PinkMilkshake

> My biggest fear is that you are in the minority of developers that can single-handedly operate one

You're right. About 6 months ago the University of Canberra, Australia started it's 'Bachelor of Information Technology in Mainframe Computing' degree program because of the shortage.

I love Lazy Game Reviews. One of the most interesting channels on YT. I found him via a video he did on an old PC game series calls Petz, which still has some of the most eerily life-like animation of any game I've ever played.

I would rather resist the temptation if I can avoid it. I'm so frustrated with what we've come to tolerate with software.

Ada/SPARK seems to be trying to make a comeback, something I welcome. They are interacting with the 'maker community' [1] and the online learning resources have improved a ton.[2] SPARK is even taking some inspiration from Rust. [3]

[1] https://www.makewithada.org/ [2] https://learn.adacore.com/ [3] https://blog.adacore.com/using-pointers-in-spark

I'm not sure why you would make this claim. I've replaced the screen on my partners phone in a couple of hours with no previous experience. There's an entire industry of phone repair and data recovery.

I work at an Australian university that has a good reputation in China and so attracts many Chinese international students. Possibly even 50% of the student population here is Chinese. I've personally found them to be extremely polite, courteous and easy to deal with.

The only cultural differences that get on my nerves is rubbish disposal and sometimes Chinese men seem to be a little rough with their girlfriends (It's entirely possible I'm just misinterpreting what I'm seeing). But if there is a location where a large number of Chinese people hang out, it will often be covered in trash and cigarette butts.

But I also remember a decade ago when the thing that annoyed everyone about Chinese people was constant spitting everywhere, yet that isn't really an issue anymore. So I'm sure in time our cultures will synchronize further.

Disclaimer edit: I’m slightly uncomfortable making statements like this about a particular group of people. This sort of conversation on the internet can do downhill fast. So I want to emphasise that I’m just referring to differences in culture and that I’m optimistic these differences will resolve themselves organically.

What about gender fluid board members? Will the company be compliant with the law on some days and not on others?

Presumably your body uses or stores some of it.

I really notice this during video games. As soon as I feel stuck/frustrated I try stop, take a 15 minute break, then quite often nail it on the first retry.

Nice one! Such a great project.

Every time I go and have a play with Godot my mind is blown that the whole program is a single ~45MB executable.

>As someone who has only ever experienced sight when my eyes are open

Do you not dream?

I think it's a totally reasonable question because there lots of nonsense out there.

I keep it simple. The heuristic I use for sweets is, if a child would cry for it in a supermarket, then I can't have it.

I've been losing ~1 kg a week since I cut out sweets like this 3 weeks ago. Was at 81kg, slightly overweight for my sex/age/height, now at ~78kg.

So no candy, chocolate, biscuits, cookies, potato chips, cake, cordial, fruit juice, soda, milkshakes including "breakfast shakes" which aren't actually food, even if you want to believe they are like I did. Also dessert versions of real food, like flavored, sweetened yogurt.

I still have takeaways once or twice a week and still drink alcohol if I feel like it.

My main cravings are soda and candy, so I have some sugar-free alternatives I use to satiate that.

Not really no. The closest thing to production I've used it was as a one-liner web-server to serve some images.

BEAM has a 'busy wait' feature. Schedulers with no jobs to do will remain active so they can respond to new jobs faster. You can turn this down so that the schedulers go to sleep quicker, reducing CPU usage.

From http://erlang.org/doc/man/erl.html:

  +sbwt none|very_short|short|medium|long|very_long

  Sets scheduler busy wait threshold. Defaults to medium. The threshold
  determines how long schedulers are to busy wait when running out of work
  before going to sleep.

They might be able to fix it by making the only valid user agent “not-curl-honest”.

No cheese before bed (I didn't know that was a thing) and I like watching strange films but it's not something I do often. I haven't used any interesting substances in a long time, just ranitidine for reflux.

Honestly, I don't know. I don't remember them not being like that. I still have some normal dreams, even the common ones like teeth falling out. But a large portion of my dreams have always been nonsense.

It might be hard to believe if you have fairly normal dreams. I can easily believe it. My dreams are much stranger than that. The last vivid dream I had was of Anubis looking men emerging from eggs laid out in a grid. They clapped their hands chanting 'wolf men, wolf men, wolf men' while I had to fight their normal looking wolf pets.

That's certainly a possibility. I believe they did something similar with UFO sightings by publicly giving them more credibility to mask testing of experimental aircraft's?

They weren't 'taken' by it. It was likely to investigate it on the off chance it was possible. They had to try because if an enemy did and it turned out to be real, the advantages they would have would be huge. It's easy to look back from 2019 and roll our eyes, but I think the truth was less obvious then and it's likely our now easy dismissal of these things came from those very studies.

I've been following this stuff for years, it's fascinating. I'm particularly interested in the recent practical applications like Minimal English and it's equivalent in other languages. For those that don't know, unlike other minimalist English subsets which usually focus on learnability or clarity, Minimal English focuses on maximum translatability.

