eggy

Wow, I never saw this! I like APL/J/Uiua, so this is perfect. Uiua is both stack and array based. Thanks!

Cool, and I love the retro font. I had a Vic-20 (early 80s) and Commodore PET 2001 (1977) I am learning Odin, and I was going to try creating live coding environment with scripting in Forth and with the gui and rest in Odin, but for audio and graphics. I was inspired long ago by Paul Batchelor's Sporth and Tidal (now tidal cycles?). Forth is a great language. You can make an compiler/interpreter in a few days. John Earnest's ok.js is also cool. I like stack and array languages, so when I am not playing in J, I use Uiua. Uiua has the capability to do audio and graphics/animations and scratches my array/stack itch.

I picked up a book around 1977 on the PDP-11 processor and worked my way through it with pencil and paper to understand the architecture when I was around 13. I saves up my summer job money and bought a used Commodore PET 2001 for ~$700 with cassette drive and 8kb and a green phosphor screen. I later bought an expansion for it that gave me 32kb. The PET's 6502 was simpler, but that DEC handbook and working out registers on paper gave me a strong foundation in computers. I realized computers would only be tools and always managed to take jobs outside of comp. sci. or IT, but always used a computer and programmed utilities for every job I had in any language I fancied at the time and throughout the years: C, Basic, asm (6502, PIC, Scenix, 68000, 8086/88, now ARM/x64), Forth, Lisp (Lush/Lush2 lush-users on Sourceforge with Yann LeCun to get Lush running, APL, J, Logo, Pascal, Factor, Java, Python, F#, now Rust, Odin, and J is still open on my desktop daily). I had in mind how people were talking about high-paying jobs if you learned WordPerfect, and it was "the future" back in 1991-93. I felt people were putting the tool before thought, intelligence, and process. I did dip into DBA and IT here and there for a little bit, but I thoroughly enjoyed writing embedded software for the window animation I was working on for a display company, and interactive prox switches on the store window at Sachs to trigger a pneumatically actuated Nutcracker to raise his arm and close his jaw and other fun kinetic pieces in the late 90s (Pre-Arduino saturation days - Parallax Basic Stamp, Scenix, PIC, and PCBs from scratch by hand with resist and etch). Kids loved pressing the Nutcracker switches! The reason I learned so much was that you had to go to the library, write a letter or eventually by the 90s email and user groups, and just plain figure it out through trial and error on your own. I had a VIC-20, Commodore 128, Amiga 500/1000, then a PowerPC Mac running Mach Linux in the late 90s/early 2000. I loved Commodore. It's a shame. They were the best option for the buck.

Why did you choose F# over OCaml? I am in the same boat and evaluating both. Mainly systems programming, applications, etc.

A great tech book on symbolic computers in general and Lisp machines, is Peter Kogge's 1991, "The Architecture of Symbolic Computers". I believe new efforts by people like Yann LeCun will counter the "LLMs or bust" monoculture along with SOC/ASICs, in-memory compute, neuromorphic chips, dataflow, optical/analog hybrids , etc. that will bring a healthy correction or alternatives to the Von Neumann architecture.

For me, vigorous exercise, riding my bike, running, jumping rope, has always made me feel better mentally and physically whether it was a pathogen funk or just life and feeling down or symptomatic as some describe below. I always check my kids and myself after hikes, especially in tall grass or shrubs. I've found ticks here and there over the years. The cathartic effect of high-intensity exercise where you push yourself to what you think is your limit is amazing for your physical and mental well being. The old Sufi saying, "Movement is life; stillness is death" is my mantra. I have friends who avoid hiking for fear of ticks and Lyme disease. It's a shame, since being outdoors in the sun, smelling the woods, and taking in the views while walking are priceless. Movement over pharmaceuticals.

Yes, and AdaCore's tooling is formally verified and produces reports already familiar to aerospace, railway, and auto auditors for verifying certifications making it attractive to this industry segment of high-integrity apps. Memory safety is taken care of mainly through the features Ada/SPARK2014 offer in creating safe, high-integrity programs, correct.

