richard_todd

8 ms·

31.
by richard_todd 4y ago
It’s all mind-bending fun until the interpreter starts blowing one of its internal stacks. Then it’s hours of tedium tracing through queries looking for ways to contain the computation.
32.
by richard_todd 4y ago
How do you control memory layout in Common Lisp?
33.
by richard_todd 4y ago
Why not compile directly to C in step one, if you’re already presuming the presence of a zig compiler?
34.
by richard_todd 4y ago
Yeah Acrobat and ABBYY editors are really only useful as a last resort when you don't have time to recreate someone's PDF but you really need a couple words changed. But they are life-savers when that's your situation.
35.
by richard_todd 4y ago
You literally said in another comment that rust is a "magic bullet" that will "put an end" to memory and thread bugs. That is clearly too much hype, when you can turn around and say you're not surprised that a rust
36.
by richard_todd 4y ago
This comment reminded me of Redox (rust microkernel), which I haven’t looked at in a while. It’s an impressive project, but it was funny to see that in their top news post, one of the items is about tracking down memory-corruption/use-
37.
by richard_todd 4y ago
But what’s confusing everyone is that tar cf - will create the tar without any external compression program needed.
38.
by richard_todd 4y ago
Consider the popularity of ffmpeg and imagemagick. Putting the mainstream algorithms together under one interface seems to be an appealing model to a lot of people, even though new algorithms are constantly being developed in those areas. P
39.
by richard_todd 4y ago
It's interesting to think about the way these things evolved. Imagine if, over time, the `compress` utility got -gz, -bz2, -lzma, etc. flags, and `gzip`/`bzip2` were all converted to deprecated shell scripts. When is the right t
40.
by richard_todd 4y ago
powershell has `sls` which expands to `Select-String`
41.
by richard_todd 4y ago
I had to check that out; found it here: https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_computerDe_143117685/m... (note: the articles sedatk mentioned didn't seem to be in the table of contents, but on PDF page 113 the
42.
by richard_todd 4y ago
Thanks! When I convert the jp2k file for that page 58 with ABBYY default ("balanced") jbig2 settings I don't get any of the errors we see in the examples. If I convert to DJVU and purposefully degrade the image to 150DPI, I
43.
by richard_todd 4y ago
I'd love to see some examples (especially if the scan appeared to be of good quality and not a grainy 100dpi affair). Do you have any idea what kinds of documents you were browsing when you found them?
44.
by richard_todd 4y ago
This potential problem is overstated if the quality of the scans is decent. I have scanned literally hundreds of books, and encoded them in both djvu and pdf/jbig2 formats, and have never once found a bad character. (Yes, having heard
45.
by richard_todd 4y ago
You have just demonstrated copying the result of the call to pack() into a string. That's what I already do, but what I want is a version that just writes over bytes in $s without creating the "60" string.
46.
by richard_todd 4y ago
Pack is great, but one feature I always wish for is to pack into the middle of an existing string. So instead I have to pack into a new string and then copy it into the destination. Python has struct.pack_into for this case. I know the pe
47.
by richard_todd 4y ago
The reference to ARC in the article is broader than just the one Rust type Arc<T> (the footnote even mentions python, c++ and swift). In many contexts ARC does indeed stand for Automatic Reference Counting.
48.
by richard_todd 4y ago
Yeah, exactly. The other big factor is that the lines are vector but the flood fills are pixel-based, so accuracy depends very much on the width of the lines---and even the rasterization algorithm used for the lines. Add to this the issue y
49.
by richard_todd 4y ago
It's actually not been that hard to hand-write an SVG that looks good in the major browsers, but then Inkscape renders it into a mess. The areas I tend to run into it are when fine-tuning text, and when using complicated clip-paths.
50.
by richard_todd 4y ago
To be fair, by your definition, McIlroy is one of the Don Knuth's of the world. He wrote `sort` and `tr` for example [1]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_McIlroy
51.
by richard_todd 4y ago
Yeah the locality is another great point. It's really cool to have a file per major feature, and have interfaces, implementations, and unit tests all in one file co-located. And I do add documentation even in the "semi-literate&
52.
by richard_todd 4y ago
Sometimes I do "semi-literate" programming where I don't even bother with the commentary. I just use a tangler so I can write the code in the order I want to see it. I really think writing in "human-order" and tan
53.
by richard_todd 4y ago
Hopefully you are right about all of this. I don't follow it closely, but when I periodically check in on nntp.perl.org I get the feeling they have no idea what to do about v7 anymore. Since they have to say _something_, currently th
54.
by richard_todd 4y ago
That doesn't really capture what's been happening. If feature bundles are still today's plan, it's only because the multiple attempts to get strict on by default have so far all been defeated. They are still pushing fo
55.
by richard_todd 4y ago
Yeah, I agree with you. For fun I built Perl 1 a couple years ago and was amazed at how similar it was to Perl 5. In fact most of the test suite from Perl 1 runs unmodified on Perl 5. The subroutine calling syntax was different (it used
56.
by richard_todd 4y ago
We liked Tengen Tetris so much we "bought" it from Blockbuster by telling them we lost it and paying the fee. We couldn't find it to buy any other way, and now I know why! If they are rare and expensive now I guess that was
57.
by richard_todd 5y ago
I was also at university in 98/99 going to job fairs and I was totally sold on the Sun/Solaris/Java future, so I was very excited to see the Sun booth and try to get an interview. But, of all the companies there, they were t
58.
by richard_todd 5y ago
Fun fact: Some people think the aurochs is the animal mistranslated as "unicorn" a few times in the King James Bible. Most newer translations just say "wild oxen" instead.
59.
by richard_todd 5y ago
I was a dvorak user for years, and the standard vim key-bindings were not a problem. I mean, j and k are still right next to each other, and h is still to the left of l. Most of the other commands are mnemonic like (i)nsert (d)elete, so t
60.
by richard_todd 5y ago
I got caught up in the fad and tried hard at polyphasic/uberman in 2005, for like six months. It would almost work, but I didn’t feel good, and once in a while instead of waking up after 20mins it would be more like 12 hours and I’d fe

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