Notices by Ramin Honary (ramin_hal9001@fe.disroot.org)

@amszmidt well, I believe the story. Zenie said, she was working on a Xerox Alto System 9, which was a machine that would be placed in the office, not a data center, and could connect several Wyse terminals to it, each one at an individual’s desk.

@bshankar @amoroso @screwtape @sacha

We always made fun of emacs because you could often hear the disks swapping.

@Zenie I guess “Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swaping” was not just an idle slander, so it really did have to do lots of swapping.

And yes, if you really believe in the “each tool does one thing and does it well” ethos, then why not have all of your tools written in Lisp and work together nicely in a consistent environment?

Thanks for telling us your story!

@amszmidt @bshankar @amoroso @screwtape @sacha

Besides, I don’t want my Emacs to do “one thing” (even if it did that one thing very, very well), because I don’t want to do just one thing

@sacha yes indeed. My article is critical of the UNIX Philosophy, not supportive of it. I prefer not tools that “do one thing and do it well,” I prefer tools that are simple, orthogonal, and composable, i.e. “functions” in a functional programming environment. So any environment (such as Emacs) that allows me to compose these tools together easily is a computing environment I would prefer to use.

@bshankar @amoroso @screwtape

@firebreathingduck @sacha it is funny to me that we have Emacs “distros” like Spacemacs and Doom Emacs that give you Vim bindings, but not really anything yet for VS Code bindings. That would lower the barrier to entry.

@hellomiakoda same with me.

Actually, the whole “you get more conservative as you get older” truism was based on the fact that throughout the lifetime of the boomers, The West and especially the US was becoming so wealthy from the spoils of World War 2 that basically anyone of a certain age was incredibly likely to become more wealthy as they got older, and the more wealthy you get, the more greedy and detatched from reality you get, and thus the more conservative you get. But Gen-X and later are experiencing poverty at an ever-increasing rate, and so fewer and fewer people are becoming conservative as they get older.

@sacha @screwtape I had a little free time today, so I wrote an outline to keep our discussion on track during the recording of the podcast next week. It is on Codeberg, so send a pull request if you want to change anything.

https://codeberg.org/ramin_hal9001/lisp-gopher-climate_chat-about-emacs/src/branch/main/show-outline.org

@screwtape @sacha @masso as far as I can tell, Emacs was one of the first Lisp implementations for Unix systems, and it was free to use, so it would have probably become pretty popular for that reason. Both the GNU project and Emacs had got started before Common Lisp was even standardized. In those days, Lisp was being implemented mostly on mainframes and minicomputers, on the Xerox Alto, and on bespoke hardware like in the case of Symbolics. But this was in parallel to development of Unix, and so Unix maybe wasn’t as widely used or popular enough at the time for anyone to bother porting Lisp to it until the 1980s after GNU started cloning Unix.

So there may well have been other Lisp implementations on Unix or it’s clones, but I don’t know enough about pre-1980s Lisp. I don’t even know what computer Steele and Sussman used to implement the first Scheme.

@hellomiakoda I’m the same. I am completely self-taught with keyboarding. Fortunately, keyboarding was an elective class at my school so I never had anyone teaching me the “right way.”

I could probably improve my technique by sticking more to the home row and being more conscious of the nubs on the “F” and “J” keys (on QWERTY) and increase my normal rate from roughly 100 wpm to maybe 110 or 120 wpm, but typing speed is not the thing that I need to optimize if I want to get more things done in a day.

Emacspeak is not a desktop environment.

@kc that is a very debatable claim.

(You are probably not interested in debate, but on the off-chance that you are, please read this first.)

@ArneBab @PepperTheVixen

And I guess regions aren’t supported at all in that editor?

@amszmidt it has “selections,” but not really regions, so there is no C-x C-x (swap point and mark) command, which is unfortunate because I use that one all the time. That said, Control-K does the same thing as Emacs C-k.

And there is no kill-ring either so C-y M-y does not work, it is just the ordinary Mac OS copy-paste buffer. That one would have been helpful.

Oh, and You can’t use “Option” as Emacs “Meta” unless it is combined with Control, it seems. So any command that uses Mata as the only modifier will not work. Mac OS uses “Option” for selecting another layer of the keyboard, defaulting to Greek letters. It has been this way since even the 1980s.

You have to pay me pretty well to use Mac OS or Windows… and that is what my new employer is doing, so I have started using Mac OS as a daily driver again for the first time in over 15 years. For the most part I have been quite disappointed with how things have changed in that time.

But, I just discovered one little detail in the Mac OS “Text Edit“ application that made my day: it has a few of the Emacs key bindings built-in. You can do Control-N,P,F,B to move the cursor around, Option-Control-F,B to jump around words, and Control-Y to paste text. (Unfortunately, Control-W does not copy text.) I am sure there are a few others, I haven’t bothered to check yet.

Well done, Mac OS engineers.

