downsplat

That brings some memories. I got into tetris around 1988 on a 8086 PC with 5" floopy drives. Somebody gave me a copy of a very early tetris, it was a tiny DOS .com file, and the game was in text mode, written by the original Russians. I must have spent entire weeks on that thing, and when I learned programming, I proceeded to write a whole list of tetris variations, including one hexagonal, one for 3 players on a single PC, and a regular Tetris in assembly that fit on a boot sector. To this day it I open a tetris, I expect the exact rotations as that original version. Never got into these easier random generators - all my clones used full random pieces. Except for one where the machine would always throw you the hardest piece :)

> For me video is video, I can relax, sit and watch/listen to it. With text it is different, it is a mental exercise to read and process it, so turning video into text feels like an essential downgrade.

Exact opposite for me. Reading goes at my pace, in silence. Video is much more invasive, so I avoid it except for the highest quality stuff.

Don't people use whatsapp in your corner of the world? Over here in Europe all of that happens over whatsapp, which is still a Meta property at the end of the day, but one that hasn't been enshittified with off-network crap or algorithmic feeds... so far!

> There's a crossover point where self-managed is cheaper than cloud

Single data point here: before cloud managed dbs were a thing our smallish startup was running mysql on virtual servers by installing it from the linux package manager. Always worked great, runs without needing manual attention for years at a time once set up, so I've never felt the need to change.

So at least in some cases the crossover point is "right from the start".

So happy that I never stopped curating my digital music collection. Old raspberry pi with USB DAC and external HD, connected to good old hifi amplifier, and controlled via mpd from anyone's phone. It's been working wonders for almost 10 years.

That sure brings some memories. They were calling sleep() so you would have time to read the messages in the status bar at the bottom of the screen. Back in 1995 or so I submitted patches changing the browser's inner loop to be select() based, with a queue of messages to show for a few seconds each without slowing down browsing. It took one night of hacking, and the maintainers rejected the approach as "too complicated".

For Android, I've been using Firefox Beta as my daily driver for over a year, it works flawlessly, and about:config is available.

That's very interesting, at $WORK we recently added SAML support in a similar use case, as a SaaS SP integrating with the customer's IdP.

At the time we looked at various open source implementations, and ended up using OneLogin's PHP library. We wanted a headless library, so we could store the SAML metadata in our main DB and implement the public endpoints on top of it.

It did take a few days of googling and trying, but it wasn't really that complicated. Our core implementation adds up to just some 500 lines of PHP, most which is just glue code to fetch metadata from the db, put it in the format the library expects, and then do the basic thing of sending the user to the IdP, getting the response back, checking it, and mapping a couple of attribute names.

The advantage of this approach is that we were able to made it self service for our users. User logs in as admin, goes to "SAML settings", inputs their metadata, clicks a button to test, and if it's good, clicks another to activate. We did get a few support requests from people who didn't know their own systems very well, but otherwise it's working smoothly.

Translated into simple language, Ruby chose to expose the multithreading paradigm (multple threads over shared data), like Java and others.

Multithreading is strictly more powerful than single threaded event loops. For some kinds of software there is just no alternative - a modern browser engine for example needs to be multithreaded.

The trade off is that you need to make sure your code is thread safe, which is not trivial as the collection of articles explains. That's your function color right there, green functions are verified thread safe, gray functions are not or not sure.

Personally in nearly 30 years of programming I've never needed to write multithreaded code. I still haven't found a business need that could not be met with suitable choices between multiprocessing (i.e fork) and event loops.

I'll definitely take wait/async programming over having to worry about concurrent thread safety any day of the week.

Right. I started a perl codebase in 1999, which has slowly evolved and is still one of my main projects to this day. The language has slowly improved, there are decent libraries for everything you might want to do, and I've basically never had to rework or throw away my code because of incompatible changes in the language.

For reference, PHP at the time was at version 4, Python was around 1.6, and noone had heard of Ruby.

I remember learning perl in the early 90s, it was perl 4 at the time, and it opened up a whole class of possibilities by its incredible expressivity, things you wouldn't otherwise do because they'd be far too tedious in C and not really doable in sh or awk. Then perl5 came and extended it into a fully fledged programming language with modules, data structures, closures, the whole lot. And CPAN was unequalled for very long.

