Live data from Hacker News

The Uxn Ecosystem

100r.co

41–50 of 58 posts

Re: The Uxn Ecosystem

#41
post #36
post #34

I think 100r reminds me of the thing we're missing the most nowaydays - bravery. We're afraid to take chances, to explore ideas, to take a slightly harder path or to explore difficult challenges. We're risk averse and we're unwilling to try new things. Reading about their trips, about all the work they do on the boat and their approach to code (love the concept of making software for one person!) makes me feel like a…

[flagged]

> capitalism will crush you in the end

It's already crushing the majority of us. Unless some people are brave enough to forge alternate paths and live different lives, it will crush the rest of us too eventually.

Re: The Uxn Ecosystem

#42
post #39
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This illustrates just how complex even the "basic" stuff turns out to be in practice. Text rendering hates you[1]. Even if you take obvious shortcuts/compromises like limiting yourself to monospace, you'll get bitten by "double width" characters. Kudos to those who try, rather than bundling a copy of Chrome with their chat app. [1]: https://faultlore.com/blah/text-hates-you/

Yeah, that's why ASCII with a few of accenter chars and glyphs [áéíóüñ] would be enough with just a small extended western table. Optional as a library, OFC. By default you write ASCII chars from a table with a "display" device. I prefer uxn's simplicity over my own complex locales. Anyway, as I said, a tiny .tal code for extended chars wouldn't be very big. Some fonts for uxn (look at the ~rabbit repos at git.sr.ht)…

> [...] ASCII with a few of accenter chars and glyphs [áéíóüñ] would be enough [...]

Making a bespoke ASCII extension would be a step back - by about 30 years. You don't need a lot of code to support UTF8; if you're concerned about runtime memory usage, you can make your rune type take 8 bits and support only the U+0000-00FF range[1]. It happens to cover all of [áéíóüñ] and a whole bunch of other languages - unfortunately, not my native one, which would leave me gravely upset ;P

[1]: https://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0080.pdf

Re: The Uxn Ecosystem

#44
post #20

The author's account on Mastodon ( https://merveilles.town/@neauoire ) is a treasure trove of many cool little projects and screenshots from the parallel computing universe that is Devine's computer. I strongly recommend the podcast episode with him at Future of Coding: https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/044.html and the follow up where he talks about Orca, his incredible live music environment: https://futureofcodi…

>him

It says "they/them" right there on the mastodon profile you linked.

Re: The Uxn Ecosystem

#45
I had done some stuff with uxn and I wrote my own emulator too (called uxn38); uxn is not too difficult to implement. I think that is is better than some similar designs. I am glad that it does not use Unicode. There are other advantages, too. But, there are some problems, such as the lack of seeking files, and the friend port is no good because it ends up being too complicated (even if it seems simple).

Re: The Uxn Ecosystem

#46
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> for software it lacks Unicode support That's not an inherent limitation of the VM at least, just of the current software ecosystem. It would be possible and practical to make a tiny unifont-based Unicode text library. Though handling bidirectional text, joined scripts and vertical scripts would be something else… :(

This illustrates just how complex even the "basic" stuff turns out to be in practice. Text rendering hates you[1]. Even if you take obvious shortcuts/compromises like limiting yourself to monospace, you'll get bitten by "double width" characters. Kudos to those who try, rather than bundling a copy of Chrome with their chat app. [1]: https://faultlore.com/blah/text-hates-you/

I tried to tell other people that (and more; there are even more problems with Unicode than mentioned in that article) but they don't believe me and they believe that Unicode is good anyways.

I design my own programs and specifications to avoid Unicode as much as possible, even when multilingual text (sometimes even in languages that Unicode does not have) is desirable.

Re: The Uxn Ecosystem

#47
post #42
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that's why ASCII with a few of accenter chars and glyphs [áéíóüñ] would be enough with just a small extended western table. Optional as a library, OFC. By default you write ASCII chars from a table with a "display" device. I prefer uxn's simplicity over my own complex locales. Anyway, as I said, a tiny .tal code for extended chars wouldn't be very big. Some fonts for uxn (look at the ~rabbit repos at git.sr.ht)…

> [...] ASCII with a few of accenter chars and glyphs [áéíóüñ] would be enough [...] Making a bespoke ASCII extension would be a step back - by about 30 years. You don't need a lot of code to support UTF8; if you're concerned about runtime memory usage, you can make your rune type take 8 bits and support only the U+0000-00FF range[1]. It happens to cover all of [áéíóüñ] and a whole bunch of other languages - unfortun…

Then you could just implement ISO-8859-1 instead. It is the same range but a simpler encoding, and external programs could be used for conversion if necessary.

Re: The Uxn Ecosystem

#48
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> capitalism will crush you in the end It's already crushing the majority of us. Unless some people are brave enough to forge alternate paths and live different lives, it will crush the rest of us too eventually.

Living your life on a boat in the middle of the ocean means you are not spending your life crushing capitalism back.

I saw a quote today somewhere on the fediverse: "It’s not the barricade but the rifle that you have to hold onto." - Buenaventura Durruti

If you defend your one boat from capitalism, while it subsumes everything around it, what have you really won?

Re: The Uxn Ecosystem

#49
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [...] ASCII with a few of accenter chars and glyphs [áéíóüñ] would be enough [...] Making a bespoke ASCII extension would be a step back - by about 30 years. You don't need a lot of code to support UTF8; if you're concerned about runtime memory usage, you can make your rune type take 8 bits and support only the U+0000-00FF range[1]. It happens to cover all of [áéíóüñ] and a whole bunch of other languages - unfortun…

Then you could just implement ISO-8859-1 instead. It is the same range but a simpler encoding, and external programs could be used for conversion if necessary.

1. UTF8 encoding is trivial and everything already speaks it by default nowadays; 2. it is useful to explicitly differentiate byte arrays from text; 3. if you'd change your mind later on and decide you do want to support Japanese (like here: https://100r.co/site/niju.html), you haven't dug yourself into a hole.

Re: The Uxn Ecosystem

#50
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then you could just implement ISO-8859-1 instead. It is the same range but a simpler encoding, and external programs could be used for conversion if necessary.

1. UTF8 encoding is trivial and everything already speaks it by default nowadays; 2. it is useful to explicitly differentiate byte arrays from text; 3. if you'd change your mind later on and decide you do want to support Japanese (like here: https://100r.co/site/niju.html ), you haven't dug yourself into a hole.

The problem it's uxn it's ported to tons of devices. Would utf8 work under platforms like the Nintendo DS or DOS with a simple header file?
Post reply on HN