Lisp has a lot in common with Forth in that people often reduce it to a trick and miss the lesson it has to teach; people implement their six words from the bare metal and use those six words to implement Forth but never seem to make the leap, realize they can take it one step further and implement the language they need for the task at hand just as easily as they implemented Forth with those six or however many words they decided to start with. Sure it may not be the most efficient solution but in a time when most people walk around with half a dozen cores in their pocket, counting clock cycles is generally not a concern and it can probably be more efficient than the batteries included solution that comes with eight D cells when it only requires a single coin cell. But there is something about the weight of those eight D cells, they are substantial and we can feel it.
I believe Lisp is relatively more understood than Forth these days, in that most of the "big ideas" that have been built in it have also been borrowed and turned into language features elsewhere. We have a lot of languages with garbage collection, dynamic types, emphasis on a single container type, some kind of macro system, closures, self-hosting, etc. These things aren't presented with so much syntactical clarity outside of Lisp, but they also benefit from additional engineering that makes them "easy to hold and use".
Lisp appeals to a hierarchical approach, in essence. It constrains some of the principal stuff that "keeps the machine in mind" by automating it away, so that all that's left is your abstraction and how it's coupled to the rest of the stack. It's great for academic purpose since it can add a lot of features that isolate well. Everyone likes grabbing hierarchy as a way to scale their code to their problems, even though its proliferation is tied to current software crises. Hierarchical scaling provides an immediate benefit(automation everywhere) and a consequent downside(automation everywhere, defined and enforced by the voting preferences of the market).
Forth, on the other hand, is a heavily complected thing that doesn't convert into a bag of discrete "runtime features" - in the elementary bootstrapped Forth, every word collaborates with the others to build the system. The features it does have are implementation details elevated into something the user may exploit, so they aren't engineered to be "first class", polished, easy to debug. It remains concerned about the machine, and its ability to support hierarchy is less smoothly paved since you can modify the runtime at such a deep level. That makes it look flawed or irrelevant(from a Lisp-ish perspective).
But that doesn't mean it can't scale, exactly. It means that the typical enabled abstraction is to build additional machines that handle larger chunks of your problem, but the overall program structure remains flat and "aware" of each machine you're building, where its memory is located, the runtime performance envelope, and so on. It doesn't provide the bulldozers that let you relocate everything in memory, build a deep callstack, call into third-party modules, and so on. You can build those, but you have to decide that that's actually necessary instead of grabbing it in anger because the runtime already does it. This makes it a good language for "purposeful machines", where everything is really tightly specified. It has appealing aspects for real-time code, artistic integrity, verification and long-term operation. Those are things that the market largely doesn't care about, but there is a hint of the complected nature of Forth in every system that aims for those things.
Ok, if my comment came across as saying to scorn forth, then it was badly written.
Chuck Moore is a genius. How many other people created a language, wrote their own semiconductor simulator and ECAD system, and used it to design their own CPU? But, Forth has a strong culture of NIH, and it started with him. Maybe you need a degree of arrogance and self-belief to do the things he's done. Sadly, most people are not such geniuses as to be able to get away with it.
What I tried, perhaps badly,to say; is that it's worth learning everything from Forth culture except for contempt for everything that's not Forth. There are a lot of things wrong with common-denominator programming languages, and common-denominator practices; and it can be exciting for a young programmer to join a community which openly expresses the problems and has an alternative view. (This was especially the case 15-20 years ago when C++ hegemony was at its height). But it can easily become parochial.
The lesson of Forth for me, is that you can really gain a lot of productivity by ruthlessly removing generalisations and focusing on the exact problem you want to solve; and not being afraid to re-implement stuff in order to do so - if you can do it in a simpler way. I don't think adopting concatenative syntax is necessary to do this; there are too many examples where it was achieved without.
Chuck Moore has argued that all programming should adopt this radical simplification approach; this seems to be the case put by the OP (although not explicitly). I don't think it works. Too many tasks require a degree of collaboration which is enabled by the abstractions. Rewriting everything simpler works for a lone programmer, but it means you have to understand everything, and sometimes you just have to interoperate with some system whose complexity can't be refactored away. Take Unicode- Chuck Moore's answer would be "throw away unicode" but most of us don't have that choice.
