salgernon

There was a TV miniseries/movie a few years ago called "DEVS" that was shot in part at UCSC - science hill and the engineering library emerging from the mist was unmistakable. (Not defending or promoting the show.) That coastal morning fog...

It was also a great example of the 'feelies' that came with games back then - the peril sensitive sunglasses and little baggie of belly button lint. It helped bridge the virtual text world with a connection to the physical.

When I need to refactor a large C codebase the first thing I do is recompile it with C++ - and then fix the missing prototypes and other grit that gets in the way. The cost to do this is minimal but I then have more options (via macros, automatic assignment, etc) to start shoring it up like a retaining wall that's about to fail. At the end of the day, a POD C++ structure with const inline accessors is way easier to reason about and costs nothing once compiled. It probably helps that I started with CFront, so C++ is just C (and C is just assembler with macros.)

Classic MacOS in the 80s had "MPW" macintosh programmers workshop - that treated open text windows as files and selections within the windows as files, so it wasn't uncommon to have a portion of an otherwise documentation file have a "click here and hit enter", which would use the selected text as stdin for some semi-ported unix tool. (no memory protection or multitasking, so true pipelines with backpressure didn't work)

There wasn't a lot of code review going around our group in 1991 - but you're absolutely right that it would be harder to get away with today. There are a lot of hidden knobs in various places across various systems, and they are a potential liability since they're frequently untested and may even be a vector for an exploit...

sudo dtrace -qn 'pid$target::getenv:entry { printf("getenv ( %s )\n", copyinstr(arg0)); }' -c "/bin/ls -l"

In a list of "Countries by alphabetical order", I see:

- Cabo Verde - Cambodia - Cameroon - Canada

So if you were typing 'can' instead, you would always be correct (today) even if one of the earlier ones were removed.

Back in 1991 I was at Sun and tasked with implementing type-to-complete for file dialogs in OpenWindows. Coming from a Mac background, I naturally implemented... type to complete. But the OpenWindows Spec declared it should be "first letter, keep typing first letter".

That method requires you to very explicitly look at what is selected each time you press 'B', as opposed to just typing 'bagend' or 'bilbo'. Maybe it makes sense if you can't type? In any case, I added a secret preference to do it the right way, and then quit.

Imagine if the web browser incremental search worked that way...

I would imagine the checks and balances that a mature engineering organization maintains to prevent the unintended consequences of capricious management decisions.

I saw this mentioned in the submission about memory allocators and unix, although it’s only tangentially related to that.

It’s more about choosing which parts of c++ are either mature enough or useful enough for any particular task.

But like any religion, there are indulgences available when it makes sense. (Eg, the occasional template)

“(/usr/ucb/mail -s ‘Pizza Order’ ‘pizza-server@poit.eng.sun.com’)”

I had just paged that most useless piece of trivia in, but “poit” was from a Don Martin cartoon in Mad, not Al Jaffee.

Nevertheless, Excelsior!

I love Terry Pratchett’s description of XXXX - the Australian analogue in his book “The Last Continent”. While a book on deadly native animals would encompass several volumes, the “book” of safe animals was a single page that listed “some of the sheep.”

So how about a quick M-x psychoanalyze-chatgpt ? (Since psychoanalyze-pinhead became defunct pithed.)

Rez and DeRez still ship with xcode (or did the last time I checked)

The Apple Pascal poster has a very 70s vibe: https://www.whatisepic.it/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/apple_p...

Terry Pratchett’s Discworld has a christmas santa analogue called the “Hogfather” - essentially the anthropomorphic personification of the winter solstice. I’d never heard of Hogmanay before - but I can’t help but feel it must have fed into his narrative mythology.

Some day I hope we as a species can come together in unity to declare the solstice celebrations on their actual solar day instead of smeared messily around those dates, based on arbitrary religions. Metric holidays.

It’s Uber for timeshare pitches. You get a ride to the airport instead of a fruit basket for sitting through the pitch.

I imagine they would have the driver multitask as the presenter.

I've been in a similar state - I had a shell running but lost /bin/ls among other things; but I could use "echo *" and redirection to recreate an /etc/mtab.