Over time I picked up php, python and node, but to this day my personal scripts are done in perl, and lots of command-line file wrangling starts with "perl -En".

I think two very early decisions doomed perl's ultimate future, and they were too ingrained in the language to ever change without losing compatibility. One is the shifting sigils, accessing @x with $x[3] instead of the logical @x[3]. The second is auto-flattening, where foo(@a) passes the contents of @a as separate arguments instead of @a as a single thing. Fixing these was so incompatible that the attempt turned into Perl6/Raku, which went way overboard in terms of design and failed to catch on. Meanwhile other dynamic languages converged on the better design of having containers be objects, and flattening done by an explicit operator.

I think perl has done a very decent job at turning into a legacy language, which was the right direction given the constraints. The maintainers have prioritized compatibility to a high level, while still slowly fixing whatever pain points they could, including finally adding function signatures (!).

Is Chart.js officially out of fashion? Been using it for years with good results... My charting needs are admittedly not very complicated.

I remember it was one of the remarkable take-away points of nonlinear system dynamics, aka chaos theory: the weather/climate system doesn't even have an "average regime" that it converges on. You can average over longer periods of time, and the resulting sequence doesn't necessarily converge to a single limit. Pretty mind boggling when you think about it. Long term enough, "this place's climate" doesn't even exist.

Yeah, any other Windows would have been worse. For me it was crappy because no-one wants to be maintaining a second hardly-used OS on their laptop. You randomly need it once in a blue moon, have to deal with two UIs with their conventions and feels on the same computer, and with copying files between them, and then and of course the first thing it wants to do is download tons of updates. Makes for a crappy experience.

Reminds me of the bad old days when I regularly had to open a crappy windows 7 in a VM because some minor piece of software would not run on Linux or on the browser. Thankfully I haven't needed to do that in years.

On a more constructive note, this might be really useful for kernel developers, and for big companies using desktop virtualization.

Similar story here, we have a fairly large code base which has been continually evolved since year ~2000, with our own legacy "framework" for much of the server-side structure. Back then the forms used to reload the whole page, keeping user input and adding error messages (fun times!), then some kind of AJAX was added, where the server would send actual JS back to the client for execution. Some older pages still use jQuery.

A couple of years ago we needed to choose a way forward for new front-end dev, and we chose Vue just as Vue 3 was maturing. I didn't know much about reactive frameworks back then, so it was a bit of a hunch, but I'm very happy with how Vue3 has worked so far.

We did however do the effort of adding a build step. The site is basically multi-page, with small SPAs sitting at their own URLs for individual jobs. So we wrote a Rollup config to bundle each of the mini-SPAs into its own file, and modified the framework to add a way to configure "this page wants Vue3 and this is the path to its bundled JS". We load the main Vue script as a <script> tag of its own, instead of adding it to all the bundles, for better caching. But as far as I can tell, in this way we can use all the Vue3 niceties, including Single-File Components.

That's more or less how it works in English too... is it really that bad? Spanish and French also have special words for the teens, it's quite common in Europe and I've never heard of it being that difficult to learn.

Some languages have it much worse... I think Hindi is pretty irregular up to 100 .

Such a tantalizing article... come on, where are the examples? It's like reading a description of a painting without being shown a picture! What are some of these vulgar urban words that the Riksmål elites didn't want their children to be taught? What are some of these rural dialectal words that were kept optional but fell out of even moderate Nynorsk? More than a few readers of a chapter-length history of the Norwegian language might have some familiarity with Scandinavian, and the rest of us can handle a few words in italics!

Thanks for your kind words :) Now I really need to answer something, and it's not so easy based on the info you give.

I'll skip the standard religious answer to your question in terms of existential unsatisfactoriness - you can find that in the 1st chapter of any decent Buddhist book.

On the one hand, you could be someone whose mind is already fairly flexible, creative, open and not very compulsive, so you don't see much point in doing explicit work to make it even more like that. In which case, I'd say, just enjoy life and go with it!

The other possibility is that you could be (like many of us here probably) so deeply fused with your thinking mind that you have little experience or appreciation for the things consciousness can do beyond that.

Either way, maybe the point here is to remember that meditation is a tool among others, not a must or a panacea.

