quink

They acknowledge that in the article, and make it clear that it really refers to 1 BC.

"A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision."

Not having literal strings in the source code, I do need to get a capital “R” somewhere and the name of the system being “IRIS” in system variable $ZV makes that easy and terse. Apart from that one trick I think it’ll be more or less just fine.

No you don’t - you can abbreviate it to just ‘K’ or ‘k’.

First job out of university and stuck around with it for the next dozen years, probably longer than sensible... in the context of maintaining a bag of software that got put together in the mid-80s, a substantial module of which continued to enjoy some moderate success to this day.

Also, the marketing term was post-relational if I recall correctly, the funny thing about that being that it was really pre-relational at first. Also, I forgot, it was IRIS this AOC stuff runs on - the $ZV actually needs that "R" in IRIS so it knows what label to jump to... and what file mode to use... it's wonderfully cursed ;P

That said, it doesn't hold a candle compared to this: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4151554/need-mumps-sampl... which is just about the best obscured (or byte-saving rather) MUMPS snippet in existence.

One thing I miss about Caché/Ensemble/IRIS is the three different paradigms for manipulating the same bits of data - the whole object layer, SQL (with pre-compiled embedded SQL an option), and the raw global access.

I did most of Advent of Code last year code golfing in MUMPS (running on Caché), with the additional challenge on up to and including day 7 doing without literals - that's to say no numbers and no strings. It was good fun - https://github.com/dominique-m-aoc/aoc-2025/blob/main/day03p... for day three part 1 for example. Or day 7 part 2 where the alphanumeric chars spell a story with only two nonsense words, with almost all the chars being on their own: https://github.com/dominique-m-aoc/aoc-2025/blob/main/day07p... It is a neat language but even more so a neat overall system and bag of concepts that I feel annoyed we haven't seen more of...

I count 23 instances of invective language or politicisation in that HUD statement, and that’s to say nothing of the supposed data behind this.

How about blame wealth extraction by the 0.01% before going after the out group that’s clearly working more than the average and paying taxes?

Likening non-Kelvin Kirk to Hornblower is so far off the mark…

The 888 in the top right corner back in the day: https://youtu.be/rAk94cq23HQ?si=JLJMSqbUjKUsFcdQ just amazing that teletext was understood and ubiquitous to such an extent that just putting three numbers was important and clear enough to share in these very sparse idents.

They literally mention Vrij Nederland as a source as near enough the first thing in the article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vrij_Nederland and https://www.vn.nl/microsoft-ambtenaren-amerikaanse-overheid

That Duffy sent this letter to the governors: https://ops.fhwa.dot.gov/memorandum/Freedom_to_Drive_Initiat...

Asking them to maximise roadway capacity (that’s to say just one more lane bro) in order to solve congestion, at the explicit request to have other modes of transport minimised. “recover roadway capacity from other purposes to support driving” because that’ll solve congestion. Deeply, deeply unserious.

It is of course, one step between this view and them being punished for having that view. One small step between being declared a luddite and the powers that be deciding that luddites aren't a thing we're to have.

It feels also this speech was not really in any way related to AI per se.

It was the Ayn Rand-esque hero, an Übermensch, who of course formed Google out of nothing proclaiming that individualism and egoism are the way to go, that they have a small alcove at best in between the productive assets of the factory owner who wields the materials to his will and creates his perfect city of perfect design that needs none of your contribution. That these graduates aren't be be valued by their creativity or self-worth but by the marginal contribution they may have towards his empire, to be discarded once they don't have anything to give. He's the ultimate factory owner, the owner of the factory that makes everything and brings light to all, and the masses just don't appreciate his brilliance and the brilliance of the other tech bros.

None if it is particular to AI, it's just that AI is the latest tool with which the workers of the world are deprived of the means of production. They know that capitalism is healthiest when the wealth is distributed, and here the Randian hero tells them not that the wealth will be distributed, but only the labour and the AI will do most of the labour, and that the human contribution is a penny for themselves and 99 cents to those that already have a hundred billion, and excited with an incomparable glee Eric expresses that the datacenter that powers the AI will be the panopticon through which the factory owner will judge the productivity of his workers.

It is such a horrifyingly dismal picture he painted right on their faces and if they would just allow that data center and stop booing him they'd understand, surely they must understand that he's the hero, that he and his Rearden Steel will make them the shining city that the unwashed masses for their utter collective incompetence cannot.

