Notices by mathew (mathew@universeodon.com)

@alcinnz Next: the CATCH FIRE circuits...

@alcinnz Hence my blog meta.ATH0.com

@alcinnz It has always amazed me that people looked at the performance of Facebook’s web UI and said “I’ll use what they’re using”.

Updateware: Software that seems to have a minor update you're supposed to download every time you open it.

Examples: MusicBrains Picard, Calibre.

String comparison in JavaScript:

"Warning: Do not rely on exact return values of -1 or 1!

Negative and positive integer results vary between browsers (as well as between browser versions) because the W3C specification only mandates negative and positive values. Some browsers may return -2 or 2, or even some other negative or positive value."

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/String/localeCompare #JavaScript

@faho I mean, honestly, all you needed to say was "It's in C++".

@vertigo @alcinnz @raccoonformality Seconded. The 6502 is a great choice for learning what programming in assembler is like, but pick hardware that has a frame buffer.

The BBC Micro is a pretty good choice because the assembler is available from inside BASIC (so you don't have to do literally everything in assembler to get started), and the hardware is a simple memory-mapped bitmap, rather than having things like sprite hardware or tiles to worry about.

Another option is BBC BASIC for SDL with built-in assembler support. You could run it on an ARM device like a Raspberry PI; ARM assembler is pretty simple because it was inspired by the 6502, and ARM is also going to be a useful platform to know in the future.

http://www.bbcbasic.co.uk/bbcsdl/index.html

Also not a bad choice is the Atari ST. The 68000 series CPUs are really friendly to program in, and again you get a nice simple flat frame buffer. FaST ST BASIC is BBC BASIC for the ST, with built in assembler.

If I use command line gzip to decompress this file, it gets the correct timestamp restored. If I double-click it and let GNOME desktop decompress the file, it gets timestamped 13 Jul 2042.

GNOME, desktop of the future.

I don’t seem to suffer from the “uncanny valley” revulsion at computer generated faces, perhaps because I’ve played so many video games with not-quite-human-looking characters.

However, I really get creeped out by computer generated narration that’s almost (but not quite) human sounding. It seems to be in a lot of online ads, and also increasingly people are using it for voiceover commentary for their videos. Horrible.

Also:

You left Twitter because they started welcoming transphobes, QAnon, antivaxxers, racists and neo-Nazis onto their platform?

Then I'm afraid I have some bad news about your Substack newsletter…

#substack

https://www.isdglobal.org/digital_dispatches/anti-vaxxers-qanon-influencers-and-white-nationalists-flocking-to-substack/

Dear GNU localedef, I know Unicode has a lot of characters, but I doubt these statistics:

[verbose] LC_CTYPE: table for class "upper": 18446744073709551615 bytes
[verbose] LC_CTYPE: table for class "lower": 18446744073709551615 bytes
[verbose] LC_CTYPE: table for class "alpha": 18446744073709551615 bytes
[verbose] LC_CTYPE: table for class "digit": 18446744073709551615 bytes

Hot take: Programming languages should not have a syntax for spreading regular expressions across multiple lines.

Because if it's complex enough that you have to split the regexp across multiple lines, you shouldn't be doing it with a regexp. #programming #HotTakes

A quick reminder that "standards compliant" doesn't mean that something is any good:

https://github.com/qntm/fastjson

#json #standards #javascript #rfc #rfc7159

@csepp To a certain extent that's the appeal of Gentoo: You can have your entire OS compiled to optimize for performance, optimize for RAM usage, or somewhere in between. If you have a strange CPU variant (I once had a VIA C3 system) you can have the OS compiled to make best use of its particular features. What's lacking is having the adjustment happen automatically. I think in the battery life case, the plan would be largely ruined by how much battery would be used up recompiling the OS.