Wow, I just got GPT-5. Tried to continue the discussion of my 3D print problems with it (which I started with 4o). In comparison GPT-5 is an entitled prick trying to gaslight me into following what it wants.
Can I have 4o back?
Readit Newsfroh42 commented on CARA – High precision robot dog using rope aaedmusa.com/projects/car... · Posted by u/hakonjdjohnsen
What a horrible video is this, with the robotic translated AI voiceover?
Update: Ah, weird, if I watch the non-embedded one on youtube it is the original in English with normal sound. It's the one embedded on his web site which has AI translation to German.
XSLT is a bad programming language wrapped around XPath. I'd rather take any existing general purpose programming language, add an XPath library to it, and write anything I'd do in XSLT in a programming language where I don't have to wait until version 3.0 for, well, all this stuff: https://www.w3.org/TR/xslt-30/#whats-new-in-xslt3
And a lot of that "badness" is precisely that XSLT is a very closed, scarcity-minded language where basic library and language features have to be routed through a standards committee (you think it's hard to get a new function into Python's or Go's standard library?), when all you really need is an XPath library and any abundance-mindset language you can pick up, where if you need something like "regular expression" support you can just go get a library. Or literally anything else you may need to process an XML document, which is possibly anything. Which is why a general-purpose language is a good fit.
That "What's New In XSLT 3.0" is lunatic nonsense if you view it through the lens of being a programming language. What programming language gets associative arrays after 18 years? And another 8 years after that you still can't really count on that being available?
Programming languages tend to have either success feed success, or failure feed failure. Once one of those cascades start it's very difficult to escape from them. XSLT is pretty firmly in the latter camp, probably kept alive only by the fact it's a standard and that still matters to some people. It's frozen because effectively nobody cares, because it's frozen, because nobody cares.
I definitely recommend putting XPath in your toolbelt if you have to deal with XML at all though.
Years ago, I was maintaining a huge XML->XML transformation in XSLT. The input format was the XML based config file of the system, that was created by the configuration tool. Output was a XML that has the same information in a way that is optimized for the system to read in efficiently. (Changing order of things, introducting redundancy by replicating similar information for different parts of the system, etc.)
(It was a Building Information System, Fire Alarms, Access, Lots of business rules stored in XML)
While the XML was easier to transform in XSLT than in the native C++, and yes, XSLT was probably the right tool at that time I developed a deep hatred for XSLT at that time. It felt like a functional language that had just all the important parts removed.
Yes, pattern matching is a good thing, but hey - I can do pattern matching for rules in any decent language. It was just the amount of existing code that prevented me from porting it to another language.
(And I remember a few ugly hacks, where I exposed "programming language" stuff from C# - which we also used - to the XSLT processor)
However, with all the XSLT ugliness: XPath is amazing! I love that.
It's too funny. I tried the voice chat and it was the typical frustrating shit, misunderstanding words, then slowly answering to them - "das Ding" it understood as "Singen" etc. You could film a comedy with that, but a company that owns something like it - I'd never call them.
froh42 commented on Amoeba: A distributed operating system for the 1990s (1990) [pdf] cs.cornell.edu/home/rvr/p... · Posted by u/PaulHoule
I seem to recall that early versions of Linux wouldn’t run on a cheap 386sx until the kernel started to incorporate embedded applications from widespread use in the late 90s. Also I remember the minimum ram was 4 meg but could go down to 2 meg if networking wasn’t installed even though it was built in to the kernel. Until the dot com boom, I don’t recall Linux being a partially flexible operating system. I think this is what kept windows 3.1 and ms-dos going until the late 90s
Coming from Commodore Amiga, my first PC was a 486dx with 4MB to run Linux. I did set it up the same day I bought it - noticed 4MB was not enough to run XFree86 on top of Linux 0.99.6 or whatever, so I grumbled, checked my wallet and bank account, went back to the dealer and asked him to take back the 4MB memory and sell me 16MB of RAM.
I was a student and ate only very cheap food the rest of that month.
Oh, and a bit later (two or three years) Tanenbaum visited my University and held a lecture about Amoeba.
Oh yeah, if there was a way to send markup to the browser and have the browser render a UI for that. I wonder why nobody thought of that as of now ... oh. wait. ... ah we want "native" components. Yea. html only had "native components" for a long time, too ...
so - html as json without css and a richer component palette?
froh42 commented on Things I can’t do on macOS which I can do on Ubuntu (2020) shkspr.mobi/blog/2020/04/... · Posted by u/robin_reala
You could get all those features and more in Windows, plus you have wsl2 :)
Yep. WSL and WSL2 are great. I used Windows with WSL, upgrade to WSL2 then noticed I don't need the "Windows" part of the system anymore and WSL2 cross-boundary file access is slow, so I deleted Windows and finally installed Linux again on my work laptop. (Used Linux up to 2007, bought a Mac, another Mac, switched to Windows after Apple locked down the system because "Windows has WSL, so I can do my work stuff" and switched back to Linux due to a slow Filesystem under Windows - for my use case).
The only thing that pisses me off, is that the MS-Teams client for Linux is roughly 5 decades behind the Windows client, feature and stability-wise.
(And still have Windows on my private laptop for Fusion360 and games)
That's an abomination. I love it.
froh42 commented on Show HN: Monocle – bidirectional code generation library · Posted by u/lucasluitjes
Haha, the old Java GUI builders in the 90s did something like this. You could either drag around the window (and the code would be updated) or modify the code (within limits) and it would parse it into the GUI builder.
Who's old enough to remember the Symantec Visual Cafe IDE?
Eine freundliche Distribution. Ok, fuck yes, if it is friendly, does it say good morning and good night? And ask me how I am?
"Es ist eine perfekte Kombination aus Erfahrung und Ökologie." Ok, it's about ecology, so something about trees and nature and owls and bunnies?
"AnduinOS ist Ihre finale Linux-Distribution!". Wait, you'll think I DIE if I use this?