It was functional for me; there was someone reading some rather bad (in the best way) jokes, "What kind of car do dogs hate? A cor-VET". It really felt connecting, since the people replying and cooperating on the channel are all going through the same experience. I saw a comment above about having a radius visible for the talkie (if there is a radius?)

Oh, and +100 points for the thing being anonymous.

I’ve been unable to convince Dall-e to render anything “in the style of artist Robert Tinney”. I love his work - and have several prints of his byte covers.

One of the joys is when you re-read one of his books and discover its tie-ins with the other books in his universe. Small Gods has a tiny but important role for Lu Tze the history monk, who subtly interferes with the story to see it to its conclusion. But I completely missed it as a plot point until I’d read Thief of Time, which explained the whole point of the history monks. Then they show up again in Night Watch.

His fictional universe evolved - but also circled back and reinforced itself. (Mostly!)

I would like to disagree to the extent that I find Nigel Planer’s Rincewind to nail the character in my mind. His reading of “The Last Continent” with Rincewind vs the various Australian tropes is a family favorite.

If you see the Hogfather screen adaptation he plays the role of the wizard Sidney.

I don’t know how close he was to Pratchett - but he has recently written a novel that supposedly was influenced by Discworld[1] (but not of Discworld)

[1] https://unbound.com/books/jeremiah-bourne-in-time/

It’s weird how Apple is part of the title when they’re barely mentioned.

By coincidence, after reading this submitted article and not knowing the named artist, I completed the game “Universal Paperclips” by “Everybody House Games” today, and the brief credit scroll listed

  ‘10 MIDI’ by Four Tet, (c) 2017 BMG

So off to listen to his content now.

(Edited slightly)

See Also, "The Truth"[1] by Terry Pratchett pp144 "'Yeah, King of the Golden River,' said the dwarf."

Pratchett's character employs people to collect the "night water" - they get paid for collection, and the recycler gets paid after processing.

"Terry adds:

"And let me say right now that practically everything in the career of Harry King is fairly based on fact (except for the trolls)."

[1] https://www.lspace.org/books/apf/the-truth.html

It doesn't work anymore - but for a while you could ask Siri (also via Stanford) "do you know shrdlu" (you'd have to type it into the correction box) and it would respond with something to the effect: "Wasn't SHRDLU crushed by a blue pyramid?"

Clarus dates from the 24bit address space era, and we lost that a long time ago. But she transcends.

From the fiction side, Walter Miller's 1959 _A Canticle for Leibowitz_ [1] was written from the perspective of Benedictine Monks preserving knowledge - without truly understanding it - post apocalypse.

In _Earth Abides_[2] by George R. Stewart, the protagonist eventually gives up on his attempt to provide for the future, eventually deciding that the best he can do for his clan is to teach them to fend for themselves instead of foraging in the rubble.

That conclusion always reminded me of one of the conclusions of the WIPP report[3]: we may not be able to communicate with the future, so hopefully if nothing else, they'll learn to avoid the contaminated area through attrition....

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

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Abides

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warnin...

[3, (big pdf!)]: https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1279277/m2/...

I don’t know why I keep coming back to this - maybe because he reminds me of people in my life that have had similar problems.

He was 75 when he was first cited, not 83.

He was given a chance to mitigate the code violation and he refused, which incurred a 250 per day penalty which he refused to pay.

He dragged it out for 7 years by being his own lawyer and and presumably has also not rectified the code violation.

As an aside, if he had actually fixed these cars they would not be in his back yard. He’s a hoarder.

I’d be willing to bet that he could settle this for less than the full amount.

There’s just something about this mindset of (a) he’s too old to be held accountable (b) free will/it’s his property to do what he wants with it (c) he’s just a hacker and we should be encouraging people to ignore civil law when it’s inconvenient.

It’s also likely that his dragging this through the court system for so many years has probably cost more than he owes - and when he dies or abandons the property the state will likely have to pay to clean up after him.

Sorry, bad mood rant today. All that being said, I have no skin in this game, it just touched a raw nerve.

Because there was presumably no or minimal fine for violating this civil ordinance, should he have complied with mitigating the violation.

There are then penalties for continuing the violation.

So should the state have just given up? At what point? If there were a maximum, what would it be?

The part where when he was cited 8 years ago and told that the fine was $250/day for non compliance.

It’s about 90k per year.