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steponlego commented on 9FRONT (Plan9) "Humanbiologics" Released   9front.org/releases/... · Posted by u/BSDobelix
whynot-123 · 2 years ago
maybe i'm getting older (almost 40) - but I spent 5 minutes clicking through links and could not figure out what in the world this is. They need to do a much better job on the documentation front.
steponlego · 2 years ago
It's intentional - the last theing we need is newbs asking ridiculous questions.
steponlego commented on The world of Japan's PC-98 computer   strangecomforts.com/the-s... · Posted by u/jdblair
steponlego · 2 years ago
Sooooooooo many porn games on these Japanese systems, it's shocking really.
steponlego commented on Mass surveillance silences minority opinions, according to study (2016)   washingtonpost.com/news/t... · Posted by u/walterbell
steponlego · 2 years ago
Working as intended. The science is settled, the majority opinions are the correct ones.
steponlego commented on ZFS silent corruption bug found: replaces chunks inside copied files by zeroes   github.com/openzfs/zfs/is... · Posted by u/csdvrx
ryao · 2 years ago
Another contributor who is watching this more closely informed me that the issue appears to predate Oracle’s acquisition of Sun. While this is bad, it at least suggests that this bug is very rare.

The code has never been formally verified, so there was always a possibility of such a bug existing. Without formal verification, it is possible that more such bugs will be found. I should add that there is no formally verified production ready storage stack, so not using ZFS would not eliminate the risk of hitting bugs like this. :/

steponlego · 2 years ago
Formal verification seems more appropriate for finished software not undergoing development or feature changes. It's the last step before software is set permanently in stone, unchanging, forever.
steponlego commented on Nvidia sued for stealing trade secrets: blunder showed rival company's code   engadget.com/nvidia-sued-... · Posted by u/bookofjoe
kkielhofner · 2 years ago
These plus Raspberry Pi firmware, Intel ME, the list goes on and on.

RISC-V is so exciting and interesting because it’s practically the first time in modern history 100% open source meets reality.

People that act as though Nvidia is the exception here should just say they hate Nvidia for personal reasons - and that’s fair and fine.

Again, they’re not angels and they do all kinds of shady things but to single them out vs practically every company in history is just bizarre.

steponlego · 2 years ago
I'm not acting - I'm genuinely saying, NVIDIA hates Free Software and this isn't a controversial stance. Always have. This is common knowledge and doesn't need sources, citations, etc.
steponlego commented on Need a PRNG? Use a CSPRNG   sortingsearching.com/2023... · Posted by u/tczajka
fanf2 · 2 years ago
Jason Donenfeld (author of Wireguard) replaced Linux’s SHA-1 based PRNG (remember, SHA-1 is cryptographically broken) with BLAKE2. What is shady about it?

You can’t get cryptographically secure random numbers without platform support, so it’s really bad to tell people to avoid the kernel CSPRNG.

steponlego · 2 years ago
I simply don't trust NSA people and those who take their money. Why would you? We've seen nothing but shady moves from them in this space.
steponlego commented on Nvidia sued for stealing trade secrets: blunder showed rival company's code   engadget.com/nvidia-sued-... · Posted by u/bookofjoe
steponlego · 2 years ago
I just avoid NVIDIA because they hate Free Software, not for any other reason.
steponlego commented on The Revival of Medley/Interlisp   theregister.com/2023/11/2... · Posted by u/samizdis
DonHopkins · 2 years ago
When I worked at Kaleida (a joint venture of IBM and Apple), I had the wonderful opportunity to play around with Sk8, which was amazing! It was kind of like Dyland and ScriptX, in that it was an object oriented dialect of Lisp/Scheme with a traditional infix expression syntax. But it also had wonderful graphics and multimedia support, and cool weird shaped windows, and you could point at and explore and edit anything on the screen, a lot like HyperCard.

Q: What do you get when you cross Apple and IBM?

A: IBM!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SK8_(programming_language)

>SK8 (pronounced "skate") was a multimedia authoring environment developed in Apple's Advanced Technology Group from 1988 until 1997. It was described as "HyperCard on steroids",[1] combining a version of HyperCard's HyperTalk programming language with a modern object-oriented application platform. The project's goal was to allow creative designers to create complex, stand-alone applications. The main components of SK8 included the object system, the programming language, the graphics and components libraries, and the Project Builder, an integrated development environment.

[...]

The SK8 Multimedia Authoring Environment:

https://sk8.dreamhosters.com/sk8site/sk8.html

What is SK8?