I have never seen that, most in the Forth world seem resigned to obscurity and content living in their own world. If you could point me to the people advocating Forth above all else, I would love to see it and I don't mean that in a "you're wrong, I'm right" way, I just want to see what their methods are.
As someone whose goal in life is to be blown about the oceans by the wind, I have mixed feelings about this. With the "traditional" freighter I would have the right of way, my being a sailboat under the wisdom of the wind, they have to make allowances for me and change course, but things are different when that freighter is also under the wisdom of the wind. The same goes for things like offshore wind power, my life is made more difficult because most people expect their home to be 70F when it is 60F outside and 60F when it is 70F outside, anything else would incur undue hardship.
It is a complex situation, should I be penalized for wanting to live a life that has little or no environmental impact at cost of those who want to live in reasonable comfort while being a part of/contributing to, society? Probably not but I can't help but wonder about what happened to the first 'R' of the three R's (reduce, reuse and recycle), no one seems to reduce anymore unless technology gives them a way to do it without any inconvenience no matter how small that inconvenience is.
> The same goes for things like offshore wind power, my life is made more difficult because most people expect their home to be 70F when it is 60F outside and 60F when it is 70F outside, anything else would incur undue hardship.
This is an overly simplistic view of demands on energy, but it might be one of the easiest for people decry. (As it happens, comfort is nice though.)
> should I be penalized for wanting to live a life that has little or no environmental impact at cost of those who want to live in reasonable comfort while being a part of/contributing to, society?
No, but it's also unrealistic to expect to be sheltered from all externalities of society.
After all, switching to sail cargo ships is itself reducing an externality incurred by others.
> what happened to the first 'R' of the three R's (reduce, reuse and recycle)
This is a good principle, but it's not universally accepted, and it still permits things that involve cargo via ocean.
As more and more people are pulled from poverty, they too will begin to use more energy to improve their lives, perhaps to the point that they can choose to follow their dreams upon retirement.
I admitted or strongly implied everything you used as rebuttal with the exception of your final point, I don't believe using more energy improves ones life. Also, this is not a retirement dream, this is going to happen in the next year and I will be pulling over to work for ~6 months every couple years.
Not OP, but in general, while some things do improve my life (climate control, hot water, cooking), I'd say there are also plenty of things that don't.
I don't think my device usage habits or media consumption actually improve my life. I'm not sure the energy that's been dumped into producing the many gadgets I've bought over the years really improved me life.
I'd say that a lot of energy goes into distracting me in a way that I can't genuinely say is an improvement.
I think the point is larger than any individual. It involves the environment in which you're located. Infrastructure changes require energy, lots of energy. Increasing quality of life for most things we've built in our world requires investing lots of energy at the state level. You reap the benefits of this by living in the state.
Yeah, but even looking beyond individuals, my personal take is I'm no longer convinced, for example, all the massive amounts of electronics, fast fashion, and other consumerism-oriented production (which definitely do all use energy) are actually improving life. Same goes for a lot of online businesses that are occupying data centers and using electricity.
eg I'm unconvinced smart phones are truly improving life, let alone getting yearly incremental updates from every manufacturer.
So yes, to some extent, most life improvements are going to use some energy, but I wouldn't argue that most increases in spent energy lead to quality of life increases for a majority of people.
Why do my beliefs require anything to prove them? My beliefs are not fact and I never represented them as such, I said plainly that I have mixed feeling and that society should not bow to me. The exchange in response to my post are a good example of why my goal in life is to retreat from society, everyone ignored what I said to be "right." Admittedly I did not actually say that society should not bow to me, I said probably not, but that is simply because I don't actually know and I don't believe I ever implied that I did, putting on a sweater seems a small sacrifice to me.
I find it somewhat inconsistent that you feel people's choice of indoor temperature is an imposition on you, but also that your choice of sailboat should entitle you to having something that is literally hundreds of times larger and less nimble than you have to make the effort to go around you.
> that your choice of sailboat should entitle you to having something that is literally hundreds of times larger and less nimble than you have to make the effort to go around you.
That's how the rules of the road work. See: COLREGs.
We also travel by a small sailboat, and it is always reassuring to see huge tankers make small course changes tens of nautical miles away. That way everybody stays safe and nobody is majorly inconvenienced.
