metroholografix

5 時間前議論

There's no need to pay for questionable courses. Here's an excellent free alternative that covers all the basics:

https://haqr.eu/tinyrenderer/

metroholografix

15 日前議論

Current SOTA models work great with Emacs Lisp and Common Lisp. Giving access to the REPL enables them to do an amazing job but they still work well with Unix input/output static code processing paradigm.

metroholografix

2 か月前議論

Official chess competitions are taking place under stringent monitoring conditions and even then, with professional reputations on the line, there have been multiple high profile cheating incidents.

Amateur online chess on the other hand is besieged by cheaters that use engines, even in casual non-ranked games where there's absolutely nothing to gain besides a pat on the ego. This has drastically changed how the game is played today with lot of players gravitating towards speed chess (bullet and blitz) to compensate. That will thin the herd of cheaters but one still runs into engines on a weekly basis.

This is also the tip of the iceberg, with the true scale of the problem being orders of magnitude worse, as someone dedicated enough can use an engine to cheat in a way that's essentially undetectable.

metroholografix

5 か月前議論

6$ / TB / month is a fool's bargain even for something as low as 10 TB. One can buy a used LTO-6 drive for a few hundred bucks and build tape libraries that span hundreds of TBs.

There's no Cloud-based backup service that's competive with tape.

metroholografix

5 か月前議論

The vast majority of MUDs don't even implement the full TELNET protocol, just a small subset. In typical MUD fashion, fundamental TELNET parts like option negotiation were either hacked together -badly- or altogether ignored.

For the longest time in the 90s TELNET AYT would crash tons of custom implementations.

metroholografix

7 か月前議論

This doesn't apply here, a wealth tax is levied against assets not income.

metroholografix

7 か月前議論

If you want Scheme, go use Scheme because these are not arguments for Common Lisp. There is tons of value in the CL specification being this big and I'm happy I can still run code I wrote more than 25 years ago (or third party code written more than 50 years ago) without any issues.

Generally, contemporary folks that propose improvements to the CL spec tend to be misinformed / misguided and/or lacking experience to realize why their proposed improvements are bad ideas.

metroholografix

昨年議論

Great story! I also read Neuromancer for the first time in Greek translation (Αίολος), around 1995, knowing nothing about the book otherwise. It was a blind buy in a bookstore solely because I liked the cover and the short synopsis on the back. It was a book that changed my life. I remember being drenched in sweat when I finished it, and I immediately re-read it without a break. I was already at age 14 hopelessly hooked on computers, but Neuromancer completely rewired how I thought about technology (it was the first book I came across that put forth a non-anthropocentric point of view, with Technology being presented as both an addictive drug and a force in itself, bringing about its own teleology).

That book was the main impetus for me connecting to the Internet, installing Linux and getting involved with the European hacking underground of the mid to late 90s. I also periodically re-read it (now in English): the prose still seems razor-sharp and the divergent feelings are still being evoked. Plus, it's an insanely hyperstitional book: one gets the feeling that Gibson (whose non-Sprawl work pales in comparison and who has never again reached these heights) didn't just write a heist-story filled with countercultural sensibilities but channeled something greater, something that has been intricately involved with how the world we experience has evolved.

Looking back on those days, I now wish I'd read it in English for the first time. The Greek translation is not bad but it feels kind of archaic and doesn't do justice to the brilliance of Gibson's dystopian vision.

metroholografix

昨年議論

A lot of the power of Forth comes from its metaprogramming capabilities and having the compiler available at runtime, all wrapped in a tiny footprint. Similarly to Lisp, it empowers one to explore a problem domain without getting in the way. These concepts are alien to C which is downright hostile to exploratory programming.

If you really want to understand the genius of Forth and its creator, I suggest reading everything that Chuck Moore put down in writing starting with "Programming a problem-oriented language".

A lot of us today, being bogged down in the sort of tedium-inducing programming that pays the bills, tend to forget that programming languages are (or should be!) primarily about expressing ideas. Forth is still one of the best languages to do that in.

metroholografix

昨年議論

I see the following in code written by newcomers to CL frequently:

    (optimize (speed 3) (safety 0))

but it is a very bad habit to get used to, in general, and may create the impression that it's needed for optimized code. Instead, use this where needed:

    (optimize (speed 3) (safety 1))

which will result in roughly same performance for the vast majority of cases, but keep array bounds checks and (weaker) type checks.