I'm going to get silly now, but I can't help but think the semantic primes - if you can avoid thinking of them as words or even conscious experience - represent some core set of cognitive axioms, like the primitive elements for constructing mental models. As you go to simpler life forms the "word list" would get smaller. If there is any truth to that, I wonder what potential primitives we are missing that would allow us to think more complex thoughts and whether you could measure species intelligence by their "vocabulary" and working out what concepts can't be expressed when one of the primitives is missing. What would happen if you lost the concept of above'ness?

The other thing I find interesting and it might be no more than a coincidence, is how there is only the numbers one and two and then you have to use many or more. This in some way matches up with the ideas of the Parallel individuation system[1] whereby young children can only precisely recognize quantities up to 3, or 1 + 2 and an adult can only precisely recognize quantities up to 4, or 2 + 2. After that, the brain uses the Approximate number system[2]. So it's like there are only 2 slots to place a quantity.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_individuation_system [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approximate_number_system

I thought it was a reference to the film The Big Hit.

* Deno, or something like it. This general idea of software that interacts with the internet but interacts little with the host OS by default.

* RISC-V, and a general open source hardware revolution.

* Augmented Reality. I don't see VR going anywhere. AR has broader practical applications.

* Voice UI. I think this still counts as niche. The general interaction model at the beginning of the movie Her seems highly plausible to me. Not so much the AGI.

* Desktop/mobile OS convergence. This seems inevitable. The convenience factor is too high and why would the average Joe keep forking out for 2 or 3 computers when they can have 1 that does everything.

* Software formal verification. This is long overdue and we can't continue to be this irresponsible.

* Cryptocurrency, or something like it. I think the need is there, but the current implementation leaves much to be desired.

* Processors with many cores. We're already up to 18 or so on desktop processors. But I expect many more.

* FPGA. I'm less sure about this. 10 years might be to soon. But if your computer was just full of FPGA's and companies could sell you digital hardware through an app store without having to actually manufacture anything, I'm sure they would love it.

Alan Kay (and others) developed a 3D collaborative world in Smalltalk called Croquet [1]. Definitely one of the most interesting virtual worlds I've come across.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croquet_Project

Is there a consistent pattern to it? I'm having trouble working out how you derive LineScript from HTML.

  <meta charset="utf-8" />

becomes

  charset -> utf-8

but

  <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1" />

becomes

  meta -> viewport -> width=device-width, initial-scale=1

Why does the first one start with the key of the attribute, but the second starts with the element then the value of the attribute?

I'm sure this is possible in some places but in others it would be completely impractical. At a university, specifically in the STEM faculties, not giving users sudo/admin would create an endless workload for IT. We end up being nothing more than professional software installers.

There is a company in Sydney, Australia called Dresden that make cheap recyclable plastic glasses. The prices range from AU$49-$99 (US$35-$70) depending on how thin you want your lenses.

They keep costs down by producing a single, neutral, yet attractive style. You can have just about any color you want and a choice between four sizes.

An engineering friend of mine was helping them improve the recycling process. Once you are done with the glasses, you take them back to Dresden, they grind them down and reuse the plastic in new frames. I'm not sure if they recycle lenses.

https://dresden.vision/

If the world was truly going to take the time/money/effort to rewrite the operating system from scratch and create a new standard core for the future of computing, there are much better options than Rust. Ada being just one of them.

It would be a real tragedy to do it all again, only to make a mistake on the very first decision, what language to use.

I think I know what you are getting at. You may have something like dyscalculia[1], but I'm not a doctor.

There are several mental models used for picturing numbers. I think the most popular is the number line [2]. Common Core uses this in a clever way. I've never found it useful personally.

I suspect some people might see numbers as purely symbolic and perform purely symbolic operations. When the symbol 2 and the symbol 3 have the operation 'add' applied, it yields the symbol 5. Or something.

I think I mostly visualize the numbers as a quantity of solid objects. So I think of 3 as 3 things. This has limitations. I can break objects apart but how do you visualize 3.767? So some of it is intuitive.

There is evidence that the human mind can only encode exact quantities up to four [3], after that they use an estimate. [4] So maybe your situation is the norm. What I mean is, sometimes it can feel like everyone else has 'got it' and you're the one lacking, when in reality everyone is just as bad.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyscalculia [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_line [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_individuation_system [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approximate_number_system

What is the significance of this book? I'm not familiar with the author.

> gross mischaracterization of these philosophical bents

Could you please explain? I don't think I misrepresented anything, but I'm open to correction. I'm no expert either, but I have explored these ideas and I feel like I gave fair summary.

> but it's not the whole truth

True, it was a summary of what I felt were the relevant points.

> misinformation

I don't think what I said is even particularly controversial, least of all misinformation. It's just not well known. Most of what I said is explicitly stated by the people who hold those beliefs.

What do you mean by 'worthwhile'? And what would worthwhile be to an alien?

For all we know, the universe is jam packed full of Predator-like aliens who are the dominant species on their planet specifically because their society is built around dominating everything they can.