mbrock

64 ms·

631.
by mbrock 9y ago
Oh. For me it's just pointless drudgery to remake everything like that. I want a new fully coherent and portable system using an existing kernel and graphics layer for bootstrapping. I mean, Emacs or Squeak are already almost there as
632.
by mbrock 9y ago
Agreed. I think the best way would be to use Linux as the kernel, maybe with Wayland for display, and Chromium/Firefox in a sandbox, and then the custom OS system running alongside this. Emacs with the Elisp window manager is an exampl
633.
by mbrock 9y ago
Well, wouldn't that just be a JavaScript machine implemented in Smalltalk?
634.
by mbrock 9y ago
Except Smalltalk keywords can't be reordered or omitted. It's more like you put the arguments in the middle of the method name, like a kind of mixfix notation. The method name would be "rangeFrom:to:withStep:" and that m
635.
by mbrock 9y ago
I think it would make sense (in a lulz way) to run the 4chan clone on one of the Ethereum testnets, instead of the mainnet. It's a lot cheaper, because you're not paying for permanence!
636.
by mbrock 9y ago
I think a lot of that is just the poverty of UI APIs and especially the imperative drawing paradigm. There's no reason in principle why we can't programmatically verify that the basics of the UI spec are fulfilled. If the whole UI
637.
by mbrock 9y ago
Why not just mock the UI drawing library? (I find this a very interesting question.)
638.
by mbrock 9y ago
It's a normal, stable, adult font. Decent and legible and reminiscent of a double spaced essay in the humanities.
639.
by mbrock 9y ago
Times New Roman.
640.
by mbrock 9y ago
Yeah. I think part of the problem is that centralized vs decentralized becomes a dualism and people get fixated with an ideal of pure decentralization. In my view, decentralization is about building resilient systems where it's not a
641.
by mbrock 9y ago
SMTP, Git, and Bitcoin are really and truly decentralized in their actual implementations, even as economies of scale favor a concentration of service providers. "Because Git the technical protocol is not a bank fund that gives every
642.
by mbrock 9y ago
When I hired people, I looked around on the internet for people with public work (whether side projects, university homework, open source development, essays, whatever), I scrutinized all of it, and then I talked to the people about those t
643.
by mbrock 9y ago
It's the most widely useful online service I know of, but building in it means vendor lockin and privacy problems. Collaborative spreadsheets seem like a building block of networked organizations and it would be great to have that unde
644.
by mbrock 9y ago
First job out of college. Homemade crypto plugin for SQL Server sometimes corrupted client data, which was life & death important. Couldn't recompile the plugin. Discovered race condition causing use of fallback crypto key. Taught
645.
by mbrock 9y ago
I want to read things in the public sphere that I can link my friends to, so I don't want to participate in any kind of pay per view.
646.
by mbrock 9y ago
Google Sheets...
647.
by mbrock 9y ago
Whether it's religious or faith based is a kind of tricky question because it's a "Zen Buddhist" place (in rural Sweden, as it happens). To make a long story short I'd say yeah, basically you spend the time eating,
648.
by mbrock 9y ago
A lot of monasteries have way more social interaction, unwinding time, and exercise than most IT workplaces offer. The month I spent in a temple was definitely like that! I mean, where else do you have tea every evening together with dozens
649.
by mbrock 9y ago
https://dymaxion.org/essays/pleasestop.html
650.
by mbrock 9y ago
That's a really good question flip.
651.
by mbrock 9y ago
Money as a medium, from McLuhan's Understanding Media , as an encouragement to think of cryptocurrency as a medial paradigm shift... “Money talks” because money is a metaphor, a transfer, and a bridge. Like words and language, money
652.
by mbrock 9y ago
Bitcoin's history involves a plan for combating spam—that's why proof of work was invented. Hashcash, Bitcoin's PoW game, was intended for use as an email attachment to create a real cost to spam without any micropayments. &q
653.
by mbrock 9y ago
Well, you might be in a bubble of luck so far. I also have a personal mail server that works fine, but I wouldn't recommend most people to do it, because getting spamholed is quite a serious liability.
654.
by mbrock 9y ago
My first thought is "How much of this can I get to work in a day or two using mostly shell scripts, existing programs, and text files?" My first drafts of web apps always look exactly like this: <!doctype html> &lt
655.
by mbrock 9y ago
All of those things can, in this day and age, be somewhat usefully summarized like this: Airplane mode! That is to say: turn off your radio for a while and just sit down, or maybe go for a walk or a swim. Marshall McLuhan, who was extreme
656.
by mbrock 9y ago
I think faiths and ideologies are group identities that pass me by since I'm a perpetual outsider. There are books and sayings and thoughts that I really appreciate and like to think about... And I definitely have some personal biases,
657.
by mbrock 9y ago
Yeah, that's a good point. Federated networks like IRC have their benefits. Most chatting doesn't need total consensus. Disordered messages are sometimes confusing but mostly harmless.
658.
by mbrock 9y ago
Netsplits on IRC are such a visceral experience of distributed consensus failure. I remember as a little teenager on IRC being like "omg what is happening, why are there parallel worlds where weird things happen and everything drifts i
659.
by mbrock 9y ago
Reinventing the wheel is probably a really good exercise for anyone who wants to be an engineer.
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by mbrock 9y ago
Haskell was an "incremental" improvement on Miranda and a consolidation of features from a zoo of lazy functional languages sprouting forth from Landin's 1966 article "The Next 700 Programming Languages."

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