eschaton

44 ms·

661.
by eschaton 6y ago
Yes they should, everything involving “cryptocurrency” is a scam in one way or another. Dead serious. There is no reason for any of it to exist other than to engage in one form of serious crime or another.
662.
by eschaton 6y ago
This is a grossly inaccurate description of computing at the time of the rise of C. C was competing with Pascal/Modula, BLISS, PL/I, BCPL, and so on, not assembly on punched cards. The “C competing with assembly” meme was very spe
663.
by eschaton 6y ago
Virtual machines work, Apple provides not just Hypervisor.framework but also Virtualization.framework as part of macOS so implementing a headless VM app is less than a page or so of code.
664.
by eschaton 6y ago
What would be the point of (and what even is) “proper Linux support?” It’s a Mac, why would you get it not to use as a Mac?
665.
by eschaton 6y ago
They did, it also went nowhere. The original DEC personal computer strategy was three-pronged: DECmate, a PDP-8 variant (12-bit), for word processing and office automation at the low end; for the DECmate II you could get a CP/M card an
666.
by eschaton 6y ago
“It didn’t use standard parts” is a silly criticism of a personal computer in 1985; to a first approximation there were no standard parts yet, as MS-DOS/x86 was still in the process of driving CP/M-80 out of the commodity system
667.
by eschaton 6y ago
Oh no, people smoking cannabis. The horror.
668.
by eschaton 6y ago
In addition, the semantic consistency of the frameworks combined with the verbosity encouraged by the language makes it easy to jump into a new-to-you part of a 25+ year old codebase and start making useful changes very quickly. This is mu
669.
by eschaton 6y ago
Or the George Floyd video? Or the Eric Garner video? Or read about Breonna Taylor?
670.
by eschaton 6y ago
I haven’t read your piece yet, but I searched the page and didn’t find any mention of DEC VMS’s DCL, or Symbolics Genera’s Dynamic Listener. If you’re talking about how to design a command line for usability, you really need to become fam
671.
by eschaton 6y ago
Sounds like maybe you shouldn’t consider yourself an ethical person. Otherwise, if you’re involved in enough startups, you’ll eventually be in the position where have to ignore the potential for insider trading to make you a million (or sev
672.
by eschaton 6y ago
And if, say, Jeff Bezos hired his warehouse workers as employees, paid them an inflation-adjusted minimum wage (eg about $25/hr), and offered real benefits, he and his company would still be making massive profits. That’s what makes it
673.
by eschaton 6y ago
It’s called addiction, OP.
674.
by eschaton 6y ago
A company choosing whether to actively participate in US immigration policy is not the same thing as a company choosing to run its own immigration policy. Is your defense of IBM’s work in Germany in the 1930s also that they were just follow
675.
by eschaton 6y ago
Exactly. Only those unaffected by a decision have the luxury of considering it entirely apolitical.
676.
by eschaton 6y ago
Even the Apple I was relatively expensive relative to both competitors and its own BoM. The advantage has always been that the company attempts to make computing appliances for users who want to do something besides “compute.” Sure people i
677.
by eschaton 6y ago
SPARCprinter was way more than 15 years ago. Try 30…
678.
by eschaton 6y ago
This has been possible on NetBSD for quite a while, glad to see FreeBSD joining the party! Now we just need OpenBSD to support cross-builds… it takes a while to build even a kernel on my mvme88k system.
679.
by eschaton 6y ago
When their work and pay are dictated by the platform, they are not independent of it, and are de facto employees. Making the work they do and their pay something they decide and just obtain via the platform (just facilitated by it) then the
680.
by eschaton 6y ago
What does it matter? And would an Xcb-based window manager perform well on a 68020 with only a few megabytes of RAM and a 1-bit display?
681.
by eschaton 6y ago
Dynamic linking overhead was not that significant in the late 1980s on 25MHz 68030 and 68040 systems. Only in an overwhelmingly large system will that fraction of a fraction of a percent matter significantly.
682.
by eschaton 6y ago
This would likely have been the case.
683.
by eschaton 6y ago
They weren’t, though! Uber and Lyft are being told that they should have been classifying drivers as employees all along because they’re treating them like employees. This has been plainly obvious from day one.
684.
by eschaton 6y ago
This is in fact exactly how modern Smalltalk systems interact with source control.
685.
by eschaton 6y ago
Why do you assume black kids are being put away for violent crimes? Mostly it’s drug possession, and they get hit with years while a white kid caught for exactly the same drug and amount gets off with a warning “to avoid ruining his future.
686.
by eschaton 6y ago
Negligence is actionable regardless of whether it’s criminal. And whether it’s criminal depends on the duty of care that can be reasonably expected from the negligent party. In this case, I’ll leave the expected duty of care to your imagina
687.
by eschaton 6y ago
Pointing out that many SSC commenters believe in “human biodiversity” should not be controversial; neither should pointing out that this concept is just a thin coat of paint atop “scientific racism.” What should be controversial is people m
688.
by eschaton 6y ago
Having his real name linked to the gathering place and intellectual support he provided for eugenicists is beneficial to his patients, since it lets them see just who it is they’re really going to for treatment.
689.
by eschaton 6y ago
Slate Star Codex wasn’t a nuanced conversation. It was a gathering place for people who wanted to discuss “scientific racism” without using those words or the other well know dogwhistles. It’s great that SSC stopped providing a platform for
690.
by eschaton 6y ago
It’s such a shame that an institution like this, backed by an estate that can fund it indefinitely, gets shut down purely because some middle managers saw a dip in cashflow during a pandemic. It’s utter idiocy at the core.

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