smurpy

Interesting connections with motion jpeg, animated gif and RFB (Remote Frame Buffer as used by VNC). The latter has me particularly curious, though all of them seem like mad hacks in search of faint excuses. Imagining a bi-directional link, still though, without any idea of WHY beyond "Because it was there".

Earth time <> Sol time <> SagA* time

We don’t have much trouble yet with relativistic temporal distortions, but Earth’s motion causes us to lose about 0.152 seconds per year relative to the Solar system. Likewise we lose about 8.5 seconds per year relative to the Milky Way. I wonder when we’re going to start to care. Presumably there would be consideration of such issues while dealing with interplanetary spacecraft, timing burns and such.

Not at all, just a bit of word play. It's "officially" a meme even! Cheers

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/touch-of-the-tism

Here is the three original Postscript Books. They are the classic way to learn PS.

The Blue Book (Tutorial and Cookbook) https://archive.org/details/postscriptlangua0000unse

The Red Book (Language Reference) https://archive.org/details/postscriptlangua0000unse_l1h3

The Green Book (Language Design) https://archive.org/details/PSGreenBook

As a language it is lovely, if you're a fan of minimalism -- being stack-happy, like FORTH. It is well worth learning even just to flex the mind, but especially if you need to make complex diagrams and value stable APIs.

Haha! I used to do LOTS of work in PostScript. The biggest project was a system which was part Python for the management, but PS for the content of a database publishing engine, motivated by the the need to generate crazily complicated real estate books, back in the day. There was a whole huge template system for different kinds of commercial and residential property and all sorts of different sections, ranges and indices. It was responsible for generating hundreds of multi-hundred page documents per day for dozens of real estate boards across Western Canada. Each publication was about as complicated as a Yellow Pages and generated daily and automatically from ever-changing data. In fact, the underlying database schema could evolve automatically through the update mechanisms in RETS (the Real Estate Transaction System API), though that was on the Python side. The rendering happened using GhostScript out to PDF for printing and electronic distribution to realtors. A stupid amount of detail, but what else is a touch of the 'tsim for anyway?!?

My other PostScript stuff was mostly fun and experimental: some fractal hacks which made printers and typesetters groan and some collaborative knowledge visualization stuff. I got started with PostScript on my NextStation in 1991 and it served me well, being the basis of a whole career of programmatic visualization.

Check out Kroki for a multi-syntax wrapper around a bunch of text driven diagram generators —- including Mermaid, PlantUML, Ditaa, GraphViz, SVGBob, etc, etc

https://kroki.io/

Back in 1992 or so the NeXT could distinguish (was it 16 or) 64 fixed, trained, phrases. Point being, it doesn’t take too much compute with a finite vocabulary.

Oh yeah, and I generally keep such a monster running in a GNU screen via mosh on servers too. Loverly! They can run for years.

I've gravitated to the use of a 43" 4K TV as my main monitor (and have a few others scattered about for auxiliary purposes) and when hacking hard have a full screen emacs window split into lots of panes, vertically and horizontally a la Mondrian. I am confused about how others get anything done without a similar configuration! This new feature seems like it will be great fun.

Exactly. One whale’s weight of antimatter

I came to the chat before reading the piece only to find myself confronted with my assumption that it was about going deeper into flow while coding — and this is how some innovations happen!

Fascinating exercise and nice work!

Adjacent (resilient, low-level, big-vision, auditable) projects include:

http://collapseos.org/ Forth OS, bootstrapable from paper, for z80

https://urbit.org/ standalone, distributed, auditable, provable, minimalist

https://justine.lol/ APE (actually portable executable); cosmopolitan libc

I lived in Inuvik, NWT (Canada) for a decade in my youth. It's above the Arctic Circle and has 30 days without sunlight, bracketed by months of near darkness. Each year a new crop of noobs would move in and there would be a little exodus when the folks who just couldn't hack the dark would finally realize what they had signed up for. Summer was grand compensation though, three or four months of the sun being up whenever you might be tempted to be. An odd thing was, in the summer, being up at 3 am and seeing things uncannily lit from an unfamiliar side! Quite a fascinating place to experience, all in all, and well worth the couple thousands of kilometers of driving to get there too.

My friend Colin Broughton completed the first full implementation of the Algo68 spec. Apparently there was some concern that it was not going to be implementable!

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

I personally saw a rat cavorting quite vivaciously on a pallet of dogfood in the Bonnie Doon K-Mart (in Edmonton, Alberta) in around 2002. I have no basis for any claims about whether said rat was in a committed sexual relationship so cannot make any assertions about whether it was part of a breeding population in Alberta. Perhaps "spontaneous generation" (see Middle Ages) is a thing! Admittedly, it might have been a hapax -- some bold and singular rat Magellan travelling the Earth on bulk food pallets. I dare not presume.

To staunch any other niggling, I am neither sure of the year nor whether that property was bearing the K-Mart branding at that time. It has also been a Zellers and a Target, if memory serves.

I see this discussion as failing to touch on two main points.

