boffinAudio

Very cute language ..

     match x {
        is table {
            print(indent_this + "{")
            for pair in pairs(x) {
                write(indent + "   " + to_string(pair.key) + ": ") 
                pretty_print_internal(pair.value, indent + "   ", false)
            }
            print(indent + "}")
        }

You find growing tomatoes in a closet to cause great suffering and injustice? (that's what dystopian means)

As a gardener, I would for sure suffer if all I could do is grow plants in a closet.

Gardens are a truly valuable treasure. Grow wherever you possibly can, but please don't ever take away the sunshine.

Lua can be quite performant, so this isn't really a thing, imho. Perhaps its just a matter of using familiar tooling.

I'm a parent, I have researched it, and found it not great because it still involves third parties and doesn't promote local control/anonymity without involving some external entity - i.e. Apple requires accounts, Google still gets its metrics, etc.

Unless you've got some specific better examples?

I dunno, I think I would've preferred Lua bytecode as a deliverable executable target, rather than WebAssembly. The tooling would be simpler, more efficient, and would allow a far wider ranger of interoperability with other engines.

I'm unsure about the Weeping Figs' inclusion in the list, although I do expect NASA has considered this - but, don't Weeping Figs contain lactose, which becomes air born when dried into a dust, and isn't anaphylactic shock a potential consequence of lactose dust inhalation?

Or is it that the impact of Weeping Figs lactose content is minimal when compared to the benefits of the plant, overall - perhaps the lactose is why it is able to filter air so well, anyway?

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8603279/

This is a failure of Operating System Vendors, in my opinion.

If Operating Systems had a way for parents to adequately monitor/administer the machines of their children, this would not be such a huge, massive hole, in which to pour (yet more) human rights abuses.

Parents have the right to have an eye on their children. This is not repressive, it is not authoritarian, it is a right and a responsibility.

The fact that I can't - easily, and with little fuss - quickly see what my kids are viewing on their screens, is the issue.

Sure, children have the right to privacy - but it is their parents who should provide it to them. Not just the state, but the parents. And certainly, the state should not be eliminating the rest of society's privacy in the rush to prevent parents from having oversight of - and responsibility for - the online activities of their children.

The fact is, Operating System Vendors would rather turn their platforms into ad-vending machines, than actually improve the means by which the computers are operated by their users.

It would be a simple thing to establish parent/child relationship security between not just two computers, but two human beings who love and trust each other.

Kids will always be inquisitive. They will always try to exceed the limits imposed upon them by their parents. But this should not be a reason for more draconian control over consenting adults, or indeed individual adults. It should be a motivating factor to build better computing platforms, which can be reliably configured to prevent porn from having the detrimental impact many controllers of society have decided is occurring.

Another undeniable fact, is that parents - and parenting - get a bad rap. However, if a parent and child love and trust each other, having the ability to quickly observe the kids computing environment in productive ways, should be being provided, technologically.

When really, we should be building tools which strengthen parent/child relationships, we are instead eradicating the need for parents.

Unpopular opinion, I know: but Thats The Point.

programmer discipline that cannot be relied upon

This is the crux of all computerization and will never be eradicated.

Nice project! I have a couple of the Transcend SD-WIFI cards in my studio - one thing that I really like about them, is the Lua-based interface that allows programmatic control, remotely, of the filesystem. This has been quite useful.

Do you have any plans to support similar functionality?

Your Grok and my Grok should meet.

Its appropriate, inasmuch as they are an apex predator, and spend a majority of their lives hunting for food - as opposed to many other whales which filter-feed as a harvesting mechanism ..

In the context of ocean plastic recovery/harvesting, I don't know that the purity is all that important - the more important factor is, collection. Being able to take plastic bottles and turn them into a kind of string, for example, seems more viable - if a hopper could be designed which takes a plastic bottle, rotates it around a stripping knife, and the output is a long twine - this could then be fed into the knitting machine.

I imagine this rube-goldberg'esque strandebeest-like contraption sitting out there harvesting wind and waves, slowly turning every bottle it gorges on into a finely woven matte of materials .. maybe even reproducing itself, who knows ..

EDIT: I asked Grok to design a self-replicating ocean weaver, and I have to say .. it seems like a viable idea to me. Perhaps we will see this kind of plastic harvesting in the near future .. at the very least, were I to be stranded on a plastic-laden island, I'm pretty sure I could work out a way to build a raft with sails ..

This is a great idea .. I wonder if it can be adapted to using recycled plastic threads, so that a fleet of these could be deployed into the ocean to recover plastics, turn them into nets, and use those nets to .. recover more plastic?

If I were shipwrecked on a tropical island, I'd make it my daily task to work out how to build something like this, into which I can feed plastic bottles, and get a brand new material that could be used for more construction.

Sure, knitting scarves is neat. But knitting a weather-proof shelter? Hell yeah!

Yeah, I think this factoid has changed significantly in the decades since I learned it during a visit to Pinjarra. ;)

Still, bauxite is pretty weird business.

Whats crazy is that a significant portion of the aluminium minerals comes from a single source of bauxite in the world, near Pinjarra Western Australia .. something like 90% of the worlds aluminium is sourced from that one mine.

Your superficial dismissal of this situation is highly offensive. Please inform yourself.

Yes, white children were stolen and officially trafficked by their governments, as official policy. From around the Commonwealth, in fact.

And some of us are still suffering.

Sounds like you're not qualified to talk on it.