Do you sometimes feel a sense of awe? Exhilaration from music or some other source? Deep compassion for someone's misfortune? The thrill of riding a bike or some sense of flow from bodily exertion? The sense that time just stops in some special situations? The warm feeling of being part of something greater than you? A sense of mystery in life?

These are examples of things that most of us value when they happen, and yet they are neither happening at the level of the mental map (in the way that e.g moral philosophy is), nor reduced to bare sensory experience.

Deep meditation is about going deeply within yourself, and whatever you find along the way just becomes part of your journey of integration. There is no universal blueprint, bc the material you find yourself wrestling with is just whatever happens to have lodged itself in your unique psyche - traumas and all.

This should not be confused with the light meditation that has been popularized as "mindfulness" - that's a fairly safe technique that most everyone can probably benefit from having in their toolbox to help handle stress or bad times.

To the basic question "am I missing something", the only real answer is that if you feel curious, you can only know by giving it a try - thinking won't give you the info. If you were wondering about e.g learning to play the saxophone, you could get a pretty good idea whether it's worth your effort by listening to some on a cd. But this music is silent.

It takes at least 3 day immersive retreat, or (alternatively) a few months following e.g a weekly course with a bit of practice at home every day, to get a first feel for the space that meditation can open up, and decide whether you're interested in further exploring that.

For resources about Ramana Maharshi, sure, Paul Brunton was popular, but I'd first go with Arthur Osborne and/or David Godman. David has a metric ton of videos on youtube if you prefer listening to reading.

Nice description into progressive steps, sounds recommendable. It's very close to one of my favorite types of meditation, awareness of feeling. It can get pretty intense, but it's also quite regularly rewarding in clearing up inner heaviness or tension.

> One of the aims of mediation is to gradually understand that this self is really an illusion

Yes this is a standard Buddhist (and not even exclusively Buddhist) point, and I'd say it's basically correct, but the problem is that it can, and has been understood in dozens of ways. Some more profound than others, and plenty contradicting one another.

Let me give a fairly psychological interpretation. One of our major cognitive functions is to create and maintain an automatic, pre-verbal map of the world, at the center of which stands a mapped entity labeled "ME". Let's call it the "self-representation". This is in itself fine and dandy, and quite useful; it gives us a sense of being an integrated organism through time, and lets us say things like "yesterday I went swimming". More troublingly, it's also the subject of our self-esteem, and of most of our hopes and worries.

The map, with our self-representation in the center, is not the only thing in our awareness - we're also able to attend to stimula and feel our emotions in the here and now. The problem, and the only problem as far as radical Buddhism is concerned, is that our sense of being is most of the time entirely fused with this self-representation. It becomes the entirely of who I am to myself. (Hence Ramana Maharshi's super direct path: inquire within "who am I").

What meditation does, by slowing down the whole mechanism, is to allow us to feel that there is more to me, here and now, than this running self-representation. By insistently putting our attention away from it, we temporally and partially unfuse from the self-representation. We get little breaks from it, where it either it mostly just stops for a while, or it becomes something I see happening, rather than something I am. And if I can see it happening, I can also train myself to not give it so much importance.

The result is a much vaster inner perspective, and a sense of deeper presence - for a few moments at least. But, usually, the moment the meditator notices these changes happening, the most automatic reaction is for the self-representation to rise back up as the one who wants to own that. HEY, INTERESTING STUFF IS HAPPENING TO ME!!! And there you go go crashing again into stuffy ordinary consciousness.

Hence the usual advice you will hear from good meditation teachers: getting experiences if often easy, but not running after them can take years and years of practice.

I get the appeal, it's a minimalism thing. The thinking mind makes up patterns and checks them against each other, there is no ultimate reality, blah blah blah. Besides, a mathematical ground truth would be a kind of transcendence, in that it's prior to human thought, which makes it uncomfortably close to ideas of God.

Still, I've come around basically to mathematical platonism. The structure is out there, we just happen to be smart enough to tease some of it out.

I have two arguments for this. The first is the very existence of long-standing problems, and their eventual resolution either way. For centuries we were able to wonder whether Fermat's last "theorem" (which was really a conjecture at the time) was actually true, and eventually Wiles came around with an extremely complicated proof and it was settled. And we do believe that math/logic is consistent enough that someone else couldn't just have followed a different train of thought and come up with a proof of the opposite. How does a strict intuitionist account for this kind of situation?

