Thanks

“Fine” might be overselling it a little bit.

I would say its ‘comprehensible’ if you’ve read the book, but its still not great.

Since you have expertise in this maybe you can answer this question for me.

Do brick or stone roads last longer than asphalt or concrete roads?

It seems to me like they should, given the higher hardness of the material and the presumably greater resistance to freeze/thaw cycles. I have also seen a few brick roads near me that I can only imagine have gone a very long time with no maintaince (as I think the government here would rather cover it in asphalt than try to work with the bricks). The ground underneath the bricks has shifted over time forming depressions in the path that car tires take, but it is still fine to drive over at low speeds, as the slopes are smooth unlike the holes that form in asphalt.

I’ve tried googling this before but haven’t been able to find a straightforward answer as to how long a road like that can go between rounds of maintenance.

The phone I’m typing this on right now has an audio jack and still gets updates.

This is an idea from the 1960s back when they thought solar panels would be like computer chips and remain super expensive in terms of area but become exponentially better at the amount of sunlight they could convert into electricity.

It makes absolutely zero sense to spend billions of dollars putting solar panels in space and beaming the power back to earth now that they are so cheap per unit area. The one thing you could argue a space based solar array could do would be to stretch out the day length so you need less storage, but that’s easier to accomplish using long electrical cables.

What happened to it?

I’m not sure if you realize, but my comment was agreeing with yours.

One could argue that “god” and “man” (as in humanity) are pretty important concepts, and dogs and cats were probably more important to our ancestors than they are now.

But then there are words like gel, mop, wig, tug, and dam that kinda make that fall apart again.

Wikia was never great to begin with, with all the useless JavaScript and floating shit all over the page, but its gotten even worse now yeah.

FOSS doesn’t mean “we think people that make software should work for free because we like free shit”. It means:

1. When you want to modify something someone else made to your benefit you should recognize the work they did for you and pay it back in the form of contributing those changes back to the project. Beyond that, it also benefits you directly because someone else might build on your improvements (well, that, but also its easier to stop your changes from breaking in new versions of the software if other people are aware of them). Like the other commenter said, its communal development, sure lots of people do it at least partly because they want to make the world a better place, but the primary reason it works is because the various parties mutually benefit from mutual cooperation.

2. The belief that you should have complete control over your own computer, which you can’t do in practice without being able to view the source code of the software you run.

Assuming the light really was being powered by the flash from the lightning this is a pretty crazy demo of just how little power LEDs consume.

The british mind cannot comprehend the concept of high speed rail.

In the campaign setting I’m developing the world works roughly like ancient Greek philosophers thought it worked. Physics beyond Newtonian motion (and even that is iffy) simply doesn’t exist.

Solves all the problems with wondering what would happen if you transmuted this into that and so on and so forth.

I’m not a hunter, I’ve never shot a dear and I don’t think I ever will. I do go hiking though.

Let’s say it comes across as “grey” for argument’s sake. But they CAN apparently distinguish all the shades of green and brown and that is why you are dressed like John Duty. Which means… they have a giant blob of “grey” moving around? Pretty sure that would stick out…

When you hear the term “red-green color blindness”, do you think that red and green appear grey to those people while they can still see orange, yellow, and blue the same as everyone else? And that they go through their lives with these super high contrast grey objects everywhere?

That’s not how eyes work. Color blindness means an inability to distinguish between shades of colors, not that they have some sort of selective filters that block those colors out, turn objects of that color invisible, or convert them to grey.

Homie. Go spend even twenty minutes walking around a park in a mountain town. Deer don’t give a fuck.

You think this because you live in a suburb where people feed them, “in a park”, or “bordering a forested area”. No unconditioned wild animal in the world, except maybe things that live on tiny islands with no predators, is chill with an unknown human sized animal standing next to it.

When I hike I sometimes see deer as close as a hundred feet or so away, but if one started walking towards me I would consider that behavior so far out of the ken that I might think it has rabies or wasting disease.

Understand that I’m not even arguing that shooting a deer is some sort of crazy achievement.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/google-engineer-claims-ai-chatbot-is-sentient-why-that-matters/

This was back in 2022 when LLMs were exponentially worse too.

