pho4cexa @pho4cexa@tiny.tilde.website

Holy shit I can just follow @blender which isn't even a Mastodon instance but a Peertube instance and it just WORKS. ActivityPub is AWESOME

Paging @pho4cexa! https://www.gnu.org/software/mes/

"GNU Mes aims to help create full source bootstrapping...It consists of a mutual self-hosting Scheme interpreter written in ~5,000 LOC of simple C and a Nyacc-based C compiler written in Scheme."

"Mes is inspired by The Maxwell Equations of Software: LISP-1.5 – John McCarthy page 13, GNU Guix's source/binary packaging transparency and Jeremiah Orians's stage0 ~500 byte self-hosting hex assembler."

Guix folks continuing to do pretty cool things :)

Just learned about a really cool thing - Przybylski's Star. It's a "chemically peculiar" (Serious Astronomical Term) that's VERY weird indeed - weird elements like holmium, scandium, neodymium, and uranium present at 1,000x to 10,000x their abundance in our own Sun.

In fact, some even weirder elements - plutonium, einsteinium, californium - have been detected as well. Which is REALLY weird - those have short enough half-lives at a cosmic scale that we don't really observe those ANYWHERE in nature, because they disappear so quickly that they would have to have been produced very recently in cosmic time.

It's actually been proposed that the star may contain the theorized but as-yet-undiscovered "island of stability" isotopes of exotic superheavy elements like flerovium, or Element 120, or Element 126 - and that the reason we're seeing those strange radioactive elements is actually as decay products from these exotic isotopes.

This just seems like the sort of thing that is OBVIOUSLY the hook for a science-fiction novel.

I wonder how performant a primitive x86 processor, but fabbed on modern processes, could be.

No branch prediction.
No speculative execution.
No out-of-order execution.
No attempts to extract instruction-level parallelism.
Just a single-issue pipeline that issues things as they're ready, and stalls if they're not ready.

Changing random stuff until your program works is "hacky" and "bad coding practice", but if you do it fast enough it's "Machine Learning" and pays 4x your current salary.

"It means a lot."

@aral @dredmorbius @aral I've been seeing FB ads everywhere in the UK. One was played in the cinema, a fake mea culpa that blamed their business model and its structural problems ("data misuse" and "fake news") on trolls and other third parties. It also claimed that a mythical "we" (the owners, engineers, and users of FB) are going to take back the internet, rhetoric totally borrowed from folks in the #fediverse and the rest of the internet freedom movements. Orwell must be rolling in his grave.

What's the dumbest bit of paleotechnological trivia burnt into your brain, mine is a fragmentary memory of certain of the TRS-80's graphics character set 128-191 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_character_set

#retrocomputing

Amazing amount of work has gone into this custom built gaming keypad https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=93039.0 #keyboard

"what is it like to be perfectly perpendicular to the surface you're on"
"oh, pretty normal"

Last year I wrote a bot that, when followed, would follow a user back and then send each of the links they tweeted to the Wayback Machine: https://parkerhiggins.net/2017/07/linkarchiver-a-new-bot-to-back-up-tweeted-links/

It relied on an API that Twitter is deprecating this week, and I will be shutting it down.

I think a ported version would work over here, technically, though it feels very hacky. Would it be appreciated? It feels like per-user opt-in is the wrong layer to do this.

"Dear @cwebber, I don't suppose you have opinions about how to implement a web of trust system for the fediverse???"

Heck yeah I have opinions, and here's how you do it: you combine it with a petnames system: https://chat.indieweb.org/social/2018-08-14#t1534216302328700

Super-cute attiny project:

http://www.technoblogy.com/show?283C

Putting it in the simplest terms possible:

When I was 8, I desperately wished I could ask my family computer, "Wow! How did you do that?"

I still can't today and I spend a lot of time thinking about what a solution to that should look like.

I should note that I don't even think all software needs to be preserved. I just think it's a travesty that we're 60 years into the project of programming and our tools for _asking computers_ about how programs behave are so poor and so specialized.