Viewing profile — gdwatson

Deliberately so, and for an Internet standard correctly so. I know there is a long tail of environments, so I am curious. What's your environment like that you need traffic inspect…

There are two angles on this. There is the rejection of the humanities in favor of science and wealth, which are good things in themselves but are not everything. But, on the other…

That post salvaged the subreddit; before, it had lost its focus. When I came back to give it another try, that post had become a meme and a rallying cry, and the sub had a lot of l…

Fair. If only they'd retired those APIs, too. I remember when Windows gained experimental support for a UTF-8 locale usable with its 8-bit APIs. I used to run it at work; it had so…

Windows bought into Unicode hard before Unicode expanded beyond 16 bits. The consequence is that its native strings are theoretically UTF-16, but often behave like UCS-2, allowing …

I am not so paranoid, and I haven’t been working with AI, so my AI-dar is bad. But I keep reading technical writeups like this, then getting frustrated at the writing style or inco…

I stumbled over that too, but it makes sense when you finish the article. The ancient Romans didn’t build a lot of keyboards.

I think a lot of people just want to be able to discuss different areas of the automatic memory management design space separately, and maintaining the distinction between referenc…

This reminds me a bit of the way academics in programming language theory internalized the type-theoretic definition of the word “type” over and against the traditional programming…

It was a clever hack for porting existing code. But it doesn’t scale at all – you’ve just described adding four registers to a register-starved architecture in order to solve the i…

"He resigned and declined Mozilla's offer to remain in another C level position." At this point I think it's clear his resignation was not voluntary. Maybe the other offer was sinc…

I actually think I like the baseline-aligned one best. It's spaced reasonably well while reflecting the character of each font better, IMHO. Or maybe it's just because a consistent…

> Now maybe its my male engineer brain, but I haven't heard of that color in 36 years, but it does make sense and it is rather distinct. You need to get into either fishing (chartr…

I feel like I am missing too much background here. If there is only one licensor, why add terms to defeat the license it chose rather than choose a license which does not need defe…

I think the idea is that SmallTalk replaced conditional syntax with methods on booleans. You could call `ifTrue:` on a boolean, passing it a code block; a true boolean would execut…

I hope that God is indeed willing, but the man is 88 years old and he’s not done with the third tome of volume four. It would require a minor miracle for him to finish volume 7 wit…

I guess I am a sucker for stories about redesigning data structures, and I'd have liked more detail on that front. Also, they talked about Rust's greater memory safety; it would ha…

I will confess to skimming by the end. But I don’t think they explained how they solved the cache issue except to say they rewrote the software in Rust, which is pretty vague. Was …

> Scribus is an open source project but I’m not sure how the quality is in that. I am not a typographer, and I’ve never used it in a professional capacity, but v1.6 (early 2024) im…

Years ago I wrote a toy Lisp implementation in Objective-C, ignoring Apple’s standard library and implementing my own class hierarchy. At that point it was basically standard C plu…

> I really miss the days of the fairness-doctrine. There are so many ways to game the system, whom do you trust to enforce it? I don’t trust my own “side” to do so, and I sure as h…

I think that diff algorithms have more in common with traditional, “lower” textual criticism than with the sort of source criticism canjobear is pondering.

It’s interesting that they’re organized by date. On an intuitive level, that makes sense. But so many of the dates are hotly debated, and reorganizing the list would produce such a…

Units based on base 12 or base 2, as U.S. standard measures tend to be, are easier to divide in many ways. Now if we used base 12 numbers instead of base 10, and we had a system of…

I realize you are tongue in cheek, but I hope people respect the logical limits of this sort of thing. Years ago, there were some development tools coming out of the Ruby world – S…