Posts by Exact Circus

Combustion engines grind Linus Torvalds' gears

(...) Flowers

If all vehicles suddenly had zero emissions, what percent reduction of total carbon would be achieved ?

Asking for a friend.

How to deorbit the Chromebook... and repurpose it for innovators

Can not those geniuses at GrapheneOS take the Chromebook under their wing ?

New information physics theory is evidence 'we're living in a simulation,' says author

Vopson, Bostrom - an eerie similarity…

Is one a simulation of the other ?

We all scream for ice cream – so why are McDonald's machines always broken?

As G. K. Chesterton said over a hundred years ago,

“Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists.”

“The big commercial concerns of to-day are quite exceptionally incompetent. They will be even more incompetent when they are omnipotent. Indeed, that is, and always has been, the whole point of a monopoly; the old and sound argument against a monopoly. It is only because it is incompetent that it has to be omnipotent. When one large shop occupies the whole of one side of a street (or sometimes both sides), it does so in order that men may be unable to get what they want; and may be forced to buy what they don’t want.”

Nothing has changed. Monopoly usually becomes anti-economic.

No reliable way to detect AI-generated text, boffins sigh

Not even wrong

Not being all expert all the time, we have developed a sense of what’s probably OK and how far to trust, based on the assumption the originator is human.

All this has to be revised now that the source is a statistics based computation. There is no social guard rail. Maybe more rigorous habits are needed.

UNIX co-creator Ken Thompson is a… what user now?

Inferno

No need to Halt and Catch Fire; it’s already on fire.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halt_and_Catch_Fire_(computing)

Generative AI is out of control: Nothing, Forever is a Seinfeld spoof about nothing... forever

The only reason to watch Seinfeld was/is the shots of New York that sporadically appear in the epsiodes.

Apple releases Lisa source code on landmark machine's 40th birthday

Re: eh no, that book was total bollocks when it came to writing real world software..

In my experience the book is utterly practical. There is no heavy jargon or pseudo-intellectual nostrum making. It really does provide principles for problem analysis and solution synthesis or design. Code becomes more economical, less buggy or even bug free, clearer and more maintainable. It is language independent.

As far as code goes, if only they had read this book

https://archive.org/details/principlesofprog00jack

And still true.

What did Unix fans learn from the end of Unix workstations?

Où sont les command lines d’antan ?

I want my Apollo with Aegis o/s

Bill Gates says NFTs '100% based on greater fool theory' amid crypto cataclysm

None dare call it tokenism

This too is art:

https://youtu.be/prVRwXAWFeA

Cryptocurrencies - when you think you're rich, they think they think you think you really know.

512 disk drives later, Floppotron computer hardware orchestra hits v3.0

I won't dance, you can't make me

Like Lego, but for audio ;), a surprising and beautiful application of the idea of signal approximation by (finite) expansion in terms of a chosen set of basis functions (Lego - bricks, Floppotron - drives etc.).

One could consider following through formally - perhaps Zadrożniak has done this - and writing an algorithm which would, given a piece music, compute the coefficients of the basis expansion and output the connexion matrix for the basis elements.

Perhaps also one could combine Lego and Floppotron by connecting the basis elements with mechanical linkages so that when the music began to play, the assemblage of Floppotron elements would configure themselves à la Transformers into a robot that would dance to the music it was playing.

https://youtu.be/6CTR3d2Ly80

Sony responds to inflation with $3,700 gold-plated 'Walkman'

I want one

I don't see any unsurmountable obstacle to putting a small audiophile gold plated turntable in this thing.

No more fossil fuel or nukes? In the future we will generate power with magic dust

International power source of mystery

CLERK (reading) : Pixie Dust, personal effects.

AUSTIN: Actually, my name's Austin Dust.

CLERK: It says here, name Pixie Dust.

AUSTIN: Pixie's my middle name.

70 anni fa ...

Why pixie dust sometimes is the only way to keep hope alive

On the dynamics and evolution of some sociotechnical systems, Elliott W. Montroll, Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. (N.S.) 16(1): 1-46 (January 1987).

pp 38-39

"On December 2, 1942, Enrico Fermi and his colleagues produced the first sustained fission chain reaction, demonstrating the feasibility of a nuclear power plant. By fifteen years later, the first commercial nuclear power plant was operating.

The highly successful space program was initiated only a few decades after primitive rocket experiments. Robert Goddard's first success in shooting a rocket over a mile vertically was achieved on May 31, 1935; twenty-six years later the Soviet cosmonaut was the first human to encircle the globe in a rocket-launched satellite.

The record of these successes has led the public, and even numerous scientists, to believe that with a little money and ingenuity, any desired scientific goal could be achieved. Unfortunately, this is not always true. Consider the magnetically confined fusion program which started as Project Sherwood in 1951. ...

...

I contend that the magnetically confined fusion program has fallen victim to the tyranny of many dimensionless constants. The great engineering successes of the past have involved processes which could, to a first approximation, be characterized by a small number of dimensionless constants. Hence only a small number of model experiments were necessary to determine the feasibility of a project and to estimate the cost and difficulties to be surmounted. Even the space program was broken down into a number of subprojects, each of which could be analyzed in terms of a small number of dimensionless constants so that the results of many independent model tests could be used as a basis of the required full-scale engineering designs.

The sad state of Linux desktop diversity: 21 environments, just 2 designs

I have no trackpad and I must scream

I'm loving me the discussion of the "101-button mouse", an approach to navigating the desktop and its depths totally by the keyboard.

More generally, Jeff Raskin's book/extended essay "The Humane Interface" is worth a look. He discusses principles and measures for any kind of interactive system. At the end he presents ZoomWorld, a very intriguing "3D world" approach to the desktop,

Plans for UK rival to Silicon Valley ditched

This may be a blessing in disguise. Britain has a long history of being at the start of new insights in technology. Let the Oxbridge et al brains do it their own way.

Deere & Co won't give out software and data needed for repairs, watchdog told

What are the barriers to entry in this market ? It seems like "found suitcase full of money" for the right entrepreneur to move in and take market share by providing a product and terms - openness - that customers would want. There is no need to try to take every dollar that needs to be spent. As they say in the garment district, you can make money at the high end and at the low end.

Google and Facebook's top execs allegedly approved dividing ad market among themselves

Actually, no software changes are needed to avoid ads. Since the point of the ads is to get you to buy something, simply sign an agreement that you promise not to buy anything if they promise not to show you any ads.

Too busy feasting on meatballs, Windows struggles to update itself in IKEA

Re: Sossij inna bun

You don't want to eat hotdogs raw, hotdogs are more appealing when they are done, the doner the better.

Yule goat's five-year flame-free streak ends ignominiously

But are we sure this whole thing isn't some veiled attempt to bring a return to ancient rites ?

More perhaps to feed the paranoia in order to control the monarch.

Fans of original gangster editors, look away now: It's Tilde, a text editor that doesn't work like it's 1976

I find vi is generally all that is needed.

But what I would find very handy in certain situations would be the capability to use full vi on the text in the vi edit line. Maybe this exists but I have never seen any reference to it.

If unix text editors were military aircraft:

ed - early biplane with one machine gun mounted on top wing; stand up in cockpit to operate

ex - early biplane with two machine guns mounted ...

vi - biplane with machine gun firing synchronously through propellor

emacs - A10 with nose mounted electric auto cannon and lotsa rockets under the wings