HN user
Nothing to see here.
A huge thank-you to the dev(s)! I love retro projects like this. I use Dillo daily, although it is for internal use. One thing I use it for is to view gemini protocol sites. The plug-in architecture means that you can render any protocol; gopher and gemini amongst others.
It's so lightweight!
Finance professor Aswath Damodaran, and others, have made many useful insights as to how AI as an investment is likely to pay out.
One technique is, instead of trying to pick individual winners, look at the total addressable market. Then compare the market size with the capital being pumped in. If you look on this basis, Aswath concluded that collectively AI investment is likely to provide unsatisfactory returns.
Here's a recent headline: "Nvidia’s Jensen Huang thinks $1 trillion won’t be enough to meet AI demand—and he’s paying engineers in AI tokens worth half their salary to prove it"
There are two parts to this. 1. A staggering $1t is expected to be invested in AI. Someone worked out that this was more than the entire capital expenditure for companies like Apple. We're talking about its entire existence here. IOW, $1t is a lot of dough. A LOT.
Secondly, this whole notion that AI is such a sure thing that half the salary will be in tokens should ring alarm bells. '“I could totally imagine in the future every single engineer in our company will need an annual token budget,” he said. “They’re going to make a few 100,000 a year as their base pay. I’m going to give them probably half of that on top of it as tokens so that they could be amplified 10 times.”'
I recall from the dotcom fiasco that service companies like accountants and lawyers were providing services to the dotcom companies and being compensated in stock options rather than cold hard cash like you'd normally expect.
Very dangerous.
As another poster pointed out, this really boils down to FOMO by big tech. I'm expecting big trouble down the line. We await to see if I'm early or just plain wrong.
Forth is at this point more of a culture than a language.
As the saying goes, once you've seen one Forth, then you've seen one Forth.
I've mucked around with my own Forths in the past, including one that recognises lexical type, so you could build something like a parser in Forth. I didn't take it that far. Forth is normally conceived as being built from the ground up, but if you're you're going to implement it in C or C++ then you can be more imaginative.
I played around with colorforth for 5 minutes on a couple of occasions, but I ran away screaming. What - just what - the hell is going on? I'm sure it all works for Charles Moore, but for mere mortals it might as well be a klingon control panel.
I think Moore effectively gave up on programming a couple of years ago? There was some strange modification in the guts of Windows and he couldn't get his environment to work any longer. He concluded that the game was not work the candle.
To add to the cool things you can do with Neoleo, I wrote a little TCL extension that loads current processes into the spreadsheet. I added custom bindings so that you could search for processes, go to its parent, and kill processes.
I'm also half-way to adding a little calendar extension, too.
Yes, I'm partial to a bit of retro. It does back to around 1991, IIRC. I don't think it had a curses interface in those days.
And check this: version 1.2.2 is available on Aminet, for the Amiga. How's that for a blast from the past?
Oleo is C, circa 50k of C code, Neo(-leo) is around 5k of C++ code. A 10th of the size, but not necessarily any less powerful. Oleo has some memory leaks in places, whereas Neo has no (known) leaks.
Oleo uses lex and yacc, whereas Neo has a hand-parser.
Oleo is in the style of emacs bindings, whereas Neo is more vim-like, but without the modality.
I think the Neo code is better-structured and more readable (but I would say that, wouldn't I? - although it is far from perfect). C++ generally makes code more readable and obvious, without all that pointer arithmetic.
The internals of Oleo are more complicated. It uses byte-code for cells, for example. Neo stores a parse tree for a cell. So you can see that a lot of programming effort is saved right there.
In terms of speed, I suspect that the original Oleo is faster, although it's difficult to benchmark.
Neo is also heading towards being a library that you can compile in with other C++ code. Plus there's an interface to Tcl, which Oleo never had. So you get a lot of extensibility there which Oleo doesn't have.
I also think Neo is more generally accessible. It's got something in the way of a menu (still early stages), which helps. Neo is just generally less fiddly with editing cells, IMO. The mouse works, too.
Oleo does have an interface using Motif. Very early-90s. There's even an interface to GTk, although I don't think that works properly. I decided to abandon all that and just stick to an ncurses interface. After all, if you want a fancy interface, there are proper options these days like LibreCalc, Caliigra and Gnumeric.
Visidata is a fast popular data tool in python https://www.visidata.org/ if you just want data entry.
If I may be permitted a small plug ...
Oleo is a GNU spreadsheet going back absolutely donkey years. I cloned the repo here: https://github.com/blippy/oleo and made minimalist fixes to get the thing to compile.
I also based my own terminal-based spreadsheet based off of it call neoleo: https://github.com/blippy/neoleo
I wouldn't say that my project is particularly good, but it does have a number of features that I find useful. The next release will include Tcl bindings, so you can customise some of the workings of the app. There's also a module available where you can go to town programmatically.
It opens up a world of possibilities, including stuff like pivot tables.
package require oleo
load-oleo mysheet.oleo
set ws [toMat]
set subset [subRows $ws [mand [mstreq 2 foo] [mstreq 3 bar]]
I'm kinda dog-fooding it at the moment to put in place features that I need. It doesn't have the full equivalence of SQL-equivalent though.