I know it's the rule of the road, but that's not the point.
The point is the inconsistency in tone between "your life choices make me go around your wind farm, that makes my life difficult", and "my life choices make your giant freighter go around me, I have right of way".
Small sail boats do not need to go around wind farms, they can just sail right through them assuming the weather is agreeable. The problem is more that if you are caught up in a storm anywhere near a windfarm (within range of the storm carrying you into it) it makes everything very dangerous for you; instead of dropping sail and letting the boat find its way through the storm from the safety of below decks you have to stay on deck and fight the storm. To put this into metropolitan terms, it would be like routing the main pedestrian path through the most dangerous part of town for the sake of a highway.
Either way, to repeat myself again, I did not say I was right or better and plainly stated my mixed feelings.
I didn't say that I am entitled or that it was an imposition, just that it was complex and I have mixed feelings about it, literally said that I don't think society should make allowances for me.
Yeah idk. Maybe it's the tone of stuff like "it would incur undue hardship" (re indoor temps) that comes across to me as a bit holier than thou and makes the rest of your first paragraph seem more self-centered.
I plainly stated that society should not bow to my needs and that those who contribute to society and are a part of society are more important than me, what more do you want?
That's true only in constrained waters. But obviously they need to see you from afar to be able to make that course change. That's where AIS transponders help a lot.
We've crossed some of the busier shipping lanes of the world, and have had to call the bridge of a freighter on radio just a couple of times. And usually the watchstander immediately confirmed seeing us and clarified their intentions.
> "With the "traditional" freighter I would have the right of way"
In theory, perhaps. In praxis, might makes right, bigger wins, and if you in your sailboat want to play chicken with a freighter of any kind, you're taking an unreasonable risk. Actually, commercial boats get priority over pleasurecraft, so even in theory it's probably your job to stay out of the way.
Not even in theory. Sure I may loose my boat but they will be liable for it and will not even question being liable, the cost is tiny to them and I would get a new boat if they ran me down. Things are more complex when that freighter is also under sail and most of the world lacks any legal bearing here.
You might want to read more about the right of way rules and USCG apportionment in maritime accidents. In the scenario you describe you most definitely would not be getting a new boat.
What makes you think the USCG has any bearing on my life? Even if I am an American I stated that my dream was to be blown about the oceans, which strongly implies that I will be out of USCG jurisdiction the majority of the time. You are right in context of a busy seaway like New York Harbor but in that situation a sailing freighter will be under power, not under sail and anyone in a small sailboat will be very alert. Most of the ocean is not under jurisdiction of the USCG and the rules for open water are different than those for near the coast or in the harbor.
I’m not sure where people get the idea of the rules don’t apply in international waters. The COLREGs clearly state commercial vessels have right away over recreational sailboats. End of story. You get run over by a commercial vessel, it’s your fault for being in the way but it’s their fault for running you down.
Not under command
Restricted maneuverability
Constrained by draft
Fishing (actively dragging)
Under sail
Ignoring not under command; in the open sea only the fishing boat has right of way over a sailing boat because the rest are not restricted by maneuverability or draft when in the middle of the ocean unless the crew is negligent. Fishing vessels in the open ocean tend to give way unless they can raise the boat on the radio and get them to change course because they really do not want the sail boat to foul their lines, especially the long line boats. In restricted waters boats under sail often have the right of way because they have restricted maneuverability (restricted by the wind) and their deep keel means they are restricted by draft but it is not so black and white here; if the sailboat can fire up its engine it is more maneuverable than that tug pulling a bunch of barges so if that sailboat has less draft restriction than the tug and its barges, it has to fire up its engine and get out of the way.
But COLREG is not the rule of the sea, just the rule for countries who are a part of the UN. But the truth is that a collision with such a sailboat will not phase these boats and generally writing a check is an insignificant cost and rare enough that it is what they do.
A large ship is very unlikely to just instantly destroy and sink a small sailboat, bow wave pushes it aside and destroys the rigging leaving the boat adrift, crew either abandons it or scuttles it when rescued unless they are near land and can be towed.
Having witnessed a large commercial ship going 15 kts run over a smaller 30 foot sailboat I can assure you it was not “pushed aside” unless by aside you mean pushed under.
