Notices by Julia Evans (b0rk@social.jvns.ca)

entering text in the terminal is complicated https://jvns.ca/blog/2024/07/08/readline/

someone in the replies elsewhere pointed out that Ctrl+J = 10 in the ASCII table = LF ("line feed") = Enter (because J is the 10th letter of the alphabet)

so Ctrl+J is the same as pressing enter

which I don't have any practical use for but is kind of cool

(edit: some corrections in this reply: https://pgh.social/@ben/112752235264922484)

also someone elsewhere left a comment like "I CAN’T BELIEVE IT TOOK HER 15 YEARS TO LEARN BASIC READLINE COMMANDS". those comments are very silly and I'm going to keep writing “it took me 15 years to learn this basic thing" forever because I think it's important for people to know that it's normal to take a long time to learn basic things

my mastodon server's been really struggling with running all these git polls & discussions -- there's a lot of federation to do, and when I made a new post it would take up to 45 minutes for that post to actually get sent to anyone because the server had to chew through 20,000 federation events

so I upgraded to the $89/month masto.host tier to see if that helps

(not looking for advice, just sharing what it's like to run big discussions on mastodon. masto.host has been great.)

i've been hearing a lot from folks on here who are frustrated with git (for many good reasons!)

but I'm curious about the opposite perspective: if you've worked with more than one version control system over the years and you _prefer git_, I'd love to know:

a) what other systems have you worked with? (hg? svn? p4?)
b) why do you prefer git?

notes:
- please no replies about why you think git is worse
- interested in answers other than "because I have no choice"

https://float.exposed/ is really indispensable for explaining floating point -- it's SO fun to open it up and change the bits to show people how floating point works

enjoyed this blog post on patterns and abstractions in Rust, since I often get confused by abstractions https://without.boats/blog/patterns-and-abstractions/

I'm also trying to figure out the reasons for this "holy war" about whether whether networks should be big or little endian https://www.rfc-editor.org/ien/ien137.txt

Was the motivation mostly that people didn't want their machines to pay the cost of byte order conversion? ("my platform is little endian, so if networks are little endian too, that will be better for me”)

again, I'd love references or links if possible, not speculation. I'm really struggling to find any archives of these discussions from 1980.

one final computer history question: why are Intel processors little endian? Why were some other processors big endian?

Mostly interested in pre-1980 reasons (before the internet)

I'd love citations / links if possible -- I got a lot of guesses and speculation in replies to the last computer history question.

everyone keeps asking me why x86 uses an 8-bit byte, but I'm struggling to find an explanation that makes sense to me. Can any of you help?

what I've found so far
- it looks like x86 evolved from the intel 8008 (from 1972), which was an 8-bit CPU
- the 8008 came after the 4004, which was 4-bit

some questions I have:
- was the reason to build an 8-bit CPU to increase the size of the instruction set? or something else?
- did x86 really directly evolve from the intel 8008?

would love any links!

or maybe the reason was that the 8008 was a popular microprocessor, and it happened to use an 8-bit byte so it became the foundation for all of intel’s future microprocessors, but in theory they could have also built a microprocessor with a 10-bit byte instead and that would have been fine too?

so far the reasoning I'm getting for the 8-bit byte seems to be:

1. you want your byte size to be a power of 2. This is EXTREMELY believable to me, but I don't understand why exactly you want this, my understanding of CPU design is very bad. Maybe it's because of busses? (what's a bus?)
2. 4 bits is too small, you can't fit a character into 4 bits
3. you also don't want your bytes to be too big, and 8 bits was working well, so the byte size never got bigger after the move from 4 to 8

how do nix builds work? https://jvns.ca/blog/2023/03/03/how-do-nix-builds-work-/

(hopefully this is the last post in the julia-goes-down-nix-rabbit-holes series, I have two other things I was in the middle of writing before I got nerdsniped)

some notes on using nix https://jvns.ca/blog/2023/02/28/some-notes-on-using-nix/

I might regret asking this but -- is there a guide out there to nix for human beings?

I like the idea of nix in theory but every time I look at any nix documentation or configuration files my eyes glaze over after about 12 seconds and I give up.

(really what's happening is that I’m using a Mac right now, I miss Linux package managers, I'm mad at homebrew, I'm somewhat hopeful that nix can help me manage my packages more sanely, but I'm unwilling to spend a million hours learning nix)

bases

writing javascript without a build system https://jvns.ca/blog/2023/02/16/writing-javascript-without-a-build-system/

every time I start a new frontend JS project I consider using a bundler (like rollup/esbuild/etc), and then I think about how happy I am that my past self didn't use a bundler because my old projects are so easy to get working

I do sometimes feel like the no-bundler way of using JS is getting a bit harder -- yesterday I was looking at upgrading to codemirror 6 (from codemirror 5) and it looks like version 6 is impossible to use without a bundler/build system. Which I'm sure was the right decision for their project, but means I'm going to stick with version 5 for now.

I really like this gov.uk design system page, everything is explained so clearly https://design-system.service.gov.uk/components/date-input/