Notices by Christian Lynbech (mapcar@mastodon.sdf.org)

#askatp I have gotten a new computer (Mac mini) and will need to configure timemachine disks for backup. I have become uncertain what would be the recommended choices for encryption, as this can be done on both filesystem and timemachine level.

So what do you guys do, encrypt twice (both disk and timemachine), once (disk or timemachine) or not?

I just want to be be both security minded and practical, there are no dark secrets expected to be hoovered up by the backups.

@amszmidt @screwtape @kentpitman I chatted many years ago with Peter Paine from the UK who had a stash of Symbolics HW. He told a story about a group that had spent weeks or months hunting a bug in a Fortran program. He helped them by running it on a Symbolics which quickly caught the problem as part of the memory protection (or something like that).

@nsrahmad @simon_brooke @praetor I feel similarly, there are many things I like about CL, but my sentiments are also somewhat historical. I could see myself liking clojure, but I have so far not really have had neither the energy or the usecase to really dive into that.

Having done a fair amount of scheme in university, I must say that I very much prefer CL, I am much too practically oriented to live with sillyness like nil =!= false.

@MonaApp I often find that when I click on a user in the Mona app (one fine example would be @MonaApp), I see only the bio but neither any posts nor replies. If go to the mastodon web interface, I see lots of posts. Occasionally, I see something but the majority of the time, I do not.

Is this a known issue? Is there anything I can do to fix it?

@kar @vavakado @screwtape @prahou For people into hardware, depending on the type of hardware of course, it might be worth checking out uLisp, a Lisp for microcontrollers. It might also be a simpler starting point than Common Lisp which is a fairly big language (even if one does not have to know all of it to get started).

http://www.ulisp.com

@thomasfuchs Apple has been pretty clear that what they want is in fact not a VR headset but an AR glasses like thing. However, the technology is not yet there to enable that. I believe that the AVP is much more aimed at developers than consumers; Apple is building a new concept (spatial computing) and they need help to develop bothe concept and the apps to fill it.

@thomasfuchs Nilay Patels review for The Verge did say that the AVP is the best headset that has ever been built and yet it needs to be 50 times better to be able to relay an experience on par with the real world. That is so far off from what we have now, that he thinks that something like the AVP, that is using cameras and screens to project the real world, is a dead end wrt the road to AR.

Interesting discussion on his review and feed back from industry:

https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/2/24059291/today-on-the-vergecast-the-score-the-vision-pro-deserves-and-the-future-tiktok-is-foisting-upon-us

@pellechristensen @thomasfuchs I don’t think AI will get a change to do that. We are do well underway with destroying civilization with traditional means that it will have collapsed before AI is ready to replace humans.

@thomasfuchs I am not sure if that is better (that the executives know) or worse (that they know and do it anyway).

As for the recent wave of layoffs, I am once again amazed how the supposedly highly innovative and trailblazing Sillicon Valley keeps showing amazing flock mentality.

@thomasfuchs Unfortunately, computer executives will be computer executives.

As reported by the The Verge, there are currently layoffs going around in the industry. There could be many explanations, I could however fear that one explanation could be that a lot of executives thinks AI will mean they can do the same work with a lot less employees. They will be mistaken, if that is the case, but it might be a painful period until they realize that.

https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/14/23458204/meta-twitter-amazon-apple-layoffs-hiring-freezes-latest-tech-industry

@inthehands @adamhill @endocrimes Equally wrong, even dangerousluý so, is the idea that AI will help by taking away the boring parts of programming. First of all, that is unlikely to be true, humans will be left with the debugging, the getting the code to work, which is *not* the fun part. Secondly, I deeply believe that there is a value, even in the boring. Even the best pianist will spend hours daily, practicing scales.

@inthehands @adamhill @endocrimes I really agree with this. Many, also programmers, see programming as puzzle solving which is a very wrong frame of mind for the activity. Programming is much better understood as a journey of learning, as Danielle is also saying.

@inthehands @adamhill @endocrimes And while I do understand that many programmers do not really control their tools and environments, I cannot help but thinking that if your programming language has so much bolierplate that you need an AI to help write that, perhaps you should consider using another language.

@thomasfuchs @uliwitness @grumpygamer I am not sure I understand how the argument goes, as shoe sizes clearly are not metric, so in what way are they an argument against the metric system?

@thomasfuchs @grumpygamer How are you doing the streaming?

@nic @kkarhan @davidgerard To be fair, this remote thing is oretty complicated, saw this in a job ad last year (ok, it probably is something boring like a typo).

@colinsmatt11 @screwtape I am pretty sure that GNU Hurd was the original plan; if it is Linux now, it has been forced upon GNU by the neverending development story of the Hurd kernel.

Should we criticize Stallman, it should be for the decision to start the GNU project with doing GCC and friends. It is a big question if the Linux kernel (and countless other free C-based UNIX utilities) had happened at all, if not for there being a gratis high-quality C development system.

@thomasfuchs Do you know of any examples of such other federated networks?