This seems to have a lot in common with how the Nabu computers worked, especially the continuous loop of programming to get around the fact that you couldn't upload data back to the cable company.
Really cool!
Readit NewsKehvarl commented on Reverse engineering the Sega Channel game image file format infochunk.com/schannel/in... · Posted by u/ndiddy
Kehvarl commented on A Road to Common Lisp (2018) stevelosh.com/blog/2018/0... · Posted by u/fuzztester
I wanted to love Common Lisp, but as a Vim user every day was a struggle. One typically uses plugins (Slimv, Vlime) that contort buffers in bizarre ways in order to simulate the SLIME EMacs REPL — if not, they will lose out on the interactive development experience that is so central to CL.
Being tied to either EMacs or an enterprise solution like LispWorks to get the full language experience was ultimately a non-starter. I’d love for someone to build an alternative CL development experience that could work in a wider range of text editors and IDEs.
There is a lot to learn from CL, but I think it can be hard to access for most developers.
I had similar issues trying to get used to EMACS when I was playing the CL. Add to that the fact that I tend to use Windows at least half of the time, and I wanted an alternative.
I ended up setting up Atom with SLIMA and some other plugins to do CL development on Windows and Ubuntu. I even wrote up some very sparse instructions https://github.com/Kehvarl/roguelike-tutorial-cl/blob/main/d...
While Atom is gone, Pulsar now has a SLIMA plugin to allow Lisp interaction.
Kehvarl commented on MacRelix – Unix-like features for classic Mac OS macrelix.org/... · Posted by u/Lammy
This makes me wonder.. Are there any quirky whimsical or nostalgic but still functional desktop OS out there.. Like the fantasy console PICO-8, but for Desktop applications?
The makers of Pico-8 just released a fantasy desktop called Picotron, and it's rather amusing. Not really a suitable daily-driver yet, though.
Kehvarl commented on Every default macOS wallpaper 512pixels.net/projects/de... · Posted by u/jorgesborges
My last mac was a Powerbook g4 12 inch with OS 10.3 Panther, but for some reason I clearly recall the 10.0 wallpaper being the one it came with and the one I stared at for years. The proper 10.3 wallpaper doesn't look familiar at all.
I believe this is why we're seeing some of the industry starting to experiment with pre-fabbed homes that are modular but can be constructed using the automation we see in car manufacturing.
The weak link in creating ever more complex homes, with ever more stringent building codes, at faster rates, is to remove the "humans with nail guns and drills" from the construction process.
At some point, us meat sacks are the weak link in optimizing an industry. Humans can only go so fast. That's why (as you've said) we've seen massive gains in productivity for other manufacturing industries.
Back in 2003-2007, I worked for a home builder who vertically integrated and went for maximized modularity. In '05 we expanded our truss yard to 2 large presses and 4 automated saws, and added a wall-framing yard what worked the same way as the truss yard. Add in that they bought a concrete company to do the slabs, and a 2-story house could go from pour to sheeting in 35 days. Plumbing, electrical, and finishing jobs could take as little as an additional 30.
Since the parent company dissolved them in '08, I haven't seen any of the other subsidiaries using the same techniques or scheduling, and it's always rather surprised me. They invested literally 10s of millions of dollars into us figuring out how to make it all work, then trashed the knowledge.
Because it removes the clutter of your desktop + other windows. I think many would agree. Sure, there are times you need to see windows side-by-side, and there is affordance for that. But mostly, a person is doing one task at a time.
As my displays have gotten larger, I've found I want my windows to take up less and less of them. I may occasionally full-screen something, but it always feels incredibly difficult to deal with. As primarily a Windows user, I've more than once wished I had a "fit to content" button like Mac's.
Just another instance of different users having different patterns.
If I have a proper cleaning cloth and some cleaning spray handy I'll use that, otherwise I'll just use my shirt or a clean microfiber cloth. Even with that abuse, the coating on my lenses tends to last roughly 2 years. I've never managed to cause enough scratching on my lenses to bother me before it was time to see about getting new ones anyway.
Exactly what I wanted was a MBP2015 13/15 inch with "retina display" ie. 2560x1600 px glossy with anti reflective coating (the first iterations would have the coating get loose but I was able to get free replacement on both). Not matte. Its what I got (both 13" and 15"), though they're showing their age. With brightness on full, there's barely any reflection (I get easily distracted and I don't notice it). If Mac ecosystem is a must, the spiritual successor would be a M1-based laptop. These have, on paper, even better screens.
For me, I prefer to keep my screen brightness at 50% or so. In that case a glossy screen is just a distracting mass of reflections, where a matte display is pleasantly usable. Color accuracy isn't an issue for anything I deal with, so the more comfortable appearance of the matte display is a clear winner.
For my digital-artist friends, they do prefer the over-bright glossy displays since it's actually a critical need for their process.
Kehvarl commented on Engineers should invest in decision-making skills early reforge.com/blog/technica... · Posted by u/znpy
I think most software engineers are (in a way) glad that they don't have to talk to customers, and that there is someone in the middle. Managers and such are tolerated by developers for this reason.
The biggest problem with this stance is that far too often those middle-managers or other customer interfaces understand neither the customer's actual needs nor the programmer's needs.
Every successful project I've been part of has required me to meet directly with the customer and understand what isn't working. Asking someone else to ask the customer for a specification just leads to the wrong solutions being solved or an endless stream of feature requests that make no sense in isolation.