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.

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

After one accident long ago, I have a policy of all drinks on the right, on a lower level than the electronics. I’ve splashed a few keyboards & mice, but never again a computer.

I posted on fedi

This corporate takeover shit is why you can’t trust penguins.

and immediately got reply-guyed from someone defending federation with Threads.

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.

RCS is not end-to-end encrypted, so their bubbles will remain green.

Google’s proprietary extensions add E2EE, and Apple’s not going to pull a Beeper on Google.

There’s a massive number of security holes in bash, shellshock being the most egregious. bash has some really terrible design flaws, especially parsing $var multiple times so you can’t reliably break on spaces. Almost any other shell is safer and more productive.

csh/tcsh (not anymore, I use zsh)

scsh (more usable scripting than interactive), with the best acknowledgments

To misquote John Waters,

If you go home with someone and they have LinkedIn in their browser history, don’t fuck them!