Life is Tetris @tetrislife@qoto.org

@mhoye beware the man who had one highly acclaimed accomplishment early in his career

“Rewilding the internet is not a nostalgia project for middle-aged nerds who miss IRC and Usenet.”
https://www.noemamag.com/we-need-to-rewild-the-internet/

Now it’s getting personal! 😅

"Scheme and Common Lisp differ mostly in the communities they cater to. Scheme programmers like to talk about how great it is to have a short specification; Common Lisp programmers like to write programs."

- Let Over Lambda, Doug Hoyte

#commonlisp #scheme

I would like to give a shout out to all the excellent people on emacs.ch. You are not only passionate about Emacs and Lisp, but also friendly, fun and always willing to help out.

Thank you for you being you.

#emacs

@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io Ever since Thunderbird has split off from Mozilla they have done exactly what everyone wanted; Just build a better e-mail client.

"we regret to inform you"- then stop doing it. i have plenty of information

I get ridiculed by young JavaScript and Python coders, whenever I say that parallel processing is essential to the future of computing.

The seasoned among them point out to me that the idea of #supercomputers is almost as old as me, that their iPhone can run rings round a typical supercomputer I may have used in my grad school days, and that their Python programmes running on laptops can beat anything I may have written on a CRAY in Fortran or C. Those points seem valid, but they miss the mark.

First, just outrunning a 30-year-old system is not a legitimate measure of current performance.

Secondly, if modern hardware performance has reached a level where a naïve implementation of an algorithm in a slow scripting language can beat a hand-tuned parallel programme running on an old supercomputer, then today's programmers have the ethical responsibility to optimise their software implementations by exploiting those newer, greater hardware capabilities available to them.

Thirdly, if there is so much excess hardware capacity, the software should soak that up by striving for more accuracy, more precision, more features, whatever, instead of running a Doom server or mining bitcoins.

Lastly, just about every consumer-grade machine today—server, desktop, laptop, tablet, phone, single-board computer—is a multicore, multiprocessor monster. Programmers should be exploiting those readily available parallel resources, now. Automatic performance upgrade of sequential code by Moore's law and Dennard scaling is dead and gone. And fully automatic parallelisation of sequential code by compilers is still a distant dream.

#Parallel processing matters—especially today.

@BeAware @atomicpoet @fediversenews

Well, I'm only beginning to dip my toe into the issues here, but... my admin spends a lot of their own time and money running my instance, and they don't even charge me for using it. I choose to make donations, but they don't require or even know that I do. So, from their perspective, my account is nothing but a burden for them.

That being the case, I don't think they really owe me a vote on how they handle threads. Of course I'm free to migrate if I want.

Machines aren’t taking over. Corporations are taking over.

Worry about the right thing.

#corporatocracy #ai

I’ll let you in on a secret: I love sporadically updated weblogs. I subscribe to over 1200 feeds and most of them are sporadic or even technically “inactive”. Months often pass between updates

It means that every post published was important to the writer

Back in the days of snail mail, letters that began with “It’s been a while since I last wrote to you” were the ones people cherished the most

You don’t need to post every day or even every week to have a blog that matters

Them: What’s the dumbest thing you’ve ever done?

Me: Awfully bold of you to assume I’ve peaked.

One of the key facts here keeps getting sidestepped by a mixture of scam marketing and common language usage out there.

LLMs don't *sometimes* make shit up, they *always* make shit up.

That's what an LLM *is*: a piece of software that makes up plausible sounding shit.

What's impressive about this is the extent of improvement in the plausibility.

What's horrifying about it is the extent to which so many people don't care to distinguish between plausibility and correctness.

several good bits here, I note this as one key for me

I know Wirth was horrified by the repulsive syntax choices of today's dominant languages; he could never accept that a = b should mean something different from b = a, or that a = a + 1 should even be considered meaningful. The folly of straying away from conventions of mathematics carefully refined over several centuries (for example by distorting "=" to mean assignment and resorting to a special symbol for equality, rather than the obviously better reverse) depressed him. I remain convinced that the community will eventually come back to its senses and start treating language design seriously again.

https://m-cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm/279178-niklaus-wirth-or-the-importance-of-being-simple/fulltext

#niklaus_wirth #pascal #simplicity #design

Thoughts on 3 months of #ObjectPascal #FreePascal usage (in #NeoVim):

- Easy to pick up and read
- Good libraries
- Generics
- No closures
- Binaries aren't small
- LSP (pasls) isn't complete, but better than nothing; #Treesitter + #Periscope really help
- Docs are frustrating
- Good forums/community
- Targets SO MANY platforms (#HaikuOS, 32-bit #DOS, #Amiga, #Z80, #baremetal)! More than Rust, Go
- A *lot* of historic books and projects

Would I use #Pascal again? Absolutely yes, without doubt.