GregDavidson

5 hours agodiscuss

Emacs is a Platform. Operating Systems are also Platforms. Many other things are platforms. A platform is a layer of software designed to enable you to build new things on it. This should raise the question: What platform X would be good for building this thing Y I want to build? I often find X = Emacs, but also Racket, Rust, et al. An application which is also a good platform may be worth a greater learning investment than a simpler application would justify.

GregDavidson

11 days agodiscuss

I use formal verification as part of my development process. The needs of the proof guide the development of the code as much as vice-versa. The result is usually cleaner, simpler, smaller and usually more efficient programs developed much faster as debugging effort is minimal. I still create complete test cases. Proof maintenance as code changes is a pain and I would like LLMs and/or other tools to help with that. I would never try to formally verify code written with regular processes!

GregDavidson

last monthdiscuss

I learned to read English the same way I learned to understand it spoken: exposure. As a young child a relative would put me in their lap and a book I liked in my lap and read to me. After awhile I was reading fluently without effort. Most schools teach reading as a conscious intellectual decoding task which leaves little brain power left to engage with the material - the same way most schools teach "foreign" languages. Engage the brain's language centers and language skills will be fluent.

GregDavidson

2 months agodiscuss

I started with Fortran 2 which has subroutines which don't behave as black boxes. It took me months of frustrated study to understand procedure calls in decent languages as delegation. That opened up the world of high-level computing. Later I would teach this using problems that were a good fit for "recursion". Recursion is not a feature, it's just an obvious pattern of the more general and important nature of delegation. While recursion is occasionally a useful technique, it's tremendously valuable as a tool for learning how to think about procedures as black boxes!

GregDavidson

3 months agodiscuss

Everything I run on servers I also run on my laptop. Occasionally I get crashes or corruption because of the lack of ECC memory. I'd also like to be able to swap parts between a modular laptop and a home/small-office server, but again - I want ECC. If framework had a model with ECC I'd be all in!

GregDavidson

4 months agodiscuss

Regulatory systems need omsbuds within the government who can ask for help and explanations from all the agencies regulating a project yet are (primarily) accountable for helping projects succeed as soon as possible and (secondarily) responsible for providing transparent feedback to those agencies and the public where regulation is malfunctioning.

GregDavidson

5 months agodiscuss

This technology is completely amazing - for large fleet vehicles like buses, trucks, ferries, etc. Also airplanes! Getting this so compact and refined is a technological miracle. Now put it where it fits!

GregDavidson

5 months agodiscuss

Do what Linus does: Focus on code quality!

GregDavidson

5 months agodiscuss

Culture is huge nested networks of memes[1] which reinforce themselves and evolve via natural selection. Their substrate is our brains. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memetics

GregDavidson

5 months agodiscuss

Only train when the Sun shines.

GregDavidson

5 months agodiscuss

Realistic Hard SF has to deal with Accelerating Change making technology vastly powerful yet still limited. The hardest thing to write about is cognitively enhanced humans or any other entities (AI, aliens, etc.) exceeding human cognitive limits. JW Campbell famously said it couldn't be done, but without that depictions of the future or wider universe fall flat. Vernor Vinge became the master of such SF and showed several ways to do it. I recommend everything he wrote! Good Hard SF requires an author who has a good grasp of science without that stifling their imagination. It's easy if you cheat but Science Fantasy is unreadable by the science literate folks who frequent HN. Good Hard SF is out there, with and without spaceships, but you'll have to hunt for it - and thanks for all the recommendations here!

GregDavidson

5 months agodiscuss

GTD in https://orgmode.org/

GregDavidson

last yeardiscuss

The biggest difference between now and the 1990s is in the reduction of abject poverty worldwide. Death and disability from food shortage was extremely common in many countries. A huge improvement in the 1990s over the 1980s is that I could own my own computer (I bought a Sun-2 with Solaris) instead of having everything I created owned by the institution which owned the computer I needed. Today's consumer products, though, are a mixed bag. As an example, I wish I could buy a microwave oven as good as my first one. It was larger, had a temperature probe that could be used instead of time and it used a small internal metal wheel to distribute the microwaves evenly throughout the oven instead of wasting space for the silly rotating platter.

https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty-in-brief

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

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