DougMerritt (log😅 = 💧log😄)

@ed1conf@bsd.network 2/2 Let's look at a typical novice's session with the mighty ed: golem> ed ? help ? ? ? quit ? exit ? bye ? hello? ? eat flaming death ? ^C ? ^C ? ^D ? --- Note the consistent user interface and error reportage. Ed is generous enough to flag errors, yet prudent enough not to overwhelm the novice with verbosity. "Ed is the standard text editor." Ed, the greatest WYGIWYG editor of all. ED IS THE TRUE PATH TO NIRVANA! ED HAS BEEN THE CHOICE OF EDUCATED AND IGNORANT ALIKE FOR CENTURIES! ED WILL NOT CORRUPT YOUR PRECIOUS BODILY FLUIDS!! ED IS THE STANDARD TEXT EDITOR! ED MAKES THE SUN SHINE AND THE BIRDS SING AND THE GRASS GREEN!! When I use an editor, I don't want eight extra KILOBYTES of worthless help screens and cursor positioning code! I just want an EDitor!! Not a "viitor". Not a "emacsitor". Those aren't even WORDS!!!! ED! ED! ED IS THE STANDARD!!! TEXT EDITOR. When IBM, in its ever-present omnipotence, needed to base their "edlin" on a UNIX standard, did they mimic vi? No. Emacs? Surely you jest. They chose the most karmic editor of all. The standard. Ed is for those who can *remember* what they are working on. If you are an idiot, you should use Emacs. If you are an Emacs, you should not be vi. If you use ED, you are on THE PATH TO REDEMPTION. THE SO-CALLED "VISUAL" EDITORS HAVE BEEN PLACED HERE BY ED TO TEMPT THE FAITHLESS. DO NOT GIVE IN!!! THE MIGHTY ED HAS SPOKEN!!! ? 2/2

@AmenZwa@mathstodon.xyz Wait just a darn minute...was "eh" the original name of the ed(1) editor?! Inquiring minds need to know. (Bystanders, please do not send "helpful" notes about the truth; this is just humor. Attempted humor. Supposed humor. Carry on.) @ed1conf@bsd.network

@vnikolov@ieji.de Thanks. I was a huge Pink Floyd fan in the 70s and went to several of their concerts (Oakland Arena, I believe), but by the 80s I was too busy to follow music, other than what was on MTV in the background when I was home. :) If I didn't say so before, judging from what you post about music, our music tastes have huge overlap. P.S. However I was the opposite of eclectic concerning music back then, and then I (randomly) studied music theory (casually, not at university), and now I'm eclectic and hate far fewer things! :) The mere existence of disco still makes me angry, though. We all have our weaknesses. There are, alas, 2 or 3 disco songs that I like despite myself, and when I hear someone playing them and I'm not paying attention and I catch myself liking them, the reflex is to hate myself, which is silly, so then I'm in a state of moral confusion and must quickly listen to classic hard rock to soothe my nerves. Bach or Beethoven also serve that purpose. But I digress. @AmenZwa@mathstodon.xyz

@vnikolov@ieji.de I like it. @AmenZwa@mathstodon.xyz @ed1conf@bsd.network

@vnikolov@ieji.de Although since you're being all sensible, this is clearly implementation-worthy, rather than being Editor Hell. Well, it could have two modes. @AmenZwa@mathstodon.xyz @ed1conf@bsd.network

@vnikolov@ieji.de Ok, interesting brainstorming. The "specific" is one that affects me only occasionally, but more frequently than "rarely", and overlaps with the case of binary files, which is in fact a concern of mine. Everything about "General" makes sense conceptually, but what would "more structured" mean? Like braces around input to insert/append? @AmenZwa@mathstodon.xyz @ed1conf@bsd.network

RE: https://masto.ai/@hackaday/117269814563752444 @screwlisp@gamerplus.org I just forwarded this to Amen, but it did make me think of you, too. Just the spirit, not the retro-BASIC. 🙂

@vnikolov@ieji.de Very good! :) What is that from? @AmenZwa@mathstodon.xyz

@lcamtuf@infosec.exchange Did they cry and say they had a litter of 27 little Roombas to care for?

