somat

My rather pop-sci understanding is that when you start playing around with relativity math, trying various masses and densities you hit something rather worrisome. As you approach some great, but still possible, value the plot goes infinite, the singularity. This is bad for the theory because going asymptotic like that usually indicates a fundamental problem in the math. But relativity does so well everywhere else... What if it could? And thus the black hole was born.

The easy thing to miss, and blew my mind when I read it. is that general relativity is the concept of space-time, emphasis on the time, and this is also compressed by the mass, so if this singularity can actually occur it would also take an infinite amount of time to fall into it. So nothing can actually enter it. From the point of view of an astronaut(deliberately ignoring all the other relativistic implications) flying directly toward the event horizon. As you approach you will quickly see the rest of the universe age and die. and if hawking radiation is real the black hole will evaporate in front of you before you can reach it.

Hell, critical thinking in general will collapse. I mean, even more than it already has due to easy access to the internet.

Thinking through a problem is hard. For the most people will take any chance they can get to not think. Myself included. I probably gain double digits of IQ when my internet goes down.

Probably a stupid question, but what is your mechanical process? that is, how do you make entering a em-dash natural? Personally, I am of the nature that if it does not live on my keyboard I am probably not going to use the character, And I say this as a great aficionado and maintainer of a carefully curated compose key file... That I never use.

Guesses, because I like to guess, replace the dash with an em-dash? map alt+dash? compose-key dash dash dash?(my preferred method), dash dash rewrite rule(now we are getting into science fiction), ligature?

My go to example: IPFS is Plan9 to bittorrent's UNIX. Some achingly beautiful design, willingness to completely disregard existing messy conventions(for example: The ipfs unified url format) and, like you said, still not enough better for people to want to change.

What I want to know is who decided to break px, the last thing we need is yet another screwball physical measurement, css was already full of them. But what "tut tut, everybody is using px and these new hi-dpi displays are rendering things really tiny, we can't have that" and now px as a useful unit is ruined.

Is there a way to use real pixels? My, admittedly quick, search says no. at least nothing jumps out at me from the spec.

An interesting bit of schadenfreude, How does management feel when you try and communicate with them via AI?

In my experience communication via LLM is easily the worst part of them, it feels absolutely miserable to receive that big blob of machine generated fluff. This is especially interesting due to the duality present, it feels pretty great to run them, just sit there and let the machine handle the fluff while you handle the big picture.

Anyhow, usually the flow is the reverse, the boss gives you that big ball of machine fluff and you just have to sit there and take it, fun seeing it go the other way, but seeing as they are in charge I would not be surprised to see directives along the lines of "use more AI it makes you more productive, but don't use it with my reports"

What always got me at the time was retry is understandable, but what the heck is the difference between abort and fail? I don't want to complain too much it was probably in the manual, but as a young teen during my DOS days (there are manuals? read?) The distinction was lost on me.

My understanding today is that one of them(fail?) gives the application a chance to do something clever. Did any application actually handle this gracefully? Something like, Disk 11/15 error(fail) Please put in recovery parity disk.

On the subject of being slightly too pedantic for my own good, using "disk" in a conversation sort of worries me, It does not really matter, everyone knows what you are talking about, but it is not often an actual disk anymore. Is "storage" fine as a replacement? as in, memory vs storage.

I could go full nerd and call it "non-volatile storage" but nobody wants that.

The article covers it, but to reiterate. Yes, The idea is to have a mechanism to map phone numbers to hosts.

The normal path for voip phones given a phone number is to end up at a sip trunk provider go over the traditional phone network (which at this point probably routes over the internet anyway) hit another sip trunk and end up at the receiving sip phone.

This provides a method to bypass the traditional phone network and go directly over the internet. The sip phone looks up the host responsible for that phone number and directly connects. The sip providers would be responsible for maintaining this number to host mapping in dns.

When you think about it DNS is really just a big distributed phone book, a key value store to look up numbers based on names. The reverse records are a method to look up names based on numbers using that same distributed architecture.

There is also an interesting legacy architecture interaction here, traditional phones can only enter numbers. Cell phones could use dns names directly(but don't) or we could use ip addresses as a sort of modern phone number(but don't), The whole world was connected via phone numbers and that is now how we expect phones to operate.

Scorched Earth always comes to mind as an influential early artillery game, but it too was PC, so hard to say.

I actually remember it's stupid tagline better than the name, "The mother of all games" indeed. But that is what I was searching for to get the name.