SK8 (pronounced "skate") is a multimedia authoring environment developed in Apple's Research Laboratories. Since 1990, SK8 has been a testbed for advanced research into authoring tools and their use, as well as a tool to prototype new ideas and products. The goal of SK8 has been to enable productivity gains for software developers by reducing implementation time, facilitating rapid prototyping, supporting cross platform development and providing output to multiple runtime environments including Java. SK8 can be used to create rich media tools and titles simply and quickly. It features a fully dynamic prototype-based object system, an English-like scripting language, a general containment- and renderer-based graphic system, and a full-featured development interface. SK8 was developed using Digitool's Macintosh Common Lisp.

[...]

Sk8 Users Guide:

https://macintoshgarden.org/sites/macintoshgarden.org/files/...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21846706

mikelevins on Dec 20, 2019 | parent | context | favorite | on: Interface Builder's Alternative Lisp Timeline (201...

Dylan (originally called Ralph) was basically Scheme plus a subset of CLOS. It also had some features meant to make it easier to generate small, fast artifacts--for example, it had a module system, and separately-compiled libraries, and a concept of "sealing" by which you could promise the compiler that certain things in the library would not change at runtime, so that certain kinds of optimizations could safely be performed.

Lisp and Smalltalk were indeed used by a bunch of people at Apple at that time, mostly in the Advanced Technology Group. In fact, the reason Dylan existed was that ATG was looking for a Lisp-like or Smalltalk-like language they could use for prototyping. There was a perception that anything produced by ATG would probably have to be rewritten from scratch in C, and that created a barrier to adoption. ATG wanted to be able to produce artifacts that the rest of the company would be comfortable shipping in products, without giving up the advantages of Lisp and Smalltalk. Dylan was designed to those requirements.

It was designed by Apple Cambridge, which was populated by programmers from Coral Software. Coral had created Coral Common Lisp, which later became Macintosh Common Lisp, and, still later, evolved into Clozure Common Lisp. Coral Lisp was very small for a Common Lisp implementation and fast. It had great support for the Mac Toolbox, all of which undoubtedly influenced Apple's decision to buy Coral.

Newton used the new language to write the initial OS for its novel mobile computer platform, but John Scully told them to knock it off and rewrite it in C++. There's all sorts of gossipy stuff about that sequence of events, but I don't know enough facts to tell those stories. The switch to C++ wasn't because Dylan software couldn't run in 640K, though; it ran fine. I had it running on Newton hardware every day for a couple of years.

Alan Kay was around Apple then, and seemed to be interested in pretty much everything.

Larry Tesler was in charge of the Newton group when I joined. After Scully told Larry to make the Newton team rewrite their OS in C++, Larry asked me and a couple of other Lisp hackers to "see what we could do" with Dylan on the Newton. We wrote an OS. It worked pretty well, but Apple was always going to ship the C++ OS that Scully ordered.

Larry joined our team as a programmer for the first six weeks. I found him great to work with. He had a six-week sabbatical coming when Scully ordered the rewrite, so Larry took his sabbatical with us, writing code for our experimental Lisp OS.

Apple built a bunch of other interesting stuff in Lisp, including SK8. SK8 was a radical application builder that has been described as "HyperCard on Steroids". It was much more flexible and powerful than either HyperCard or Interface Builder, but Apple never figured out what to do with it. Heck, Apple couldn't figure out what to do with HyperCard, either.

steponlego · 2 years ago
Download link's broken on the sk8 site.
steponlego commented on Tesla vs. Toyota Is the New Hot Battle in Cars   wsj.com/business/autos/te... · Posted by u/bookofjoe
steponlego · 2 years ago
Teslas are Toyotas though.
steponlego commented on Need a PRNG? Use a CSPRNG   sortingsearching.com/2023... · Posted by u/tczajka
barathr · 2 years ago
Even simpler than implementing a cryptographic PRNG yourself, just use /dev/urandom, which will provide an infinite, non-blocking stream of cryptographically-strong pseudorandom bytes. All platforms currently have known-good implementations of /dev/urandom -- Linux uses ChaCha and MacOS and BSDs use Bruce Schneier's Fortuna.
steponlego · 2 years ago
They weakened it recently in Linux again. For over a decade there was a badly bugged PRNG in the Linux kernel, it was discovered and replaced with a more costly one which worked great. Then, only a short time ago, they replaced that with one of... shady provenance. You're better off writing your own PRNG on that platform IMHO.

u/steponlego

KarmaCake day134December 15, 2022View Original