This coverage does a poor job of conveying whether he could tell that the craft was climbing, though evidently it was. A crucial detail in his situation was whether the vehicle was responding to his control directions and whether its trajectory was upward, hence without an immediate threat of crash. There is a faint indication that he should have known that his aircraft was in fact climbing and that, as a consequence, he was going to have time to problem solve.

It sounds like the group he led is tasked with establishing the limits of and determining the norms for the operation of the various craft they fly. This suggests that a greater spirit of discovery and exploration of the letter of the rules was in order than he happened to exhibit on that occasion.

He had that command taken away, not his flight privileges, because the shortcoming he exhibited was indicative of his personal unsuitability for exploring the limits of his vehicle and the policies for its operation — in short for doing that particular, exceedingly demanding job. He gets his choice of other posts, but not continuing that crucial and complicated role for which he evidently did not have the right stuff. No shame. Peter Principle avoided. Everybody did the right thing, including his commanders.

Basically, if you're a coder and you make documents or images which are complicated, structured, data-driven or orderly enough to seem amenable to programmatic construction, then Postscript really is worth learning. It would be no problem to whack together an open source toolchain for making videos using postscript too, if you were trying to make programmatic 2D or 2.5D animations. Just sling ghostview and ffmpeg together and Robert is your parent's brother. Javascript with SVG or Canvas is certainly better if you need interactivity, soft realtime or web-only delivery though.

Hey, that's a pretty handy document. Interesting to see it support PS in the context of LaTeX and Word.

I used to dream in PostScript I was coding in it so much -- the experience was dreaming about stack-oriented coding, as opposed to vector visuals, for clarity. I got started coding in PS on the NeXT in '91 doing data driven graph visualizations. PS was great for some algorithmically-generated logos too. Really fun were some fractals which strained the imagesetters and printers they ran on. Learning PS really paid off though when I ended up using it to create a database publishing engine for real-estate listings. It used Python for data wrangling and orchestration and then PostScript for the dynamic book generation and layout. It was used back when real estate agents relied on giant books printed daily, which this engine generated for dozens of markets across Western Canada. These documents were pretty gnarly too, including property-type-specific templates, various indexes, property images, market-specific variations, etc -- and doing all that with the absolute control which PostScript permitted was fantastic. It would have been nightmarish to try to do such things in LaTeX, Word or the DTP tools of the era. PDF rendering was automated with GhostView so the whole toolchain was open source.

I'd suggest that if extreme precision, detail and complexity are your requirements and especially if rendering to PDF and screen bitmaps are needed then PostScript is still very relevant. It's also quite fun as a developer.

At first I thought "wow, they're so smooth" but then realized that the dynamics must be so incredibly fast that the fuzzy smoothness is really just motion blur. Amazing though....

Doubtless there are lots of other ways to get it running but I just tried it myself by: * 1990 * System 6.0.5 * Customize... * Machine: Mac II * Infinite HD > Multimedia > HyperCard > HyperCard

Hi Hussam. I really like the hTime idea! The compelling perspective on this, for me, is to see it as a planetary frame of reference for thinking about time. Of course there is UTC but we don't casually and habitually speak about UTC because it involves "conversion" (between our own TZ and UTC) and "disambiguation" (what what, are we talking about UTC here? gotta check the TZ, ah, yes). The way your hTime differs is that it uses new a new alphabetic nomenclature for the global time, so it carries the signal right on its face that it is this new system. Definitely a subtle point, but I think a reasonable one. It'll be great when hTime "faces" for smart watches are available. That would speed adoption by making it easier for people to start "living" in planetary time. Personally, I'm all about this planetary cognitive context in my own work, so I have sympathy for the challenges you're dealing with landing the message of the value that hTime offers. Good luck and keep it up, it's an important innovation.

It looks like one of the authors is on HN with us. Can you offer any insight into the cause of the confusing language in the "Science News" piece? It reads like it was written by a bot not a human.

In the sentence "With the theory physicists Gregory Breit and John Wheeler were able to prove that when two high-energy photons collide, a positron and an electron arise, i.e. matter is formed" shouldn't the word be "predict" not "prove"?

A more flagrant example of a strange word choice for a human science writer to make is "A direct conversion would require a laser that emits gamma-ray photons in a highly concentrated steel." Shouldn't the word "steel" instead be "beam"? This seems like the sort of thing an uncomprehending bot might do, conflate those two words.

Are my the nits I've picked, above, unfounded? Does the author of the original paper have any information which might suggest that an actual human wrote the "Science News" piece?

If not I would suggest that we've got a bot on the loose! Eeek!

Further, I think I'm seeing rather a lot of "content" floating around recently which smacks of machine origins.

Also, to Daniel... Great paper. Amazing stuff!

Two thumbs up for Refactoring by Fowler. Exactly. Even if you already know know the 300 odd refactorings he documents... The fact that his names let you talk about them with your team or more easily treat them as abstractions is a powerful win. That book is one of the best investments you can make.

Here is a version which uses OSX's say command for a spoken announcement of "github is up again". It also checks once every minute instead of once a second.

    while true; do curl -s https://status.github.com/api/status.json | egrep 'good|minor' && say -r 160 "github is up again" || echo -n .; sleep 60; done

Edit: accept a status of minor as an indication of up-ness.