ahefner

Interesting. I wonder if Harlan Ellison read Colossus before writing I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream.

too.

(sorry)

Computers haven't presented an accurate model of how computers actually work for decades. Compare the surface ISA of anything mainstream since the mid 90s versus all of the superscalar and out-of-order execution happening under the hood.

Deliberate efforts to surface this deeper layer back to the programmer-facing ISA (VLIW, notably Itanium) failed spectacularly outside of niche applications. C and its contenders can't simply hop over the CPU abstraction presented to them without having to map backward from some lower-level model to the surface ISA it's forced to target then having the rug pulled every few years due to microarchitectural changes. It has managed to evolve surprisingly gracefully over decades from tiny 16 and 18-bit machines, sometimes segmented, to 32 and 64 bit machines, and even accommodating SIMD reasonably gracefully via intrinsics (which is about the best we can do at present, as CPUs continue to diverge wildly in this area, though I'm begrudgingly impressed by what modern compilers can do via autovectorization to optimize simple loops).

Do you really need a central directory? The tar and cpio file formats basically append files serially with a small header preceeding each one, and for most use cases this is sufficient.

3 MB is still pretty big... try a rewrite in C.

Seems to be a tradition rooted in the original Maniac Mansion. In Thimbleweed Park the multiple characters became tedious due to having to walk multiple people all over and pass items between them, though I enjoyed being able to see the world through the different lenses of how Ray and Reyes vs. Ransome vs. Delores react to things.

Day of the Tentacle (which coincidentally I've replayed in the past week) executed the multiple characters mechanic the best I've seen, since each character was confined to their own area (past/present/future) and you could instantly pass items between them.

But how much time per week does an SWE actually spend writing code?

Every government is an attacker.

This was really frustrating me. YT started recommending this channel and I could recognize the voice as an AI impersonation but had no way to know if it was at least reading something really written by Feynman. Eventually I concluded it wasn't, but there wasn't clear criteria under which I could report the channel. I'm not sure it's even against YT's TOS.

I think you're not technically wrong, but you're defining NAT differently than the majority of people you're arguing with (those who assume NAT also implies a firewall blocking inbound connections), and the remaining minority (the "on the WAN subnet" crowd) are dismissing outright the idea as a reasonable attack vector that an attacker close enough to be able to send packets destined for non-internet routable addresses to your router.

Is the latter something that was/is actively exploited?

It's there in the name - "Rust graphics community" as opposed to simply "the graphics community". Language fetishization above the end goal - or, rather, the language fetish is the real goal.

Apple is already sending spam notifications for stupid bullshit like that F1 movie.

If gRPC overhead is critical to your system, you've probably already lost the plot on performance in your overall architecture.

You make a fair point about smart pointers, and median "modern C++" practices with STL data structures are unimpressive performance-wise compared to tuned custom data structures, but I can't imagine that idiomatic Java with GC overhead on top is any better.

He definitely made games. Chris Crawford was one of the first known names in game design, a few years ahead of contemporaries like Sid Meier whom I expect you'd still recognize. Crawford seemed to alternate between computer war games, with reliable prospects for commercial success in the 80s, and more experimental fare about managing nuclear reactors, geopolitics, and such - difference being he seemed to get bored by the whole thing and completely disembarked in pursuit of whatever it was he intended to achieve via Erasmatron, Storytron, etc. It's fascinating to read his writings over that period. It seemed a sort of tragic paradox overshadowing all of it that, if he was so bored of mechanistic, algorithmic, and predictable computer game mechanics, maybe stop pursuing computer games as your chosen medium? It may have been a blind alley in the end, but someone had to explore it.

Nevertheless, it is quite sad - however, it's difficult for me to relate to the experiences of someone who lived through that first wave of personal computing and played a notable part in it - perhaps through that lens, anything was possible.

The 8x16 font from the Atari ST's hi-res mode is pretty slick if you like something bold and a little futuristic. https://github.com/ntwk/atarist-font (or rip it directly from the ROM)

Not ideal, but MS-DOS seems to me like the most practical universal software platform. DOSBOX isn't going anywhere.