And even if there weren’t any jarring errors, and rest assured there’s about a billion of them, there’s no appeal to this. It’s all context free short unassociated clips of pretty faces dancing on a beach. And?

There’s no narrative, there’s now sense of reality, it’s just a sense of here’s a million pixels of colours that have proven to go well with each other, it’s _slop_.

It’s been years and the only place AI has conquered in visual entertainment is as a subpar Photoshop replacement to fill in the B-roll gaps for those that don’t have the patience or money to do it the proper way.

And here I’m thinking that my text editor should have zero interaction with anything git other than as a diff viewer.

lazygit is text editor agnostic and works brilliantly to give some near perfect porcelain to git specifically. And it works the same with Ghostty, Terminal, zed, VS Code, any environment I happen to be in, while saving so many keystrokes.

It was a telegram, not a letter. As also immortalised at the end of the 1968 episode of ‘From The Earth To The Moon’, attributed there to an apparently fictitious person.

Because at this point all the people in all the other countries do not care who you voted for, especially not after he caused an insurrection and a Democratic Party administration didn't do anything to prosecute that. At this point all the people outside the US just want to know what you're going to be doing about this insanity.

lol, others are saying elections to solve economic concerns. If that solves it why do you keep re-electing Republicans given this context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._economic_performance_by_p... sure the next election might fix it temporarily but the one after that will just just tank the economy again. Or overturn insider trading bans or issue pardons, the possibilities for chaos are endless and — fun fact - investors abhor regulatory uncertainty.

Getting rid of the delusion of American exceptionalism in how politics is conducted. In other words, do something about the two party system, or the pardon power or any number of things, the possibilities are endless. But doing anything about it would require admitting that the USA is something other than perfect, so it’ll never happen. Too bad really.

At least the USA is only 4% of the world’s population so the world economy will just find other financial hubs and currencies, no big loss.

Crazy suggestion, just connect two normal keyboards. Particularly if the left one is numpad-less you’ll get much of the idea for sure.

They might be a smidgeon further apart than might be ideal, there’s some ugly duplication… which happens to enforce a minimum distance… just get that shoulder opened up and start evaluating. It’s certainly likely to be more optimal than the status quo.

Might need Karabiner on macOS to keep shortcuts working.

Get any satellite imagery of the UK, like on Google Earth. Even at a very zoomed out level, with London and Birmingham but an inch apart, you'll instantly spot the bit of HS2 they're building.

SponsorBlock. Granted, doesn’t do much for my iPhone but on computers it’s a solved problem.

How? Near enough no one was using the Kunrei system for any of that. If anything this will make it more consistent or at least no worse. Macrons are the biggest inconsistency but that’s always been the case.

It was either Hepburn, the English title (i.e. rock instead of rokku), or just most sensibly kana/kanji that would have been used for this everywhere, never other romanisation systems, to within a rounding error.

to win multiple elections around the country.

So voters across the country have come to the conclusion that the Democrats aren’t to blame.

You don’t always get comments that contain their own rebuttal, but when they happen they just bring a tear to your eyes.

Hooks were first introduced in 16.8. Make it 18 maybe?

One of these days I’ll get a model railroad bridge and put it over a borehole. But that day shan’t be today because arguing technicalities on HN seems easier :)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_bridges vs https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest_bridges

Note: highest, not tallest. Highest should technically be the building here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kola_Superdeep_Borehole which is more than 12km above ground, that is to say 12km high. Or, rather, was, having been destroyed since. There’s other boreholes too though.

Just make it a well-defined class.

Like option structs in Go. Simple.

I'm not even talking about compilers though... all I want is a baseline standard that I can point to and say: "Here. This right here is where it says that 'curl' and 'wget' shall be available and in $PATH."

And some simple command for any Linux distro or macOS to install everything necessary to adhere to that standard, or a distro that conforms with that standard in the first place.

I may have mentioned on occasion, here or there, about how ludicrous it is that there appears to be no well-defined standard that user space shall have sqlite3 and git and gzip.

So, for all intents and purposes, nothing that would be relevant in any reasonable end-user way in 2025. It’s all just: here’s defaults and here’s scripts to set up your environment and here’s a dozen things to run brew with. But no standard.