Reviving Urbit
I said I'd look into Urbit. Going through old email, it turns out I had actually mentioned this .... seven and a half years ago. I'm shocked, I have no memory of this, lol. My old blog-post…
Computing
52 posts
On the "unix philosophy"
There's this talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ea3pkTCYx4 There's this blogpost about an aspect of the talk: https://blog.deref.io/unix-and-microservice-platforms/ There's this disc…
My history with computers, part 4: The early internet
Context In my previous post I talked about how the realm of what was possible expanded when we got a better, faster computer … but it took a whole other leap with the first “on-line” experiences. Q…
My history with computers, Part 3
Old computers sometimes had a “Turbo” or “Boost” button to manually switch to a higher clock speed. Toggling this on and off could count as a valid game-playing strategy, if you needed to “speed past”…
My history with computers, Part 2- “Mid 90s
Context Picking up where I left off last time: we’d got a first, new computer, the first set of simple games, and a first operating system (ye olde DOS). QBasic As I’ve mentioned, the only program…
My history with computers, Part 1: “Early 90s”
Context As hinted at in a previous post, I thought I’d go over a history of my interaction with computers. This was … harder than I thought, mostly because I barely remember anything. If only I had p…
Monthly Curations: November 2019
* Applying the lessons of the Golang scheduler to the Tokio scheduler in Rust * Speeding up Nixpkgs by avoiding subshells * Pessimism about engineering software * The Racket programming language i…
The "trinity of computation"
I never thought of it this way LogicLanguagesCategoriesall three have ontological force; they codify what is, not how to describe what is already given to us. In this sense they are foundational; if…
Memristance is futile. Not.
I came across this wired article recently, and what I read sounded too science-fiction-y to be true, so then I decided to go to the source, and found this video (see below) by a researcher at HP, and…
Comparative Latencies
It is usually hard to get an idea of how the time taken for various fundamental operations varies, and it does matter, but it's hard to viscerally get it (time intervals in nanoseconds, microsecon…
Lispium ?
What if you did the following: * Take a chromebook * Modify the chromium build running to run Sbcl within it. * Create lisp bindings to the internal surface, so that all UI elements can be created…
What has speed brought ?
Many good things, to be sure, but more has been omitted. Perhaps Kent Pitman expressed it the best: I want speedups not just to make my same old boring life faster, but to buy me the flexibility to…