We passed on Rust for Ada/SPARK2014 to write to bare metal on Cortex-M processor for real-time, high-integrity, and verifiable mission-critical software. Rust is making strides to be a future competitor, but it's new to the formal verification tooling and lacks any real world legacy in our domain. Ada's latest spec. is 2022. Other than AdaCore's verified Rust compiler, Rust still does not have a stable language specification like C/C++, Lisp, or Ada, SPARK 2014. I have no doubt that it will start rising to tick all the boxes that Ada/SPARK do right now with their decades of legacy in high-intetrity, mission-critical applications. The mandate to use memory-safe software put into effect this past Jan 1 2026 puts some wind in Rust's sails, but it's more than memory-safety in this domain. Plus, I do not enjoy Rust, but Cargo is nice. We're looking at Lean for further assistance in verifying our work. I think there was and is lot of Rust evangelism that will also carry it forward and boost even more Rust popularity,

Everytime I start jumping rope after a long break like Winter. It immediately starts trending lower a few points in 3 to 4 days, and plateaus after 6 weeks or so. I've averages as low as 54 bpm, but not as consistent as 58 to 60 bpm over a six month period. Granted, I tend to sleep better, have lower stress anecdotally and quantifiably by my Garmin watch's data. It has to be said that I usually add more exercise, because the rope jumping greases the skids so to speak. Good begets good.

For sure, and that makes MINIX the most widely used consumer OS!

From my comment below, we used Betamax back in 1982 for film class and would go back to editing it on a tape-to-tape deck, so starting with Betamax vs. VHS meant you had less degradation in the final edited product, since you started with higher quality. Sort of like editing RAW vs. JPEG photos nowadays to start with more resolution/information. For me streaming vs. my Blu-ray stuff was about cost. A $39 Blu-ray disc vs. a $12 movie or free movie with subscription. Amazon Music took away a purchase I had from 2014. I could no longer download it, since something changed with their licensing agreement. I have digitized my DVD/Blu-ray discs, since the discs don't last forever. I keep a streaming rez and a hi-rez copy of my faves.

Yes, but you're forgetting editing wasn't digital/digitized. You would copy from one tape to another, so a degradation issue. It's not the TV's capabilities, but if you started with higher quality you would get less overall degradation. I took film classes in TSOA at NYT back in 1982, and one class was film production and the other was lugging around a huge deck and camera in Betamax and then going back to a tape-to-tape transfer editing deck.

I'm going to download and check out Mine and Coalton. Right now, I use Neovide and Lem interchangeably. However, I am in deep with Shen. I bought a hardcopy of The Book of Shen, 5th Edition, and I still have Peter Kogge's 1991 text, "The Architecture of Symbolic Computers". I suspect the Hindley-Milner type system in Coalton will be more familiar to the Haskellers out there, but it is not as strong as Shen's Sequent calculus type system. In Shen, computation is allowed in side-conditions (if, let, and, etc.), so you can compute over terms inside types. Shen wins for raw expressive power and programmable types. Shen is very portable, but being a DSL, Coalton must integrate nicely with Common Lisp. And you get native exe's. Glad to see a simple way for people to program in CL or Coalton without having to go through the decades I have done with Vim and Emacs. VS Code bores me, but it is practical, even if it seems like junkyard truck with everything bolted on or hanging off of it.

I ran Minix around 1991 on my Amiga computer. Minix had a smaller attack surface and isolation provided by its microkernel vs. Linux's monolithic kernel. I had the Minix textbook, and it was easier to think about it because of the split along modules. I personally think Minix vs. Linux was very similar to Betamax vs. VHS. Betamax was technically superior, but the market picked VHS. I may run Minix again on my old Lenovo T430u from 2012. I was amazed that some of the code to Minix was in the appendix of the book, sort of like the magazines with pages of code to hand type in games or toy programs. I guess I liked MS-DOS for the same reason: tinkering, from my PEEK and POKE back in my Commodore PET 2001 (1977) and Vic-20 days...

Wow, 160 kWh/month! My family of four uses as much as 790 kWh/month in the high-heat or very cold season, with an annual average of 650 to 700 kWh/month. We pay around 0.13 USD/kWh, however, when you add the taxes and supply charges, it actually averages out to 0.28 USD/kWh...Granted I have two younger children at home, and my wife cooks fresh meals all the time - fresh-baked breads, etc., so we don't eat out much at all. We have an electric oven, electric washing machine and dryer, and electric cooling and heating (split unit HVAC).