#tech #software #Apple #TextEditor #Emacs

@hellomiakoda I see.

Yeah, I was considering getting the FLX1 because it has such good specs at a good price point. But I decided I didn’t really need high specs so much as I needed repairability, so I went with the FairPhone instead.

Apparently, FLX1 is Droidian, which as I understand it, is a Debian (Mobian) userland and package manager running on top of an Android kernel with Android proprietary drivers and (like you said) the Android runtime containers for apps from FDroid and the Google Play Store.

I wish I could try a few distros, but I am only going to have one Fairphone and I don’t want to accidentally brick it or otherwise fuck around with it too much since it is going to be my daily driver and I can’t go without a phone, so I don’t want to switch the OS more than once.

Linux mobile is a bit of a learning curve.

@hellomiakoda I just bought FairPhone5 (still shipping), and it has the default Android build, but it is supposed to be carrier unlocked, so I was thinking of installing something like Mobian, /e/OS, Postmarket, or Lineage. I don’t know if Linux or de-Googled Android would be better, but I am guessing it would probably be a lot easier to find drivers for de-Googled Android.

What are some of the difficulties you have had with Linux mobile, and do you have a favorite distro?

The box which has it isn’t exactly what I’d call fast, so still chugging away, but it’s a third of the way through and so far it is compressing to 5% of it’s unpack size.

@Infoseepage thank you for doing the compression!

@shaknais @luckytran @gamambel

No joke. I just ran a test compressing the 100+ GB and it is compressing down to maybe 1/10th the size using 7z on the LZMA2 Ultra setting.

@Infoseepage I believe it. CSV data is usually incredibly repetitive and can often compress down quite a lot.

Maybe we should update the Internet Archive page for this dataset with the compressed files?

@shaknais @luckytran @gamambel

Does anyone have a pkzipped or tar-[bgx]zipped torrent of the same data? The torrent file on Archive.org seems to be all uncompressed CSV data which makes it much heavier to share around than it should be.

@Infoseepage @shaknais @gamambel @luckytran

A lot of the left were deeply disappointed with the Biden administration and running on “We’re less evil than the other guys” is not a platform for getting people to show up. Try…I don’t know…actively not being evil for once?

@Infoseepage They can’t do that because their largest donors would get mad.

@mattsheffield

According to the DistroWatch newsletter they have received multiple reports of Facebook users having their accounts suspended for talking about Linux.

I predict that this is just the beginning of a US government crack-down on people who want to break away from the corporate-controlled propaganda, and the surveillance technology built-in to Apple, Microsoft, Google (Alphabet), Facebook (Meta), and Amazon products, or who want to run their own federated web services. It is only a matter of time before ActivityPub is classified as “terrorism.” TikTok was only the beginning.

(begin quote of DistroWatch news:)

Starting on 2025-01-19 Sun Facebook’s internal policy makers decided that Linux is malware and labelled groups associated with Linux as being “cybersecurity threats”. Any posts mentioning DistroWatch and multiple groups associated with Linux and Linux discussions have either been shut down or had many of their posts removed.

We’ve been hearing all week from readers who say they can no longer post about Linux on Facebook or share links to DistroWatch. Some people have reported their accounts have been locked or limited for posting about Linux.

The sad irony here is that Facebook runs much of its infrastructure on Linux and often posts job ads looking for Linux developers.

Unfortunately, there isn’t anything we can do about this, apart from advising people to get their Linux-related information from sources other than Facebook. I’ve tried to appeal the ban and was told the next day that Linux-related material is staying on the cybersecurity filter. My Facebook account was also locked for my efforts.

We went through a similar experience when Twitter changed its name to X - suddenly accounts which had been re-posting news from our RSS feeds were no longer able to share links. This sort of censorship is an unpleasant side-effect of centralized communication platforms such as X, Facebook, Google+, and so on.

In an effort to continue to make it possible for people to talk about Linux (and DistroWatch), as well as share their views and links, we are providing two options. We have RSS news feeds which get updates whenever we post new announcements, stories, and our weekly newsletters. We also now have a Mastodon account where I will start to post updates - at least for new distributions and notice of our weekly newsletter. Over time we may also add news stories and updates about releases. Links for the feeds and the Mastodon account can be found on our contact page.

#Tech #Politics #Censorship #FreeSpeech #Linux #Fediverse #TikTok #FLOSS #FOSS #FreeSoftware #Twitter #Apple #Microsoft #Google #AlphabetCorp #Facebook #MetaCorp #AmazonCorp

what project have you worked on that has the most dynamic range and why is it a garbage collector?

@wingo today I learned: type checkers are a kind of garbage collector.

https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2025/guix-user-and-contributor-survey-2024-the-results-part-1/

Comment about it on fedi social media here:

https://social.sciences.re/@zimoun/113837703409145679

#tech #software #Linux #GNU #Guix #GuixOS #SchemeLang #Guile #Scheme