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dmm10 commented on The Berkeley Software Distribution   abortretry.fail/p/the-ber... · Posted by u/rbanffy
drewg123 · a year ago
It was a lot better than the alternatives at the time, which were CVS and SCCS.. :)
dmm10 · a year ago
Add RCS to that list.
dmm10 commented on Wendelstein 7-X: Gigajoule energy turnover generated for eight minutes   ipp.mpg.de/5322229/01_23... · Posted by u/greesil
nomel · 2 years ago
Coming from 3d sculpting to CAD was...eye opening. It really makes you realize how much of design constrained by the CAD tools, which are mostly constrained by manufacturability.

If true 3d printing* ever gets cheap, it'll be interesting to see how much form will be able follow function, rather than manufacturing cost.

* true 3d, as in overhang are allowed. Something like a cheap FDM is more 2.5d, since overhangs aren't allowed.

dmm10 · 2 years ago
With powder bed printers overhangs and detached captured parts aren't a problem. Try making your own from an old inkjet printer.
dmm10 commented on Vision Pro   ben-evans.com/benedicteva... · Posted by u/andsoitis
bitwize · 2 years ago
The Vision Pro is in the same position as the Mac was in 1984: overpriced, doesn't seem to do much and people don't understand what they might use it for. In a relatively new untested product category no less (VR goggles/personal computers).

But it's going to change the world.

dmm10 · 2 years ago
Or perhaps the Lisa
dmm10 commented on Place mushrooms in sunlight to get your vitamin D (2012)   fungi.com/blogs/articles/... · Posted by u/cameron_b
YellOh · 2 years ago
D3 is more effective in raising serum levels of vitamin D (87% more efficient according to [0]). However, D2 still helps and can be fine for people who aren't very deficient.

Also, there is D3 from non-animal sources. Although most D3 supplements are from lanolin (the fatty coating of sheep's wool), there are some plant-based D3. Most of the ones I've seen are derived from lichen (ex. [1]).

[0] https://academic.oup.com/jcem/article/96/3/E447/2597204

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Deva-Vegan-Vitamin-5000-Cholecalcifer...

dmm10 · 2 years ago
I mean the following more to elucidate than criticize.

A minor point of clarification (admittedly rather pedantic though in line with the many comments in this discussion which relate to scientific rigor) but the statements indicating lichen sourced D3 is plant-based can be misleading. While many lichens contain one or more algae species/strains (hence containing a plant) some do not. Some lichens contain cyanobacteria as their sole photosynthesizing member in symbiosis with fungi (ie. no plant involved.) I don't know the specifics of the lichen source for vitamin D3 production. So a plant may or may not be involved.

Based on vitamin D being produced by other fungi than lichens and no (known to me) plant source of D3 I'll venture a guess that the source of the D3 in lichens is from the fungal component. If this holds true then claiming lichen sourced D3 is plant-based is a bit of a stretch.

Of course a popular reading of "plant-based" as used in current diet marketing -which seems to mean anything not derived from an animal- could hold. But marketing speak is anything but scientific.

[Quick searches didn't lead me to clarity on whether algae are part of the lichens used for commercial D3 production. I do wonder why lichens were chosen over mushrooms. I'd have thought mushrooms would have multiple advantages.]

dmm10 commented on PLATO: An educational computer system from the 60s shaped the future   arstechnica.com/gadgets/2... · Posted by u/mpweiher
userbinator · 2 years ago
1980s: computers are inseparable from almost every part of our day to day lives

As someone who lived through that period, I don't think so. That description would be more applicable to ~2010+.

dmm10 · 2 years ago
Your comment does not reflect history in the U.S.A.. And judging from the GP "our day to day lives" is very much U.S. centric.

Transportation: ""By 1981, all GM vehicles would be equipped with their new Computer Command Control System ("CCC") emission control system that featured an ECM (Electronic Control Module) that featured a Motorola 6802 based 8-bit microprocessor manufactured by Delco Electronics. "" https://www.chipsetc.com/computer-chips-inside-the-car.html

Entertainment - video games:

""we saw the release of all-time classic games such as Pac-man (1980), Mario Bros (1983), The Legend of Zelda (1986), Final Fantasy (1987), Golden Axe (1988), etc."" https://www.hongkiat.com/blog/evolution-of-home-video-game-c...