There's still a few Common Lisp features the mainstream would benefit from ripping off. Relevant here is the condition system. Conditions and restarts are still foreign enough that it's hard to explain to people why the "debugger" was a fundamental part of the lisp machine UI, and how much sense that made, and harder still to fathom how you'd adapt that to Unix, where it would morph into some kind of weird IPC tied into the command shell.

It's not just about being able to stop your program and hot-patch code to recover from errors - this should be trivial in any dynamic language. Rather, it's about being able to composably control how to recover from exception conditions (or, really, any branching behavior) both interactively and programmatically in a unified framework.

Today by, way of your screenshot, I discover Asm-Pro. Just got into Amiga recently (by way of receiving one from my uncle's closet..) and have been meaning to backfill my shameful lack of 68k asm knowledge. Thanks!

Probably true, but it still stings that this dubious piece of software (speaking as a former iTerm2 user still holding a grudge) had been spraying my passwords and random terminal activity all over the internet in the form of unencrypted DNS requests for who knows how long, deliberately, due to mindless opt-out featuritis on the part of the developer. In my mind this is one of the clearest violations of privacy and information security I've been directly subjected to, because the developer had some gee-whiz-neato idea of highlighting URLs in a terminal and making them clickable.

It pains me to think people are still exposing themselves to this class of risk because of whatever iTerm2's latest and greatest idea is.

Oh, I don't know - in my (admittedly limited and very individual / company-specific) experience, the senior management was hard to relate to from the perspective of us rank and file, but clearly had the Sword of Damocles over their head at all times, and tended to get swept away arbitrarily every few years as the winds of corporate politics changes direction. It seemed to require some exceptional execution (or luck) to defer this cycle for even a year or two.

Depends what you mean by senior management, of course. I'm thinking mostly the "VP / SVP of Engineering" type role, and to a lesser degree, one hop down, the "Senior Director" folks, who seemed to be subject to the same phenomenon but on a slightly slower cycle.

From my perspective (for me, personally), the closing of Google Reader killed blogs. That's when I largely stopped reading them. Other readers seemed not worth the trouble, for various reasons. Was this before or after the onslaught of SEO slop? Seems like this shouldn't have been an issue in the age of RSS readers - why would you subscribe to blogspam?

Briefly, Twitter was a useful alternative to promote blog posts (the set of people you follow on Twitter not necessarily being that different than who you'd subscribe to via RSS), but then the blog hosting platforms themselves seemed to age into irrelevance while things like Medium and Substack appeared (neither judging nor endorsing them) while Twitter degraded.

I suppose you're right about Twitter to some degree, though anything that could fit in 140 characters probably belonged better there anyway.

Wounded the pride of iTerm2 fans wielding downvotes, I see. It's fine. You maybe didn't even know about this bit of history. It was a long time ago, and the internet has a short memory.

Yeah, that was the moment everyone should have immediately stopped using this piece of software, and it should have been tarred with such an inescapable stigma that we would not be talking about it today.

But that's like half of computing.. every new tool the world inflicts on you, configured in Jojo's Awesome Configuration Language, with some arbitrary made up grammar punctuated by Tourette outbursts of special character line-noise.

That, or YAML, then a tool to template and generate the YAML, and then a stack of tools wrapped around that, ad infinitum.

A little learning is the cost of not having to write the thing yourself. On the other hand, hell is the non-composable tower of babel that is computing. Total employment by exponentially compounding incidental complexity.

Salmonella as a Service!

SDL1 had no high-level graphics system - you either got a raw framebuffer, or an OpenGL context.

There's some irony in this for me personally. My most recent major "I quit Apple" rage moment was trying to get Flameshot (which I use routinely on Linux) working on my Macbook, so I could more easily take screenshots, just to share something with a friend, because the built-in screenshot functionality in MacOS is so clunky. Between Gatekeeper and the XCode upgrade train, Mac OS's dogged insistence on not letting me run the software I wanted it to run worked me into a rage and I swear I'll never buy another Mac for casual daily computing again. They've really ruined the OS.

China, supposedly.

Curious writing an article about how setf works and not mentioning 'defsetf', only setf methods. I suspect the gentleman's mental model of setf remains slightly wrong.