AlbertoGP

The article notes that it was written by an LLM from a conversation, and indeed it would benefit greatly from a good copy editor, but I still find it an interesting way of looking at the effects of LLM use now that the token-maXXing wave is receding:

> The term Demulsification describes the physical separation of a stable emulsion into its distinct chemical constituents. In software labor economics, high enterprise salaries acted as an artificial emulsifier, suspending supernumerary application bloat alongside core systems craft within the same engineering organizations.

> As AI tools collapse the cost of generating high-level glue code, this corporate emulsion is rapidly breaking apart:

First I thought this post was someone looking for a job, then seeing that it was only a link to a company's About page and that your user name matches its co-founder's name it seemed as if you were offering a job and the question mark got lost somehow.

But then I do not see any indication in your website that you are expanding and given the current situation it sounds more likely that the link is meant as a portfolio to show what you have done lately.

Then again, the lack of a jobs/careers listing might be a way to prevent a flood of automated applications.

I would suggest to clarify it in any case.

> After all that work, and the expense of getting an original Zytek interface, giving it away for free seems almost as socialist as Britain’s NHS. But the potential market is limited to fewer than 400 owners. “You don’t have to be a mathematician to understand the very limited upside of trying to sell something like this,” Radom explained. “The better approach is to increase the value of the car itself by giving away the technology.”

I learnt about the XJ220 from the Amiga game and many years later got to see a real one at the Technikmuseum in Speyer, Germany. What a beautiful machine!

For a more detailed technical description you can see my 2019 edition of Chip Morningstar's “Xanadu Hypertext Documents” architecture and data structures from 1986, that got some comments in HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30905524

For my own selfish purposes I would like to have a license that allowed me to reuse parts of SearchEngineSuite as if it was a library, for instance Apache 2.0 which I used for my C preprocessor at https://sentido-labs.com/en/library/cedro/202106171400/

I am preparing a pull request adding the Apache license in case it is acceptable for you.

This is absolutely relevant to my interests and I will try it out in a few hours as it is early morning in Europe now.

So far I do not see any licensing terms, the source file headers only state the copyright notice. Do you have any plans about that?

> I came up with the idea while waking up from a nap and then was so blinded by how great this feature would be to have.

This has happened to me many times. In my case I forget how my program works fron all the approaches I have tried while writing it, then get excited to try a great idea which then does not work because it relies on some feature from one of the alternatives that I rejected for some other reason.

I will indeed waste a few hours trying the PDF indexing idea, there has to be some way to make it work. I have done some feeble attempts in this direction by myself before using the C library pdfio ( https://github.com/michaelrsweet/pdfio) which would work also on Windows. I will probably crash again on that wall but if the code search works as described I will still use this program every day.

Thank you for the clarification.

The article does not promote it on security grounds:

> This article however will focus on the technical reasons why I won't be installing Omarchy yet. It boils down to what I call the security sweet spot.

> ... Most of the improvements I read about seem to focus on the desktop and UX, but I wish this humble list gives some food for thought about deeper OS architecture in terms of security and privacy.

> The person who used to edit things for me has not been replaced,

I assume you meant "now" instead of "not": "The person who used to edit things for me has now been replaced,"

Might be your ISP's DNS censoring the domain name, it happens to me for different ones depending on whether I am in Spain or in Germany at the moment when I click the link.

It might work if you manually change the TLD part of the URL.

What I did was get the IP address when it worked and add it to "/etc/hosts" so it works when on another network.

> A town, street name or postcode were omitted, but a highlighted note – presumably written by a postie – chirpily added ‘Royal Mail, we never fail!’ to the front of the letter.

I think the note was written by the sender because the handwriting looks the same as in the vague "woman in Cornwall shed" address.

My guess is that it was intended to motivate Royal Mail to figure it out by quoting what might have been their slogan at some point. Now the highlight could have been added by a post office worker as a way of saying "indeed we never fail". The sender's style of higlighting things seems rather to be adding asterisks.

Which one of the Markdowns should each browser support?

Alright but where is the link? Can you put in a comment?

I will try this out later, but for now the address https://mucss.org/ does not work for me. The Github link does.

In 50 years, people will be equally amazed that we could afford having our own computers on our desks.

I might be missing something, but parsing the HTML, even with the different formats, should be much simpler than the PDF form.

In 20 years I would guess they used no more than 20 formats, which is doable even if writing XPath (perhaps CSS selectors would suffice) by hand.

Do you mean that the mutual fund complex includes many funds and you get as many different formats for a same time period?

Thanks for the information, I have observed this in some of those links before (others worked, I do not know what the diffference is) and it might be the case. I am indeed outside the U.S.A.

The move to Singapore has been mentioned in several comments but he does address it in the linked piece:

> Some might say: “Hang on, it’s all very well James Dyson telling Britain to support doers and makers, but he took his company’s manufacturing to Malaysia in 2002 and then set up a global headquarters in Singapore in 2019.”

