mdhughes

joined 2 years ago
[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

Reset, New Game.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 months ago (3 children)

I recognized the twist at a certain conversation early in the movie. It's not really hidden, or at least not well.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 7 months ago

Bruce Bethke, the guy who actually invented cyberpunk and wrote the story Cyberpunk, wrote a book Head Crash. In which the VR hotsuit includes a "ProctoProd®" for bass. Bruce's predictions have turned out more accurate than anyone else's.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

Some of Rudy's books are free, and they will blow your minds. Software, etc. and Postsingular as "what technology can do to us", and White Light as "how does infinity work in a story context"; he also has a couple non-fiction books on infinity.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 7 months ago (7 children)
  • Greg Egan
  • Rudy Rucker
  • Vernor Vinge

Hard, computational SF aren't given nearly the respect they should, and these apply math, comp sci, and physics in a way nobody else does. If there's any civilization in the future, they'll be seen as visionary.

Runners-up are Robert L. Forward, Alastair Reynolds, but Forward has very little computation, and Reynolds doesn't show his math too often.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 7 months ago

You can get the same basic CS education and write your own OS, it was in my 4th year CS classes, we mostly just implemented Minix 1.0 but you could get as weird as you want.

Then you have to make enough libraries to start porting things to it, or write everything from scratch.

One of my favorite hacks like this is SectorLisp, which fits a Lisp (sort of) in a boot sector.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 8 months ago (2 children)

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."

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

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.

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