vaxman

Please consider rebranding to something other than the name of the OG Linux distribution. I do get the Norse mythology tree connection vs STP etc but it’s sort of disrespectful to overload Yggdrasil Linux. After what’s left of RedHat finishes imploding, maybe Son of Yggdrasil will come out.. :D

..directly while also visualizing his neck veins xD

Mind. Blown.

On DEC systems, I programmed using FORTRAN, BLISS, MACRO and (on GiGi and RSTS/E) in BASIC for a long time.. then one day the Bell Labs spinoff I worked for bought a Whitesmith’s C license for the VAXcluster (for probably oodles of money) and I was transferred into a group headed by the guy who wrote UNIX’s malloc implementation a long time before I came along. He hated VMS as much as I hated C. He couldn’t use UNIX because it only ran on dogshit computers. I couldn’t use FORTRAN because someone read a book that said C was cool. We all carried around our K&R pamphlet books and the Whitesmith’s manual (which the Indian workers would mispronounce with three syllables lol). The compiler had all kinds of issues on VMS. Eventually, DEC released VAX-11 C (still have my little 5x7” orange book) and that was enough to make me give up (the truly wonderful) VAX FORTRAN and MACRO/BLISS compilers. My home setup (it was not common for anyone to have home setups then, even programmers) was all assembler, FORTH, Pascal and BASIC but with the shift to C at work, I finally sold a kidney and bought Lattice C and later Aztec C and after moving to the Mac (as I sealed my Amigas into the boxes in the garage where they remain to this day), MPW C, THINK C and CodeWarrior C, MS Visual C, before Yggdrasil Linux…GNU C, then GNU Objective C and now (needle scratch silence) Swift? All started with Whitesmith’s C…

TL;DR: The team that destroyed Apple by posing as innovators spun off into Be and took many Apple customers with them. There, the team spent days on end rearranging the icons on their corporate home page and operating system until they ran out of runway. CalPers management team then chose NeXT over Be to save their investment in Apple and Be shutdown, so the team’s cult following moved on to reimplement that horrible Be atrocity on Linux. Some guy who worked on UX code libraries for one or those Be clones took it off the shelf after all this time and is releasing it for Wayland.

I may have added some of that which wasn’t in TFA but is in my lived experience ;)

Roger, who spoke only Chinglish and never paused between words, was working on a VAX FORTRAN program that exchanged tapes with IBM mainframes and a memory mapped section, inventing a new word in the process that still has me rolling decades later: ebsah-dicky-asky-codah

When they run out of training data, they have to rely upon better reasoning algos which take time to develop and that’s when the party ends. The purpose of IT investment is to increase competitiveness through better efficiency and thus capture more of the market. If everyone is using the same model trained on the same max dataset, it stops being much of a competitive advantage. I’ve already heard the stock-option Billionaires bloviating with their intuition shaped by narrow corporate experiences that the AI objective is to increase GDP or similar, but obviously the ol’ man in the corner office ain’t payin’ for that and so at some point, the question of how to keep the Three Mile Island running to power this sucker becomes very real. The answer is sort of scary, if you think about it…

Your question made me throw up in my mouth. RAD, Agile, Dacom, etc. were attempts to codify natural processes so that there could be some semblance of accountability for the resource allocations. They were not a glimmer in the eye of their warped creators eyes until decades after Lisa.

Thank you for posting this. RIP Bill Atkinson

Interesting article. DOGE staffers are widely reported to be financially independent, genius technologists from Elon Musk's inner circle with a profound lack of ethics and very narrow world perspective that come from their extreme youth. Those guys aren't going to hang around for long and take the heat; if they do, they'll eventually hear Trump's two favorite words anyway. The name DOGE is also now politically toxic and remains associated with Elon Musk. NYT (and the liberal media they feed) will likely try to keep the DOGE name in the headlines as long as they can, since it is a tremendous embarrassment for Trump.

I do hope that after DOGE goes away, Trump goes back to supporting his base with respect to maintaining VA staffing and restricting H1B visas, especially after the R&D tax credit debacle cost so many tech jobs and the true potential for LLMs are being realized to increase productivity at all levels (as opposed to the halving the workforce at the bottom).

He said a lot more than that. It's reported he lost $34B last week, so maybe it was a human reaction, but his security clearance is still going to be toast.

The Pentagon has had to deal with once-trusted contractors going off the rails before and they will have to deal with it again. There are two key issues: what does the USA need from SpaceX to meet contracted Defense needs and what are the new national security risks associated with current SpaceX operations under the staff that's loyal to this guy. Will the military take control while the Pentagon figures out how to transfer permanent control to trusted parties and the bean counters resolve the accounting?

This is a no-op. There is no $1T in savings, only infinite political liability (cutting USDVA by 80K people -laughable). DOGE is cooked, Trump will unwind it and DOJ will start chasing down the data they are reported to have copied.

As for how we’re going to reign in the budget, they’ll likely turn to Regan-era austerity initiatives at some point. Come get your 10lb block of cheese…

DOGE is over, they will blame Musk for its wind down. Trump would have to go against his advisors to keep it operating but DOGE has only ever delivered small savings and tremendous liability, so our genius president is unlikely to do that.

DoD has now and has always had ultimate authority when it comes to putting things into the space above our heads. Don’t listen to the idealistic millennials and their powerful downvote buttons. ;)

They may try to fix Boeing with SpaceX because they must take every effort to fix what went wrong there. They do have several other options though.