What part of "(Disclaimer: White Stolen Generation Australian.)" didn't you understand?

an unfortunate typo

No, it was not an unfortunate typo. You have merely not bothered to take anything more than a superficial glance at the details.

Please, before you rush to be right about something you know nothing about, try a simple google search, at least - especially for such a subject where some of us were victimized by our own governments.

The link given goes directly to the section on the White Stolen Generation:

https://www.creativespirits.info/aboriginalculture/politics/...

(Look at the URL...)

The "white stolen generations"

Did you know that in Australia there is another stolen generation, one which shares the pain and consequences? It's called the "white stolen generation" to distinguish it from the Aboriginal stolen generation.

In the five decades up to 1982, the newborn babies of young, single women were forcibly removed from them for adoption, a practice sometimes called 'baby farming'. Mothers were drugged, tethered to beds, not allowed to see their babies, told they were dead. [54] Many of these adoptions occurred after the mothers were sent away by their families due to the stigma associated with being pregnant and unmarried.

More than 250,000 white mothers lost their babies to forcible removal at birth by these past illegal adoption practices. Groups such as Adoption Loss Adult Support and Apology Alliance offer help and support.

Between 2010 and 2012 apologies were offered by Western Australia, South Australia, ACT, New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania. Prime Minister Julia Gillard offered a national apology to those affected by forced adoptions in 2013.

Source: A guide to Australia's Stolen Generations - Creative Spirits, retrieved from https://www.creativespirits.info/aboriginalculture/politics/...

Then there is this:

https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/white-mothers-of-sto...

.. and of course you could read what Wikipedia has to say about it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_adoption_in_Australia

In fact, an "apology" was given by the Australian government, but as we can see, it was not enough.

General public awareness of the subject, as you have demonstrated, is terrible. And, yet again, Australia gets away with it as a result.

mass misinformation

The White Stolen Generation is a real thing. If you don't know about it, you're not qualified to dismiss it:

https://www.creativespirits.info/aboriginalculture/politics/...

(EDIT: please look at the URL, which includes the anchor directly to the section on the "White Stolen Generation" - for some reason when following the URL through HN, the jump to the anchor for that section is not followed, giving the impression that there is no "White Stolen Generation" section on the given website, when .. indeed .. there is.)

Those who don't want to confront this painful aspect of Australia's terrible history tend to want to muddy the waters, but those of us who actually suffered under the forced human trafficking regime that was official Australian government policy see things a lot more clearly...

Censorship is fascism. If you want bad ideas to die, let them be examined and discussion to proceed. When you censor ideas you don't like, you give them a safe environment to foster.

5-eyes and then 9-eyes and then 12-eyes say "whaaaa?"

I think the kinetic testing is done all over the middle east. The mind-control stuff is pretty successfully deployed down under, though.

It remains a rare gem, though.

I still have dreams of battles I once, long ago, played in Tanarus.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanarus_(video_game)

Seems to me that the better solution is to give parents the ability to observe their kids' activities, and for <16 accounts to be able to operate only when tied with an adult account, which can observe activity...

Of course many will say this can be abused, but all technology can be abused and the reason we're in this mess in the first place is because OS designers haven't figured out that the relationship between parent and child is an important one which should be strengthened, not made weaker ..

Australia has been a petri dish for the testing of totalitarian-authoritarian policies and populist dogma since its inception as a nation.

Never forget that the Western worlds first, most successful racist genocide occurred in Australia, and the same racist reasoning that allowed it to maintain White Australia policies into the 80's are still being used to justify the slaughter of innocent human beings all over the world.

When the USA wants something dirty done, in yet another illegal war, Australia is ready with hat in hand, willful and subservient, to commit yet more crimes against humanity and get away with it.

Australia is where the apparatus designed, with intent, to massively violate the human rights of over a billion human beings currently operates, at insane scales, every second of the day. Australians are fine with it.

(Disclaimer: White Stolen Generation Australian.)

I cut my teeth on a MIPS Magnum pizzabox (kind of like an SGI Indy without the cool bits) in the 80's, 'upgraded' to an Indy as soon as I could, and would've killed for an SGI laptop. So sad they didn't make one.

If only there were a universally recognized icon that represented the Universal Declaration of Human Rights... seems to me, that would be a good logo to use for an operating system dedicated to freedom and collective competence.

There is/was plenty of anti-Zionist material available in the IA.

Or, equally valid, pro-zionist activists who want something that is normally easily accessible in the IA to be censored.

2. homebrew often wants to install things I already have, like python.

I think its important to understand why this is the case. The python you think you have already, out of the box in MacOS, is the system python. Its not the python you should be using - its the one that python-based tools that your system depends on, is using.

Brew installs other versions of python - and gives you access to tools that allow you to maintain completely independent, different versions of python - for a very good reason.

You simply should not be using the system python for tools that are outside the purview of the system tools - doing so can lead to broken essential system tools.

So, don't be so quick to resist this aspect of package management. Its also true of Linux, by the way - developers should be using their own python installations, and not just glomming libraries into the system-provided python tree .. to do so, is to live very dangerously as a systems operator and as well as a developer.

I did, and I hope you will promote that fact a bit more overtly, because its kind of important for some .. especially in Europe ..

Thanks for the info. Of course, "its all open source" is a fair answer, but its also a dangerous one, since it shifts culpability for verification to anyone who has the time/resources to audit the open source components that you're using.

But, it also has to be stated, there is no guarantee that you're using only the open source components you've declared, which is why an impartial audit by a third party would be necessary before this project can be used to build products in some industries.

Anyway, I see that you have other concerns, so no worries and thanks for the honest answer.