Financial - personal:

ATMs were quite common if no ubiquitous by the mid 1980's "" "The origins of the cashless society: cash dispensers, direct to account payments and the development of on-line real-time networks, c. 1965–1985" "" https://web.archive.org/web/20140714184815/http://www.ebhsoc...

Business:

VisiCalc came out in 1979, and spreadsheets were common in business offices in the U.S.A. through the 1980's.

Entertainment - TV and movies:

Computers were also used in commercial and movie production (ex. the 1984 Macintosh commercial, Pixar founded 1986 more or less out of Lucasfilm, and note that the VideoToaster came out for the Amiga in 1990 bringing professional level video production to a much more accessible price point.)

dmm10 commented on Punctuation Matters: How to use the en dash, em dash and hyphen   punctuationmatters.com/en... · Posted by u/MrVandemar
frizlab · 2 years ago
An example from the article:

Looks good: “Sometimes writing for money—rather than for art or pleasure—is really quite enjoyable.”

Unreadable: “Sometimes writing for money-rather than for art or pleasure-is really quite enjoyable.”

Yes, punctation does matter. (In French the em-dash is almost inexistant; we use parenthesis instead usually.)

dmm10 · 2 years ago
Others have mentioned using spaces with an en-dash or hyphen instead of an em-dash. Having used a typewriter -back in the day- I learned to produce text like this.

How I learned the Unreadable: “Sometimes writing for money -rather than for art or pleasure- is really quite enjoyable.”

To the teacher I learned from this was a standard way of punctuating on a typewriter.

dmm10 commented on Study finds that buttons in cars are safer and quicker to use than touchscreens   futurism.com/the-byte/stu... · Posted by u/janandonly
kayodelycaon · 3 years ago
I like the dashboard in my 2014 Prius. The speedometer is digital numbers, which is great because I have trouble reading dials. Never had an issue with anything freezing up.

Later Toyotas I’ve rented have full color screens. They work okay.

dmm10 · 3 years ago
Anecdata and another case against center-dash touch control panels -which are integrated with control units.

Our 2013 Prius just had the center-dash unit crash likely due to the audio sub-system. And it would have burned but for a fuse blowing (replacing the fuse lead to smoking.) This took out the rear camera display along with climate controls, audio, ...

Fortunately someone at the Toyota shop we patronize had just replaced their same model year working unit with an iPad (hence learned that's a thing in the US even if illegal in the UK.) So what was going to be a ~$2,000 USD rebuilt unit (~$5,000 OEM new but a guy in town rebuilds them because there is apparently enough demand) was going to be less expensive.

Unfortunately, our Prius's unit seems to be unique to a particular finish/package for the model. And this particular unit type (a JBL variant) has connectors different from all other Toyota center console units.

Gist of the situation: failure of what is likely the audio section of the integrated center-dash unit took out rear camera, climate controls, audio, etc. with high price tag to repair when simple loss of audio unit would have been ignored.

dmm10 commented on Homoiconic Spreadsheets: What, How and Why [video]   youtube.com/watch?v=U9uZl... · Posted by u/winkywooster
elzr · 3 years ago
Thanks for the kind words whacked_new!

I agree entirely with your prediction: spreadsheet programming is different from interactive "control flow" programming... and it should remain different! The spreadsheet model of programming is easier to grasp and incredibly flexible. I think the key is that spreadsheets are time-less & space-full, I hint at this in the talk & see also my root comment for more elaboration on this.

What's exciting to me about lambdas is that they can be used to enhance this time-less, space-based style, like in the examples I elaborate around 18m47s: the habit tracker, timesheets & a spatialized Game of Life.

I imagine/hope that in a few years we will have a culture of casually importing magical custom functions that will become polished through mass use and eventually become standard. These native functions are much safer than macros so you can be as casual with them as copy-pasting formulas. There's no permissions fuss to wade through, as there is for AppScript. (I even think there will soon be libraries of custom functions, I might even publish one myself in a couple of months.)

* * *

As to your question, I interpret it as: why are lambdas coming inside spreadsheets instead of spreadsheets becoming incorporated into programming languages, right?

I have come across many extensions of spreadsheets over the years. Spreadsheets are so ubiquitous there's many kinds of wrappers for them, many hybrids. Since the birth of spreadsheets in 1979 there has been a flood of drastic alternatives & variations that have been tried. The most famous variant so far has been pivot tables, which has become a useful, somewhat infamously intimidating feature of spreadsheets but not the revolution once expected. One of the more interesting extensions is TreeSheets https://strlen.com/treesheets/ But nothing yet has beaten the simplicity & power of a flexible grid sprinkled with formulas & references through the value rule.