For SBCL, there's also the excellent sb-simd [1] plus compiler macros and even hooking into some of the VM internals for custom code generation [2].

[1] https://www.sbcl.org/manual/#sb_002dsimd

[2] https://pvk.ca/Blog/2014/03/15/sbcl-the-ultimate-assembly-co...

metroholografix

昨年議論

Stallman has done more to safeguard our freedoms than all the critics and corporations that are happy to exploit his work put together.

He’s also been extremely prescient and decades ahead of his time. He stood his ground against relentless attacks where so many others have sold out and betrayed whatever morals they thought they had.

metroholografix

昨年議論

> I commented that Patagonia made great stuff and actually cared about their materials

Last I checked a lot of their clothes were full of forever chemicals and processed plastics but maybe they've made progress.

https://www.insidehook.com/gear/patagonia-major-microplastic...

metroholografix

2 年前議論

It should become clear to everyone that reads his work that "management theorist" Stafford Beer can best be characterized without any doubt whatsoever as a charlatan.

Cybernetics came out of the Macy conferences [0] and this is where one needs to go, in order to establish context. I also highly recommend Norbert Wiener's biography "Dark Hero of the Information Age" [1] as a good introduction to one of the greatest geniuses of this age, easily eclipsing Shannon and von Neumann.

Principia Cybernetica [2] is another good resource.

[0] https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/C/bo23...

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Hero-Information-Age-Cybernetics...

[2] http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/

metroholografix

2 年前議論

I always saw VLC as subpar. A typical case of software that's just trying to copy what the pioneers do. As we all know, mediocrity it not antithetical to popularity, and VLC has become very popular indeed.

However, it never pushed the envelope in terms of codecs, features and performance and as a result was never at the forefront of opensource video playing: mplayer got the ball rolling with rapid breakthroughs including hardware acceleration (e.g. /dev/mga_vid) before standards such as xvideo even existed and that spirit of technical excellence has been passed on to Mpv which remains at the pinnacle.

metroholografix

2 年前議論

Folks who find this useful might also be interested in otel-profiling-agent [1] which Elastic recently opensourced and donated to OpenTelemetry. It's a low-overhead eBPF-based continuous profiler which, besides native code, can unwind stacks from other widely used runtimes (Hotspot, V8, Python, .NET, Ruby, Perl, PHP).

[1] https://github.com/elastic/otel-profiling-agent

metroholografix

2 年前議論

Wizards for me falls flat (kinda like "soul of a new machine" that's often recommended but which I found a complete waste of time) while the Dream Machine, Dealers of Lightning [1] and Norbert Wiener's biography [2] are all essential reading.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Dealers-Lightning-Xerox-PARC-Computer...

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Hero-Information-Age-Cybernetics...

metroholografix

2 年前議論

There's no JS interpreter in EWW [1]. If you're forced to use a different browser, having JS off by default is not hard to get used to.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/eww/Over...

metroholografix

2 年前議論

These bugs can be described as the major or minor mode evaluating code that is provided as part of the buffer that the mode is being enabled for. The two semi-recent examples that come to mind include Org (which offers this code evaluation as a feature) and text/enriched (which allowed arbitrary Lisp evaluation through a non-standard extension). In both of these cases, the evaluation was -somewhat- intended and even documented, so these are not bugs in the traditional definition. They become security bugs when one takes into account the exposed attack surface / dynamic interaction with parts of Emacs automatically switching on the mode (e.g. through an email in Gnus) on 3rd party untrusted input.

I don't expect to see code evaluation on untrusted input as intended features in web browser or chat modes.

metroholografix

2 年前議論

What's of greater importance here is not this specific security issue, but the default configuration of MIME handling in Emacs which can turn any unexpected evaluation bug -which we are likely to see more of- into remote code execution. We've had a previous Org security issue in exactly the same vein [1] and the Emacs MIME defaults are still unsafe. Of course, one can change them (non-trivial and related documentation is extremely confusing, see [2] for a possible solution) but really Emacs should not come with these defaults.

The loss of on-by-default functionality such as Org fontification in email message buffers is in no way as important as being wide open to trivial remote code execution.

[1] https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/commit/befa9fcaae29a6c...

[2] https://xristos.sdf.org/fix-gnus-mime.el.txt

metroholografix

2 年前議論

Unexpected evaluation is never a feature, Emacs should at least warn and prompt before executing code in a file that somebody opens.

metroholografix

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New exploit acquisition program – up to 1.5M for IOS

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