If hit just right it would destroy the boat but that is a one in a million hit. The shape of displacement hulls and their need to part and push the water aside so they can move through the water will almost always mean that small boats will be pushed aside and damaged but not sunk. An open boat (which a small number of 30' sailboats are) would be a different story, the hit would almost certainly heel them enough to flood and sink them, but I think it is obvious that I am not talking about open boats but boats with a deck and a cabin that you can live in. I could be wrong in that assumption, many do not know the difference between an open and a decked boat and I could have been more clear there.
I think "reduce" has always been pipe dream by the de-growth sector. At its core I'm not convinced that humans can ever willfully engage in managed decline. When I say this I mean societies, large groups, cities, etc. Not individuals. De-growth has a serious scaling issue. It's fundamentally incompatible with the bedrock of why humans come together.
Maybe? I don't think this is beyond societies, but it does require society to expect it. The idea of reducing had an effect on society back in the 80s and into the 90s, people did reduce, but it didn't last. This is not "de-growth," unless you think growth is a measure of the number of people who live a life a leisure.
My X13G3 does not have such a setting in EFI setup but the fancy power management setups that come with most (if not all DEs) does not seem to play well with it, it seems to wait for some processes to finish before sleeping even though those processes have already been suspended and will not finish, so it never goes fully to sleep even though the laptop's lid LED says it is suspended. I never investigated this issue since I was just seeing how KDE and XFCE had progressed since my last try of them. Have not had any issues with it using old fashioned suspend setups with just a WM and no DE.
Other things; it really did not play well with the 5.x LTS kernel of slackware 15, poor performance all around but switching to slackware current with its 6.x kernel solved that. KDE also used the GPU which decreased battery life but was still good, certainly better than the Windows that it came with which had abysmal battery life. I think the DEs also played with the CPU governor, at least with KDE, seem to recall that it reved up to full speed long before it needed to but don't quite remember.
Overall, love the X13, especially the 16:10 screen ratio, but I think the G1s had a 16:9?
Edit: With the DEs my X13 also goes into a half awake state when you plug it in when suspended. Generally not an issue but it will stay in that half suspended state until the lid is opened and then reclosed which means if you just unplug it and toss it into your bag, it is still in that half suspended state and will eat the battery. Another thing which I never investigated because I don't use DEs.
J mostly looks good but [) looks almost like a fancy capital D which can be distracting and =# run together at smaller font sizes which is a little weird. Those are the only things that jump out at me but I did not look hard, overall I would say it is one of the better fonts I have tried for J.
The big problem that I am having with this font is that its narrowness makes it difficult to find a fallback font for APL/BQN that plays well.
I have spent a fair amount of time over the past couple years browsing this list and the People Lost at Sea category. I visit them and the page for Fatal Familial Insomnia every couple months.
Being the weirdo frees you from a great many time consuming pleasantries. Making friends might secure a permanent place but it also means a few minutes from every break will be lost to small talk and sometimes the entire break; you see a self serving lone wolf casting himself as the hero, I see someone just trying to find a way to do what is important to him. I am fairly certain that much of the eccentric artist image is just frustration over small talk.
It makes me sad that pleasantries are viewed by some as a time-consuming chore. You can recognize that person who really cares about how you are doing or what you did on the weekend, and it makes you warm inside. You don't need to shoot the shit for 30 minutes, but human interaction is what builds community, and most of us like that; all of us need it.
For some people, “pleasantries” are mentally taxing, and while you can force yourself to feign interest in someone’s random weekend activity, you can’t force yourself to actually find it interesting if in reality you find it dull. The “chore” isn’t that it consumes time, it’s that not everyone finds it a pleasant thing to do with any random person.
It’s a mixture for sure. My time is divided between a WfH desk and a (shared with one coworker) private office at a Co-working space. I love my coworker dearly. I also have made a handful of friends in the space that, like you say, they truly care about how I’m found and that feeling is reciprocal and definitely makes me warm and fuzzy.
And sometimes I just really need to be able to walk over to the coffee maker and refill my cup while processing a complex problem in my head. Unfortunately due to my brain wiring, having even that 5 minute conversation makes a ton of that problem solving context evaporate and it’s exceptionally frustrating when that happens.
I’m fortunate that I can plan where I’m going to be working based on the probability of working on hard problems on a given day. The pleasantries are deeply pleasing for me, except when they’re not.
