Notices by Weekend Editor (weekend_editor@mathstodon.xyz)

@amszmidt

... because it is a category error to use a verb like "care" with an inanimate subject.

My toaster doesn't care about me either.

"Category error" is a useful idea, due to Gilbert Ryle. Particularly when listening to Trump: he seems to say nothing other than category errors.

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

@amszmidt

Nor can you spell "Aieeeeee!"

@amszmidt

Silly me; I just did exactly that:

https://www.someweekendreading.blog/llm-ai-still-crap/

@larsbrinkhoff @amszmidt

So the peak of the art form was the VT52?

(Especially the bell, which people described as the sound of grinding the gears on a 1950s manual transmission car.)

@amszmidt

Ask an ITS person about SUPDUP. (@larsbrinkhoff might be able to add quite a bit.)

The pedestrian terminal emulator in those days was telnet.

But SUPDUP was a "super-duper" telnet that did what we'd now call something like curses, letting you move stuff around on a screen of a dumb terminal with smart repaints. This was at least a decade before the X protocol, but it worked nicely on text terminals.

Very nice at the time. No idea how it would stack up today; I suspect it's just a historical artifact due to its non-graphics nature.

@ksaj @glitzersachen @loke @amszmidt

I was going to point out that you could print your Roman numeral to a string, then use read-from-string to get it back with a different *base* setting, and put that into a defformat definition to extend format, and...

... and then I remembered that (a) defformat isn't part of CL, and (b) even if it were, that way lies madness.

So, yeah.

I guess I'm with you, once I calm down enough. :-)

@jbz

"Compiled to microcode"?

Sort of... and sort of not.

Probably meant to say "compiled to machine code", like any other machine and compiler. The machine instructions were quite readable, at least after getting used to them. Mostly a stack machine with 256 registers to buffer the top of stack.

MIcrocode is another matter.

LMI had a microcompiler for a while, which could take a (smallish) lisp function and create a single instruction to execute it. Then you'd create a "defsubst" -- a function that would be open-coded -- to persuade the compiler to emit that instruction.
However, this only saved time if instruction fetch and decode dominated execution in normal machine code. It was kind of tricky. (Their marketing folk sure loved it, though.)

Symbolics never released a microcompiler. The micromachine (for the L-machine, that is) had a much wider microinstruction word (sort of like VLIW stuff?). That meant there was much more parallelism going on for each microinstruction. That meant there was no straightforward microcompiler.

Later, the I-machine series no longer had a writeable control store for microcode. It was all in ROM, and that worked pretty well.

The Sunstone chip, the next Symbolics architecture, was going to be a RISC version of all this with no microcode anyway. It was cancelled the day it taped out for its first S-machine chip, sadly.

(And yes, the architectures of the L-, I-, and S-machines were spelling out LISP. The joke was the P-machine was going to be the "penultimate, pocket, parallel" architecture.)

#lispm

@PaniczGodek @amszmidt @jackdaniel

How are you with reading Common Lisp?

@amszmidt

It is indeed broken.

That's a passive-voice way of saying it, concealing the ones who broke it. A better way is to say that Trump has corrupted and broken the justice system.

However: the president cannot pardon a *state* conviction. So if you can get them convicted in a state court whose governor doesn't want to pardon them, you can get some traction.

(However, in fairness I must note that Trump himself is a 34x felon in New York, with no noticeable effect.)

@larsbrinkhoff @amszmidt

Oh, yeah. A perfectly executed dismount.

@amszmidt

I'd love to have an Ivory emulator running a Genera image with all the "layered products" (Fortran, C, Pascal, Ada, Prolog, MACSYMA, Joshua...). Especially running on Apple Silicon.

But according to @gmpalter the rights are still encumbered. (JCMA seems to be the current owner, almost by accident.)

https://hachyderm.io/@gmpalter/110673934200402296

@amszmidt

If you really want to be silent, you need to use uninterned symbols:

'#:SILENT-SCREAMING

... otherwise the obarray will hear you.

Do not wake the obarray.

@larsbrinkhoff @amszmidt

No, that was just MacLisp. Dunno why it came to mind.

@jackdaniel

Sadly anonymous.

Any idea who wrote it?

@mapcar @amszmidt

Ok, I'm actually old enough to have done that! It worked really well, but I was so frustrated in the moment I didn't take time to be glad about it.

But basically, you've re-invented the old-time astronomy instrument called the blink comparator.

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

@amszmidt

That's the solution known to antiquity, in the story of Procrustes.

@amszmidt

Now I'm stuck with a physics question: how to make a tall person shorter using footgear that involves black holes.

@amszmidt

VT.

It's a world index fund, capitalization- and float-weighted of pretty much everything reasonably investable. Good, solid diversification all around the world.

Do I use it? Yes, why do you ask? :-)

https://www.google.com/finance/quote/VT:NYSEARCA

@JdeBP @cstross

The other great one is a tariff on the Heard & McDonald Islands.

These are technically part of Australia, but got a tariff of 29% instead of Australia's 10%.

The Heard & McDonald Islands are *uninhabited*.

Those damn penguins.

@JdeBP @cstross

This is more literally true than you may perhaps think:

One of the tariffs is on the British Indian Overseas Territory (BIOT).

The main island there is Diego Garcia.

The *only* thing on Diego Garcia is a military base jointly operated by the US and UK.

So... we just applied a tariff to our own military base.

I mean... that's *talent*, right there.