@AmenZwa@mathstodon.xyz I joined immediately. We all need to help each other.

Great comment there:

To be fair, it was never said that they were trying to quit.

@teledyn@mstdn.ca I like the idea. Although I'm not sure I myself have seen an LLM be perfect as yet. But now the idea is all set to go, if one weren't already thinking in terms of wabi and sabi. @ancientjames@mastodon.social

@nixCraft@mastodon.social No no,most people don't know it yet; it takes time for things to become obvious. You're on the leading edge of noticing the signs. I've notified my friends, but what else can you do. Comparing this with the dotcom bubble, IIRC it took 14 months from the first definite signs until the bubble was considered totally popped (all the relevant stocks that weren't going to make it had crashed or even gone bankrupt, etc.) Technology is faster now, but is the stock market? It's hard to say.

@vnikolov@ieji.de Since that inspired name wasn't previously used, alas, we should implement it. But what could we do that hasn't already been done; hmm. @AmenZwa@mathstodon.xyz @ed1conf@bsd.network

@AmenZwa@mathstodon.xyz DEC (and Unix) syntax or MIT syntax? I didn't know there was more than one at the time, but later when 68000 came up, there were two again with opposite operand ordering, Motorola versus AT&T.

@teledyn@mstdn.ca I, too, have observed malignant behavior in me myself, in creating unwanted bugs in code I write. I call this "misalignment" relative to my goals. I am suspicious and will keep an eye on me. I promise. Trust me. I think all of the problems OpenAI "revealed" were found and reported long ago -- not by OpenAI researchers, but by users. Well, I suppose it's good that they are reluctantly admitting at least some of the *proven* problems.

@AmenZwa@mathstodon.xyz We have a happy little sarcasm club, yay!

@AmenZwa@mathstodon.xyz Don't be silly! They'll be trading them for RAM. They need a steady stream of trades for their tokens, so that'll be neighborhood kids.

@teledyn@mstdn.ca It does say that, but of course it's not literally true, as they casually say early on:

So physicists have turned to laboratory stand-ins that obey the same equations, building black hole analogues out of flowing water, ultracold atoms and, as in this study, light.

I like the experiment, but I dislike the clickbait headline, which 100% lies to the public, most of whom don't know when to trust science headlines and when not to.

Pet peeve.

@TallSimon@mstdn.ca @david_chisnall@infosec.exchange Good thoughts, but remember that the AI bros are expendable. Preferably. (And launching the AI bros is a brilliant thought, I wish I'd thought of that!)

@AmenZwa@mathstodon.xyz If you want to design a CISC, I have plenty of experience there, and would be happy to toss in a bunch of highly complicated instructions. I just found out yesterday that the infamous REP string instructions from the 8086 family, that were originally reviled for being as slow as just repeating by hand, have been revived in recent-ish x64 CPUs and are now faster than doing it by hand.

@AmenZwa@mathstodon.xyz We always want what we can't have, as someone once said.

RE: https://mathstodon.xyz/@sprout/116760372707116149 Control structures in programming languages From goto to algebraic effects Xavier Leroy July 13, 2026 This is a preview of a book to be published by Cambridge University Press. It is distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license. Contents Preface Introduction Part I Control structures for imperative languages Chapter 1 Early programming languages Chapter 2 Structured programming Chapter 3 Non-local control Chapter 4 Control inversion Part II Control operators for functional languages Chapter 5 Functional languages Chapter 6 Continuations and the CPS transformation Chapter 7 Programming with continuations Chapter 8 Control operators Part III From exceptions to algebraic effects and handlers Chapter 9 Exceptions Chapter 10 Effect handlers for user-defined effects Chapter 11 Monads Chapter 12 Algebraic effects Part IV Reasoning about control and effects Chapter 13 Type and effect systems Chapter 14 Hoare logic for control structures Chapter 15 Separation logic for control operators References Index

@teledyn@mstdn.ca One regex standard per school year, and then by year 12 they should have them all, if approached carefully. Worldwide testing of regex mastery could replace all those other silly standardized tests they give students.

