I may be wrong, but I believe the name of the type family is simply Times New; the name of the italic face would then be Times New Italic rather than the contradictory Times New Roman Italic. It’s strange that the name of the roman face specifically is always used; I’d suppose it’s merely because that’s how the digital fonts were inadvertently named? Times New Roman has been the name in dropdown menus, and most laypeople are unfamiliar with roman as a term of art, so there’s no reason people wouldn’t use that name. But I wonder how the digital fonts came to be named Times New Roman rather than Times New.
Readit Newsagalunar commented on A brief history of Times New Roman typographyforlawyers.com/... · Posted by u/tosh
agalunar commented on Ditch your mutex, you deserve better chrispenner.ca/posts/mute... · Posted by u/commandersaki
> A data race occurs any time two threads access the same memory location concurrently and non-deterministically when at least one of the accesses is a write.
From what I understand of the C++ memory model (shared by C and Rust), this is not the definition of data race – a data race occurs when two or more threads access memory concurrently where at least one access is a write and the accesses are unsynchronized. However, synchronized accesses may not have a deterministic ordering, in which case a race condition occurs.
(Confusing as it may be, I believe this is standard terminology.)
agalunar commented on I'm working on implementing a programming language all my own eli.li/to-the-surprise-of... · Posted by u/ingve
I love that you are using colon for the assignment operator. This is absolutely correct. Most languages use the equal sign as the assignment operator in most contexts and then the colon in limited contexts. This comes from Fortan and its just wrong. The equal sign should be reserved for comparisons, because that is what it means in mathematics.
I’d argue there’s a very big difference between “x: y” and “x : y”. I can only see the former as assignment and the latter as the has-type relation.
(I find it baffling in the extreme that in many mainstream languages the convention is to write type annotations as “x: T”, both prima facie and because in those languages the notation then collides with field assignment!)
agalunar commented on Undefined Behavior in C and C++ (2024) russellw.github.io/undefi... · Posted by u/imadr
A small nit: the development of Unix began on the PDP-7 in assembly, not the PDP-11.
(The B language was implemented for the PDP-7 before the PDP-11, which are rather different machines. It’s sometimes suggested that the increment and decrement operators in C, which were inherited from B, are due to the instruction set architecture of the PDP-11, but this could not have been the case. Per Dennis Ritchie:¹
> Thompson went a step further by inventing the ++ and -- operators, which increment or decrement; their prefix or postfix position determines whether the alteration occurs before or after noting the value of the operand. They were not in the earliest versions of B, but appeared along the way. People often guess that they were created to use the auto-increment and auto-decrement address modes provided by the DEC PDP-11 on which C and Unix first became popular. This is historically impossible, since there was no PDP-11 when B was developed. The PDP-7, however, did have a few “auto-increment” memory cells, with the property that an indirect memory reference through them incremented the cell. This feature probably suggested such operators to Thompson; the generalization to make them both prefix and postfix was his own.
Another person puts it this way:²
> It's a myth to suggest C’s design is based on the PDP-11. People often quote, for example, the increment and decrement operators because they have an analogue in the PDP-11 instruction set. This is, however, a coincidence. Those operators were invented before the language [i.e. B] was ported to the PDP-11.
In any case, the PDP-11 usually gets all the love, but I want to make sure the other PDPs get some too!)
agalunar commented on The demographic future of humanity: facts and consequences [pdf] sas.upenn.edu/~jesusfv/Sl... · Posted by u/akyuu
Funny, I just wrapped a blog post about this: https://green.spacedino.net/i-dont-worry-about-population-de...
Good presentation by the author that reaffirms my own opinions about the topic, specifically that while it sucks and cripples the social welfare programs our (deceased) elders built on the theory of continued population and productivity growth, it's also an issue we can fix with coordination between powers and workers. It's about building a new environment that puts families, rather than employers, first, and encouraging participation in the creation and maintenance of that environment by everyone regardless of age or demographic. The return of third places, social events, volunteerism, clubs, transit, public gatherings, stay-at-home parents, and more.
