Digital Mark

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.

I grew up during the Cold War, I had zero expectation that I’d live to adulthood, and I’m still unconvinced the world after 2000 exists. The way to cope is nihilism and/or activism.

Nuclear war, global warming makes the Earth uninhabitable, new plagues wipe out everyone, AI poisons us or creates nanotech grey goo, fascists take over and gas everyone who isn’t them, a dinosaur-killer meteor hits the Earth again, eventually the Sun expands and fries the planet. You personally are going to die, probably long before any of those.

So you can either say “fuck it” and do your usual stuff anyway, or get involved in trying to stop or delay one of the disasters. Have fun with it.

Or as Morty says: “Everybody’s going to die. Come watch TV.”

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.

MacPorts is nice for keeping disk space used down, and being compiled as fast/small as possible.

Homebrew wastes a lot of space, most packages contain all their dependencies and won’t be optimized for your hardware.

Nix is really for people moving a workflow over from Linux, it’s not what you’d normally use for Mac native tools.

Cops (ACAB) are not a good example for moral treatment of others.

• APOD - start my day with some perspective
• techmeme - aggregates tech news
• memeorandum - aggregates political news
• HuffingtonPost - nice mix of serious & trashy pop culture junk
• Politico - slightly right, but very serious analysis
• Mother Jones - very left, but well-written
• Then a few thousand RSS feeds, which I read in Feedbin.
• Fediverse, Lemmy, etc.

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 addition to the things everyone else has brought up:

• MacPorts gives you everything on any BSD or Linux machine, on your Mac.
• iTerm2 is the best terminal on any platform, there’s amazing capabilities in it. You didn’t know your terminal was so inadequate!
• AppleScript, Automator, and every programming language on Mac; Shortcuts, Pythonista, LispPad, & Hotpaw BASIC on iOS; make automation of the system and programming little tools incredibly easy. Everything is accessible to the power user, it’s not like Linux where some GUI features are scriptable, and others you’ll be writing a C++ program to reach some API because it’s not exposed to anything.

As the old ad says (which got me to buy in): Sends other UNIX boxes to /dev/null

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.

The purpose of Air Force is to monitor the skies, project power at a distance, and provide air superiority.

The purpose of Navy is to put a floating fortress off your shore and bombard your cities, carry around materiel, men, and aircraft, and patrol a vast volume of ocean.

So Navy structures fit the mission better, and this has been true since early SF.

That only became a problem with giant ball of crap WWW sites. A <10KiB page is fine.

You can use server-side forms to update pages, just like we did before front-end HTML became Flash 2.0.

It’s fine, I use Lagrange to read it sometimes, and there’s a few gemlogs I follow. But it’s in a weird space of “almost HTML, so why not just do HTML?”

Gopher still works fine, and has more clients (I still use Lynx). I like the clean separation of menus (even if you use a lot of i info lines) and documents. There’s a bunch of gopher holes still out here. I haven’t updated mine in a couple years, but when/if I move it over to a new server I will, as kind of a back-channel to the site & blog.

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.

I follow a simple diet called “half”. I eat a half portion of whatever I’d like. I don’t eat any better or worse, just less of it. Did you know a frozen burrito has 300+ calories? Eat one, not two. Portion controls are essential, don’t get a tub of ice cream, get a box of little ice creams, and then eat one instead of gobbling two or more. Giant bowl of pasta? Half now, half goes in the fridge for tomorrow, instead of packing my gut full.

I probably cheat enough that I’m getting 2/3 or 3/4 of my full calorie intake, but it’s good enough that I’ve lost 30 lbs in a couple years, I’m not putting it back on, and it’s required no real hardship.

John Varley’s 8 Worlds books (pre- and post-reboot) have had to colonize the rocks of the Solar system, tho they’re not that technical, and he rarely moves past the Moon. Also Gaea (Titan, Wizard, Demon) has an extremely alien habitat; there are other Gaea creatures, just the protagonist one is crazy but also Human-friendly.

Vernor Vinge’s A Deepness in the Sky is about life on STL, multi-generation starships.

Bruce Sterling’s Schismatrix is mostly set in habitats, asteroid mining, and Martian terraforming, but also a very alien hive.

2. NEVER BORN. “You mean we all came from Earth?” said Nikolai, unbelieving.

“Yes,” the holo said kindly. “The first true settlers in space were born on Earth—produced by sexual means. Of course, hundred of years have passed since then. You are a Shaper. Shapers are never born.”

“Who lives on Earth now?”

“Human beings.”

“Ohhhh,” said Nikolai, his falling tones betraying a rapid loss of interest.

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.