A blend of FreeBSD and macOS? lunduke.substack.com/p/the-fre…
Sounds too good to be true, but good luck to the folks doing this đź‘Ť
A call
On unifying “toy languages” and “real languages”
On the bio-electrical science behind how organisms control anatomy through gene expression: www.youtube.com/watch
Looking into Neeva for when I ever decide to move off DuckDuckGo.
“Ten years ago Google spent a billion dollars on search technology, and earned thirty billion,” … “Now they spend a billion, and make a hundred billion.” It’s a good business proposition, and a worsening customer experience.
An entertaining Youtube channel which also promotes a much-needed “cultural coming-together” in these times:
A look at “low-level” schemes (though still missing a mention of Gambit/Gerbil)
Everything getting older
The Onion’s Our Dumb Century is a classic satirical look at the twentieth century, of course, but it’s also a nice tour through the American zeitgeist over that time. One of the headlines that hits a little harder than it used to is from 1985: “Dynamic New Soviet Leader Not on Brink of Death.” In the early 80s, the USSR successively appointed Yuri Andropov (68 years old, died in office in a year and a half) and then Chernenko (who took power at the age of 72 and died after just over a year). But now the US Senate is the oldest it’s ever been, the speaker of the House is 82, the party leaders in the Senate are 71 and 80, and the Presidency is held by someone who won at age 77, running against a 74-year-old.
Spectacularly contrarian take: “Use one server“
When you experience growing pains, and get close to the limits of your current servers, today’s conventional wisdom is to go for sharding and horizontal scaling, or to use a cloud architecture that gives you horizontal scaling “for free.” It is often easier and more efficient to scale vertically instead. Using one big server is comparatively cheap, keeps your overheads at a minimum, and actually has a pretty good availability story if you are careful to prevent correlated hardware failures. It’s not glamorous and it won’t help your resume, but one big server will serve you well.
Wordle 412 6/6
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Two approaches to (web)publishing
The “_just use Fossil_” approach is particularly novel!
Public art in a surprising place
Hilton Waikoloa’s art collection
In pursuit of that goal, Hemmeter traveled to China, Japan, Indonesia, Thailand, Burma and beyond. He spent at least a year traveling and shipping artwork back to Hawaii on barges where it would then be flown by helicopter to the hotel’s property.
But the best thing about the collection, besides its sheer size and diversity, is that viewing it costs nothing, and that holds true for both guests and members of the general public.
Displayed throughout the corridors and common spaces for all visitors to enjoy, the Hilton Anatole’s varied collection ranges from 12-foot segments of the Berlin Wall painted by Jurgen Grosse to an 18th Century Thai Reclining Buddha fashioned in gilt-bronze.
“_The Hajj trail_”
Well made online rpg!
The backstory of Marcel the shell
Inferior is Better
Software that is better in principle comes with everything you need. Software that is inferior does not, and someone has to fill it in. They do it by building tools.
Every third-party “tool” is actually a weakness: it’s doing something that either didn’t need to have been done at all, or could have been done better in the first place. However, it creates a community. There’s a way for people to contribute. It’s like a game that leaves little bonuses lying around for people to pocket. If even a novice can make a small contribution, so much better. They feel good about themselves, and now they’ve made a commitment to that ecosystem. The switching costs suddenly became significantly higher.
In the realm I know best, programming languages, this is especially true. And in fact, to be “successful” in terms of size, perhaps every language should start out somewhat flawed: it should have bad scope rules, weird modules, funky overloading, floating points as the only numbers, and so on. To a rational observer, this might seem an awful idea. But programmers, as a species, have gotten acculturated to salt mines as a natural habitat. They will think nothing of it.
From this great rant
Illuminating article about Chuck Moore and levels in Forth
A novel way to blog, using Curio
An excellent HN comment (source)
Common Lisp and SmallTalk have rapid dev models by working in a running image, CLOG gives Common Lisp a foss visual IDE moving closer to its goal of marriage of CL+Pharo+VB.
James Clear quotes today:
1. “Many problems are minor when you solve them right away, but grow into an enormous conflict when you let them linger.
As a rule of thumb, fix it now.”
- “Raise your ambitions. Lower your expectations.
The higher your ambitions, the bolder your actions.
The lower your expectations, the greater your satisfaction.
Achieve more and be happy along the way.”