And as I've seen others point out in regard to the biological procreation imperative, we as a species are wired to breed. For all the whining from puritans about pornography, I'm of the opinion that its proliferation and normalization in fact reflects a deeply-held urge of humanity to have more time to have sex and live authentically again, whatever that may look like to the individual or family unit. Humans clearly want sex, and families, and time off, but the current global civilizational model is work > all, and thus families have taken a backseat to GDP growth at all costs.
I’ve noticed that, besides the magnetism and drive for sex (which would be sufficient for a species to propagate), many people also experience the biological imperative (wanting their genes replicated) as its own separate feeling.
This makes no sense to me – it’s not a feeling I can personally relate to. I’d like to raise kids because I’d enjoy getting to teach them and share things with them, but I don’t care whether they are my biological children or not.
So it’s something I’ve wondered about. The likely why makes sense, but I don’t really get the what.
agalunar commented on Underrated Soft Skills: Charisma utopianengineeringsociety... · Posted by u/andrewstetsenko
I think the author confuses simple likability for charisma. Charismatic people generally have a lot of likability, but not all likable people are charismatic.
Charismatic people aren't just able to get people to like them, they are able to persuade people to adopt their viewpoint. When someone charismatic wants X to happen, you find yourself also wanting X to happen.
This distinction matters, because the easy path to likability is agreeability: simply do what the people around you want you to do. They'll all like you, which is definitely valuable. But it won't necessarily get you closer to your goals.
Charisma, which is a quite rare trait, has a special balance of likeability and dis-agreeability, where people will get on board with your plan and feel good doing it. It's the ability to increase their agreeability.
At some point in my life I unconsciously decided that charisma (in this sense) was something I did not want to exercise, and was perhaps even wrong to exercise.
In so many facets of our lives already, our wants are being manipulated for the benefit of others. And who am I to decide what is important? For things that involve other people, I’d rather make that decision collectively. I want the thoughts, opinions, and feelings of people who don’t possess or exercise charisma to have space and weight.
People may also be interested in the Tako shell, which is a fork of Xonsh that “sacrifice[s] some of the ‘fancy stuff’ so that basic shell operations work as expected, the codebase is small, and things are as performant as can be expected from a shell written in Python.”
(Homepage) https://takoshell.org/index.html
(Differences from Xonsh) https://takoshell.org/xonsh.html
agalunar commented on Softmax forever, or why I like softmax kyunghyuncho.me/softmax-f... · Posted by u/jxmorris12
The extended horizontal size is the only goal here. The dimensions for a sinoform is still related to pt size, so the relative spacing, compared to chr(32), at the same pt size, is reasonably larger.
But...the vertical dimensions don't scale so well, at least in my browser. It causes a slight downward shift.
You’d perhaps be better off using U+2002 EN SPACE (or the canonically equivalent U+2000 EN QUAD).
From what I recall, the size of a typical interword space is ⅓ of an em, and traditionally a bit more than this is inserted between sentences (but less than ⅔ of an em). The period itself introduces a fair amount of negative space, and only a skosh more is needed if any.
agalunar commented on Softmax forever, or why I like softmax kyunghyuncho.me/softmax-f... · Posted by u/jxmorris12
There's: U+3000, ideographic space. It's conceptually fitting, with sentence separation being a good fit for "idea separation".
edit: well I tried to give an example, but hn seems to replace it with regular space. Here's a copy paste version: https://unicode-explorer.com/c/3000
Belying the name somewhat, I believe U+3000 is specifically meant for use with Sinoform logographs, having the size of a (fullwidth character) cell, and so it makes little sense in other contexts.
agalunar commented on The origin of the cargo cult metaphor righto.com/2025/01/its-ti... · Posted by u/zdw
What are some good alternatives to express the same concept?
“Imitation without understanding”, “imitating but misconstruing”, “mindless imitation”, “superficial emulation”, &c.
I think “cargo culting” in the popular sense means little more than that (whereas actual cargo culting is much more complex, as the featured article describes).