I am always hit hard by the paradox of choice, it is very hard for me to just rank something, But it is easy to compare two items. Considering the metaphysics of this a little too hard I put together this silly little web toy to explorer my ideas on ranking things. https://compare.outband.net/compare/app/compare.html

It still sort of sucks and you can tell I am not a web dev, but it was interesting to think about.

It does not matter, X11 is also not a display server it is a protocol. That distinction changes nothing.

For what it's worth Xorg is the display server, before that it was XFree86, there was also Xsgi and Xsun and for mac Xquartz, I even saw a neat project once where the Xserver was in javascript, I am trying to find it again but our modern search engines are a bit shit. The point being all of these can interoperate with one another.

  Around computers it is difficult to find the correct unit of time to
  measure progress.  Some cathedrals took a century to complete.  Can you
  imagine the grandeur and scope of a program that would take as long?
                -- Epigrams in Programming, ACM SIGPLAN Sept. 1982

We have our cathedrals, only we are such barbarians as to call them worthless garbage and unfit for purpose and do our best to tear our legacy down.

I mean sure, but anything the build script could do, the build artifact could also do, That is to say, if you don't trust your source why do you trust the thing it compiles into?

The theory is simple, it is a 90 degree rotated polarizing layer, How comfortable you are doing surgery on the delicate LCD assembly is another matter. If I were to do it I think I would buy a couple cheap watches to practice on first.

And Opinion: I wear a factory blackout casio, I like it because it does not have all that great 80's casio text all over the place (I am not sure what is wrong with me) but a downside is the inverted LCD display, it looks very cool, but is also much harder to read, I was trying to see if I could do the mod the other way, back to a light background.

Probably. I was trying to figure out if it could be done with an address family translation, and while ip4 is trivially embedded in an ip6 address, going the other way just does not have enough information. but if you know the domain, that is a simple lookup.

The fun part is, with a dns entry like that they could technically get certs issued for peoples domains if they wanted to. I will be charitable and assume it is just a neat relay someone put together, but they could get up to some real shenanigans if they had a malicious bent. Really nothing worse than cloudflare where much their business is ssl hijacking(correction)termination.

It may be a case of needing write only logging, I always think of the nuclear power station logging all events to the line printer, But I can see a NOC doing the same, How finger ended up triggering it would probably be a fascinating case study of early innocent decisions getting ossified into the infrastructure.

It does not help that things fundamental to the new tech, even though they took real effort to develop, are now exactly those items that are now "obvious to experts in the field" and "overly broad" And then have fun trying to distinguish real fundamentals from items in the form of (existing invention "with a computer") Or whatever the hot new tech of the day is.

A good example(old enough to not matter any more) is the how the Wright brothers invented something fundamentally new, their patent was on how to control an airplane, The problem is, once you see it, it is obvious how to control an airplane. Birds do it, Why should such an simple thing be protected? But conversely. This is a discipline that took the Wrights many years of hard and meticulous work to figure out. Is it morally correct to say "No, we are not going to grant you exploitation rights to this thing you invested so much time and effort developing"?

I don't think patents are inherently evil, however they certainly can be used for evil.

But The basic idea is sound. If you invent a novel mechanism and publish it the government will grant you exclusive economic exploitation rights to that mechanism for the next 25 years. After that it is now fair game.

It is an attempt to solve the real problem that it is much harder to be first than second, the guy in first place has to spend all that time and effort to develop the thing, and the guy in second just has to copy the guy in first. To rectify this social injustice the patent system was developed, where the government would grant and enforce economic exploitation rights of the mechanism to the inventor.

The wright brothers patent was not on wing warping, it was on controlling a vehicle in the air. In short the Wright brothers did not invent the aeroplane they invented how to control a aeroplane.

https://www.wright-brothers.org/History_Wing/Wright_Story/Sh...

"We wish it to be understood, however, that our invention is not limited to this particular construction, since any construction whereby the angular relations of the lateral margins of the aeroplanes may be varied in opposite directions with respect to the normal planes of said aeroplanes comes within the scope of our invention."

Some people (Curtis) felt this claim was far too encompassing and should not be enforced. But I don't know, These guys just spent a decade working out an entirely new discipline, aeronautical control. And you don't think they deserve exclusive exploitation rights to that discipline for the next 20 years?

The turbo button was always on, or it should be. you would turn it off to downgrade your pc to run at the speed of the original IBM PC in the mostly vain hope that whatever old game that was programmed for that exact speed would start to run right. It was slightly be fore my time(we had a 286 with the button, but I was to young to be curious about it) Would the pc take the speed change without problems or was it best to reboot? I sort of hate whatever marketing genius figured out to label it "Turbo" instead of "Slow" But they definitely earned their bonus.

