-free search experience.

[0]: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/gnus/Sea...

[1]: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/gnus/Sea...

But AI is next in line as a tool to accelerate this, and it has an even greater impact than social media or troll armies. I think one lever is working towards "enforced conformity." I wrote about some of my thoughts in a blog article[0].

[0]: https://smartmic.bearblog.dev/enforced-conformity/

Expanding the "Gradual rollout" section is … interesting. I could hardly read it, let alone understand it straight away. For me a clear indicator that I am trying to ingest AI generated content. It's so embarrasing - is quality in documentation now a foreign concept in the age of AI, or does nobody simply care?

Debian Stable.

Thanks for clarification! I meant more, why isn't there a C API first, but Rust, Haskell, and Go before that — that's kind of surprising or new to me.

With all the @ symbols, it reminds me a lot of Lout.

Unfortunately, Lout never really took off, but I have fond memories of it. I liked it more than LaTeX, too.

[0]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Lout

I am puzzled by this:

> A official c library doesn’t exist yet unfortunately, but there’s several out there you can try.

> Landlock is a Linux Security Module (LSM) available since Linux 5.13

Since when is not a C API the first and foremost interface for developers when it comes to Linux kernel stuff?

A question I only dare to ask myself in these times of LLM: Is this even a real human being or already an instance of an ‘agentic system’?

Agreed. I once used it for data preparation for a data science project (GNU APL). After a steep learning curve, it felt very much like writing math formulas — it was fun and concise, and I liked it very much. However, it has zero adoption in today's data science landscape. Sharing your work is basically impossible. If you're doing something just for yourself, though, I would probably give it a chance again.

I actually confused AsciiMath with UnicodeMath[0]. Interesting that this hasn't been mentioned here yet. Check out its playground[1].

[0]: https://www.unicode.org/notes/tn28/UTN28-PlainTextMath-v3.1....

[1]: https://murrayiii.github.io/UnicodeMathML/playground/

It would be much more readable if AsciiMath[0] is used and still gives you the benefit to render it with MathJax if required.

[0] https://asciimath.org/

I use XQuery to transform XML data. Whatever can be done with XSLT can also be done in XQuery. It is a functional language and, unlike XSLT, it is supported by more tools for newer versions (XSLT > 1.0 is only supported by Saxon, as far as I know). Overall, it feels much more modern and ergonomic for querying and transforming XML. Best of all: XQuery 3.1 supports JSON natively — I have also adopted it for JSON in some ETL pipelines.

Check Wikipedia for more information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XQuery