A delta of 3 bpm on sauna days corresponds to around 4% delta if the baseline is 72 bpm. I've gone from a resting heart rate over a 7-day average of 64 bpm to 58 bpm by jumping 15 min. of rope a day, 4 times a week. I've lost weight, body fat, and I feel like my body is more efficient with corresponding lower heart rates throughout my active day. I like saunas for recovery and aches, they put me in a relaxed state after, and I believe the dilation is flushing my system. Like anything else, moderation. Perhaps I will add sauna to my weekly routine 1x per week or less.

Since it's not a battery storage setup, the energy being sent into your home circuit alleviates demand by a small amount. Where did they come up with 10 to 25% savings? Factors such as an optimal view of the sun for as much as possible, south-facing or biased East or West, would be the max. payoff. Night would be a zero net gain. At a savings of $7 a month, the panel would pay for itself in maybe 10 years not factoring in government subsidies. You need to keep it clean as well for it to maintain its potential output.

Correct, not millions of Demodex mites, which are usually in the hundreds to thousands on a typical, non-infested human. The millions should be the general amount of mites and other symbiotic/parasitic on and in your body. Thanks!

Yes, and I think it's important to highlight that Iverson would write APL on chalkboards and paper when working on math at times. I am sure some people here can hand write a program, but it seems so much more akin to writing math. I am in J daily, APL once in a while, Uiua more frequently, but J is the only one I actually write in my journal and then try it on my J phone app or when I open up my laptop. The intro books for J are great for working through math and learning J - Concrete Math for Computing in J; Easy J; Calculus; Arithmetic - https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Books

Yes, a strong argument, and staying in a line of PLs: F# for high-level, and F* <-> Low* for theorem proving and low-level coding. I am evaluating F/Low for verified code on Cortex M processor that I am currently trying to write SPARK2014. The Cortex A processor is running seL4 for less safety-critical tasks. I did look at Lean4 as a scratch for my Idris2 itch use cases.

Looks great! Nice work. I am steeped in CAD for my work flow, so I used to program AutoCAD in AutoLISP, Rhino in Rhinoscript, now F#, and FreeCAD in Python as well as Blender. They have the geometry engines built-in and tested over decades. I think this is good for the maker with a 3D printer to do parts that are relatively simple (not discounting parametric code to make complex shapes here). Industry needs integration of CAD, BIM, CAM, Viz, etc. Take a look at this now older (2014) project where Rhino and F# were used to design and manufacture complex geometry for a real world build: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZY-bvZZZZnE

Agreed. When you zoom in, even the normal life stuff can give you concern. I showed my kids what creatures live on their and others' bodies. You have millions of microscopic arachnids called Demodex mites living in your hair follicles and sebaceous glands, particularly on your face. My wife gave me an evil look as I showed my children this fact in online vids and pics. Granted these are symbiotic/parasitic relationships of life, but still, the closer you look, the more you see!

I have loved math since I was a child, and I think it depends on when you grew up and how steeped you are in reality vs. the virtual or the computer world, and how much of an abstract vs. concrete thinker you are. I was always making things in modeling clay, that greasy grey-green stuff, and so my scale was what I could make out of one brick of such stuff. I bought my first computer in 1977 (Commodore PET 2001), and the CBM ASCII set had some graphics, but nothing compared with today's graphics. My first encounter with visualization and scale was writing a program to let me know which of the four moons of Jupiter I was seeing in the sky that night. Io, Ganymede, Callisto, and Europa's orbits are almost edge-on to our view from earth, so I made Jupiter a capital O, and the moons were lowercase letters. I printed this out on a thermal printer (like a wide receipt). Cosmos was the rage on TV and I had read Einstein's Universe by Nigel Calder. I had a telescope and a microscope, so the micro and macro were very real to me. I suspect if you grew up on tablets and only built things on a 3D printer scale, you don't have that unbridled sense of the small and large except on very abstract terms. However, not a donut, not a universe-scale torus, but rather a pool donut comes to mind when I first hear torus! I built an XYZ router table in the early 2000s out of old stepper motors. It was 8'x4', and I built stitch-and-glue wooden kayaks from the panels I cut on it. These would wind up being 16 to 22 foot long kayaks to go into the real world and have fun!