I think an open world videogame with this sort of world would be really neat.

I mean, this is already basically how videogames work, but it could be made diagetic and stylized like this.

So did they take the firefighter out afterwards and shoot him as part of the staging?

How did they acquire a perfectly preserved old big mac for comparison?

That was a good comment, thanks.

I’ll try to clarify a little bit more about what I was talking about and reply to some stuff.

• Window Manager: This is Niri, but of course everyone will have their own preferences for their window manager. For foot pedals you can just search “USB foot pedal” and get lots of results for ordering that sort of thing online. You might also be interested in macro pads, which are basically just little keyboards with extra keys you can use to supplement your primary keyboard. Of course you still have to set that up in software, but it seems like this program can do that for you (I haven’t done this myself, so no guarantees lol).
• Better Markup, Responsive Terminal UI, Unified UI: When I mention these things I’m mostly thinking of The Mother of All Demos. You can watch recordings of it on youtube, and its quite remarkable, Douglas Engelbart demonstrates things like rich text (nested lists, collapsible sections), hyperlinks, word processing, the computer mouse, and a slew of other things, all back in 1968 when most people were barely even using an interactive shell (as batch processing was the norm). But the really interesting thing about that demo, in my opinion, is how unified the UI was. It was built for handling a data structure that was basically a linked list of text strings: showing you different views of that data structure and editing it in different ways (opening and collapsing subsections, displaying only a single subsection, ‘following’ a link like clicking on a hypertext link, its hard to explain succinctly, the best way is just to watch the demo). Which of course works for things like lists of groceries or whatever, but works just as well for files in a file tree, items in a configuration file, the syntax tree of a piece of computer code, or a version control tree. On NLS (the system shown off in the demo), you could use the same interface, the shortcut keys, for interacting with all of these. I don’t necessarily think that we should copy NLS in every detail, but you can see what I mean when I say that I think the terminal, file explorer, and document editor could have the same UI. IMO these are all ‘text dominated’ tasks that could probably be manipulated in the same way.
• Auto Complete: In the first part I’m talking about being able to type something like example.mp4 ffmpeg, instead of ffmpeg example.mp4. In the second case you need to know that ffmpeg exists to begin trying to manipulate the video file, in the first case you could hypothetically type example.mp4 [tab] then get a list of programs that are registered as being able to handle mp4 files, allowing you to discover ffmpeg’s existence. This discoverability is one of the big reasons that graphical interfaces are perceived as more user friendly than a terminal. That’s what I mean when I say using a noun verb syntax would be more similar to right click (specifically right click --> open with). Of course you’d still want the ability to force a specific program to try to ingest a type of file its not associated with, but you can do that with [right click] --> [open with] too.
• Config Links to Manual: I have heard of that but I haven’t used it much (I probably should though). If it works for shell commands I don’t see why the same technique couldn’t work for config files. The real problem is that so many programs use very different formatting for their configs, and they’d all have to publish detailed descriptions of their syntax in a metasyntax language, along with detailed English documentation of their behavior. So it would be a lot of work to implement. I don’t think this is impossible, but I don’t think its likely to happen any time soon.
• Indexed Full Text Search: Grep is fine for what it is, but its not indexed search. Search indexing is what allows sites like Google and Wikipedia to search billions of documents, very fast, and with very little CPU and disk usage. Recoll is a program that can do this (and it works on pdfs and epubs too), after you select what directories you want to use it on and build the index, but in my opinion this should be a standard part of the OS’s functionality.
• Tags: BeOS (made a typo earlier with the capitalization) was an OS that was around during the 90s. Among a few other neat features it had a file system that let you add arbitrary metadata attributes to files, and optionally index them (a little bit like having Hydrus built into the file system and file explorer). In such a system an email program could be implemented just by adding extra attributes to a bunch of text files in a folder. That makes the email program easier to implement, since it can piggyback off of OS functionality instead of having to come up with something itself, but the real power of that kind of setup is that other programs, like command line utilities, could inspect, search, and modify that metadata in a very easy standardized way.
• File System Snapshot With Version Control: You wouldn’t want to make snapshots for every single change, and you probably wouldn’t want to keep the full snapshot history for your entire computer (although for some folders you could maybe do either/both of these). Rather you’d mostly take snapshots of your whole disk before big updates or changes, and use them as a restore point (so you typically wouldn’t keep ones that are years old). You can do this without file system level snapshots, using programs like Timeshift, but its cheaper from a disk space standpoint to use file system snapshots, and also much faster to create / restore. OpenSuse uses BTRFS to do this, and even lets you boot into old snapshots from the grub menu.
• Plan 9: Plan 9 was built as a successor to Unix, meant to be less crufty and to take the ‘everything is a file’ philosophy further. For example to take a screenshot in Plan 9 you can execute cat /dev/screen | topng > screenshot.png. Even other devices on the network are represented as (virtual) files in a folder, and everything is accomplished using file operations.
• Namespaces: In general computing a namespace is a mapping from a set of names (or identifiers or whatever) to a set of objects or resources. So, URLs for example, are a namespace that maps a text strings to IP addresses. In Plan 9 a namespace is a mapping between the file system as presented to a specific program, and the actual file system. Processes can modify the namespace of their child processes, allowing them to redirect their inputs and outputs. This lets you do a lot of stuff, for example in plan 9 every program can run without a display server, because every program tries to write directly to the screen ‘file’. If you start a program up using a display server and desktop environment its output is redirected to an input on the display server instead. Same goes for audio, and IPC, and so on and so forth, since everything is accomplished using file operations. Using this you can containerize applications, or even run an entire plan 9 userspace nested within the actual userspace. This was invented in the 90s, way before Docker or even the common use of virtual machines. Rather than use a special tool to accomplish something specific, it was accomplished using standard functionality of the OS, that was designed to be applicable to a wide range of situations. This is a common theme in the things I’ve mentioned.