You can have anything you want. You get what you design for.
However, saying you're committed is not the same as being committed.
Furrowing your brow and saying you'll try harder, even when you mean it, doesn't necessarily work, either.
It needs trade-offs, and a willingness for abandon certain things as trade-offs. It requires an honest assessment.
Stop updating the system every 5 minutes, stop with the advertising, stop with the user is the product mentality. Stop changing the interface. Stop with requiring a user account. Stop with the all your data are belong to us. Simplify.
None of this will happen, of course. Corporate imperatives militate against it.
Wanna improve Windows? How about having a two-year release cadence? Developers can get a technology preview, full of cavaet emptor achey breaky changes if they want. This allows them to develop for the next release.
Sync the development tools (more importantly the libraries) like C++ in with the release. Include those libraries. The pay-off is, as if by magic, if a user downloads a program for Windows N, it will work. No extra libraries will be required because they'll already be included in the OS.
In the words of Adam Ant: it took us 3 years to be famous overnight.
I also heard about Matt Lucas, of Little Britain fame. He was slowly plugging away at it, and was about to give up. At around 30 years old, he teamed up with David Walliams, describing it as the last roll of the die. Their popularity exploded.
Morgan Freeman didn't become famous until he was in his 50's. Someone asked him if he was upset that it took so long. His response was: "No, because it didn't have to happen at all."
How about trying to run it on ReactOS?
Don't forget that Aminet is still receiving regular uploads: https://www.aminet.net/
It's amazing that a platform that's been dead since the early 90's is still getting so much love.
There's also Fuzix, which is Unix-like. https://fuzix.org/
Supports Arm M0 (Raspberry Pi Pico), ESP32 and a variety of others, including Z80.
For anyone interested there's tinybasic, which will run on something as small as an Arduino.
I did see Debian on YT being booted up on an Amiga. It was, to say the least, a painful-looking experience. It seems sacrilege in a way. If you're going to use an Amiga you might as well use AmigaOS.
Amazingly, Aminet is still up-and-running with frequent uploads.
I contributed a package to that once.
I also made an animation on the Amiga, "Sadistic Circus". A circus dog jumps through a hoop a few times, then gets set on fire. What a sick, sick little puppy I am. I submitted it to a PD disk collection one time.
The dog was an image I got off of a magazine disk, which I mucked around with to create my animation.
Pretty rubbish really, but whatever. Happy days.
Ah, nostalgia ain't what it used to be -- source contested
I tried Zig some time ago to use with microcontrollers. It has a generator for the pins, which was nice. But subsequent versions broke as Zig changed syntax. So I started going down the rabbit-hole (it needed a newer version of llvm, for example) until I eventually decided that the game wasn't worth the candle.
The fact that another breaking change has been introduced confirms my suspicion that Zig is not ready for primetime.
My conclusion is to just use C. For low-level programming it's very hard to improve on C. There is not likely to be any killer feature that some other contender will allow you to write the same code in a fifth of the lines nor make the code any more understandable.
Yes, C may have its quirky behaviour that people gnash their teeth over. But ultimately, it's not that bad.
If you want to use a better C, use C++. C++ is perfectly fine for using with microcontrollers, for example. Now get back to work!
I've messed around with Forth before, and even created my own one. I could do cool things with it, and gotten a DSL-like language.
I used words like IMMEDIATE and POSTPONE to create words that create words. I quickly get lost doing that, though.
Forth is very very cool to play with. Pragmatically, virtually any other language is better.
As some wag on Reddit put it, "Digital Note Taking Systems: Cutting and pasting your life away, one note at a time."
As an experiment I tried
yes | pv > /dev/null
and was getting about 5.4GiB/s
On the fasm code, I was getting a meagre 7.3MiB/s. Ouch! The non-assembly version is considerably faster. I wonder if it is because I make a syscall for every write I want to perform, whereas C uses buffering, or something.
A few days ago I had the very foolish notion of trying to learn assembly for x64 Linux. It came out to 73 lines of code and weighs in at 288 bytes. It doesn't support the --help or --version arguments.
https://gitlab.com/mcturra2000/cerbo/-/blob/master/x64-asm/0...
Some people seem to revel in assembly, but I now know why C exists.
As Bill Burr said, if we were to eat just one billionaire, then all the rest would tow the line.
Brit here. IANAL, but there is a legal principle of "vicarious liability". So if an employee does something bad, it's the employer that foots the bill. This is vicarious liability. It is actually a "good" thing as a legal principle because it's the the employer who has all the dough and is most able to compensate for a wrong.
The downside to all this is that the bad actors get away with it. They have less skin in the game.
My view is that more people need to go to jail. Corporations would behave less like sociopathic institutions if this were done.
I'm currently using Slackware current. I use an approach of compiling from source or using AppImage. Things like Flatpak and Snaps are an opaque black box to me.
