hyperion2010

I love the point in there that it isn't actually xorg vs wayland, it is xorg vs dbus. Wayland is so deficient that basically everything has to depend on dbus if it doesn't want to use X. This framing clarifies the issue substantially, because whatever people think about wayland, they might have some slightly different opinions about dbus.

If this does not have a way to track and filter based on who did the audit then it will wind up like the semantic web where anyone can tag a page with safeGoodQuality.

It's that time again!

John Wesley Powell warned us about this more than 140 years ago [0].

I strongly recommend that everyone living in the western United States read at least the introduction[1] to Beyond the Hundredth Meridian[2]. The introduction is more relevant now than it was when it was written 67 years ago, itself 75 years after the publication of Lands of the Arid Region.

Previously:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28907254

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27910098

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18098899

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26964166

0. https://pubs.usgs.gov/unnumbered/70039240/report.pdf LANDS OF THE ARID REGION John Wesley Powell 1878

1. https://erenow.net/modern/beyond-the-hundredth-meridian/1.ph... Bernard DeVoto 1954

2. Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West ISBN:9780140159943 Wallace Stegner 1954

Time for my usual WITWUS post.

We have know this for more than 140 years [0].

I strongly recommend that everyone living in the western United States read at least the introduction[1] to Beyond the Hundredth Meridian[2]. The introduction is more relevant now than it was when it was written 67 years ago, itself 75 years after the publication of Lands of the Arid Region.

Previously:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27910098

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18098899

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26964166

0. https://pubs.usgs.gov/unnumbered/70039240/report.pdf LANDS OF THE ARID REGION John Wesley Powell 1878

1. https://erenow.net/modern/beyond-the-hundredth-meridian/1.ph... Bernard DeVoto 1954

2. Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West ISBN:9780140159943 Wallace Stegner 1954

That dip centred around 1954 in figure 6 is one of the clearest examples of just how exceptional the experience of the boomer generation is compared to all the rest of human history.

In order to search that space you have to have a specification language for the behavior of the target program. Things like copilot/GPT-3 currently take natural language as input, but that cannot be used for anything that needs to be verifiable or have correctness. Maybe start by having the nets generate implementations of the IETF RFCs in a variety of languages given the text of the RFC as input? Not easy.

I started out building my own (story for another account) but now that TEX makes the Shinobi [0] it is my daily driver. There are some split mechs that have been modded [1,2] which are closer the Dactyl, but that would definitely be a custom job.

0. https://tex.com.tw/products/shinobi 1. https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/hz8flk/ergonomic_... 2. https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=82599.0

Yep.

Counterpoint. I won't use a keyboard without one. I use a mechanical keyboard with a trackpoint. Not having a trackpoint means that I don't even have to think about whether I will buy a laptop, I already know that I won't. Touchpads have gotten better, but nothing beats the nub.

That being said, every laptop I have ever owned has had a trackpoint, so I'm a definitely biased.

That's because those data are already available elsewhere and also well known. In addition to lack of insurance, lack of access to primary care physicians means that the first time the medical systems sees a patient is in the ER. This is staggeringly inefficient. Add to this the fact that case managers are not physicians, and you wind up in a situation where there is often no one who actually has a general understanding of a patient's overall medical situation.

This is a wonderful exploration further into the original spirit of that comment and very much reflects the experience that I have had as well.

The only other runtime I have found that has a similar absence of pain is Emacs (though Emacs has its own separate warts unrelated to friction at the repl). I think there is a deeper disconnect between having something that looks like a repl and a real repl which is that for decades Emacs didn't even have a command line style repl, because the repl was everywhere, hidden behind C-x C-e or M-:.

A point of confusion I think is that repl in the lisp world has come to imply much more than that somewhere there is some code that looks like (loop (print (eval (read)))). That level of sophistication of the repl concept was archaic well before common lisp, but the term continued to be used and evolved to signify a runtime that could support interactive development.

For many of the other languages the issue isn't with the form of the interface (almost any language can have a prompt, come up with printed representations that can round trip through their printed representation, etc.) it is that their underlying runtime can't support the kind of redefinition that is needed to avoid the creeping insanity that can arise when code becomes subtly out of sync with data e.g. in Python classes and instances.

Computers are faster now, so the workaround is "restart the runtime" and users hardly notice. Therefore no one bothered to implement what common lisp has. Given how long a cold boot took back in the 70s and 80s, avoiding the restart at all cost was a top engineering priority. Lisps evolved in a significantly different and harsher selective environment than many of the runtimes that came after, and as a result had to solve certain fundamental problems that are practically invisible for users today.

In the time since I wrote the referenced comment on reddit I have also discovered the amazing power of save-lisp-or-die. At the time it hadn't quite clicked for me. I'm guessing that the author has had a similar experience given the title of the series so I'm looking forward to reading more in the future!

In the mean time I also learned a bit of docker, and what I find amusing/sad about it is that slad is basically docker without all the fuss. Sure it can't bring a whole unix system with it, but it is a couple of orders of magnitude smaller and significantly less complex.

Figuring out how to take these realities and tweak the gameplay cycle to make it "fun" seems like a fantastic design challenge.

I wonder what the author would think of Dwarf Fortress forts that have been played on the surface.

Time for my usual post on water in the western United States.

We have know this for more than 140 years [0]. Since my previous post I can now also strongly recommend that everyone (yes, everyone) living in the western United States read at least the introduction[1] to Beyond the Hundredth Meridian[2]. The introduction is more relevant now than it was when it was written 67 years ago, itself 75 years after the publication of Lands of the Arid Region.

