To be fair, after three or four Tinder dates I realized that it was mostly silicon to be found there. It's not a stretch to say that a programmer going out on Tinder dates is mining for silicone!
So now we've got clankers catfishing human singles?
Readit Newsbitwize commented on I made a floppy disk from scratch kottke.org/25/08/i-made-a... · Posted by u/bookofjoe
bitwize commented on I made a floppy disk from scratch kottke.org/25/08/i-made-a... · Posted by u/bookofjoe
"If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent... the universe" Carl Sagan
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7s664NsLeFM
bitwize commented on Librebox: An open source, Roblox-compatible game engine github.com/librebox-devs/... · Posted by u/libreboxdevs
Best wishes, this is really neat. I hope it won't get slaughtered by Roblox's legal team. A potential use-case might be to create a Linux-native client. The one used by most right now (Sober) is proprietary, after the previous (Vinegar) got shut down because of Linux haxxors.
I have a feeling projects like this rank higher on Roblox legal's priorities than does the rampant child predator activity on Roblox's platform.
> It just works. One thing I noticed lately is that sometimes a shortcut breaks, or something is not working anymore. This is also because Omarchy is just brand new, and I’m inexperienced running Linux as my main OS. But for the last 5 years with the M1, hardware-wise, things just worked.
My experience over two decades has been that running Linux is like having a car you need to spend every weekend in the garage tinkering with to keep running well. MacOS is lower effort. I haven't run Windows in a long time, but compared to Linux, it also doesn't require constant tinkering.
While I also think Linux user experience becomes more and more "it just works", the incentives are such that a commercial experience like macOS is likely to always be a few levels above.
My experience is just the opposite: Linux requires more up-front tinkering, but once you get it into a shape you want, it tends to stay that way and get out of your way. Windows, by contrast, requires much more ongoing active maintenance, and previous releases were prone to simply shitting the bed without explanation or recourse. MacOS is better about this than Windows, but not as good as Linux.
Now if you're talking Arch Linux... sure. The Arch devs love yanking the carpet out from under you and then telling you "you should have read that forum post from a week ago if you didn't want your system to break". But other distros, like Slackware, Debian, and Void, are quite stable across updates.
Wait, what? ECC RAM for a consumer CPU? Does anyone sell motherboards like that?
"Consumer" shouldn't mean garbage. Between random bit flips in an environment where you have 16 GiB of RAM or more (common in gaming setups now) and Rowhammer, ECC should be the standard. It's only not so that chip and RAM vendors can bin and charge a premium for the good stuff.
> This convergence hints aging may not be a diffuse “wear and tear” process
About this: it seems to me that the idea itself of "wear and tear" is just silly. It's a metaphor taken from the realm of mechanical objects that have no regeneration abilities. Any living being is continuously repairing localised damages back to a pristine state, while aging is diffuse and organic. This suggests that any "wear and tear" can only be at the cellular level- but still it can't be a biological necessity given the wildly different lifespans of organisms- from a few days to centuries.
It still applies because while organisms all have some form of self-repair ability, most do not have complete self-repair. "Wear and tear" is still possible at the macro level where self-repair is missing or slower than the damage rate -- famously in the articular cartilage, for instance. There's also accumulating damage that does not resemble mechanical wear and tear: toxins, misfolded proteins, DNA damage/mutation, senescent cells, etc.
We never had that chance because you cannot coordinate 8 million people, much less 8 billion. And nobody was going to shut down all the coordination points of society such as grocery stores, pharmacies, and hospitals.
The CDC knew this at the time. The "flatten the curve" message was "slow things down enough until we know more and can avoid our hospitals from being overwhelmed and more people dying."
New Zealand had about 5 million people, and PM Ardern successfully implemented a total lockdown that drove new COVID cases to effectively zero. Then she was voted out, and per Aurynn Shaw the plague ships were let back in.
It can be done. It just requires leadership, discipline, and the willingness to take strict, decisive, politically unpopular measures against violators and spreaders of misinformation. As Schwarzenegger said, when there's a pandemic on, screw your freedoms.
bitwize commented on Show HN: Using Common Lisp from Inside the Browser turtleware.eu/posts/Using... · Posted by u/jackdaniel
Ah, in an alternate world where Brendan Eich wasn't pressured by his superiors to make JS more Java-like, we could have had something like this as very normal.
I wonder how much faster that would have pushed the world into FP ideas. While sometimes I prefer the bracket/C syntax, I wonder how things would have evolved if JS was a lisp originally. Instead of things moving to TypeScript, would they be moving to something like typed Lisp or OCaml, or PureScript ?
The JS backend to Gambit is now pretty mature. If you're willing to deal with Scheme, Gambit, and its FFI, you can live in that alternate "Scheme in the browser" universe even without WASM.
The number of people who aren't vocal tech people who actually want a smaller phone is a very small part of the market. In HN-like circles they're a notable minority but among the general population they are a smaller percentage. Especially when you consider huge segments of the market where your phone is your only computing device: a smaller phone is a massive anti-feature in large parts of the world.
Plus almost everyone who says they want a smaller phone will just buy a larger one anyway.
The sales numbers just don't justify it. Like people who pine for manual transmissions: they're vocal in car forums and publications but they're a tiny minority and making one is a money-loser even in the sports car segment.
My wife carries an iPhone 13 mini and hates the new frickin' huge iPhones. If it breaks I suppose I'll buy her a new one of those. If the OS refuses to update because the phone is too old, I guess we'll get a new frickin' huge iPhone, but only under protest.
In the early 1980s there was a CP/M and MS-DOS program called Fancy Font that worked with Epson MX-80 printers. When you put the printer in graphics mode, it can position the pixels vertically with distances as small as 1/3 of the distance between pins. I'm not sure whether it moves the platen or moves the pins within the print head, but the upshot is that with 8 pins available in graphics mode, with 3 passes of the print head you can get 24 pixels of vertical resolution in one line.
Fancy Font rendered marked-up text on the computer using one or more of the supplied, or user-created, proportional bitmap fonts, and then used this technique in the Epson's graphics mode to print out very high quality (for an Epson MX-80), proportionally spaced, "typeset" text. Many a church newsletter and the like were rendered in Fancy Font at the dawn of the 1980s, and the program even received support for those new-fangled, high-resolution "laser printers" in its latter days, but as the Macintosh and other GUI-based WYSIWYG desktop publishing solutions became ascendant, Fancy Font faded into memory.