Notices by wizzwizz4 (wizzwizz4@fosstodon.org)

@clarity If there is a way for me to help this happen, I will dedicate my life to it. (Technically, I have already dedicated my life to it – I made that decision aged approximately six – but I haven't seen a way forward.)

@lizzy What does the c stand for?

@lucy @chjara @lizzy Point is, I doubt many people who describe their political philosophy as "I want to be left alone" actually want the absence of any system of government. They want [that which I cannot name], which does actually require some kind of social infrastructure / community support.

@lucy @chjara @lizzy I don't want people to "let me the fuck be". I would die if that happened.

I want people to provide what support I appreciate, and not hold that support hostage in order to dictate my personal life. (I would also like to help others, but this should not be a compulsory requirement, because then you need someone deciding what "help others" means, wasting effort keeping the gate, and that doesn't help anyone, least of all people who can't actually help others.)

@kimapr @lucy @lizzy Oh yeah, @jonny fixed that (for Mastodon): https://github.com/sneakers-the-rat/mastodon/tree/fetch-all-replies-service

@lucy @lizzy @kimapr You can simply look at what the patch does, and port it to your software of choice.

@BeAware @miturian @db0 That could so easily have been constructive criticism…

I don't think the problem. I think it's scared people lashing out at anything they perceive as a threat.

In this case, I agree the feature /would/ be dangerous, but that's because it presents the information as an authoritative list: viewing it as "these people say this person is bad", akin to the Web of Trust, would work better. (cc: @Fedicate, because no way am I joining that thread)

@alcinnz 3/3 surely?

@alcinnz @alilly I'd be interested to see your take on Prolog. There have been several hardware implementations of it, over the years, but I suspect you'll come up with something new.

I'd also appreciate your take on miniKanren, the other language family in https://aphyr.com/posts/354-unifying-the-technical-interview.

@alilly @alcinnz That said, if you're willing to go really eccentric, the minimum you need is a LISP model of the CPU (including the instructions you want to support), a proof system, and a basic constructive compiler. Then, if you want more optimised machine code for something high-level, you can prove the equivalence of the two algorithms (up to the extent your LISP is supposed to preserve lower-level semantics).

@alilly @alcinnz I don't think it's possible to start with a small language, not unless you're willing to drop down to "and my high-level language spits out machine code". That's cheating, to me: it significantly reduces the approachability.

A big selling point of C is that it's "portable assembly" – except it doesn't achieve that. I'd like to have something that's as powerful as assembly, without all the footguns. Where you can have sum types, and define how those map to machine semantics…

@alilly @alcinnz Personally, I'm interested in a programming language that lets me experiment with various operating system designs in an "every prototype is usable" way.

Where lvalues are first-class objects, so e.g. I can say:

rax = Rax(7);
if f() then *rax = 14;
syscall(rax, &something);

and rax remains unclobbered while the lvalue is in scope.

I would usually use this language to bootstrap up to something higher-level, although it'd be nice to be able to write applications in it, too.

@alilly Existing languages aren't suitable. You know it, I know it. If we want to do OS dev (which I do), we need something better.

(Happy to collaborate if you don't want to make a new language on your own.)

@alilly To my knowledge, FreePascal has all the same footguns as GCC C, except viral Undefined Behaviour. (The optimisation philosophy is quite different: it doesn't seem to transform code into "equivalent code" in the same way, but often produces smaller binaries despite that.)

You could write your own language, and use that to write your operating system.

@alilly If you have the money to spend, I'd recommend it. Who's going to pay those starving artists, if not less-starving artists?

@Jain @mudkip You're half-right. This model probably can be run as generative AI (by providing noise as input, and calling it repeatedly in a particular way), but this application of it isn't, so it's not properly classified as "generative AI".

But "generative AI" isn't a useful term, so I don't really care about policing it. I shall instead police the policing of it! (Because that's what we all need: meta-policing.)

@tetrislife That protocol seems really really complicated, and its documentation misrepresents HTTP. I think it needs more work before serious adoption. However, it's a good start, and the hard work (identifying the real-world requirements) seems to have been done.

@apsmith @jasongorman Do you have a reference for that? I'd be interested in reading about the mathematics, but I can't really bring myself to slog through the breathless press releases again.

@Angle @lightspill Whatever we can abstract from these in a comprehensible way (e.g. most theming, default file associations, consistent key combinations), we should. Where there are already standards (e.g. CSS <system-color>), we should support them, and ideally use them "natively" unless they're somehow wrong-headed (e.g. screen reader APIs implemented over dbus-based RPC).

It's a lot of work, but it's far from unachievable.

@Angle @lightspill We should start with one DE for each paradigm: windowed mouse, tiling keyboard, and single-tasking touchscreen. "Windowed mouse" should be based on Windows 9x (which does, of course, have keyboard combinations), "tiling keyboard" should be based on a good tiling wm (something dmenu-based like dwm or i3, but ideally with mouse support), and "single-tasking touchscreen" should be GNOME 4x-esque but actually good.