jhbadger

8 ms·

181.
by jhbadger 6mo ago
Although it didn't call it that, Simula-67 was basically object-oriented and both preceded and inspired Smalltalk. But syntactically it looks much like other Algol-inspired langages so it doesn't look that interesting at first gla
182.
by jhbadger 6mo ago
Exactly, just as there are rational reasons to dislike Bayer/Monsanto's influence on the business of agriculture without being hysterical about "Frankenfood", you can be against OpenAI, etc. without thinking AI is going
183.
by jhbadger 6mo ago
There's also (besides Tate's sequel of 7 more languages), Dimitry Zinoviev's 7 Obscure Languahes in Seven Weeks. I liked it a lot, even if it hurt my feelings a bit to have my beloved Forth be one of the obscure languages (th
184.
by jhbadger 6mo ago
Amusingly, the Soviets managed to do what DEC failed to do -- make microcomputers based on the PDP/11. They had cloned the PDP-11 on a chip and used it as the basis of a microcomputer line! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki
185.
by jhbadger 6mo ago
Absolutely from the publisher's/advertisers perspective, sure, but back in the day ads weren't something just to be tolerated by the consumer in order to get to the content, but actually valued by them as much as the content.
186.
by jhbadger 6mo ago
Although before the Web, ads in specialist magazines weren't just annoyances -- they were half the point of the magazine as there was no other way to find out what was out there to buy. A bit later than BYTE was Computer Shopper (which
187.
by jhbadger 6mo ago
Collie Ryan is mine. She did three albums in the 1970s and then basically disappeared. I became aware of her through the use of her (amazing) song "It's Gonna Rain" which was featured on the soundtrack of Computer Chess (20
188.
by jhbadger 6mo ago
And detractors of Emacs used to claim that it stood for "Eight Megabytes And Constant Swapping" meaning that even on a then-huge machine with eight megabytes of RAM Emacs would use up all the memory. Now it is a tiny program compa
189.
by jhbadger 6mo ago
Every apartment that I've lived in in the US has as part of the lease that you can't smoke (tobacco or anything else) in it. Same for hotel rooms.
190.
by jhbadger 6mo ago
DDLC is a disturbing (good, but disturbing) game that opens as a bright cheerful one. So long as the description explained what the user is in for later on, I think Google shouldn't have done this. I haven't seen the Android versi
191.
by jhbadger 6mo ago
There's an argument (and I think a good one) that in structured programming there should be only one return per function. It's not that hard -- you just have a variable and you set it to what you want to return and the last line
192.
by jhbadger 7mo ago
The problem is all this talk of "onsciousness" is vague. It's like "free will" -- it's just words, not a real objective thing that can possibly be studied objectively. It's just that people are vain. We wa
193.
by jhbadger 7mo ago
I'd recommend Paged Out https://pagedout.institute/ And PoCoGTFO https://alchemistowl.org/pocorgtfo/ These are free modern magazines that capture the feeling of joy of programming that Dobbs and B
194.
by jhbadger 7mo ago
Actor was fascinating -- basically Smalltalk made to look "more familiar" with a C-like syntax. It was created by odd-language designer Charles Duff (who had earlier created Neon, an object-oriented Forth).
195.
by jhbadger 7mo ago
Eh, it worked fine in my multiroom apartment - again, this is how all first generation robot vacuums worked. Mine eventually died and I got a new one with lidar, and the main adventage is that with mapping I can specify areas to avoid like
196.
by jhbadger 7mo ago
It has something to say if you compare it to the traditional arguments against the possibility of AI like Searle's terrible "Chinese Room" analogy - the point is arguing that computers can't possibly think because they a
197.
by jhbadger 7mo ago
The classic Roombas from a decade or so ago worked without any sort of mapping or camera at all -- they basically did a version of the "run and tumble" algorithm used by many bacteria -- go in one direction until you can't an
198.
by jhbadger 7mo ago
That's a different issue. Things like Electron are popular not because native development is buggy, but because most developers these days are web developers . They know Javascript. They've never written anything in C/C++ or
199.
by jhbadger 7mo ago
You can argue that a true meritocracy still wouldn't be ideal (as Young did), but that argument seems irrelevant -- the problem in the real world is that we pretend that we have a meritocracy, but often the person who gets the promot
200.
by jhbadger 7mo ago
Or the "Whiz Kids" that Robert McNamara brought into the DoD in the 1960s who were supposed to win the war in Vietnam through game theory and other applications of science and technology. https://en.wikipedia.org/w
201.
by jhbadger 7mo ago
He did have his showman side certainly -- but I'd argue that Alan Sugar of Amstrad was more the UK Steve Jobs because Clive Sinclair really did have deep technological knowledge himself (even though he obviously also had a staff of tal
202.
by jhbadger 7mo ago
There isn't a technical reason why titles have to be that short, memory isn't in that short supply despite the RAM shortages. A function, therefore an algorithm, is deciding to truncate the title for some reason.
203.
by jhbadger 7mo ago
It makes sense that they'd make a tomato-like fruit because potato plants, like tomato plants, are part of the Solanaceae (nightshade family). Also, not that surprising for the same reason that they are poisonous https://en.
204.
by jhbadger 7mo ago
I remember Anacreon! I used to play that, and another Turbo Pascal game called BEGIN that was a sort of port of the Star Fleet Battles board game on my first PC clone that I got in the early 1990s aftet leaving the 8-bit world.
205.
by jhbadger 7mo ago
I really liked the widget set (custom made for the program) that xv used. In the 1990s it looked far more "professional" than most GUI apps on Linux/Unix in general.
206.
by jhbadger 7mo ago
I remember when IBM was upset that various companies were calling their 80286 computers "<Brandname> AT" like the IBM AT ("advanced technology"). But you can't trademark a preposition!
207.
by jhbadger 7mo ago
I'm just waiting for daguerreotypes to come back into fashion.
208.
by jhbadger 7mo ago
I think Rafael Irizarry put it best over a decade ago -- while historically there was a feud between self-declared "frequentists" and "Bayesians", people doing statistics in the modern era aren't interested in playi
209.
by jhbadger 7mo ago
If you found Ulysses confusing, what would you think of Finnegan's Wake ? Ulysses is practically a children's book in comparison. As for the lack of 1984, Orwell was an important author sure, but not particularly a good o
210.
by jhbadger 7mo ago
I also didn't think it was quite as good as it was hyped to be, but as someone who has long been into the web-based SCP stuff, I did appreciate how the book is introducing SCP to a wider audience.

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