I fully expect the western water related engineering projects of the 20th century to fail in this century because you can't store what never falls from the sky, and you cannot refill a depleted aquifer. Powell presented us with the reality of the ecological and political situation, maybe some day we will finally get around to implementing the solution [3,4].

Edit: for a special treat RE the thread on water usage in Utah as see the discussion of page 84 (96) of [0] where Powell writes the following: "In general, there is a great wastage, due to badly constructed canals, from which the water either percolates away or breaks away from time to time; due, also, to too rapid flow, and also to an excessive use of the water, as there is a tendency among the farmers to irrigate too frequently and too copiously, errors corrected only by long experience." Apparently long experience is more than 140 years.

Previously:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18098899

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26964166

0. https://pubs.usgs.gov/unnumbered/70039240/report.pdf LANDS OF THE ARID REGION John Wesley Powell 1878

1. https://erenow.net/modern/beyond-the-hundredth-meridian/1.ph... Bernard DeVoto 1954

2. Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West ISBN:9780140159943 Wallace Stegner 1954

3. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/visio...

4. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Map_of_Water_Sheds_o...

As a child my mother taught me HALT! Hungry, angry, lonely, tired. It has served me so well by itself that it was not until today that I went and looked it up and saw that it is widely known and used, though perhaps not as widely is it could be.

Please see my other comment. There is absolutely no expectation that it is possible to simply think ones way out of depression. Having already said enough that can be misinterpreted I will say only that clinical depression (and many other diagnoses) fall into a different category. The attempts by various parts of society to pretend that either there is no such thing as "normal" or that everyone is "normal" have done unspeakable harm to individuals where to the best of our scientific and medical knowledge there IS a difference. It is quackery, bordering on murderous intent to think that, much less tell someone with depression that they should just think happy thoughts.

My original comment does not cover depression. Without going into the underlying biology, it is safe to say that it is exceedingly rare for individuals with depression to be able to break out, because there are biochemical or structural changes in the brain that require either substantial changes in the individual's environment, or clinical intervention to overcome.

There is also a fundamental difference between the experience of feeling happy and viewing something from a positive perspective. Even someone with depression could choose a positive interpretation for an potentially saddening event, but that choice alone would be unlikely to result in the experience of happiness, precisely because depression impacts the very ability to experience happiness, it is something more fundamental. There is also the question of whether depression makes it difficult to pick positive interpretations for events, but that is orthogonal to the point here.

A decade ago when I did leadership training one of the key exercises was developed so that you could demonstrate to yourself that happiness is a choice. Happiness doesn't come from anywhere outside of you, it comes from you.

You could be sad or angry that something bad happened, or you could be happy that something worse did not happen, or that you are still alive, etc. You can be sad that someone is dead, but happy to have known them and gotten to share moments in life with them.

The hard part is practising until your brain believes it.

I dual boot windows and linux, but have not booted into windows in years. I can play many games on linux now, but having a completely separate system means I can keep games and work separate. The dock also means it can be used as a real gaming computer. I also refuse to play mobile games, but might make an exception for the ability to play full pc games on the go. Normally I would never consider such a device, but the price point, size, and the dock makes it almost a no-brainer.

Some people think the problem is that we don't have enough code. Anyone that has to maintain code knows that the problem is that we have too much code.

This is a perfect illustration of why the DNS system is fundamentally broken. There is zero reason why icanhazip.com needs to or should resolve to a single host or even a single virtual host managed by some SDN operated by a corp that controls thousands of machines.

These queries could load balanced across the whole internet, the code is small enough that you could just whitelist the code by checksum and then compare results from multiple underlying hosts. The fact that you need a giant corporation to be able to practically run the backend for what is essentially urn:asker.public.ip is absurd beyond belief.

The big players aren't going to fix this because the broken protocols give them a major competitive advantage.

The even deeper horror is that they explored many alternate narratives, and this is the one that they collectively though would, and in reality did, resonate most strongly with viewers.

The horror isn't the film makers, it is that this is the narrative that global society prefers to hear.

For even deeper horror still I suggest reading Francis Bacon, since from square zero modern science is founded on the rape of nature.

8964 also returning lego kits and trains.

> “Given that so much literary criticism has now been produced on the subject of Mitchell’s novel, 12 years after its publication, these version variants are potentially problematic as they have not previously been noted.”

Ouch.

I will point to a related thread [0] along with my previous comment. In the western United States there is no "could" there is only "will." This has been understood for more than 140 years [1].

0. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18098899

1. https://pubs.usgs.gov/unnumbered/70039240/report.pdf LANDS OF THE ARID REGION John Wesley Powell

After reading this I had a sad chuckle when I realized that as described these events would actually play pretty darned well with a large swath of the electorate :/

I think you are forgetting that there are nuclear missile submarines within striking distance of every major Chinese city. This is a game of chicken, not a game of "who has better logistics."

This reads like multiple instances of the same name in a json object is undefined behavior and the user will get what they deserve if they try to rely on that behavior.

Overlays, function keys, macro keys, fancy responsive RGB light shows, the list goes on.

Sandboxing is an issue, though I would argue that sandboxing and packaging are orthogonal concerns, so a new format should not have been needed just for the sandboxing use case. That said, if you are developing sandboxing from scratch pretty much no sane person would choose to use the .deb workflow as their UI for packaging.

I have come to the conclusion that the only reason why things like flatpak and snap exist is because the ergonomics for creating and maintaining .deb packages is so awful.