Digital Mark

Even original Nolan Bushnell’s Atari, was bought by Warner Brothers, then (mostly) bought by Jack Tramiel after leaving Commodore. So it’s not an unbroken line. Infogrames Fr’s new management has quit with the NFT nonsense, and is making Atari-related stuff that isn’t awful.

Joke’s on them, I’ve never been “well rested” in my life or my digital afterlife.

It’s still a surviving working copy. “I” go away and reboot every time I fall asleep.

I have two.

Scheme. It’s a fantastic language, you can cleanly switch from functional, procedural, or weird time machines (macros & continuations) solutions to any problem. Most Schemes (esp. Chez, CHICKEN, Gambit, Gerbil) compile to very fast binaries, close enough to C even with dynamic typing and garbage collection. C FFI depends on impl, but usually it’s pretty simple; in CHICKEN you can just write inline C code. SRFI vary from essential libraries to angels-on-pinheads nonsense, but there’s something to pick from.

Down side is the fractured, infighting community. R6RS was a practical batteries-included spec, which pissed off the teaching-only fans, so they made an inferior R7RS, and now committees are trying to make R7RS-large which is just bad R6RS. But if you pick one, and mostly stick to the spec language, it’s not a problem for the developer.

BASIC. I know, ridiculous, right? And I mean line-numbered, Atari or TRS-80 BASIC. But there was never a better language for teaching programming, or for banging out a small interactive program. Turn on any 8-bit computer (or start an emulator), it prompts READY, and you can write something small & interesting. Your modern 64-bit giant machine is not READY.

“She”. The gag of SwiftOnSecurity is it’s Taylor Swift, posting infosec. Tho these days she mostly trolls like this.

If they had “fixed” it, there would be a “My Computer” icon. No such thing exists, go TRY the Infinite Mac I linked above.

Yes your uncle who works at Nintendo ^W Apple told you about it.

No such demo happened. They unveiled the 128K with that System 1.0 on stage at a special event. The Lisa has a different UI, but also can’t do what’s described.

This story is a lie.

There’s no “computer icon”. Dragging the System disk to trash ejects it on a classic Mac. If you burrow down into System, you can try deleting system files… which are locked and can’t be deleted.

You can test this yourself on Infinite Mac

There’s other, more verbose, regular expression languages, for instance SRFI-115 for Scheme. But the hard part isn’t the syntax, but actually thinking about patterns, so it won’t help you any.

Just get the O’Reilly bat book and learn. So what if it overwrites 10% of your brain and you can’t remember your mother’s face, you’ll have a useful skill.

Safari’s fast, less crashy, highest privacy protections, and uses less memory per tab; I often have hundreds of tabs so that’s important. It also has the best inspector, much better than Firebug. Add in StopTheMadness and an adblocker (currently using Ghostery), and it’s pretty great.

Degoogled Chromium is useful for sites that don’t work in Safari, or as a sandbox I don’t mind crashing in development.

I’ve given up on Firefox, it’s too fat and bloated.

I play a lot of MineTest, using the Asuna “game” (big modpack) and a huge custom set of mods, and have a game that’s like MineCraft but utterly different. Others play the MineClone2 game, and it’s fine, like MC 1.12 + some stuff. Repixture is an adorable mini-minecraft-like. There’s a lot of people who use it more as creative, and many servers with various games.

It’s definitely a little harder to set up the specific thing you want, but it’s incredible how much variety there is.

I’m very interested in the “floating giant 4K screens” part, especially paired with a tiny MacBook Air, and some other uses seem fun. Real uses of AR passthru can be amazing, tagging everything around you with information. At $3500, it’s half the price of a single XDR display.

But I’m waiting for gen 2 or later, there’s no way the current weight & battery life are usable for my needs. It’s a dev kit right now, and while I’m an iOS dev sometimes, it’s too small a market to be profitable for me.

In the good old days, you had to learn assembly/machine language, C, and OS-level programming to get anything done. Even if you mostly worked on applications, you’d drop down and do something useful. At the time, this was writing machine language routines to call from BASIC. This is still a practical skill, for instance I mostly work in Scheme, but use C FFI to hook into native functionality, and debug in lldb.

Computer Science is supposed to be more math than practical, though when I took it we also did low-level graphics (BIOS calls & framebuffers), OS implementation, and other useful skills. These days almost all CS courses are job training, no theory and no implementation.

Younger programmers typically have no experience below the application language (Java, C#, Python, PHP) they work in, and only those with extensive CS degrees will ever see a C compiler. Even a shell, filesystems, and simple toolchains like Make are lost arts.

The MIT Missing Semester covers some of the mid-high levels of that, but there’s no real training in the digital logic to OS levels.

I often had to poke around inside Atom to see what it was really doing, what some bug was, and to figure out how to write or configure extensions. I don’t as often do that with Vim, but it’s pretty clean C.

Do you not look inside the overly complex tools you use, especially beta ones? The whole appeal of “open source”/“free software” etc. is you can read the code. But if it’s in something you can’t stand, that’s a disadvantage.

I liked Atom, performance was tolerable on my overpowered machine, but MS killing it just sent me back to Vim and modernizing my plugins.

Zed positives: Metal rendering. I use a Mac, so one platform’s fine. But negatives: Rust, so I can’t/won’t touch any internals, and I loathe the Rustacean propaganda wing. No extensions yet. Config is another stupid json file.

You know what’s great about vimrc? It’s easy to put in a few config commands, and then you realize you’re working in the scripting language. You don’t have to switch to a whole new file format. Thanks, Bram.

I can close my eyes and remember it, so yes.

It’s clearly secondary to correctness: A program that is well-written but doesn’t work right is worthless. Many hairy balls of mud have shipped to great acclaim.

Human readability & comprehension is nice for maintenance, but you don’t get to maintain something that never worked right to begin with.

… Of course, Windows is existence proof that you can be successful with neither.

Yes. It’s Apple’s second most profitable platform. If I go out to a café (which admittedly was before pandemic), half the people have one, much more than laptops now. In business, it’s a super common way to take around documents, presentations, etc. The kids really love them.

I’ve been in love with it since launch, it’s a magic book.

Maybe you’ve heard of this device that plays music on tiny headphones, great for listening while walking. It was called a Walkman. Came out in 1979. By the time the iPod came out, there were plenty of digital music players; I carried a Rio Volt (CD-ROM full of MP3s), but the Nomad was the one CmdrTaco compared iPod to.

Many people carried Palm Pilots, Newtons, cell phones, pagers, portable games (GameBoy, Game Gear, Lynx), film & digital cameras. I used to carry so many gadgets. Sharp/Tandy PC-3 was a great little calculator/computer, so was HP-35s.

Apple’s done an amazing job of making vastly better versions (eventually, in some cases; I waited for gen 3 iPod with USB), and folding multiple things into a device, and competing with themselves. So now most of those devices are gone, and we just carry an iPhone (or lame knockoff). I have a bunch of portable game devices, which live on my desk because why carry them? iPad rolled over the MacBook for portable computing. And now Vision Pro is going to roll over that (in a couple versions, probably).

The “one-hit wonder” assertion just requires someone to have lived a cave since 2006.