I have AppImages for things like Zoom, KeePass and LibreOffice. I don't need to keep updating them. They do what I want them to do. I have them on a separate partition. If I reinstall my system they're all ready to go out of the gate.
It's ridiculously simple.
I did try out Fedora awhile ago, but decided it wasn't for me. Why is everything a Flatpak? Just use the repo mechanism.
I have set up a Zettelkasten, which alternates between letters and numbers.21a5 is for my Alcatel 3085 mobile. So it's a similar idea, I think.
Classification is a vexing problem I've tried to grapple with.
The Dewey Decimal system is a really good example of people trying to get a handle on it. It's not easy. "Arduino Cookbook" is in the Electronics section (621.3810285536 to be precise, although the decimal system doesn't usually get that crazy in its specificity), whilst "Getting Started with Arduino" is in 005.133, more that half a library apart.
As one commentator put it, a book is rarely about one thing. People have criticized the Dewey system, so they throw the baby out with the bathwater and declare their bright shiny new wheel to be the solution.
Except, of course , they skip over the same fundamental problem that Dewey had: books don't really fit into a taxonomy.
One solution which may work for small personal systems is to not bother to use a hierarchy. Put car insurance in one folder, then file all folders alphabetically.
Getting more sophisticated, if you have a hierarchical system, consider indexing. I found an old address book that I had lying around. Add entries into that. Sure, entries won't be in strict alphabetical order, but hopefully you won't have a system so big that you can't find anything.
Indexing is "the" solution, because you don't have to try to figure out where in the taxonomy something is. You just look it up. Indexing also allows you to construct different "views" of a subject, thereby allowing you bypass taxonomic choices.
Being a computer geek, you could keep an index file on computer. You can then simply grep it.
It also reminds me a little bit like DNA. There's a lot of cruft that doesn't do very much but the organism is still viable anyway.
I was playing around with GPIO some time ago. The Linux kernel seems to adopt this approach. The first rule of Linux ABI is that thou shalt not break ABI.The second rule of Linux ABI is THOU SHALT NOT BREAK ABI.
So they had something like GPIOHANDLE_GET_LINE_VALUES_IOCTL, decided to change things around a little, so introduced GPIO_V2_LINE_GET_VALUES_IOCTL.
Although, as the saying goes, the problem with backwards compatibility is that anything that starts backwards stays backwards.
I just skimmed the docs, but I heard about it a few days ago. Noteworthy points: * it's not a way for companies to raise capital * not much in the way of regulation. Main UK listings are quite rigorous. The UK has an AIM market, in which a company is sponsored by a broker. It's a "junior" market. It's very wild-west, and the long-term performance has been bad. That's mostly because the constituents are some of the biggest piles of garbage imaginable. There are some high-quality ones, though * Trading is infrequent, like once a quarter or something. * It's mainly designed for professional investors and and "eligible" investors (you'll probably need liquid assets of at least £1m to qualify) * I think it's intended for small companies to get used to public scrutiny, with a view that they will get a proper listing
I think the Tory gov't had mooted such a scheme, but nothing materialised. Labour has implemented it. I'm a critic of Labour supporter, but I suppose I should at least give them some kudos for trying. My more impartial evaluation is that I don't think it will provide much value.
Interestingly, there used to exist another public exchange for UK shares outside LSE (London Stock Exchange) - maybe its PLUS or OFEX that I'm thinking about - but they closed down now. It was pretty cruddy from what little I saw, with gigantic spreads.
The tiddly exchanges don't really make much sense IMV. Why would I want to invest in companies that are likely to be pretty junky, are unlikely to treat their external shareholders fairly, have dubious corporate governance, and enormous spreads? I could buy into much higher-quality companies on LSE.
Just my 2c. * It's a five-year trial, whereupon the results will be evaluated.
The problem is, sites like DuckDuckGo and Gibiru are not much better.
There's loads and loads of paywall sites appearing near the top, which is pretty useless to me. There must surely be a market out there for a search engine that skips over this nonsense.
One feature that would be useful is a site filter; a link you can click to remove future results from the site.
You might be interested in "Crap Days Out", a book published about 1 decade ago. In it you can find out such treats as the Dinosaur Museum, which has no dinosaurs, the Pencil Museum, which boasts the world's largest pencil, and Teapot Island, home to more than 8,000 teapots. Of course Stonehenge appears in it.
Here's a review in the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2011/aug/21/crap-days-out...
"And that's Stonehenge!" I announced. "Is it?" replied Maria. "It's a bit small and rubbish, isn't it?" "Yes," I said proudly. "It is."
In London, some bollards have been made out of recycled cannons.
If that's too scary for you, you could always look at "Pylon of the Month" https://www.pylonofthemonth.org/
The website was set up by an Englishman, of course, because that's what us British do best: quirky and underwhelming.
I heard a fund manager in the energy sector the other day who said that PotM was the thing that fascinated listeners most.
Spoiler alert: January's pylon is from Cadiz in Spain, has its own Wikipedia page, but the pair featured aren't as tall as the Thames crossing pylons.