Notices by Rob Pike (robpike@hachyderm.io), page 4

The block vs. bytes thing is an irrelevancy. What matters is ownership.

To get back to my original point, the existence of a "Files" "app" is the admission by modern computing services that they don't understand this issue at all.

The very idea of a "Files app" is high on my list of world-defeating idiocies perpetrated by technology.

Or to put it another way, no one remembers what a profound clarification it was when Unix used the idea of typeless files and the uniformity of access that resulted.

People talk about modern languages a lot, not so much about older ones, except perhaps for Lisp. But there were other marvels, and APL is not as well known as it should be.

Quite some time ago now, just to see if I could, I wrote my (second!) APL-like language in Go, with the unusual property of using exact rational arithmetic.

When I'm bored, I poke away at it, and since my accident I'm home more and have been pulling it along. And now this: https://github.com/robpike/ivy/discussions/139

@liaizon Here's some Hagelbarger for you.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/348439425_On_Hagelbarger's_and_Shannon's_matching_pennies_playing_machines

@liaizon P.S. Likely the first ever occurrence of two computers competing at a game. Hagelbarger's was first, Shannon thought it could be improved, and the game was on.

@liaizon Regarding Nixie tubes, a patent was filed but was rejected because the patent officer did not believe it was an invention; he said there was insufficient difference between ten cathodes in one tube compared to ten one-cathode tubes lined up. He was wrong, but life can be like that. And Nixie tubes became ubiquitous for a while. They were still in much of the lab equipment I used in the 1970s.

"Oppenheimer" is very very good and passes surprisingly close to the documented history. I was captivated.

My nerd credentials must quibble though: Those nixie tubes showing the countdown were not invented until 1955 (I know because a dear friend of mine, David Hagelbarger, invented them) and also the spoken countdown is plausibly credited to early broadcasts of rocket launches.

I suppose that rather than thinking of this as the hottest year ever, we should think of it as the coolest year of those to come. Just for setting expectations.

@dpnash But glass flows, and I've often wondered why large old lenses like the 40" in Yerkes can hold their figure. One of nature's mysteries.

Does anyone have any technology that works? I am becoming despondent over the state of things. So much technological progress and yet everything seems to be broken (or must be updated, which amounts to the same thing in user experience) all the time.

Sorry.

In the spirit of the age I recently reread - not having read them since high school, when I was far too naive to understand them properly - the unofficial dystopian trilogy of Animal Farm, Brave New World, and 1984. That puts them in increasing direness and, not coincidentally, prescience.

They are all *so* much richer than I appreciated back when. And they are all terrifyingly relevant to our times.

A valuable exercise. Of course, 1984 still sits at the pinnacle, but all three are superb.

Gave a university lecture to a software engineering class about reliability. Chrome crashed halfway through.

@zakiuem Because I was using Chrome. Firefox wasn't running; how could it crash?

I open and close windows dozens, probably hundreds of times a day. I am finally considering the inevitable switch to zsh*, but every time I exit a window this happens:

Saving session...
...copying shared history...
...saving history...truncating history files...
...completed.

Is there any way to silence this? It's even more annoying that dc now having a >>> prompt.

* Not that I'm happy about it.

Good job, internet.

I have moved from inuh.net, which was giving me many problems, to hachyderm.io. I probably screwed up the migration - I know I'm missing some of the people I followed, for example - but let's hope this is a healthier site. The migration itself hit a rate limit almost instantly, but I presume things will settle down.

Meanwhile, I would really like to flip to light backgrounds. Dark mode isn't good for old eyes. But I can't find the setting in the web interface.