Notices by Chris [list of emoji] (suetanvil@freeradical.zone)

@anon_opin

But unlike Self (or Java, or Ruby, or Smalltalk, or Julia), you don't really *chose* to run a JavaScript program; it just happens.

So in order to view a restaurant menu, you will need to run thousands of lines of code on a runtime that very intentionally made the choice to trade RAM efficiency for speed.

@anon_opin

Anyway, I downloaded Self and ran the installer script. It said, "Your computer has (enormous) Mb of RAM. Self needs (3/4ths of that) to run."

So I played with it (briefly, because shared), and it was pretty cool.

The way Self works is that it trades RAM for speed. Specifically, it compiles many versions of the same method on the fly with different types. Which is clever, and also the basis for (among other things) modern JavaScript.

(ctd)

@anon_opin

So in 1995, I found out about a research project from Sun, a programming language named Self. Self was a Smalltalk dialect but *way* more dynamic--duck typing, but also duck inheritance and duck object layout. Despite this (and here was the research part) it was *insanely* fast.

Self was FOSS but only worked on SPARC hardware. Fortunately, I had access to the little (shared) Sun box the Computer Science Club ran.

This was, to be clear, beefier than any PC of the era.

(ctd)

@anon_opin

A ten year old laptop without RAM upgrades.

@evan @mhoye

I am *deeply* disappointed to hear this.

@soatok

Do it. Make a real product, offer it for sale, try to sell it to boards. It probably won't sell but it'll make the C-Suite lose a lot of sleep. Why should workers be the only ones to worry about AI?

(No, seriously, are there not a few tech lottery winners out there who'd be up for funding this kind of prank?)

@ekaitz_zarraga

You could probably get pretty far by building on top of git's plumbing layers. AIUI, jj (https://github.com/jj-vcs/jj) already works this way.

(Of course, if you want to write a vcs for its own sake, cool!)

@cwebber

Needs a "No!!!!"

@mhoye

Doesn't Debian still make systemd optional? Or did that change?

You can tell if someone is a computering supergenius if their solution to a difficult problem looks like nothing.

Lisp is six functions. Forth is 200 bytes. Unix is just tiny programs and text files. The original web is just a hacked SMTP server sending SGML files. And yet, it does *that*.

The huge, complex stuff--Windows, Java, the modern web--is all the work of mediocre thinkers with big budgets and too little time.

@mhoye

I'm of the opinion that Unix-style line-oriented text files are extremely underrated and nothing has yet improved on them.

Of course, I'm also old and grumpy.

Update: Installed Vivaldi, imported my Firefox session, and it maxed out all 8 cores and ground the computer to a halt. After waiting half a minute for a console window to raise and get focus, I had to kill the process.

Firefox is still slightly less terrible than everything else because it's still possible to make it useful on this 4-year-old computer.

It looks like I finally got the Firefox update(s) with LLM stuff enabled. In other news, I'm checking out Vivaldi now.

Cloudflare is still down because their engineering staff can't reach stackoverflow.com.

@bkuhn @jmax

Totally agree. Although I'm still waiting for M-x psychoanalyze-chatgpt yet.

@cwebber

emacs, unfortunately, still comes with `doctor`

@mcc

The few times I've done assembly language programming, it's usually been either the C preprocessor or the compiler's inline assembly capabilities.

The most involved of these was actually just written in straight C. I'd compile it, look at the output and then fiddle with the C code until the output was optimal.

(This was not gcc though; it was my employer's embedded compiler, and it let me pin variables to specific machine registers. This let me bypass the register allocator.)

@wim_v12e @cwebber @kingu

"Zuck off" is right there!

@tek

Oh, I knew who Steve Martin is. It's just that because I was looking at pictures of his breakfast on Twitter, my brain had reclassified him as "Internet friend", so seeing him on TV was kind of a jolt.

Thinking back to the time that I was watching TV and I saw some guy I knew from the Internet on a show. And I was like, I *know* that guy.

That guy was Steve Martin. I knew him from the Internet because I'd followed him on Twitter.