rswail · HackerLangs

3 giorni fadiscuss

When FSD actually works 100% (or as close as possible), manual driving will become obsolete, we're 5-10 years away.

how long until a steering wheel is an optional extra?

rswail

6 giorni fadiscuss

No one seems to be worried about the fact that a vibe-coded app or conversion or rewrite is not copyright-able. It is not a derivative, it's a machine translation, without a human author.

So if that is released to the public, it's in the public domain, no license is applicable.

rswail

13 giorni fadiscuss

Thanks, interesting, I like making my systems as stand-alone capable as possible :)

What is the primary difference between using an Unbound auth-zone (as described in the RFC) compared to localroot?

rswail

13 giorni fadiscuss

What would be the additional load if everyone ran a local caching recursive resolver like unbound?

It would need to be built into iOS/Android/Linux/Windows/MacOS but what would be the disadvantages?

I can see greater load on root servers but caching is specifically designed to reduce that.

I can see potential problems for CDNs and equivalent geo-based resolvers.

But are they really that bad?

rswail

15 giorni fadiscuss

Aren't we reaching the point where there is no "solution" in terms of density and physical dimensions?

It's like the speed of light being a constant, or the Planck length being the smallest that can be subject to standard physics.

Quantum computing, which is a complete change in the actual physical model of computing, appears to be the only alternative.

rswail

15 giorni fadiscuss

They effectively funded the legal defense against SCO that was trying to claim ownership of the IPR to Unix/Linux.

They bought and funded (and still fund) Redhat which funds Fedora and GNOME and Wayland and systemd.

rswail

15 giorni fadiscuss

That's the current reality and people are realizing that they are being ripped off in their local communities, which will result in an already beginning backlash against datacenters and particularly AI datacenters.

I don't think this will change in the US, because your governments have been totally corrupted and you have much bigger problems than datacenters.

It will/is happening in more enlightened/democratic jurisdictions.

rswail

16 giorni fadiscuss

Space based data centers make no economic sense compared to land based.

The only reason is to remove them from local/regional, and potentially national/international jurisdictions.

Oh, and of course, the other reason is to give SpaceX to have a reason for xAI to be part of its structure.

Starlink makes sense, LEO comms using a mesh makes sense.

LEO/geosync satellite data processing doesn't.

rswail

16 giorni fadiscuss

> I suppose you could condense the evaporated water somehow by using a chilled umbrella or some other ridiculous contraption above the cooling tower, but why would you do that?

Specifically to reduce the ongoing demand for water.

DCs need to get to net-zero on their energy requirements and their water consumption.

They are already losing their political license to operate because they're not.

That's independent of the noise and other impositions on the local communities.

For a DC to be politically acceptable it must be:

* Net zero emissions on energy consumption, preferably powered by renewables in addition to the existing local supply.

* Net zero on water consumption, especially fresh/drinking water from local supplies.

* Low to no noise or other pollution.

rswail

16 giorni fadiscuss

For those of us that use metric/SI units, 90F is 32.22C/305.37K.

Don't the US Military and NASA use metric now?

rswail

16 giorni fadiscuss

Extract the nth grapheme from a string of Unicode codepoints. Codepoints are 32-bit values.

Take into account that some Unicode codepoints work together to combine to form a grapheme which then links to a glyph for display.

If you use UTF-8 internally, you will be expanding out to full 32 bits when scanning the vector anyway.

So if memory isn't an issue (and most of the time it's not), indexing a vector by codepoint (ie 32 bits) makes more sense from a processing POV.

rswail

16 giorni fadiscuss

Both Linux and MacOS followed the Unix implementation, both of them are derivatives of Unix, so why would that change? Unix derived from Multics which chose LF.

The issue is that none of the print carriage movement ASCII characters should be used internally to indicate "end of line", because each of the chosen possibilities are used separately to indicate different carriage movements.

The logical decision would have been to choose one of the "separator" characters to indicate "separation of one line from another" and then allow the I/O drivers to decide what to send/receive to/from a particular device.

rswail

19 giorni fadiscuss

For an OS that was being created specifically to process text, having the equivalent of CR being separate to LF to allow for overprinting would/should have been a requirement.

I'd say Multics/Unix was technically correct, except this was still the wrong decision for I/O ever since.

The Record Separator is the logical character code to use to indicate the end of a line of text and print position characters, assuming that a line of text is a "record".

rswail

19 giorni fadiscuss

Storing them as 32 bits wide in memory means you can at least index by a codepoint (if not a glyph).

rswail

19 giorni fadiscuss

We're literally talking about two decades before that.

rswail

19 giorni fadiscuss

If it's purely binary data, then you can't.

Otherwise you need to have some sort of escape mechanism, exactly like quoting strings in CSV. In fact, there's an ASCII code "ESC" for entirely that purpose. :)

The problem is that those characters are non-printable, which means if you're just dumping the file out somewhere, you can't see them.

rswail

19 giorni fadiscuss

Except that the ISA has a perfectly good ALU there that can detect zero really easily, so no one was going to waste silicon on an instruction that required comparison to yet another value (which essentially would be an additional subtraction or OR or equivalent) added to the loop.

The fat pointers are much more efficient in that you don't need to scan memory to get the length or find the end to append or take slices etc.

Especially for vectors that don't have any value that can be used as a sentinel.

rswail

19 giorni fadiscuss

Most good ideas never are.

rswail

19 giorni fadiscuss

My bubble was obviously technically superior to your bubble. :)

And maybe it was 5/10 years earlier? Not sure. My uni days were the very early 1980s. Our university literally still made 1st years use marked sense (not even punch) cards.

I never ever liked C++, it always seemed to be tacked on to the side of C (literally at the start).

I liked the "better C" bits, but the "++" bits and the magic under the covers and then later the added layer of templates just seemed ridiculously complicated especially because we were still in the days of inheritance and "is-a" instead of "has-a" objects.

I loathed all the overloading that suddenly << meant something completely different when doing I/O and weird multiple function definitions to provide the generics.

Much preferred the Objective C idea of messages, was much more what I understood OOP to be after Smalltalk.

But by then I'd made the leap to being an "architect" and got to pontificate from on high and languages became semi-irrelevant.

rswail

20 giorni fadiscuss

Like CP/M, DOS v1, RT-11 etc.

VMS used:

    node::device:[dir1.dir2.dir3]filename.extension;version

from memory, you could have up to 15 nested directories.

The versioning was cool as long as you remembered to clean them up.

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