Cosmopolitan: Better computing, slowly, steadily
Justine Tunney is one of my heroes I aspire to have a tenth of this output Cosmopolitan is impressive: * It solves the problem of making C a build-once run-anywhere language -- run natively on a…
Computing
52 posts
On (No) Code
Couldn't have put it better: IMO the problem with low code is, that the hard part about solving most problems isn't usually the way you write or execute it. The hard part is avoiding weird e…
Computing with Water
TIL (thanks to a HackerNews comment) about this very early (1936 !) model of a "water integrator". Link here…
The time of VS Code
After a decade of Vim, Emacs and SublimeText, I think it's time to switch to a text editing environment that is both powerful, customizable, and shared with the vast majority of everyone I'm g…
On Hacking
A profound transcript, dating to March 1990. "Is Computer Hacking a Crime", from Harper's Magazine https://faculty.weber.edu/apainter1/Readings/Hacking%20a%20Crime.pdf Need to digest…
In praise of the URI
DPK argues that the thing that made the early web "click", the thing that allowed it to "break out" in the 1990s, was not HTML, not HTTP, but the standardization on URIs as "a…
Nix is (still) unusable
I first tried out Nix in 2018. The second round -- I went through "Nix Pills", which helped get a better idea of what was going on -- was in 2020. I heard NixOS getting some popularity (yo…
Chat-enabled Wolfram Notebooks
If you have a slight hobbyist interest in Math or "computational thinking", Wolfram Mathematica is an excellent investment. They recently added an LLM input layer to their already-very-prof…
On software (no, really!)
Layers
From this HN thread: So you have LLM-based English prompts as an interop layer to Python + PySpark, which is itself an interop layer onto the Spark core. Also, the generated Spark SQL strings inside…
Spend your code wisely
An insightful opinion 1. The code I write is a response to what I currently understand of problem I currently have, using my current understanding of current tools. Expertise improves how big the &qu…
Some Smalltalk
(from a long-time Smalltalker who passed away several years ago) “The basics of Pharo”…