To me the most important thing I learned researching this talk was that it crystallized in my mind that spreadsheets are not just a table, not just a grid. They have a key constraint, they intertwine code and data through the value rule that Kay pointed out 5 years after dynamic spreadsheets were invented (see http://worrydream.com/refs/Kay%20-%20Computer%20Software%20-... ).

So my answer to your question is that spreadsheets have been incorporated into programming languages, they have long grown scripting languages like VBA or Google AppScript. Those are massively useful for top-down extensions of the functionality of spreadsheets.

But the other direction, lambdas in spreadsheets, has been much slower & difficult, yet it offers the promise of a more bottom-up revolution in usage. It has taken us decades to evolve the model of spreadsheets towards lambdas in a way that works well with their true nature and to the ton of other features & culture they've grown over the years. (My personal favorite feature, btw, is the incredibly flexible formatting we can give to a sheet, specially conditional formatting.) As mentioned in the talk, spilled arrays are a recent, crucial step to make lambdas possible & useful.

dmm10 · 3 years ago
I believe Alan drew his observation of the 'value rule' from work on ASP, Analytical Spreadsheet Package - a part of Analyst, done in the Xerox Special Information Systems Group. This system is also interesting because it used blocks (aka. closures - the object version of lambdas) as the formulas for cells as pointed out by Kurt Piersol's article in the OOPSLA '86 proceedings, https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/28697.28737 .

Spreadsheet rules (or formulas) in The Analyst are kept as Smalltalk blocks. A block is a common Smaiitalk object class which allows a section of compiled code to be kept as an object. They can be passed as arguments and stored as variables. Obviously, they are an ideal choice for rule storage and execution, since they allow the rules to be directly executed by Smalltslk at compiled speeds.

The description of ASP (and the Analyst package from which it was split out as a separate product) can be found at http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/xsis/XSIS_Smalltalk_Produ... . Of interest is the example of dropping a bitmap image into a cell and having an adjacent cell display the next generation of the game-of-life run on that initial cell. (That as opposed to having each spreadsheet cell in a region represent a cell in a game-of-life automata.)

As to homoiconicity, I wouldn't be surprised if Alan didn't at some point have a Smalltalk project window running full screen that was imbedded in a cell of a spreadsheet which was running in a Smalltalk project window within the Smalltalk environment. It's the kind of thing I saw him demonstrate as an aside during presentations as he popped out of the full screen project window which the audience had assumed was the root Smalltalk environment rather than a nested environment. What is a cell or window but a live code object running in the language environment after all?

dmm10 commented on Apple Rankings   applerankings.com/... · Posted by u/bookofjoe
1024core · 3 years ago
I love Arkansas Blacks! They have a hint of cardamom aftertaste, which makes them unique!
dmm10 · 3 years ago
I took up the Arkansas Black cause from my grandmother who was born in the 1800's. They are unarguably hard. That contributes to them being amazing baking apples. Unfortunately whoever created this list of apples seems to have never considered eating apples that were baked in foods. Not even a mention of baking apples vs. eating apples appears on the site. Some varieties are good for baking and eating. Then there are those worthless for either (ie. red delicious.)
dmm10 commented on Why do we call it “boilerplate code?”   buttondown.email/hillelwa... · Posted by u/goranmoomin
pavon · 3 years ago
> Assuming that 70s or 80s programmers knew anything about printing presses is tenuous

True, but as you say the meaning of words shift. It is entirely plausible that they were exposed to the term in its bureaucratic meaning, and continued to use it without any connection to actual boilers - the same way we do today.

dmm10 · 3 years ago
As to 70's and 80's programmers knowing about printing presses I'll point out that a significant early AI program (1968-1970) was named SHRDLU. One familiar with printing history might recognize those letters as part of the second column of moveable type characters on a Linotype machine (and other type-casting machines.) I didn't look up a reference, but I recall that the first row of bins for hand set hot type letters followed the same convention of letter frequency in English text (for english speaking countries that is.) etaoin shrdlu That string of characters became more well know due to its appearance in hot type set news papers of the era. The characters sometimes accidentally made it to press rather than being pulled as part of an erroneous line of text.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHRDLUhttps://www.wikiwand.com/en/Etaoin_shrdlu

u/dmm10

KarmaCake day33April 13, 2017View Original