Community is built through third places, neighbourship, inter-family ties, and other deep and lasting connections between people. That a workplace is a place for community is an unfortunate belief that arose in the USA in recent Bowling Alone decades just because Americans largely don’t perceive any other time and place for community.
It’s true that work place socialization is not sufficient, but back when all those forms of community were in abundance people still engaged in workplace pleasantries.
Indeed - and break times don't seem to be very long. "fifteen minutes for coffee and then half an hour for lunch" - no time to waste on pleasantries when that is all the break you get!
This guy is amazing - the dedication to his craft is inspiring!
Super inspiring. A lot to read between the lines. Probably fairly introverted - prefers to be by himself than joking with coworkers. But not so much so that he can’t. He’s just really driven to be creative. And found a way, even though life took him down a very different path. “Let your wallet be your guide” is a good reminder that realistically there’s probably no chance he could make a living as a writer - very few can. But he made it happen anyway. Bravo!
Indeed, that is precisely the case for some folks - with social anxiety. Or autism. Or a number of other mental states.
Maybe they're tired to their bones and barely have energy to even have one meal a day? Maybe they lost a loved one and never quite recovered since then?
It costs nothing to be polite and assume best intentions from the other side.
In this particular case, there's someone whose most precious moments are their breaks during the day, and rather than saying "good on them for finding a way to do the thing they are most passionate about" the response is "gee they should have used that extremely limited free time to.... have the most shallow of conversations"?
Pleasantries are fine, but that was never going to be a long term solution for him. He needed a space that was always available to him, where he is always welcome. For better or worse, that's not the site office. (Even if it worked on that job, you don't stay in one place as a contractor)
And as a comment on an article written by, and about, a man who works a manual labor job because he can't support himself as a writer despite having published novels.
The vast majority of authors, even most those who were quite prolific, have never been able to support themselves on that income alone, throughout the modern history of novels. This isn't new with LLMs.
It is odd, but people often confuse Emmenthaler and Gruyere.
Even in Italian (just across the border!) it was not uncommon to hear expressions like "full of holes like groviera", and it seems in French it's the same based on the existence of this Wikipedia page https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradoxe_du_fromage_%C3%A0_tro...
I'm French and it apparently took more than four decades for me to TIL that we have our own Gruyère.
I always assumed we were just calling Emmental the wrong thing. Then again most of what we call Gruyère is a somewhat industrialized store-bought thing that arguably tastes like neither Emmental not Gruyère (but at least it has holes, I guess). And to boot, I'm pretty sure we call "Gruyère" some of the products that are labeled as Emmental anyway.
In retrospect, it makes sense we'd have our "own" given how finicky we are with names (of things we produce).
Edit: turns out we've also bastardized Emmental anyway.
There's also a tight branding and trademark component.
I remember a major ad campaign when proper imported "Emmental" was rebranded as "Emmentaler" because the former name was becoming generic, and a related ad campaign about positioning and promoting Emmentaler as one of several kinds of "Swiss Cheese" along with Gruyere, Sbrinz and maybe a fourth one I don't recollect.
As a Swiss, confusing Emmenthaler and Gruyere is wild - they're soooo different in just about any property except both being called cheese. And I personally believe Emmenthaler to be the worst cheese produced in Switzerland. The only thing it has going for it are the iconic holes. Gruyere on the other hand is up there with the best of Swiss cheeses.
I don't believe Baby Swiss is actually a variety of Swiss (Emmental) cheese, rather than a completely different cheese. IIRC Baby Swiss was invented in America and uses a different process.
I am not familiar with Lacey Swiss so no opinion on that one.
Lisp has a lot in common with Forth in that people often reduce it to a trick and miss the lesson it has to teach; people implement their six words from the bare metal and use those six words to implement Forth but never seem to make the leap, realize they can take it one step further and implement the language they need for the task at hand just as easily as they implemented Forth with those six or however many words they decided to start with. Sure it may not be the most efficient solution but in a time when most people walk around with half a dozen cores in their pocket, counting clock cycles is generally not a concern and it can probably be more efficient than the batteries included solution that comes with eight D cells when it only requires a single coin cell. But there is something about the weight of those eight D cells, they are substantial and we can feel it.
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