syncsynchalt

Note to readers: the heavily dithered websafe thumbnails lead to full-color photos when clicked.

This is my first time noticing one of their posts, but to me it evokes the ideals of the Long Now Foundation, putting our thoughts in a future-forward stance.

Here's an example image: https://petapixel.com/assets/uploads/2022/09/Prorotype-Digit...

Captured on Kodak film, I suspect.

The PetaPixel article has a sample, though the original photo from this article is lost.

https://petapixel.com/how-steve-sasson-invented-the-digital-...

https://petapixel.com/assets/uploads/2022/09/Prorotype-Digit...

It's a shame they didn't capture that first image. You'd think someone would have had a camera handy!

I was glad to hear Sasson found a place at Eastman-Kodak and worked there for the rest of his career.

Do you know if those characters are in supplemental planes? The BMP would only be glyphs from U+0000 through U+FFFF (though the first 32 and last two aren't printable, and wouldn't be included in this font).

Another example would be emoji, which would probably now be considered "basic" by most people but have always been in a supplemental plane.

Yes that section raised my hackles too, to the point where I'm suspicious of the whole article.

The solution, in my opinion, is to either document that strclone()'s return should be free()'d, or alternately add a strfree() declaration to the header (which might just be `#define strfree(x) free(x)`).

Adding a `char **out` arg does not, in my opinion, document that the pointer should be free()'d.

Yeah, at the least you'll need an understanding of ULPs[0] before you can write code that's safe in this way. And understanding ULPs means understanding that no single constant is going to be applicable across the FLT or DBL range.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_in_the_last_place

The reference is that the anime character "Naruto"[0] wears the same colors and roughly the same uniform as a Japanese recovery worker[1].

During disaster work, you see swarms of recovery workers and the joke/reference being made is that this looks like Naruto doing a "shadow clone" technique.

[0] https://i.redd.it/psseu93j62la1.jpg [1] https://sendai-resilience.jp/media/images/efforts/case31_ima...

Code golfing originated in perl.

There was strong cultural pressure to be able to write perl in as few bytes as possible, ideally as a CLI one-liner. Books[1] were written on the topic.

https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/perl-one-liners-130-programs-t...

By definition of a pure spaceship / glider, no it can't. If it emits persistent "exhaust" that's a "smoking ship"[0].

[0] https://conwaylife.com/wiki/Types_of_spaceships#Smoking_ship

Then, importantly, it collapses itself back down to a 1-dimensional copy of its starting representation, but translated.

I'm not a GoLtician myself but I don't think that would be possible under the "standard" rules anyway, except the trivial case of stasis/death.

I'm really charmed by the linked thread and all the passion and work it belies. Congrats to those involved!

Simen Olsen is not fictitious, but the "my@" email/username seems to be. Zero hits on DDG, and only this article comes up in Google Search.

Take a look at the decade+ long effort that Debian has put into this problem: https://wiki.debian.org/ReproducibleBuilds

Here's a talk from 2024: https://debconf24.debconf.org/talks/18-reproducible-builds-t...

Several distros are above the 90% mark of all packages being byte-for-byte reproducible, and one or two have hit the 99% mark.

It's not about the delay, they can take as long as they want to build what they want to build. I object to their attempt to use patents to block competitors for decades when they didn't even have a product yet.

Fortunately it was challenged and the USPTO invalidated patent 8,678,321: https://cdn.geekwire.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/2015-08-...

Over eleven years after Blue Origin patented landing a rocket on a barge, and nearly ten years after SpaceX's first "ASDS" (barge) landing, Blue Origin has finally successfully landed a rocket on a barge.

We should be impressed they did it before their patent expired.

I'm not sure they mean financially, I think they mean protection from being made unexpectedly homeless. There are an array of tenancy laws to prevent this from happening, but they don't seem to cover bankruptcy of hotels.

We have the same word in English, as "sunder" (sundered).

The trees are really sneezing today.

No, she's saying that due to UK legislation that Apple will no longer be allowed to offer e2ee and it's time to start moving your data off of their cloud services before you're forced to turn off ADP.

It's not an article about advocacy so much as the pragmatics an upcoming data migration.

His dad was Bob Morris. Unless that's the joke you're making.

Bob Morris wrote crypt(1), dc(1), crypt(3), libm, co-wrote the rainbow series, and did additional unknown work as a cryptographer for the NSA.

dmr writes about working with Bob Morris here: https://web.archive.org/web/20250121041734/https://www.bell-...

I'm assuming you're referring to partitioning of boot-critical binaries into `/bin`, but "the reason for having a separate /usr" is even older and worse than that. In original Unix `/usr` was for home dirs[1], and was colonized by the operating system in 1971 when it no longer fit on a single 1.5MB RK05 disk. Nobody ever untangled that change and we've been living with the hack ever since.

[1] https://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/busybox/2010-December/07...

One of my big problems with ASN.1 (and its encodings) is how _crusty_ it is.

You need to populate a string? First look up whether it's a UTF8String, NumericString, PrintableString, TeletexString, VideotexString, IA5String, GraphicString, VisibleString, GeneralString, UniversalString, CHARACTER STRING, or BMPString. I'll note that three of those types have "Universal" / "General" in their name, and several more imply it.

How about a timestamp? Well, do you mean a TIME, UTCTime, GeneralizedTime, or DATE-TIME? Don't be fooled, all those types describe both a date _and_ time, if you just want a time then that's TIME-OF-DAY.

It's understandable how a standard with teletex roots got to this point but doesn't lead to good implementations when there is that much surface area to cover.

I wonder how long he worked on the "at this particular time" line before giving up?

It was worse than IE not adopting standards. It was a capricious browser, would crash and misbehave for arbitrary reasons, and had an almost perverse implementation of web rendering.

People try to equate it to Safari now but that's just not comparable. Safari will render something badly or not support a CSS decorator that you'd really like to use, but it will rarely crash, go into an infinite URL-fetching loop, or arbitrarily fail to recognize random HTML tags.

As someone involved in web dev during the IE5/6/7 days, the short answer is yes.

The longer answer is yes, absolutely.

Renewables are a quarter of electricity generation now, and in some states are the majority of generation. They're also a decent chunk of all energy though that number's harder to pin down.

GDP is no longer tied to fuel consumption. You can't fight near-free "fuel" and near-zero opex, the renewables slice is only going to increase. I wouldn't trust any metric or rule of thumb tied to coal/oil/gas prices any longer.

When your scale is large enough, you move to "what monitoring methodology will find this?"

When you're doing enough transactions you start to see a noise floor of e.g. bit flips from cosmic rays, and looking for issues involves correlating/categorizing possible software failures and distinguishing them from the misbehavior of hardware.

The netlink function uses a larger stack than most.

Their repro case required a stack adjustment larger than 1<<12 (4kiB).