Some related good books I have been studying the past few years or so. The Spark book is written by people who've worked on Cube sats:

  * Logical Foundations of Cyber-Physical Systems

  * Building High Integrity Applications with SPARK 

  * Analysable Real-Time Systems: Programmed in Ada

  * Control Systems Safety Evaluation and Reliability (William M. Goble)

I am teaching myself Arm assembly for the M-series of processors, M-4 for now. I have been playing and using J (jsoftware.com) since 2010, and I have to say that as much as the higher abstracted languages and programs become, I still love the atoms and terseness of array languages and writing close to the metal. I started with Factor, gforth, and retro years ago. Something magical happens when you immerse yourself in it. Right now, I am working with KlongPy, which using the PyTorch backend along with the Klong language is amazing. I used to write assembly code for my Vic-20 back in the day and then bought the VIC FORTH cartridge for like $30 in 1982. I programmed my 1977 PET 2001 in the Commodore Basic 1.0 it came with, but there was a sys instruction for machine code! I used to write my code on an index card before typing it in and saving to the cassette recorder. Magazines had code to hand type in, so my coding was learned with reading and writing it first. I accidentally bought a hardcover book on PDP-11 programming and read the whole book before I bought my PET in 1977. Machine language. I miss the early days of computing before the internet or Genie Online, but Echo in NYC was a blast - thanks, Stacy!!

A lot of effort under Biden was to make diinformation a big push and they offloaded work to third parties, so I'd be curious to know how many of the firings or resignations came from the government being pulled away from censorship in league with social media as opposed to losing harscore cybersecurity professionals. Makes me want to jump back on the cybersecurity bandwagon. I think the the CISA and NSA mandate for memory-safe software roadmap is good. I'm more of a SPARK 2014 fan than Rust, but I think by 2027, I'll shift to 30% focus on Rust and see where the government contracts go. I'm building a high-integrity secure, mostly formally verified automation and controls software for a state-of-the-art portable hoist able to function in aerospace that I am also co-engineering with my partner inventor.

There was significant awareness and negative sentiment toward advertising long before Marshall McLuhan became prominent in the 1960s. Some of the stuff from 1900 to 1930 is interesting. I realize there is a lot at work here with multi-faceted attacks on the senses, but advertising was intentional too, and I am not sure if just making things illegal that are hard to educate people on is the right tack.

I think I would have left much sooner if I were there. Iran has claimed this January to have tested a 10,000 km ICBM with Russia allowing it to fly towards Siberia. This puts NYC and East Coast possibly within range. The claim has not been verified, but given the vitriol between the US and Iran, if they have it, and we overwhelm them with naval and air force presence, we may provoke a real world test of their claim.

I'm skeptical about banning design patterns just because people might overuse them. Growing up, I had to go to the theater to see movies, but that didn't make cliffhangers and sequels any less compelling. Now we binge entire Netflix series and that's fine, but short-form video needs government intervention? The real question is: where do we draw the line between protecting people from manipulative design and respecting their ability to make their own choices? If we're worried about addictive patterns, those exist everywhere—streaming platforms, social feeds, gaming, even email notifications. My concern isn't whether TikTok's format is uniquely dangerous. It's whether we trust adults to manage their own media consumption, or if we need regulatory guardrails for every compelling app. I'd rather see us focus on media literacy and transparency than constantly asking governments to protect us from ourselves.

You can't legislate intelligence...

I've been coding since the late 70s (Commodore PET 2001), and I've always paired it with real-world physical work—mechanical engineering, rigging, technical diving, hydraulics, welding, electronics, controls, you name it. Programming was just one of the tools, never the whole job. What I've learned is that the best thinking almost never happens staring at a screen. It happens when you're away from it: reading something deep, building something with your hands, debugging why the thing you designed doesn't work in reality. I love the updated saying: "Jack of all trades, master of none—but often better than a master of one." In a world obsessed with hyper-specialization, that range is a real advantage. What bothers me most is how quickly people—especially younger ones—now reach for a phone the second there's any friction. Forgotten a name? Phone. Stuck on a small logic puzzle? Phone. A group of engineers at the lunch table can't remember an actor and within seconds everyone's just silently googling instead of laughing and piecing it together from their collective memory. Where's the fun in that? Yeah, you get the answer instantly. But you skip the actual mental workout—and the fun of it. Remembering and reasoning are muscles. Use them or lose them. And honestly, the shared back-and-forth is usually the best part.