nickcw

6 ms·

61.
by nickcw 8mo ago
Gforth is free and well rounded so I'd recommend that if you want to experiment with Forth. It is not very fast though, SwiftForth with optimised subroutine threading will be a lot faster. I haven't tried SwiftForth though as you
62.
by nickcw 8mo ago
This does not appear to have immediate words so you can't define your own compile time words or control flow words. That is like making a lisp without macros - it takes away a lot of the fun. I suspect the reason is because it compiles
63.
by nickcw 8mo ago
This is one of my favourite short stories. In fact I've enjoyed all of qntm's books. We also use base32768 encoding in rclone which qntm invented https://github.com/qntm/base32768 We use this to store encrypt
64.
by nickcw 8mo ago
Have been surveying Computer Science courses at university with my son recently. All the ones we looked at had a compulsory ethics module which shows the direction things are headed at least.
65.
by nickcw 8mo ago
> Some believe AI Super-intelligence is just around the corner (for good or evil). Others believe we're mistaking philosophical zombies for true intelligence, and speedrunning our own brainrot Not sure which camp I'm in, but I
66.
by nickcw 8mo ago
Just been reading iWoz by the man himself which goes into details on the design of the Apple-1 Worth a read if you like electronics and computers and written in an engaging style. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IWoz
67.
by nickcw 8mo ago
Interesting reading about the difficulties with arctan. There is a better series for arctan than the Taylor series which converges for all x. You can see it here in the accelerated series section https://en.wikipedia.org/wik
68.
by nickcw 8mo ago
Eneloops are fantastic. I've been using them for 10 years. They have very low self discharge so you can keep them on the shelf for a year and they will still have 70% charge which is very different to most rechargeable batteries. They
69.
by nickcw 8mo ago
Reading this was like hearing a human find out they have a serious neurological condition - very creepy and yet quite sad: > I think my favorite so far is this one though, where a bot appears to run afoul of Anthropic’s content filtering
70.
by nickcw 9mo ago
Very nice tool :-) It would be great it it could show the reverse lookup of the IPs as on my LAN everything has a name and if it hasn't then it is probably an interloper!
71.
by nickcw 9mo ago
Traditional fix for coil hum is a blob of glue from a hot glue gun. It is fun making it part of the show though.
72.
by nickcw 9mo ago
The C5 really was a marvel of design for 1985. Sinclair really went all in on it. - Polypropylene injection-molded bodywork (largest of its kind in 1985) - Lotus-designed suspension and handling geometry - Electric motor based on a modified
73.
by nickcw 9mo ago
The Sinclair C5 battery charger and battery was ahead of its time. I remember my Dad (who was something of a lead acid battery nerd) being very excited about it. The battery in the C5 was designed to be run to 0% charge which would kill mos
74.
by nickcw 9mo ago
I like this one > At scale, even your bugs have users. Something I discovered the hard way over many years of maintaining rclone. Fixing a bug has consequences and there are sometimes users depending on that bug! xkcd: https:/&#x2F
75.
by nickcw 10mo ago
My favourite SF book this year was "Translation State" by Ann Leckie. It is set in the Imperial Radch world so having read the Ancillary trilogy is useful but not essential. I like it because it contains the strangest aliens (the
76.
by nickcw 10mo ago
I wonder if the compiler really needs to allocate 1 byte so you can get the address of the struct {} In the general case then yes, but here you can't take addresses of dictionary values (the compiler won't let you) so adding 1 byt
77.
by nickcw 10mo ago
Actually the fastest ones in my experience are the HTTP/1.x ones. HTTP/2 is generally slower in rclone though I think that is the fault of the stlib not opening more connections. I haven't really tried QUIC I just think for s
78.
by nickcw 10mo ago
Here is some speculation: SFTP was designed as a remote file system system access protocol rather than transfer a single file like scp. I suspect that the root of the problem is that SFTP works over a single SSH channel. SSH connections can
79.
by nickcw 10mo ago
The fact that sftp is not the fastest protocol is well known by rclone users. The main problem is that it packetizes the data and waits for responses, effectively re-implementing the TCP window inside a TCP stream. You can only have so many
80.
by nickcw 10mo ago
Millennium is one of my favourite books. I happened to see the film recently and here was my review: In the category of time travel romance with end of the world movies this sits near the top. If you've read the book you'll realis
81.
Revisiting Forth after 40 years for Advent of Code 2025(github.com)
3 points by nickcw 10mo ago|0 comments
82.
by nickcw 10mo ago
That is a nice approach. I'll have to give that a try with rclone. I tried lots of things in the past but not using Alpine which is a great idea Another alternative is https://github.com/ebitengine/purego You can
83.
by nickcw 10mo ago
I think the best heckle I had while riding my unicycle was from a policeman who shouted "Are your brakes working?" (In the UK you are required by law to have working brakes on a bicycle. My unicycle had no brakes at all! Though sl
84.
by nickcw 11mo ago
Why not is explained in David McKay's book Sustainable Energy - without the hot air https://www.withouthotair.com/c16/page_96.shtml The problems are that rock isn't a good conductor of heat, so once you'
85.
by nickcw 11mo ago
Very clever image and caption (right at the bottom of the page) > Header image by me: Alan Turing memorial, Manchester, where he reminds you why keeping data private can be a matter of life and death. The image shows a close up of a stat
86.
by nickcw 11mo ago
I wrote a FORTH for ARM which inlined short definitions (eg stack manipulation) then did peephole optimization keeping the stack in registers for that word. The compiled code came out looking quite nice. I'm sure a decent C compiler wo
87.
by nickcw 11mo ago
I've always had a soft spot for FORTH. I think the magic of it is how little assembly you need to write before you are writing your FORTH system in FORTH. So in my opinion this is somewhat antithetical to the idea of FORTH > 100% C&
88.
by nickcw 11mo ago
This looks like a very interesting approach bringing comptime to a static version of python. This version of comptime can then be used to define new types in the same way Zig does it. I absolutely hate the terminology though red/blue r
89.
by nickcw 11mo ago
I had an Atari 1040 ST and I used to love programming it in 68000 assembler mostly using K-Seka. It really felt like programming a 32 bit CPU which was amazing after the 8 bit world that preceeded it. The instruction set was very orthogona
90.
by nickcw 1y ago
I wrote both the WebDAV client (backend) for rclone and the WebDAV server. This means you can sync to and from WebDAV servers or mount them just fine. You can also expose your filesystem as a WebDAV server (or your S3 bucket or Google Drive

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