291–300 of 417 posts
Black and white film processing. It used to be taught in schools. Many schools still have their darkrooms and no longer use them. It is a practical application of physics, chemistry, and art.
- DNSSEC+DANE - It's half-assed deployed but there's a lack of end-user UX
- wais - search before gopher
- afs - distributed fs
- discard protocol - basically, a network-based /dev/null
- humans.txt - Not around as much as it was
- makeheaders - Auto-generated C/C++ headers
- man page generators - ronn and help2man
- checkinstall - The automatic software package creator
- bashdb and zshdb
- crystal - Compiled Ruby-ish
- forth - Powered the FreeBSD bootloader menu for many years and word processors (typewriter-like almost computers)
- ocaml - The best ML, used by Jane Street and Xen
- pony - A language built around an arguably better GC than Azul's C4 with arguably stronger sharing semantics than Rust
- prolog - Erlang's grandpa
- rpython - PyPy's recompiler-compiler
- pax - POSIX archives
- shar - shell archives - Self-extracting archives that look like scripts at the beginning
- surfraw - Shell Users' Revolutionary Front Rage Against the Web - founded by Julian Assange
- step-ca - A Go-based PKI server
- dmraid - Because it works
- X10 - Before WiFi and IoT, there was the Firecracker: a parasitic power serial port RF outlet controller
- FreeBSD - It's not unknown or obscure per se, but it powers many important things in the civilized world without getting much credit
- :CueCat - A dotcom era barcode reader that was given away
- Xen - If you need to run a VPS but can't ju$tify u$ing VMware
- KataContainers - k8s but with VM isolation
- stow - software management by symlinks
- habitat - similar philosophy as nix but not as clean and functional and almost like Arch PKGBUILD but with more infrastructure around it
- JTAG - debug all the things
- in-circuit emulators (ICEs) - hardware-based debuggers
- polarized light sources - easier to see things under the bi/trinocular microscope
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Myst has parity with most reST features and is equivalent to markdown for users not using those features: https://myst-parser.readthedocs.io/en/v0.13.7/using/syntax.h...
Oh cool I need to revisit MyST then. I thought it didn't support cross-references but it looks like I'm wrong: https://myst-parser.readthedocs.io/en/v0.13.7/using/syntax.h... I will have to dig into exactly how much parity we're talking here but if it's very strong parity then I redact my previous statement Thanks for correcting me!
A notable exception is autodoc (automodule, autoclass, etc.), and any other directives that generate more rST. The current workaround is to use eval-rst:
https://myst-parser.readthedocs.io/en/latest/syntax/code_and...
Some more discussion about that in these issues:
Since I generally have no clue what technologies are popular (other than the obvious big name projects) I'll just toss out some interesting links I've recently bookmarked in comments here. - gron (Greppable JSON): https://github.com/tomnomnom/gron - MarkDownload (Markdown Web Clipper): https://github.com/deathau/markdownload - Lean4 links: -- Theorem proving: https://lean-lang.org/theorem_proving_in_lean4/introductio…
Most people know about MediaWiki even if they don't realize they do, because it powers Wikipedia, but I wish more people used it for documentation. You can create highly specialized templates in Lua, and there's a RDBMS extension called Cargo that gives you some limited SQL ability too. With these tools you can build basically an entirely custom CMS on top of the base MW software, while retaining everything that's gr…
Mediawiki is huge and very complex. Why not something more simple like instiki? Personally I would prefer a wiki with git backend. I wrote one [1] but I dont recommend using it. https://github.com/entropie/oy
[1] Docusaurus:
[2] Tinasaurus:
Analog computation. I don't mean just vacuum tubes or even electronics at all. Mechanical analog computing is insane when you get down to it. You have special shapes that move against each other and do calculus . We make these mechanical models as analogs of more complex physical systems. We can turn huge calculations into relatively simple machines. That we can roll two weirdly shaped gears together and get an integ…
- D (the programming language). It's a lot like C++ if C++ were rebuilt around modern concepts like modules. - Matrix. It's pretty popular but I see way too many open source projects still saying "join our Discord!" instead of "join us on Matrix!"
Python took 20 years after its introduction to become popular as today, thanks to its more intuitive syntax that was based on ABC.
I really hope after 20 years of its introduction that D will be appreciated and becomes a de-facto language not unlike Python is now. Perhaps even more popular with the advent of connected tiny embedded sensors and machine in the form of IoT are upon us.
Lithium Titanate batteries. Nothing else is lightweight, safe, currently available, and lasts 20000 cycles. ESPHome. It's a framework for declaratively building firmware for microcontrollers, based on rules like "This pin is an input with debouncing, when it changes, toggle this". Contributing to them has probably been the most fun I've had programming in years. We just need power management, and a C++ implementation…
I've been looking for a more convenient way to configure some ESP32-based input devices (similar to macropads). I was interested in QMK, but it doens't support ESP32. So far I've been using MicroPython / CircuitPython, which I generally like, but on multiple occasions I've thought "I wish I could just put this in a config file."
The matrix keypad and key collector components look similar to what I was looking for. Can the key collector be used with other multiplexing methods like shift registers?
Analog computation. I don't mean just vacuum tubes or even electronics at all. Mechanical analog computing is insane when you get down to it. You have special shapes that move against each other and do calculus . We make these mechanical models as analogs of more complex physical systems. We can turn huge calculations into relatively simple machines. That we can roll two weirdly shaped gears together and get an integ…
Nature, almost completely analog, has been around a thousand times longer than humans. How many times has 'evolution' used digital methods to accomplish something? Perhaps we've chosen to switch to digital because we're in a hurry and its easier ... in hopes of, some day, asymptotically approaching the advantages of analog.
Imagine writing a program if every time you wanted to change something you had to cut a new gear, or design a new mechanism, or build a new circuit. Imagine the sheer complexity of debugging a system if instead of inspecting memory, you have to disassemble the machine and inspect the exact rotation of hundreds of gears.
Analog computing truthfully doesn't have enough advantages to outweigh the advantage of digital: you have one truly universal machine that can perform any conceivable computation with nothing but pure information as input. Your application is a bunch of binary information instead of a delicate machine weighing tens to hundreds of pounds.
Analog computing is just too impractical for too little benefit. The extra precision and speed is almost never enough to be worth the exorbitant cost and complexity.
- IPv6 - It's 2023 and it's still not deployed correctly and universally. Github, Github Copilot, Chromium-based browsers, and Amazon Alexa give up in the presence of IPv6. - DNSSEC+DANE - It's half-assed deployed but there's a lack of end-user UX - wais - search before gopher - afs - distributed fs - discard protocol - basically, a network-based /dev/null - humans.txt - Not around as much as it was - makeheaders - A…
Polarization is indeed the magical capability property of EM waves that is currently under-utilized or under-rated.
Currently I am working on highly reliable nd robust polarized wireless systems that hopefully will be part of next gen 6G PHY.