HN user
Quebec has a larger grid and lower rates due to its abundant hydroelectricity.
Ontario's relatively high costs are from the supply mix which is about 50% nuclear, 30% hydro, 10% wind, 10% gas.
Residential kWh as delivered is currently (no pun intended) about 12 US cents which is a bit high if you're used to Midwestern or Alberta coal but those in California are probably envious.
We're in a prolonged guerilla conflict in Canada. We are winning but the end is not in sight yet.
In Ontario every year the Ministry of Forestry distributes several million doses of rabies vaccine for wildlife. The goal is to immunize the majority of skunks, foxes, raccoons and the like, particularly in populated areas.
They air drop edible pellets with the live rabies vaccine; they are labeled "do not touch do not eat" because it can vaccinate most susceptible mammals, including humans.
I think a reasonable definition of "novel" is a long-form work in prose, that tells narrative stories, often looking at individual families and characters and their development over time. In that sense, novels are not that novel and there are novels preserved from classical antiquity, India's golden age, and medieval China.
Hot sauna is often cautioned against for those with existing cardiac or vascular problems, with some reason.
The US ambassador to Iceland made an inappropriate comment about Iceland being the 52nd state and was summoned by Icelandic President to explain. A poor joke, apparently.
One almost wonders if the US admin is actively trying to get one of its ambassadors declared persona non grata.
It's not a history book or even all that much a book about Lisp, despite its name, but Lisp in Small Pieces incidentally covers a lot of Lisp history. The book at its core is about implementing compilers and interpreters. It starts with something close to the McCarthy meta-evaluator, and the rest of the book iteratively elaborates on why the naive meval is not a practical programming language, somewhat mirroring the evolution of historical Lisp implementations in the process.
It dates to the early 90s so it doesn't touch on Clojure or anything recent. The bibliography and citation is excellent.
Literature about Lisp rarely resists that narcissistic pleasure of describing Lisp in Lisp. This habit began with the first reference manual for Lisp 1.5 [MAE+62] and has been widely imitated ever since. We'll mention only the following examples of that practice: (There are many others.) [Rib69], [Gre77], [Que82], [Cay83], [Cha80], [SJ93], [Rey72], [Gor75], [SS75], [A1178], [McC78b], [Lak80], [Hen80], [BM82], [CH84], [FW84], [dRS84], [AS85], [R3R86], [Mas86], [Dyb87], [WH88], [Kes88], [LF88], [Dil88], [Kam90].
https://www.amazon.ca/Lisp-Small-Pieces-Christian-Queinnec/d...
Speech is not the same as writing. It is not interchangeable. It's not easy to compose writing aloud. Speech is a poor interface for manipulating words like that. Have you ever seen something like an ex tempore speech or panel discussion or radio interview transcribed in writing? It can be almost incomprehensible.
They are different processes. You do want to see the words laid out. And you want to point at them. Drag them around. Drag and drop.
The 3 generations that spent their entire life behind a PC in the 20/21st century will be seen as crazy as the soldiers who spend all day underground to click a button inside a missile silo.
our hunched backs and strained eyes are noble signs of the craft which go back thousands of years
the remains of Ancient Egyptian scribes show neck vetebrae wear and repetitive strain type injury to the wrist and thumb
edit: for the curious https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-63549-z
I have had some truly spectacular results that still kind of stagger me in the last few months using Claude in my hobby projects -- but even though Claude insists on trying to slip its name into the git history as credit it's not Claude -- it's me. Someone who has studied CS and software engineering for decades will craft different prompts from someone without that background. A suggested axiom: there is nothing I can build with Claude that I could not build myself with my current level of CS knowledge, assuming I had infinite focus and time. In my hands it can go as far I could anyway, and no further. (But it is faster!) My experience bears that out so far.
I have hearing aids with a deep-learning based noise reduction and speaker isolation/clarity features. So about 14 hours a day. Or have we moved the goal posts again?