Does anyone here have any ideas about how computer interfaces should work? Or, in other words what sort of features would you want in an ‘ideal’ (for you) computer system?

I’ve been thinking about this for awhile, and I have some wishes:

• A scrolling/tiling window manager like Niri.
• A rich / hypertext format that’s more powerful than markup but less powerful than HTML + CSS.
• A terminal that’s capable of outputting and rendering the above format: tables, collapsible sections, links, etc.
• Some sort of unified UI that combines a file explorer, document viewer / editor, and terminal.
• A terminal / scripting language that’s more discoverable than what we have. Perhaps by using a noun verb format instead of a verb noun format. Combine that with a ZSH-like (or IDE-like) autocomplete for command options, but add a small text description to each option and allow the user to do an incremental search of this text (with synonyms) by pressing a hotkey. These two things make interacting with files a little bit like right clicking (by listing valid operations for a given type of object) and a little like doing a text search on a settings menu, respectively. This could be accomplished without giving up the power of linguistic composition.
• A terminal / scripting language that’s better than bash (not a high bar), straightforward and simple, and somewhat fast to evaluate (as far as interpreted languages can be fast), but not super complicated under the hood like Python is.
• A series of linked wiki articles written in the above mentioned markup language, stored locally, that tells you how the OS works and how to use it. Instead of having to go to an external website to find out the steps your init process takes to start your computer, you read a plain english document describing them, with hyperlinks to the corresponding articles for the processes it interacts with. Like man pages but answers “how is it configured, and why that way”, rather than just “how do I configure it”. Some of these pages, or portions of them, might need to be dynamically generated depending on what packages you have installed. The pages should be organized such that the top level (or home page) give the most generalized and basic descriptions, with links to FAQs and how-tos, and the deeper you drill down the more specific and technical the articles get.
• A NixOS-like declarative configuration system that uses config files written in the above mentioned markup language. The various config files should link to the corresponding wiki articles and vice versa.
• An indexed full text search for the above mentioned documents (and any user generated documents).
• A BeOs-like database file system, with tags and attributes.
• File system level snapshots integrated into version control and the declarative configuration system mentioned earlier.
• A plan9-like ‘everything is a file’ philosophy, as well as plan9’s hierarchical namespaces.
• Containerized applications and permissions using the above mentioned namespaces.

A lot of the above already exists, but only in pieces instead of in a fully unified system. Or else in a unified system that does some of these things, but not all of them.