Viewing profile — cben

This is a stunning achievement for many reasons! Having been born in USSR, a particular reason it moves me to tears how this vindicates Bulgakov's famous "manuscripts don't burn", …

I know how to use a slide rule, but only because my grandpa taught me. He was an electrical engineer with serious mastery of analogue circuits and relays, and a passion to explain;…

Great walkthrough teaching how to DIY a Go AST linter, thanks

Aliexpress has a lot of cheap "smart gomoku board" now, they are cheap rgb-lighted membrane button grids O(13x13) with firmware playing games like Go, Reversi etc. ( https://he.ali…

Caveat to those considering buying PineBuds for "open source firmware": OOTB they come with fully working but proprietary firmware (part source-available SDK, part closed). The har…

That's not how I understood it. Full clones are big but simple — the server just sends all the packfiles. A first shallow clone needs some server work, but that's cachable, OK. But…

Obligatory link to the gold intro to So. Many. Aspects. of pkg manager design: https://medium.com/@sdboyer/so-you-want-to-write-a-package-m... Even if its section on "Central Packa…

Totally. She has a fearless approach to learning complex topics (my favourite quote is simply "Computers are knowable", though I couldn't find it — I think she said it on some podc…

Computers are not a kitchen. They are clay, they are Lego, they are jungles of imagination. It's true that our current trajectory devolves their universality to a set of discrete i…

I'm not sure of the timing (and whether you're sarcastic) but yeah, I found it funny compared to PARC showing Steve Jobs how the Smalltalk environment allowing modifying GUI behavi…

I disagree. Assuming it's their own device, set up automated backup, but let them trash the OS. PCs/laptops are (still) pretty much un-brickable at software level. If they do, re-i…

[Python is great; my comment is only within block-based languages] For those actively teaching¹, consider Snap! ( https://snap.berkeley.edu/ ) over/after Scratch. It's nearly a sup…

https://criu.org/ (Checkpoint/Restore In Userspace) is a long-running project (i remember the name over a decade ago) worth checking... Ooh, looks like they made progress in conven…

PICO-8 code editor uses one I think.

Conversely, when you already collaborate with people in Dropbox, mainly via files, having real time co-editable docs under same folder with same sharing was nice, esp. for people w…

Radxa X4 board specifically has x86 N100, an M.2 slot (a short one) and GPIO (though you need to flash the on-board RP2040 to access them? haven't tried yet). I'm quite happy with …

I upgraded my son from Scratch to Snap! ( https://snap.berkeley.edu/ ). Snap has a much higher ceiling, including collections, first-class code pieces, higher-order functions etc. …

I regret not seeking internal transfer within my last employer. I "followed the flow" there for 8 years. Couple years ago I got less happy with project and passively talked with ma…

You could add "without using multiplication or division" as a less arbitrary constraint. Early microprocessors (and some really cheap microcontrollers still) didn't have the circui…

I learnt this from Concrete Mathematics (Graham, Knuth, Patashnik). Don't remember if main text or the side notes of accumulated student wisdom... (I dont mean on my copy, this tex…

Ctrl+T does transpose-characters (and Alt+T transpose-words) in Emacs. I assume it's not a coincidencce, I see tcsh has `bindkey -e` / `-v` for Emacs/VI bindings. Same keys work in…

Some projects in a similar space: https://hisham.hm/userland/ https://arcan-fe.com/2021/04/12/introducing-pipeworld/ http://conal.net/papers/Eros/

I wish apps that open a document for editing would embed some kind of p2p "signalling" (webrtc or otherwise) in or near the file to bootstrap more real-time collaboration. That cou…

What benefit would you get if tmux itself became a control mode client? You'd get pretty much same experience, with textual splits, modeful keyboard shortcuts to access scrollback …

It's curious how the original 1981 paper [1] on TECO Emacs, written before I was born, describes many qualities I recognize in the ELisp Emacs I grew up on. Emacs "happens" to be o…