What you need to know is that the Pentagon has ultimate authority in matters like this (regardless of the contractor’s equity structure) and it has wielded it time and time again throughout the Cold War. SpaceX cannot escape the command structure by “decommissioning” anything. If you use drugs and threaten US interests in jest, you are done. Those are hard rules. Perhaps Musk will wind up emaciated with footlong fingernails living on the top floor of a hotel in Las Vegas or Florida, but he will not still influence the assets at SpaceX in such a state, regardless of his wealth, passion, allegiance, intelligence, charisma, army of sycophants, children named after chemicals, etc. He can work out his relationship with personalities in the US government, but his arse is cooked in terms of command of dual-use orbital transit and communications systems. The people at SpaceX deserve so much better anyway.

https://youtu.be/65_FeMUuCl0 https://youtu.be/0kpNkEdB1o0

It seems likely that the Pentagon will soon force SpaceX to merge into another contractor, most likely Boeing or Boeing's largest rival, Lockheed-Martin.

It seems likely that the Pentagon will force SpaceX to merge with another company, which should be good for Tesla and Boring, but sad for his Mars dream.

As for DOGE, Trump has a couple options. He can shut it down and blame Musk, or he can let it keep running against the advice of his team. After DOGE is gone, they will be able to get a warrant and start looking for copies of the data. The first place to look is X.

The guy who invented NodeJS (a "fashionable" giant hack) got up and said he regretted it and now uses Go. Did that stop anyone from running up the tech debt with NodeJS? After all, "everyone is doing it!" So easy to start banging out JavaScript...

At the other extreme you have Swift which is not Good (as opposed to no good) until V5 which is now obsoleted by V6. Do we all know how screwed Apple is when it comes to LLM training coverage of Swift 5 or 6? Short of their own codebase (and even then), where are they going to get enough training data to help all the Vibe Coders and novices? Could take years to resolve this.

Weird future, eh? So FORTH may not be "fashionable" but it is hella fun and very good in a number of dimensions. With the right LLM interfaces (which love large libraries of concise word-like primitives), world domination is assured.

Have you had any feedback from The Chuck?

How about a ZeptoFORTH-MCP bridge (to implement services in ZeptoFORTH that can be called by local or remote agents) and an official way of programmatically configuring and interacting with an LLM, like on a Jetson, from ZeptoFORTH?

They need sideline embedded until they release a proto board and a compute module with Apple Silicon SoCs running Linux or Darwin. If Apple drops support for the embedded variant of Swift then it would be up to enthusiasts to carry on and I don't see that happening. This is also why the other OEMs like Nordic and STMicro are more likely to support Micro/CircuitPython than Swift.

There is an ad at the bottom of your clickbait. I think you understand very well.

Ive designed bathroom fixtures before Apple and had been parked at Apple making the dumbest looking computers you can image for a very long time until my Dad's lifelong coworker brought Steve back --something I am on record telling people would be the only thing that would save Apple's arse (usually adding that Hell would freeze over before that happened). When Steve returned, he found all they had left was an ability to make laptops and so, the race was on to surround them with fixtures..enter his old pal Jony Ive. In the time since, things got a bit out of hand (pun intended) with the Vision Pro, he's moved on and Tim Apple figured out a way to get all the R&D money back...but

    did Ive just land $6B+ for incarnating "Dr. Theopolis"?

Yes, https://youtu.be/1ZCxXjDlaf8 yes, I think he did... Good on Him! :D

PS: Charles "Chuck" Moore (who developed FORTH) last made a release called etherForth at https://etherforth.org/ It runs on a chip he designed called the GA144 (which is also programmed in arrayForth3) available at https://www.greenarraychips.com/home/products/index.php Again, this is for devs that want to have some fun. Between ZeptoForth and etherForth, you're covered.

Not the actual implementations heh ...I heard even Linus has dropped support for the 486. Even the infra is finally giving way...did you see the NVLINK SPINE announcement a few days ago? It's going to be deployed in Stargate UAE that was announced Thursday.

Yeah it is, it does (especially with OOP) and "ABBYY" kicked Tesseract's arse a long time ago anyway.

Maybe try OpenAI GPT-4o or Google's Document AI https://cloud.google.com/document-ai

No son, Linux is not a version of Unix anymore than MINIX is.

NeXTStep was real UNIX, but macOS is not.

BTW, I was taught to program in C by one of the original core Unix team members and I worked for DEC long before I could have discussed TesseractOCR with people who didn't. Keep those ignorant downvotes commin'

You aren't wrong..'nd I wrote one of the first Ethernet drivers (for any platform) almost half a century ago and spent a long time at the company that invented twisted pair Ethernet; but sharing MY insight gets me downvoted unless it aligns with pop views and is phrased so as not to amuse or confuse...

If they're going to "Ask HN", they should ask something like "what are most others doing in regards to X" because that's the only information that can be accurately gleaned in this kind of environment; otherwise, consider asking Reddit/Gemini. https://youtu.be/V-SJQdREDKM

It's still 40.

Why not use Ollama-OCR?

errbody from that era hates Ada --it was an edict that died once the promises of OOP began to be realized.

"dead things should stay dead" - Pet Cemetery, Steven King

If you want to have some fun from 1979, I highly recommend FORTH. It's really good and would have taken over the universe (lowercase u) had K&R C not dropped as part of the slow motion train wreck known as Unix (not to be confused with Linux). https://hackaday.io/project/170826/logs?sort=oldest

Let's not talk about kernel mode AST development at 3am on a 500 user VAX-11/780 that you can preload the typeahead buffer on your VT100 with like 45 minutes of typing.