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

In the NYT interview published yesterday, Trump openly admitted that his thirst for Greenland is not about military necessity, national security or business opportunities but simply his psychological need to own it.

I think that Trump is looking to secure his legacy as the (in his own mind at least) greatest president ever and adding Greenland would not only make America greater, literally, but also make it a bit bigger than Canada. In other words, a pure vanity project.

#uspol #greenland

@larsbrinkhoff @amszmidt @weekend_editor @cstross Not entirely sure what is meant by cross-compiling, but Symbolics had a number of compiler for different languages, certainly including FORTRAN but also C (I think).

@thomasfuchs Trying to understand this from afar, are there not a real dilemma between holding out for ACA and catering to the needs of people on SNAP?

The administration is seemingly not satisfied by just letting SNAP run out, they are actively trying to prevent states from trying to compensate.

@roadriverrail @discatte @joe It is not too late 😊

https://www.ebay.com/itm/164374244139?_skw=sun+blade+100&itmmeta=01K9FRWR5KRJBDN5K25SEBVEQ6&hash=item264577eb2b%3Ag%3ATlgAAOSwiBlh4XFV&itmprp=enc%3AAQAKAAAA8FkggFvd1GGDu0w3yXCmi1cCBcuavukUVatZkTNd%2BsaQNu8O5esB7F5RBcc2%2BmOAEkPSTFcrqZ9gJkpkYzq90cME10qkQfjAS952uRiyka%2FklHVhWAzPc2kCLnfU1XHp7upCrgOtXZC1sW%2B4eUKI0imCJRr4YXNirO6ir4kVJsz01VQIC%2BuMVVMhfDSX7Q9uowCzLEFNzPIUkc1SfrcTVVktzXcunIgUArOFuu2kLt0VO89teqxMPO%2BhjygWOyjCZaSTEqPZjIrfT6To%2Fy1AghvNAizXPtCZ%2BpRXGs9RXAkSLqS29i90rQIa3jlP8fzdtQ%3D%3D%7Ctkp%3ABk9SR_iC8_jLZg&keyword=sun+blade+100&sacat=0&relatedSearch=true

@roadriverrail @discatte @joe When I started at university in 1986, we had a fair number of Sun workstations. The two central fileservers were named ‘jupiter’ and ‘saturn’ respectively, for obvious reasons (I think they were also Sun servers of some variety) 😊

@thomasfuchs I am afraid this is in fact different. You do not learn basic skills by being told, you learn by practicing.

Previous new mediums were feared but usually with poorly thought out links between fear and mechanism. Whatever you can say of records or video games, neither offered to do your homework.

I do not teach, nor do I have children, but I do not think that people educated before LLMs understands what this is doing to education of young persons.

@mattly @technomancy Having myself being annoyed by the fixed list of search engine choices, I was delighted to discover that if one installs the qwant extension, it will override the builtin choice (if one can accept qwant as a reasonable choice of search engine).

https://www.qwant.com/

@loke @amszmidt For danish, we too have the paternal/maternal (farfar and morfar) but we also have a neutral word (bedstefar) that would work for both. Could be a german influence.

@amszmidt Nonsense, you are just using the wrong tools.

Print out the two versions onto punch cards, overlay two cards and hold them up in front of a strong lamp. Problem solved.

😊

@amszmidt @ramin_hal9001 @bshankar @amoroso @screwtape @sacha I started at university in 1986 and we certainly had graphical workstations on desks (in the beginning mostly Sun and PERQ, later also SGI and HP).

I am confident that Emacs was in widespread use in the offices, though I do not remember anybody complaining about disk noise (swapping or otherwise).

#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