"Super-intelligence or Superstition? Exploring Psychological Factors Influencing Belief in AI Predictions about Personal Behavior" https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.06602

@regehr@mastodon.social @lindsey@recurse.social It's not *all* Cthulhu-bound. When I briefly helped with Microsoft :: David Cutler :: David Hanson :: C++ MIPS code generator, I was introduced to the idea of compiling the compiler with the compiler etc. in order to double check that it was a fixed point, as an effective sanity check that all was well before more detailed testing. It worked out brilliantly for that purpose (i.e. it immediately found bugs I introduced, oops).

@TimWardCam@c.im @technicaladept@techhub.social I grew up on his stories and I loved them, but his doesn't give Clarke precedent. A friend of mine was generating text with Hidden Markov Models a couple years before that. (They need to be trained on a corpus first) And my friend wasn't first, either, he had read about others doing the same. I'm not sure who was earliest. Heuristic: if "word processor" is in the title, it probably wasn't first with a computer algorithm.

@AmenZwa@mathstodon.xyz Something about #@()?

@AmenZwa@mathstodon.xyz I probably don't overlap with you there at all, whatever you're talking about, but I have no problem with microcontrollers. It's nice that in this day and age, the venerable (although no longer super popular) 8048/8051 has even become fast. In the original, a NOP took 11 cycles. But perhaps you meant all the way down to the level of discrete transistors, which are always fun, not that I have particular expertise (custom multivibrator, anyone?). Although there's just no replacement for 7400 series DIPs. My fondness for them seems akin to that for the PDP 11.

@kenshirriff@oldbytes.space I've seen one-bit vacuum tube modules like that many times, it feels like, but it's hard to place where. Computer History Museum? The RESISTORS New Jersey barn full of retired mainframes (back when I truly did not grasp what a computer was)? Also possibly pictures on Ebay? It's a bit puzzling. Thanks for this and your other continuing posts; historical computing is cool.

@vnikolov@ieji.de Of course, this originally was because ancient Greek distinguished long vs short and wrote the two differently, and then today it's borrowed for spelling particular conjugations. But that brings up apparently weird decisions made by the Unicode Consortium -- and such things were always analyzed in depth, contrary to what most people seem to think. ` Back when I was young and brash, I sat in on the original pre-standard committee meetings for a year, just the core 12 or so people, it was never huge. I thought I'd be able to helpfully improve things. It turned out that everyone there was genius level (literally -- I knew two of them personally) and had some appropriate deep background (e.g. one American spoke fluent Japanese, another fluent Chinese, both had studied ancient versions of the languages, etc). Any apparent or real "mistakes" they made were due to political reasons -- having to give in to some country to get their buy-in. Or like emoji -- invented in Japan, used heavily by Japanese phone companies, essential for use by Japanese phones -- and the Consortium still resisted adding them, because, hey, they're fucking cartoons, not a written language. But you can imagine how they lost that battle, and we all know of the resulting worldwide impact. They do go on record as having made mistakes they are reversing in the future, like supporting codepoints which can be either text *or* emoji depending on a selection indicator. There are a thousand of those, for whatever political reasons, but there will be no more in the future. Big topic.

@brewsterkahle@mastodon.archive.org Everything about the history of public libraries is astonishing to the uninitiated modern person. This one is interesting rather than astounding, of course.

@cstross@wandering.shop Brilliant! One word: Kickstarter!

