I’ve learned that whenever someone uses tons of big words in long paragraphs, especially if they have a credential next to their name, it’s ridiculously easy for them to BS you.
You should try reading ccru then.
Readit Newspyinstallwoes commented on We remain alive also in a dead internet slavoj.substack.com/p/why... · Posted by u/achierius
pyinstallwoes commented on Weird CPU architectures, the MOV only CPU (2020) justanotherelectronicsblo... · Posted by u/v9v
Looks like an interesting read, thank you @v9v.
Just when my night was going through a meditative sleep about basing ontological models using change as fundamental block. Identity is such a brittle choice as foundation, even if it's a great tool in many situations otherwise.
Many ancient cultures use behavior as identity. It certainly has a charm.
pyinstallwoes commented on Kodak says it might have to cease operations [updated] cnn.com/2025/08/12/busine... · Posted by u/mastry
I feel like journalism used to be considered a higher calling. Getting things right was very important. Maybe I’m misremembering, or maybe the internet has just drowned real journalism in a sea of clickbait headlines.
It certainly feels like there is no journalism in our zeitgeist. It’s been replaced by propaganda, and sensationalism.
> it's not the kind of surface level "aesthetically beautiful" readability that tickles the mind of an abstract thinker
Rather, the sort of beauty it's going for here is exactly the type of beauty that requires a bit of abstraction to appreciate: it's not that the concrete syntax is visually beautiful per se so much as that it's elegantly exposing the abstract syntax, which is inherently more regular and unambiguous than the concrete syntax. It's the same reason S-exprs won over M-exprs: consistently good often wins over special-case great because the latter imposes the mental burden of trying to fit into the special case, while the former allows you to forget that the problem ever existed. To see a language do the opposite of this, look at C++: the syntax has been designed with many, many special cases that make specific constructs nicer to write, but the cost of that is that now you have to remember all of them (and account for all of them, if templating — hence the ‘new’ uniform initialization syntax[1]).
This trade-off happens all the time in language design: you're looking for language that makes all the special cases nice _as a consequence of_ the general case, because _just_ being simple and consistent leads you to the Turing tarpit: you simplify the language by pushing all the complexity onto the programmer.
So urbit’s nock vs forth?
this is a really, really good article with a lot of nuance and a deep understanding of the tradeoffs in syntax design. unfortunately, it is evoking a lot of knee-jerk reactions from the title and emotional responses to surface level syntax aesthetics.
the thing that stands out to me about Zig's syntax that makes it "lovely" (and I think matklad is getting at here), is there is both minimalism and consistency to the design, while ruthlessly prioritizing readability. and it's not the kind of surface level "aesthetically beautiful" readability that tickles the mind of an abstract thinker; it is brutalist in a way that leaves no room for surprise in an industrial application. it's really, really hard to balance syntax design like this, and Zig has done a lovely and respectable job at doing so.
Have any examples that stand out to you to share ?
pyinstallwoes commented on Debian switches to 64-bit time for everything theregister.com/2025/07/2... · Posted by u/pseudolus
The year is 292277026596. The IP TTL field of max 255 has been ignored for ages and would no longer be sufficient to ping even localhost. This has resulted in ghost packets stuck in circular routing loops, whose original source and destination have long been forgotten. It's estimated these ghost packets consume 25-30% of the energy from the Dyson sphere.
That’s only 25-30% of the energy environmental disaster in sector 137 resulting from the Bitcoin cluster inevitably forming a black hole from the plank scale space-filling compute problem.
If only Blender had an unreal engine tier real time capability!
Just use unreal ?
Information is not "stuff".
Information is absolutely stuff.
pyinstallwoes commented on A brief history of children sent through the mail (2016) smithsonianmag.com/smart-... · Posted by u/m-hodges
Reminds me of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_Train
>The state of affairs prior to this ruling is that any of 700 district judges could unilaterally block the president from exercising his authority under the constitution pending a review, including matters of national security, based on their own subjective politics.
It would be more accurate to say that prior to this ruling, any of 700 district judges could unilaterally block the president from exceeding his authority under the constitution pending a review, including matters of national security, based on their own subjective view of the law. It may differ in other countries, but under the US Constitution, the judicial branch ultimately decides the limits of executive authority, not the President.
If it's truly a matter of national security, the President could always file emergency appeal and it would almost certainly be granted. If it's such a dire and immediate emergency that even those few hours were critical, it's doubtful that any President would feel obligated to obey the injunction anyway.
Far from preventing the proper functioning of government, this was one of the few remaining guardrails maintaining the proper functioning of government under unprecedented circumstances.
Your premise is false, exceeding is not the limit, because the limit is at the behest of any of the judges; given a judge exceeds their rational, then they exceed their rational ability to limit the executive branches power