I think it is an open question: can an unknown language be cracked -- without any dictionary or grammar or understanding of the language? Just lots and lots of texts, maybe some of it bilingual.
It's a common misconception that is what happened with Ancient Egyptian with the Rosetta Stone. The Rosetta Stone was just one of the big pieces of the puzzle. The decoding came when people realized that Coptic (a language written alphabetically and still in use in the Coptic Church today) is actually descended from Ancient Egyptian; as Spanish is to Latin, Coptic is to Ancient Egyptian.
Similarly the attempts to decode classical Maya were all dead ends. Until Yuri Knorozov realized that it encoded the ancestor of the Maya languages which are still spoken to this day. (Knorozov's Wikipedia article is worth checking out just for his photo with his cat. [0] IMHO.)
I have written before about the La Mojarra 1 stele in Mexico [1]. It looks a lot like Maya. [2] But it isn't Maya. Maybe the difference like between Russian and Latin writing?
No one can read it. It's undecipherable. There are some attempts to identify it with a proposed ancient language that would have been related to the modern Mixe-Zoque languages: some of the glyphs that are shared with Maya, when read phonetically, start sounding like a Mixe-Zoque language. But no one has proposed a confident decipherment. There probably isn't enough text. La Mojarra 1 is the only long example of the Isthmian script.
Deciphering Akkadian was very difficult, at first. The process started with Persian; old Persian was written in a simplified adapted form of the Mesopotamian cuneiform (wedges on clay). It was a kind of alphabet. And Old Persian was already understood. And there was a bilingual text on a monument carved by Darius I. But even then -- decoding relies so heavily on the fact that Akkadian is a Semitic language distantly related to Hebrew, more distantly, also Ancient Egyptian. So again, we sort of knew what we were looking for.
That is all to say: even if the Voynich manuscript (for example) contains real text in an otherwise completely lost language, I'm not sure it is possible even theoretically to translate it.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuri_Knorozov
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Mojarra_Stela_1
[2] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:La_Mojarra_Stela_1_S...
I find significance in the shuffling and enjoy it. Always overhand. And very thorough; I have a perhaps overmechanistic view but I suspect effective divination requires true randomness in the information theory sense.
From what I have read the diet of people in classical antiquity was only terrible for the very poor. Most people in ancient Rome got to, at least rarely, eat honey cakes and fresh fruit and dried fish and maybe once a year at festivals even a small chunk of meat. They grew chives, dill, garlic, asparagus, radish, parsley, thyme, mustard, cumin and many other spices. And they made vinegar and olive oil and garum (fermented fish sauce) on an industrial scale. Mostly these would be used as sparing garnish to the grain-centric diet. But usually present.
Both Latin and Chinese have been modified by the technology used to write them.
When carved in stone the lines are much straighter. When written with brush or pen they became semi-cursive. When printing was introduced, they became grid-like and regular.
What westerners who are passingly familiar would think of as the standard Chinese typeface - the strict square grid with straight-line characters - arises in part from printing technology. Easy to carve that into wood blocks, and easy to line up the slots into a grid.
Latin was similarly morphed to fit into the realities of printing in the 1500s. And is still being morphed. Notice how numbers 123... are in-line and at the same height as the letters. That's a very modern convention, typewriter and computer influence on our orthography. Traditionally digits were more likely to appear as subscript, off-centre.
I mean a couple of those involved got the Nobel prize.
They reversed the lottery thing after just two years as a failure and reinstated the previous policies.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/tdsb-scraps-lottery-m...
“They decided to put ideology ahead of student achievement,” said Yu. “In reality, it's hurting everyone, including the equity deserving students that are there but [who] would not thrive in that sort of environment,” he said.