@brewsterkahle@mastodon.archive.org There's an observation in linguistics that it's very common for things to start as short phrases, then get hyphenated, then just get concatenated. Which is approximately what you said. I like it as an empirical rule for many cases rather than just happenstance with a few cases.

@teledyn@mstdn.ca It sure does. My studies of German were limited; I'm not fluent. But IIRC it's perfectly idiomatic for people to form quite long novel compound words on the fly, and I never quite grasped how that worked, as opposed to the grammar of sentences that the classes covered. @brewsterkahle@mastodon.archive.org

@lcamtuf@infosec.exchange That reminds me, where did you hide the body of that nice company engineer that offered to help by sending a note onward?

@lcamtuf@infosec.exchange "Ah yes, everything in life is an S curve. If you swap shallow with steepest parts."

@ramin_hal9001@fe.disroot.org Zig & Rust: Yeah, same here. River sounds interesting, and Wayland definitely needs to work harder to cover 100% of what X11 provides. (I used to be an X11 weenie so I was keenly aware back then of all kinds of obscure but handy X11 services, and even these days I continue to hear complaints of things missing -- which don't affect most people, but still)

@teledyn@mstdn.ca The sixth doctor tried to sell them a "men's health testosterone herbal supplement as seen on tv"

@AmenZwa@mathstodon.xyz Surely it's time for you to create some, so as to be able to talk about it. Here you can talk to people about CS & EE topics when you please; do you have some venue for chatting about legal topics when that's what you please?

@trademark@fosstodon.org @mjd@mathstodon.xyz Not much is explicit in the first three volumes. But what do computers have to do with...oh, I see, to navigate the faster than light craft. I had thought that the FTL itself was only made possible by the psychic powers of third stage "navigators". Is that open to interpretation, or am I forgetting something from the later books, or am otherwise clearly wrong?

@AmenZwa@mathstodon.xyz Clearly that's a huge issue. But are one's own cases the only thing of interest? What about legal theory, legal philosophy & principles. people in the profession (you know -- gossip :), books, etc. Academics presumably find things to get chatty about. But ok, maybe none of that is of interest to you.

@lcamtuf@infosec.exchange I've heard that in SF and many other markets, private equity investment has been a large scale reason, artificially pumping up prices to fuel the usual greed for sky-high profits.

@AmenZwa@mathstodon.xyz BTW any "tiny custom hardware" you'd be amused to mention?

@adamo@infosec.exchange Interesting.

I was not happy. Because through this endeavour I found out that I wanted to solve the game myself.

Yeah, I know that feeling, most often for personal projects but sometimes for professional work that has some personal interest.

The few times I've managed other people, though, I think is similar, although my LLM experience to date is limited.

When I think about assigning work to team members, yeah, I would not want them to do the things I find really interesting.

But on the more routine stuff, delegating is ok.

Hmm, except when one is looking for the rewarding feeling of accomplishment for the overall project. In that case I think it could go either way.

@AmenZwa@mathstodon.xyz I programmed 8080 and z80, but I don't recall two orders there. Maybe I was just sheltered.

@adamo@infosec.exchange I don't know about Ithaka, but I certainly understand that we're talking about personal experience-based preferences...mostly. PhD advising == prompt engineering seems like people going down the wrong conceptual road.

@mjd@mathstodon.xyz I have wondered that for over 50 years.

@jpm@aus.social @lcamtuf@infosec.exchange I think it's been ultra-heavily used since like 1968 or something, and hence in *some* version has lots and lots and lots of documentation and discussion in many places. And as long as any of its suppliers is still calling it by the same name, I'm surprised at any super important differences than the original models. But what do I know; maybe everyone cheats and is corrupt these days, who knows. I can hope it's some kind of mixup somewhere, but that's just hopeful optimism, of course.

@lcamtuf@infosec.exchange I'm trying to get things done; damn you for distracting with interesting-sounding things! Obviously you did that on purpose!