andrewl
Joined 19 years ago
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Comment · 1 day ago
Comment · 18 days ago
A lot of people in the U.S. are trying to innovate. I think the problem is the fossil fuel industry has been paying government, probably for decades, to implement legal roadblocks at all levels, from individual homes up to states and regions, to non-fossil fuel energy. I think they've also had a hand, at least at the propaganda level, in pushing back on electric vehicles.
Personally, I'd love to see the United States, and the rest of the world, decrease its reliance on oil. We won't get off it in any of our lifetimes, but we should move in that direction. I like diversifying. Any bit helps. Solar in Australia and Arizona. Maybe less so in northern Maine. Wind turbines where there's wind. I personally don't have any aesthetic objection to them. I think they look kind of cool. And certainly better than smokestacks. And so on.
Comment · 1 month ago
I wonder how the Beatles count compares to the count of references to Alice in Wonderland, which I think are especially frequent in papers on physics and mathematics.
Comment · 2 months ago
Paul Graham discusses this in his essay The Submarine: https://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
As you say, Apple would not be a trillion dollar company without a great product, but you can build something great and also aggressively market it. Nobody is saying they got where they are just with marketing.
Comment · 2 months ago
I just now learned of DHH’s views by reading the Github discussion. I think the quote should be removed. But I do not think that, without further information, we should condemn someone for using the quote in the first place. And that is because it’s a big world, and you can’t know everything. And I at least do not investigate someone’s political positions before I quote them. If I read that DHH said "Tests are money in the bank" I might have quoted him here or on some other site. And that’s because I didn’t stop to investigate his positions before quoting him, not because I endorse his positions.
I also am not going to dismiss the work of all the other Neovim contributors and stop using it.
Comment · 2 months ago
I like a hierarchy, too. Presumably the underlying engine could be a database but it would at least appear to the user as a tree. But with the option to find files with SQL or a SQL-like language. I would love to be able to find files based on all kinds of metadata that was available for searching with the OS’s file system, and not using any special tools. I’m thinking things like EXIF data, audio file metadata, text file line count, and so on.
Comment · 2 months ago
Yes. In this interview Michael Stonebreaker, one of the original developers of PostgreSQL, discusses (among other topics) replacing the file system with a database :
Comment · 2 months ago
J. B. S. Haldane discussed this in his essay On Being the Right Size:
Comment · 3 months ago
The site doesn't give you printouts you can fold into a globe, but it is very informative. You highlight countries, drag them around, and their size adjusts to whatever degree of distortion you'd get for any land mass at the given longitude. So you can, say, highlight Greenland and drag it on top of Brazil and see how they compare. You can highlight and drag countries, US states, Canadian provinces, and Australian states. Hovering over an entity shows you area and population.
Comment · 3 months ago
I think Bash won as Bityard says above, in the sense that COBOL won, which was because it was everywhere (approximately) and then when another system was being built to do something in COBOL’s niche COBOL was the obvious choice. Once it was sufficiently established it won by inertia and absolutely not because it was the better language. Or maybe it was the better language in its time, but it certainly is not now. And note I’m only talking about COBOL’s niche, of mainframe-based processing in the banking, insurance, state and federal payroll and similar areas.
Alan Kay at OOPSLA 1997 - The computer revolution hasn’t happened yet https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKg1hTOQXoY&t=3530s
“To me the most distressing thing that happened to Smalltalk when it came out of Xerox PARC was for many respects and purposes it quit changing. Now I can tell you at Xerox PARC there were four major versions, completely different versions, of the language over about a ten year period. And many dozens and dozens of significant releases within those different versions. And I think one of the things we liked most about Smalltalk was not what it could do but the fact that it was such a good vehicle for bootstrapping the next set of ideas we had about how to do systems building. And that for all intents and purposes when Smalltalk went commercial ceased. Even though there was a book, the famous blue book, that Adele and Dave wrote that had the actual code in it for making Smalltalk interpreters and starting this process oneself, almost nobody took advantage of this. Almost no university took advantage of it, almost no commercial institution took advantage of it. And what they missed was, to me, the deepest thing I would like to communicate to you today, and that is we don’t know how to design systems yet. So let’s not make what we don’t know into a religion for God’s sake. What we need to do is to constantly think and think and think about what’s important. And we have to have our systems let us get to the next levels of abstraction as we come to them. And the thing that I’m most proud of about Smalltalk, pretty much the only thing from my standpoint that I’m proud of, is that it has been so good at getting rid of previous versions of itself until it came out into this world. Now one of the reasons we got involved in doing Smalltalk talk again, for me it was after 16 years of not working on programming languages, a couple of years ago we started this project we called Squeak, which is simply, not an attempt to give the world a free Smalltalk, but an attempt to give the world a bootstrapping mechanism for something much better than Smalltalk. And when you fool around with Squeak please please think of it from that stand...think of how you can obsolete the damn thing by using its own mechanisms for getting the next version of itself.”