It's so strange to see this happen in the USA when our education system up here in Canada has essentially the same set of cultural and social values and there's plenty to gripe about but we haven't had the 'levelling' thing. There have been attempts but it has strongly resisted by parents. [1]
I think there may be more realization up here that "gifted education" is a type of "special" education, in the same way remedial classes for delayed children are. Kids who need spec ed. and who don't get it can have very bad outcomes in life.
When the topic has come up I've often pointed out that if you are a parent: you really don't want those evil geniuses in your child's class, poking holes in everything the teacher says, taking up all the teacher's time talking about things over your kids' head, and probably initiating your kid into inappropriately adult concepts. Such children need specialists who know how to deal with that kind of abnormality.
[1] https://globalnews.ca/news/3907781/restructuring-toronto-sch...
I could a bit biased because I do have prior experience with SML
You're probably under-weighing this factor.
The average programmer looks at SML syntax and cannot make, pardon the expression if you will, heads or tails of it.
Indeed, I'd argue the average programmer still considers recursion an advanced topic.
For fun I've been vibe coding something I know well: toolchains. Maybe not the right thing to vibe code. But I can more or less judge the quality of the output.
When left to its own devices with the instructions "make an assembler for the architecture in ISA.md" -- well Claude picked Python as the implementation language. Tokens lifted through a bunch of regex. No expression parser! Oh dear. My first assembler was like that too, to be fair.
However, when I described the desired passes and their types:
collectDefines :: [SourceLine] -> Either AsmError ([SourceLine], Map Text Text)
runLitPool :: [SourceLine] -> Either AsmError ([SourceLine], [(Text, LitKey)])
evalExpr :: Text -> Map Text Text -> Either AsmError Int
Can you take fluticasone permanently?
This is a surprisingly controversial question.
I've known more than one person who claims something to the effect of becoming addicted to Flonase. Like now they have to take it only to feel like how they felt before they started taking it.
Rebound inflammation when stopping use is a real effect with long-term use of corticosteroids and can, at least briefly, be worse than the initial symptoms were.
As someone with multiple mild inflammatory disorders I've always been afraid to use steroids consistently lest I have nothing effective when things are worst.
when pigeons are navigating their brainwaves oscillate around 150 - 200 Hz
a 60 fps computer display for pigeon vision is like a sequential slideshow it's much too slow to blur into what they would perceive as motion
many species of birds when they switch posture the motion is so fast it is imperceptible to the human eye it's like switching from one still frame to another
humans have perhaps 1/10th the temporal granularity that pigeons have
this leads me to the conclusion that if birds have a subjective experience it has a very different tempo than for humans or indeed most mammals
We may never truly know when writing was invented.
There's a stele that was discovered in 1986 [1] in Veracruz. You could be forgiven if you think that writing is Maya. But it is not. It some other language. A couple other small fragments like it have been found, but the stele is basically an hapax. It is the only example.
And from the one example, we can see that it a system overflowingly glorious in its maturity and complexity. The scribes belonged to a culture that had been writing for a very long time. That is the refinement of millennia.
There are dates carved on La Mojorra 1; if they are in the same Long Count calendar the Maya used, then the stele appears to be talking about something that happened in the 140s and 150s AD.
The obvious relationship between the Mesoamerican writing systems might be somewhat analogous to the Cyrillic and Latin alphabets, or Chinese and Japanese writing. One was adapted to write the other. Or they both evolved out of a common ancestral system. How far back might that have been?
[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:La_Mojarra_Stela_1_S...
Very interesting. My new hearing aids support Auracast and there's a complete dearth of transmitting equipment.
I remain unconvinced about Auracast. This kind of short-range broadcast is what analog baseband radio (induction loop) still excels at. (The properties of baseband tends to mimic how sound itself travels, including overlapping transmissions and fading with distance and blocked by walls.)
Auracast feels a bit like a compelled "improvement" for patent portfolio purposes. Though at the rate deployment is going, by the time it's widely deployed I guess the patents will have been expired.
