It’s an Australian charity group that does a lot of cancer prevention and education activities. One part of it is having stores and lines of sun protection products like hats, swimming shirts and sunscreen.
TLDR: the program prints a pseudorandom sequence of characters 205 and 206, which on Commodore 64 are graphics characters similar to / and \.
When repeated across multiple lines, it looks like an intricate random maze. But it is actually just a visual representation of whatever PRNG is used on the platform, with the default seed as set by the BASIC interpreter.
Looks like a great start. Using Rust and TOML configuration are good choices.
With a project like this where there are many (many) existing attempts to solve it, I think it helps to take a hard look at what exists today and design your solution to solve a specific problem you see.
Then you can pitch it that way to your first adopters too - something like “Basel, but with easier deps” or “CMake, but with config humans can understand”.
> As a reader, I don't want page authors to start hard coding sizes into these elements …
They mean h1 elements without a font-size specified in CSS (or style attribute) will be flagged as a warning. User agent styles can still override site styles if you want to set one.
> if I take some existing markup and blockquote it in some container, I'd expect the headings to shrink as they're now all sub-elements of some other section.
This logic only applied to the h1 element specifically, as it was an attempt to shoehorn some “clever” logic from the abandoned <h> tag proposed in a early draft of HTML5 (which was going to work the way you’d describe for headings at any level), on to the existing h1 element.
(Source: I used to follow the WHAT-WG mailing list closely during the HTML5 spec development process.)
The key challenges called out are a) fuel, b) robust airframe, c) active guidance to handle varying conditions, d) funding for testing and robust components. The article goes into a good amount of detail on each.
The interview mentions the word "protocol" 26 times, but sadly no detail on what a successful social media protocol might look like, or how it could get adopted given where we are today.
What I believe we've witnessed, with the recent launch of many Twitter clones and subsequent lack of sustained traction, is that large social networks are _really hard_ to replicate, and therefore extremely valuable. So you're not going to see any of today's social media companies opening up their networks through open protocols. If anything, the opposite continues to happen, as networks shut down APIs (except for ads) and disable third party clients.
To me, the only solution is (sadly) a government mandate, and one that restores citizens' ownership of their social media profiles and networks through a requirement to publish open APIs for the data. Unfortunately, this seems very unlikely to ever happen. Technology companies today are so rich and powerful, they have lobbying teams which will ensure such regulation never passes (at least in the US, where it could have some impact).
What a fascinating trip back in time. I had almost forgotten all the time I spent typing up code listings from the back of Usborne computer books as a kid in the late 80s.
It was really a great way to learn programming, although I remember the frustrations trying to work out which variation of BASIC (Commodore, Spectrum, BBC Micro or another one) would work on my ’286 with GWBASIC.
Not sure if you read TFA, but it was about games whose code you “type in” from a book or magazine. I did it a lot back in the 80s when I first started programming.
The Sierra games took typed commands, but you got the games on diskettes. That was a later era than the games mentioned in the article.