gwynforthewyn

8 ms·

1.
by gwynforthewyn 1mo ago
The timeline you're presenting matches what I recall, also. Nice! That tidbit about .S vs .a is a lovely detail. "A Research Unix Reader" has other cultural details called out that're similar - https://doc.cat
2.
by gwynforthewyn 1mo ago
C wasn't _later_, but perhaps you're misrecalling when Thompson had his Berkley sabbatical? The quickest source I can find this moment for my claim is an interview with Ken Thompson in IEEE magazine called "Unix and Beyond: A
3.
by gwynforthewyn 1mo ago
I <3 the BSDs, and they're the reason that the quote from "A Research Unix Reader" stuck in my memory! I started on the linuxes, pre-systemd by many years, and remember system v init levels seeming straightforwards but wei
4.
Learning about "The Unix Time-Sharing System"(playtechnique.io)
21 points by gwynforthewyn 1mo ago|9 comments
5.
by gwynforthewyn 1mo ago
I'm the writer of this essay. My subject is some details surrounding the first white paper that Bell Labs published about Unix was "The Unix Time-Sharing System". I wrote what Ken Thompson was doing in between the end of Mult
6.
by gwynforthewyn 2mo ago
Sadly, this one's a myth. If you check the wikipedia page for Bug as an engineering term ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bug_%28engineering%29#History ), its usage is traced back to the 1870s.
7.
by gwynforthewyn 2mo ago
Sort of? It definitely does what's needed, but it also removes any additional environment variables that were set, unless they're in your shell initialisation files. I'm not trying to persuade that these tools are essential o
8.
by gwynforthewyn 2mo ago
You're not wrong, but there's a small detail that your shell function doesn't solve for: unloading the environment variable once it's no longer needed. If you maintain one shell per process-that-needs-a-secret-in-the-env
9.
by gwynforthewyn 2mo ago
I've never even _heard_ of Documenters Work Bench. Looks like it cost about 2 thousand in the late 80s - https://www.nokia.com/bell-labs/about/dennis-m-ritchie/licen... Any chance you've got any oth
10.
by gwynforthewyn 2mo ago
I’ve been reading the 1977 Bell Labs Journal that collected everything written about UNIX up to that point. Seeing how much of its history was intimately tied to text processing and document layout was really mind-bending. I’d always assume
11.
Learning Sed or Using Claude?(playtechnique.io)
3 points by gwynforthewyn 2mo ago|5 comments
12.
by gwynforthewyn 2mo ago
Author here. I don't know if we'll be writing shell scripts in five years for our jobs, but I do know that spending a few minutes writing sed makes me feel connected to my tribe of linuxy people with a love of unix history. I also
13.
by gwynforthewyn 2mo ago
We’ve been hearing the drumbeat that these models are already better than $INVENT_A_NUMBER percentage of developers at $SOME_SMALL_TASK for several years. I haven’t seen that it’s actually true yet personally. What I do see is that the fron
14.
by gwynforthewyn 2mo ago
Why would we trust a screenshot from Claude as evidence of how to deal with mental health issues? Surely Claude’s training matter is dominated by magazines and pop-psychology rather than thorough expert research?
15.
by gwynforthewyn 2mo ago
This reminds me of when wobbly windows were the big thing in linux. It was good plain fun back then, it seems fun again with this. Drawing apps do regularly allow for canvas rotation, so I’m sure this’ll turn out to be useful for some class
16.
A GenAIration Lost in Space(playtechnique.io)
1 points by gwynforthewyn 4mo ago|1 comments
17.
by gwynforthewyn 4mo ago
I think I'm finally understanding what bothers me in LLM usage: it's the people who just want a nice little human-ingenuity community seeing it get further away from them. I wrote this one for them, so they know they're seen.
18.
by gwynforthewyn 5mo ago
I imagine the author's using OpenSIMH ( https://opensimh.org ) or something similar, so it'd be an emulated CPU running the userlands. I have a container that runs a 4.3 BSD userland using opensimh; it's not super h
19.
Azure's MFA Warning Links Free-Tier Users to a Page They Can't Use(playtechnique.io)
3 points by gwynforthewyn 5mo ago|0 comments
20.
by gwynforthewyn 5mo ago
Of course it can be that this is the case. There are predictions from the dark matter hypothesis, though, that have been testable. For example, there're some of the asymmetries in the cosmic microwave background that are explained pres
21.
by gwynforthewyn 7mo ago
Honestly, the post itself reads very generated, very rage bate. I have so much more faith in us and our hobby/industry than this blog post. There are reports of industries trying to use these tools to generate as much as possible, sure
22.
Train Your Tenacity(playtechnique.io)
2 points by gwynforthewyn 9mo ago|1 comments
23.
by gwynforthewyn 9mo ago
I had the unusual experience of Claude encouraging me to give up, so I wrote about what I think of that.
24.
by gwynforthewyn 9mo ago
That site's so damn responsive! What are you using to build it?
25.
GitHub Projects Doesnt Have Issue Types, Your Organisation Does(playtechnique.io)
2 points by gwynforthewyn 9mo ago|0 comments
26.
by gwynforthewyn 9mo ago
More options in the ecosystem seems better, but I was surprised to see this in the linked vitest docs: > However, to run tests in CI you need to install either playwright or webdriverio. We also recommend switching to either one of them
27.
Claude Post but Useful(playtechnique.io)
4 points by gwynforthewyn 1y ago|1 comments
28.
by gwynforthewyn 1y ago
I keep seeing those "I vibe coded with Claude using this one simple trick..." blog posts. I decided to write a useful one that tells you how I made progress with Claude.
29.
by gwynforthewyn 1y ago
What's the conversation that you're looking to have here? There are fairly widespread claims that GPT-5 is worse than 4, and that's what the help article you've linked to says. I'm not sure how this furthers dialog
30.
by gwynforthewyn 1y ago
I've been seeing teammates go from promising juniors to people who won't think, and I've tried hard here to say what I think they're going wrong. Like the great engineers who came before us and told us what they had lear

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