The real weird one from that era was the 7 segment led MHz displays that were popular in the 386/486 era. It was weird because the the chips could not change speed in the first place. And I don't want to say every system was like this, but every one I ever saw was set by a set of static jumpers or a dip switch. When you upgraded your cpu you put the little sticker that came with it on the chassis and changed the jumpers, they served the same purpose.

A lot of early dos development was trying to see how many unix concepts they could fit, directories, pipes, environment, devices.

2BSD is still hanging on getting updates and forked projects to this day. My understanding is that it's longevity in the face of the existence of 4bsd is because it is 16-bit clean, These days it is mainly for people who want a unix for their microcontroller.

Here is one, https://github.com/RetroBSD/retrobsd. This is for the pic32, so I may be wrong about the 16-bit thing.

I don't know if anyone has done it but it looks like it could fit, perhaps not on a original 8086 PC, but perhaps a 286 with 640K.

Glad I am not the only one who carts an id1 directory around. Mine originally came from a retail disk with a funny story, I had bought it for a friend. a birthday present. and a couple years later I bought their old pc from them and that quake disk was in the box of parts. It had came back me.

It is also in the tool options control pane ( Pick layer or guide | move the selected layers).

Not going to say your expectation is wrong, I too almost always want the tool to operate on the selected layer rather than whatever layer has the pixels. But moving the layer with the pixels is not a bad default, it makes single click quick layer alignment moves possible.

Also, salutes, sort of unrelated, but your post made me look into quick selection based editing, And there are some good operations I have never used in there including alt to move the selection and ctrl + alt to move what is in the selection.

I still think the original behavior where it just saves as whatever extension was entered as the name was one of the more enlightened ways to operate.

I sort of get their point. The "Only one of these formats(the one you have never heard of) will save all aspects of your work, every other one will lose things, pick wisely." school of interface design is a massive footgun. But I like interfaces that get out of your way and just let you do things.

And I just had a bright idea, "forget the save dialog, just use the export dialog for everything" but it turns out the export dialog will not let you save to .xcf My disappointment is immeasurable. Why not gimp team? You dashed my last hope for a single unified interface. Somebody had to go out of their way to take that out.

Sqlite is probably overkill, you will probably never have actual relational data in an image format, But what it does bring to the table is a built in b-tree based storage, that is, you don't need to load the entire file into memory to edit it, in a prior age we would use Berkeley db for this. Sqlite in this role(a file format) is probably best thought of as a better superset of the berkleydb style key value store, more than one table per file and additional columns/indexes to keep metadata in.

Nothing wrong with XML, it is well understood, and the tooling is pretty good. But partial loads/edits is one thing it can not do.

The question I always have is "why would the formal verification be any more correct than the program it is verifying?", Note: not bugs in the verification engine, but the spec made for the program.

It is not a big deal, I think formal verification is a very useful tool to help one approach correctness, but let me explain myself. When a program is written it is trying to solve a problem, when it solves that problem correctly it has no bugs, and when it solves that problem incorrectly those are bugs. For complex problems it turns out to be very difficult(impossible) to solve them correctly. Why is there an assumption that the formal verification spec will be any more correct than the program itself? They are both trying to solve very complex problems.

I was trying to get a feel for this by reading through the sel4 git changes trying to figure out how many bug fixes were for the OS and how many were for the spec. No real conclusion unfortunately. because they almost always have to fix both at the same time. a bug found in the OS means you have a bad spec and a bug found in the spec means your OS probably has a bug.

Probably junk science, But I like this attempt to describe the electron via möbius twisted em fields.

https://quicycle.com/understanding-electrons/

Fair enough, But I am of the opinion that blocks of code and magic numbers should almost always be named, There is a lot of intent that is lost when the name is skipped.

It is also my main complaint about traditional math notation, They enjoy trying to make the notation as concise as possible, single letter symbols, embedded subparts, no names for anything. I understand that having super a tight concise notation is a massive benefit while in the flow state, thinking about the problem. But man it makes it rough for us casual math enjoyers coming in fresh to the topic.

I have it it in my .XCompose as

    <Multi_key> <c> <c> <c> <p> : "\xe2\x98\xad" #symbol representing proletarian solidarity between agricultural and industrial workers

Never used, but I laugh every time I see it there.

As a slightly related tangent, The compose key mnemonic interface for rarely used characters is pretty great, beats trying to remember alt codes.