> The answer is worth exploring. In 2002 Dyson was expanding rapidly and urgently needed a new factory, but planning permission was refused. We were able to use empty factories in Singapore and Malaysia.

> However, Dyson now employs about 2,000 people in Britain, which is about twice the number we employed at the time of the move.

I get 404 from the link.

This link shows me the paywall, I have not investigated why.

We had several Quickshot II's at home for our Commodore 64; each broke after a while and we had to get a new one.

It looked and felt fantastic and was cheap, but the garbage switch mechanism was a thin metal cross pushed down onto contacts on the board in such a way that it would inevitably snap and render the joystick useless.

I did what I could as a kid without proper materials or tools to repair them but nothing lasted.

I ended up building my own from scratch with steel and wood, reusing the cable of one of them, and could finally play without fear of breaking and leaving me high and dry.

From my experience with a previous product from Retro Games Ltd, The A500, I expect this one to be much better than the original.

The URL is wrong, the right one is https://rodgercuddington.substack.com/p/the-return-to-full-f...

> UK retailers are reporting a striking reversal in dairy consumption patterns. Waitrose searches for full-fat milk increased 417%, full-fat yogurt 233%, and block butter 280% in a single month, while skimmed milk and low-fat yogurt are being left on shelves. This shift represents more than a dietary preference change – it signals a fundamental breakdown in public trust regarding nutrition guidance and reveals profound frustration with decades of conflicting advice.

> This analysis examines the scientific evidence, economic factors, processing implications, and psychological dimensions driving this trend, with particular attention to how changing advice may have eroded consumer confidence in nutritional expertise itself.

Around the time this website was made, I was building an application for a big company in Spain that was to run as a Java applet and required the code to be signed.

They did not yet have their own certificates so I had to make my own CA during testing and sign the code, and I wanted to make sure that they did not forget to switch to their certificates later, so instead of signing the code with my name which some bureaucrat might decide to not bother changing, the code was signed by Britney Spears.

They noticed it, got the joke and made sure to switch certificates for the release. Everything went well thanks to Britney.

> Then apparently the editors renamed it to the (less interesting/more convoluted) title of the page it linked to.

It is part of the submission guidelines:

> Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

A particularly interesting part that I did not expect from the title:

> Before the rats encountered the detour, the research team observed that their brains were already firing in patterns that seemed to "imagine" alternate unfamiliar mental routes while they slept. When the researchers compared these sleep patterns to the neural activity during the actual detour, some of them matched.

> “What was surprising was that the rats' brains were already prepared for this novel detour before they ever encountered it,”

> Overall, I don’t think the LLM saved me any time. I didn’t end up keeping the code it gave me. But it got me unstuck, and that meant I actually made progress.

I haven't tried LLMs yet but this sounds valuable.

In 1984 one of the developers of Xanadu at the time, Chip Morningstar, wrote a technical description to apply for funding.

In typical Xanadu fashion it was kept secret, protected by Dark Magick:

> He who transgresses against the propriety of the Information contained herein shall be Cursed! Woe unto all who reveal the Secrets contained herein for they shall be Hunted unto the Ends of the Universe. They shall be afflicted unto the Tenth Generation with Lawyers. Their Corporate Bodies shall be Broken and cast into the Pit. Their Corporate Veil shall be Pierced, and Liability shall attach to the Malefactors in personem. They shall suffer Ulcers and Migraines and Agonies Unimagined. Yea, Verily, for such shall come to pass against all who would Dare to Test the Powers of Xanadu unto their Doom.

It was believed to have been lost forever but in 2019 he found the only known remaining copy, a printout he had at home buried in old stuff, and posted it with OCR in his blog. He wrote:

> At the time, we regarded all the internal details of how Xanadu worked as deep and dark trade secrets, mostly because in that pre- open source era we were stupid about intellectual property. As a consequence of this foolish secretive stance, it was never widely circulated and subsequently disappeared into the archives, apparently lost for all time. Until today!

I took it and made a cleaned-up augmented HTML edition, with additions like Engelbart’s structural statement numbers which allow linking to individual paragraphs:

https://sentido-labs.com/en/library/201904240732/Xanadu%20Hy...

It includes a glossary of terms and detailed explanation of the content addressing “tumblers”, and is the best technical description of Xanadu that I know of.

It is indeed the 11th of September, here is the German Government's page about it: https://www.bundesregierung.de/breg-de/leichte-sprache/11-se...

That man, Rex Malik, participated in (among other things) the 1982 BBC series “The Computer Programme” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Computer_Programme), typically in a small section at the end on an episode but also as narrator in other parts and is credited as “Programme Adviser”:

Episode 1 - “It’s Happening Now”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtMWEiCdsfc

Episode 4 - “It’s on the Computer”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkXqb1QT_tI

Episode 5 - “The New Media“: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GETqUVMXX3I

Episode 10 - “Things to Come”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLL7HmbcrvQ