The second, and possibly deeper argument, has to do with structural equivalences. I've been out of the field for decades, but I know that a standard trick in academic math is to develop structural equivalences between disparate fields. You want to prove something in an area of math, but it's hard, so you prove that the whole structure of that subfield has a one-to-one correspondence with the structure of another subfield, and then prove the corresponding theorem in the other subfield, which happens to be easier (see: analytic number theory). Again, this sounds like exploring an existing territory, not like arbitrarily building thought-bridges here and there. The bridges are where they are, and if you try to build one where reality didn't put it, your proof will get nowhere.

An even stronger form of this is that, in advanced mathematics, all kinds of notions of universality appear all the time. One of the most famous is probably computability theory. Just using a few basic symbols (say, integers, first order logic and some additive operations), you get theories of varying power. But as soon as you hit a certain level of richness, bang, all of a sudden, you've hit computability. Your theory is rich enough to embed a Turing machine, and therefore is exactly as rich and expressive as any other computable - even if one is based on numbers and multiplication, and the other on graphs or some such other weird thing.

Universality shows up in lots of places. I'm too far out of the field to remember them, but it starts with the very integer numbers - there are plenty of ways to formalize their initial construction, but the eventual result is exactly the same.

At this point my general thinking is that the bulk of the structure is pre-given. I have no special conjecture to make about how that comes to be - it's all a logical structure, prior to matter or thought, so unlike physics, it's not like there could be another universe out there with different basic mathematics.

People have made harmoniums with modifications to play the 22 shrutis of carnatic music, and with those you can probably more or less approximate the right tones for most hindustani raags too, but it's rare, your average harmonium probably just does bog standard western-style equal temperament.

As the article says though, the main limitation of this kind of instrument is that it cannot generate glissandos (meend) and ornamented notes (gamaka).

A movement like Theosophy is an easy target for cynical criticism with 100+ years of hindsight, but considering the time it arose, I'd say they did some amazing work synthesizing materials from traditions that had previously barely met, and putting the whole thing in relation with the science of the time. The mere fact of embracing all these cultural and spiritual strands on a roughly equal footing must have been a really bold step at the time.

Then again, the fascination with occult forces really has not aged well.

As a long-time fan of Indian music, I'm so happy to see how the world is catching on to the depth and value of classical Indian musical traditions, and how Indians are making their voices heard worldwide. Just a 5 years ago I don't think you would have found a discussion between trained musicians in Hindustani and Carnatic on a tech-focused news aggregator. Rock on... or raag on, and thanks for the recommendations. M.S. Gopalkrishnan was certainly amazing.

Try an open source home screen launcher, I use this one, it's configurable to hell and back: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ch.deletescape...

> is that really cheaper than porting a calculator os to a modern CPU?

There was a whole OS and programming environment in there, very closely tied to the CPU architecture. All the calculator's advanced functionality, including graphing, equation editor UI, equation solver, compiler and decompiler, etc., was written in the OS's own stack-based system language. Porting all of that to another CPU family would definitely have been much more work than writing an emulator for the old Saturn CPU. Performance must not have been a problem, thanks to ARM and Moore's law.

Blast from the past for sure, OP was not but I was in Paris in the early 90s, and HP48 hacking was huge. I remember attending class, ignoring the teacher, and just patiently leafing through long print outs of HP48 disassembly, or typing in assembler programs on the calculator itself.

The software on this thing was pretty amazing, but surprisingly hacky in some ways. The RPL language had a system of embeddable objects in memory, but when the interpreter had to skip over an object (i.e all the time), there was no field marking its length, so it had to actually recurse through all the sub-objects to find the end.

IIRC there was the a hack where some memory locations could contain a direct pointer or a pointer to a pointer, and it would work either way because the same bits could be interpreted as a pointer or directly executed... or something of that sort.

Glottalized is not the same sound as dropped or flapped. The American English dropped t's in these examples are either completely dropped, or pronounced as a (weak) flap. If not completely dropped, the t in "button" would usually be a flap, almost the same sound as the r in Spanish "cara". The final t in "wait" would most likely be an unreleased stop, if pronounced at all. Both regular and flapped t are articulated towards the front of the mouth, whereas glottalization happens the very back.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flapping and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-glottalization