ralphc

I'm retired and I don't want to give my age here but I can see that I have more days behind me than ahead of me, and over the years I've created a growing list or projects that I've wanted to do. AI is letting me work on them, experiment, and most importantly see what's interesting and worthwhile to pursue without spending, or wasting, years going down rabbit holes that might not pan out.

What helps is that some of these projects are more data analysis than creating software, and the goal is an answer more than maintainable software.

Elixir developers outnumber Erlang 2 to 1, I think you'd do well with Elixir.

The stickers that wrapped around the edge of the floppy and would never stay stuck...

Never mind, I saw the story on the front page. wah-wah sad trombone for me.

Um did something happen? I'm pondering an M5 make to replace my perfectly-working-but-won't-be-able-to-get-software-for i9 MBP.

One advantage of vi is that even though emacs is available on all those systems, vi is actually installed on all of those, setting aside windows. If you know rudimentary vi you can walk up to any of those machines and edit a configuration file well enough to work.

How do you have non-IBM clones of something like this? It sounds like it would break every law ever made about copying hardware, BIOS, everything. And IBM would come after you with an army of lawyers.

Common Lisp, and even more so Racket, has reader macros. With a little help from LLMs you might be able to get a Ruby-like language that translates into Lisp.

As a last resort look at Racket's "Rhombus" language, it's basically an infix, Python-like syntax on top of Racket. You can use that or see how they pull it off and add Ruby constructs to it.

I still use a 2019 MacBook Pro, in 2026 I found the best way to warm it up was to use it daily and not blow the dust out of it for 7 years. After I opened it up and did that it's running a lot cooler.

If Intel virtualization works for Docker, why doesn't it work for things like VMWare or VirtualBox for Intel VM's?

I've barely read about Category Theory, but isn't it a just a slightly more mathy version of what programmers have been doing all along? Going up and down levels of abstraction, graphs, functions that transform one type of "object" into another?

Other magazines mentioned but no love for Computer Language Magazine? It held its own with DDJ when it came to software and theoretical topics.

Works on my Intel mac running Sonoma 14.8.2. I use Omakub on my Linux machine and missed this when on my mac.

I didn't save the tweet I saw it in but I saved the joke - "I wish I had enough money to run Oracle instead of Postgres." "Why do you want to do that?" "I don't, I just wish I had enough money to."

The big headline for our household will be to pause updates as long as needed. My wife is a CPA and having to manually delay and delay updates during the end of tax season(s) (March for corporates, April for personal, then again six months later) is an extra, unnecessary stress during those times for her.

I'm in the same boat as waynesonfire and I'm afraid this doesn't answer the question sufficiently. What do you do with an agent? What's a concrete example vs. typing in a chat box.

I don't know your autonomy with regards to IT within the confines of your classroom but if you can't install ad blockers on the Chromebooks can you set up something like PiHole and direct DNS traffic through it? It won't solve the overall slowness of the Chromebooks but it will help with some web sites.

I had a Spaceball Avenger which made it so intuitive to play.

From my old reddit post about it, "The Spaceball Avenger is a gaming peripheral. It has the usual buttons, but the big ball is used for six degrees of freedom movement. With pressure sensors the ball is pushed up/down, left/right, and in/out for X, Y and Z axes. The ball can also be rotated for pitch, yaw and roll.

Plugged into the computer's serial port it came with drivers for games such as Doom, for which it was a good controller, but the Spaceball really shined for the Descent family of games. Descent is a FPS with no gravity, where your ship moves in ALL directions, and controlling with with the Spaceball feels like you're holding the spaceship in your hand and you're just moving it to where you want it to go."

You can see it here https://www.reddit.com/r/retrobattlestations/comments/gmusxs...

Rarely mentioned is the audio, the Mac's bass and overall sound is much better than any other laptop its size.

How does 86Box and PCem compare with DOSBox in terms of accuracy?

Due to the nature of the sport (one person in a metal box, pit crews distanced from each other), after an adjustment period NASCAR races happened during the pandemic. To empty stands. The winner would get out of the car and instead of thunderous applause, or boos depending on the driver, there would be absolute silence. The word surreal is overused but it was that kind of experience for the driver and people watching at home.

The reason my 2018 Chevrolet has HDR radio and my wife's 2024 doesn't.

The nerdiest project on github sounds like a high bar, what's the project?

I worked at a perfectly reasonable company that was acquired by Oracle. This was in the 2000s. We were working on a big Java project and were using ADF, the "Oracle Application Developer Framework". It was a piece of crap. One time I asked my manager why we were using it and he said that the project would probably fail and if we used something else the higher ups would blame it on not using ADF and fire him, so...

Everyone talks about GenServers and OTP and all that, and that part is great, but what sells it for me is that it's a practical functional programming language. You get 80% of the FP part of Haskell but you don't have to mess with monads. It has tail call optimization which makes it easy to write functions in general, one "function" is made up of several that call each other, much easier to reason about and write. In general code I use what I call the "holy trinity", atoms, tuples and pattern matching.

As for it being fun and addictive, I'm retired. I can write code in any language I want, or don't write at all, and I choose to write in Elixir.

Technically not updates but if you hook up a PowerPC mac with 10.4 Tiger on it you can still get it updated to the latest version released, 10.4.11

As a user, I'm just here to offer ::applause:: for GraFORTH.

I often look for movies and series on streaming for when I'm on the exercise bike. Enough plot to keep me interested but not so much that I slow down.

I had to look up Solidity, which I've never heard of but see is at least 10x popular. It's sole reason to exist is for Ethereum.

So. Much. Modula-2. It must have been the future, there were as many compilers, ad, reviews as there were for C.

What killed Modula-2?