In some ways there has been a significant step backwards for accessibility with tech progress. Traditional speakers function as inductive loop transmitters. Anything with a traditional coil speaker I can just put my head near it and switch my hearing aid to T-mode and I get a direct signal from the electronics with no speaker/microphone intervening.
Piezoelectric speakers (like in a cheap smartphone or TV unit) do not have this property. No coil.
How are you for task completion? For me, transferring a load of laundry from the washer to dryer is not an atomic operation. There is ample room to get derailed and wander off during the twenty seconds it should take. It can be interrupted by almost anything. Oh, I forgot to send that message. Oh, I forgot to check for the parcel. Oh, I need to go to the store today still. And I will walk away and forget to come back and finish.
I've encountered several times an argument that goes something like this: corporations and other large economic or political institutions are the "original" AI agent -- slow and human-mediated, but with the same quality of non-human intellect and potential to impact the world through its non-human decision-making. It seems to me the essence, whatever it is philosophically speaking that we seem to "concentrate" into an AI model, may have first been distilled to a limited extent, when writing was invented.
Modern implementation of FPU emulation might be more straightforward.
Most 32-bit designs throw an exception on an invalid instruction so it can be caught and handled at runtime. Even basic ARM Cortex-M0 chips throw a catchable exception on illegal instructions.
So one option is to just issue the FPU instructions as if the FPU exists, and then catch and emulate.
This is how operating systems emulated FPUs on processors like the 68020, the 386 and early RISC machines, if they didn't have an FPU.
Focal length. In a phone camera the lens is smooshed right against the sensor. Such cameras have fisheye-type lenses, and the image is cropped in the centre and dewarped in software. But it's just not the same. That said convenience is above all. If I just need to photograph something I use my phone camera.
With photography as an art I have gone back to film. The cost in money and time and space involved with taking an impression of light gives it gravity that is lacking with a phone camera. It's a different kind of process. One thing I've noticed is that developing is like taking the photograph anew. It can be weeks before I finish a roll and get around to developing it, and I surprise myself.
Oh yes there's been some ELKS activity lately.
Does it support the 286's 16-bit protected mode at all?
286 protected mode has the 8086-style 16-bit addresses and segmentation. But with virtualization and protection.
Not very many operating systems made use of it. The x86 world skipped over it directly from 8086 real mode to 32-bit paging.
Edit: to answer my own question it seems the recent branch dropped 286 protected mode support
So it's you to thank for porting Fuzix to Raspberry Pi Pico.
No not me it was David Given over at the link I gave (not my blog).
I have poked around Fuzix but I am not a major contributor.
So is it possible to compile programs for Fuzix on a PC?
Most of the development is cross-devel from PC.
Yes. It has Unix style processes. The basic memory model is similar to ancient Unix on the PDP-11 without paging. A process gets a flat memory space. Processes are swapped out in the background as necessary.
How it is implemented varies by platform. On the 8-bit micros it takes advantage of bank-switching memory hardware if there is any. On the MMUless 68K a flat single address space can be used with position-independent code for the processes. On platforms with paging or relocation hardware that is used. Most of the host platforms do not have hardware memory protection, but there's room in the design to support it.
It has been ported to the Raspberry Pi Pico [1] (ARM Cortex-m0+ based) and could be ported to other microcontrollers which have enough RAM.
Toolchain is the biggest problem. It's hard to get a good cross toolchain that works. FUZIX's creator has been writing a portable C compiler but it's not done yet. The code does compile with Clang and GCC but a working toolchain is a steep knowledge cliff to climb.
I have got the kernel to build and link for a riscv32i target. Just need some real riscv32 hardware to test it on. And free time.
No I think Alan just moved where it's hosted:
https://codeberg.org/EtchedPixels/FUZIX last updated 4 days ago
Alan's currently putting most of his energy into the compiler. It's a C compiler in C which can compile itself, and compile FUZIX, for 8080 and Z80 targets. The goal is to make it compile itself on all the platforms it can run on eventually. :)