armitron

Swift was the beginning of the end of macOS. It signaled the exit of a ton of NEXT people, and a completely new regime -totally disconnected from what came before- being allowed to run the show.

The quality drop around the time it was introduced was staggering. One example: In the Objective-C days we had extensive, reliable and up-to-date documentation including entire developer guides (book-length PDFs) for all aspects of the OS. These days, besides half-broken frameworks and missing docs, you're lucky if you find out how things work from a WWDC video.

How can one argue against the disaster that is Tahoe? What kind of engineering culture not only produces something this broken but pretends it's OK? Jobs would have fired half the OS division for something half as bad.

It’s hard to argue against what Zitron is focusing on, as it’s just numbers and simple analysis.

What Dan Luu is doing with that post is an act of misdirection (if not clumsy attempt at character assassination): avoiding the entirety of Zitron’s numbers and analysis (which can’t be refuted) and instead narrowly focusing on “predictions” that one can spin a hundred different ways.

If that’s convincing to the extent that you are dismissing Zitron’s numbers and analysis, you have a major critical thinking problem.

Zero calories doesn’t mean it’s healthy, as all those drinks are loaded with artificial sweeteners some of which have a strong insulin response and are also associated with cancer.

Yes I’m sure. Take a careful look at Symbolics Genera or even Emacs and you will realize that functional has nothing to do with it.

Almost nobody programs in functional style in Common Lisp, even though it’s possible. In the vast majority of CL programs there’s tons of global state and yet one learns quickly how to architect and structure the program in order to make image based development and runtime code modification a breeze.

So no, the magic sauce is not “functional”, it’s that CL stemming from the Lisp Machine paradigm is designed for that sort of experience whereas something like Python very much isn’t. And it shows (there’s no image based development in Python that doesn’t end up creating more problems than it solves but image based development is not only the norm in CL but also tremendously empowering).

The book is layered with ideas and meta-ideas some of which are allusions and need to be deciphered rather than spelled out. Which is also I guess why the “smart idiots” don’t like it or think it’s pretentious and boring. It’s a work that rewards attention and deep contemplation.

I am surprised that Kindle isn’t dead yet just based on Amazon horrible business practices and the fact their product is a DRM hell fest that shoves anti-consumer behavior down your throat. People are either too lazy or love being sheep I guess.

I’ve had a Kobo for many years, with calibre sideloading and managing my DRM-free library of ePUBs fully owned by me, and never looked back.

Productivity modes were used a lot with the AGA machines. By that time, VGA monitors were cheap and plentiful.

That's one reason why adding fast ram (= exclusive access by the CPU) to an Amiga 1200 doubled the speed of the machine for most workloads without changing the CPU.

I spent years programming in Objective-C and loved it, it became one of my favorite languages. Swift has been a colossal letdown, as in "what were they thinking?!" but unsurprising if one pays attention to how macOS has (re|pro)gressed in the last decade.

If you can look past the dated graphics, the OG Deus EX is by far the better game and one of the best games of all time. The writing and philosophy alone elevates the game to masterpiece status. They dumbed down down these core elements in sequels to focus on better graphics and simpler mechanics and these games are far worse for it.

Your particular interpretation of the author's choice in words tells us more about your psychological makeup than the author.

Take the "meta-cognition" advice to heart and perform some self-debugging in order to determine what exactly in your psyche made you react in this way.

This is not just false but egregiously wrong. The regular syntax of Lisp is a tremendous asset when it comes to LLMs being able to work directly in the image. If I had to score languages by how well they work with current LLMs, Common Lisp and Emacs Lisp would be at the very top.