psf
psf@oldbytes.space
<p>Synths, retrocomputing, space, books.</p><p>This is my main tech-focused account. If you just want to see my music posts you may want to follow my sonomu account instead.</p>
Posts
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I'm surprised to have not run across this #forth article from 2019 until now (thanks, @LeadedSolder)! It's a clear-eyed look at #Forth from someone who describes it in modern terms and is not blinded by its advantages or disadvantages. https://blog.information-superhighway.net/what-the-hell-is-forth
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I rly like kolourpaint
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Star Wars Galactic Racer is quite good. Pure adrenaline and nerves.
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The war on password login is tiresome. "Security best practices" often do not take into account the security/convenience trade, especially when the account in question is low value or already protected by a strong security boundary.
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muLISP has an interesting way of implementing lexical-style closures in a dynamically scoped #Lisp, a method it claims to be "patterned after the Lisp Machine LISP dynamic closure package". $ (setq quintupler (let-closed ((a 5)) '(lambda (x) (* x a)))) (LAMBDA CLOSURE-ARGLIST (CLOSURE-APPLY (QUOTE (LAMBDA (X) (* X A))) (QUOTE ((A . 5))) CLOSURE-ARGLIST)) $ (setq b 6) 6 $ (setq sextupler (closure '(b) '(lambda (x) (* x b)))) (LAMBDA CLOSURE-ARGLIST (CLOSURE-APPLY (QUOTE...
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"I always worked with programming languages because it seemed me that until you could understand those, you really couldn't understand computers. Understanding them doesn't really mean only being able to use them. A lot of people can use them without understanding them." -- Christopher Strachey, quoted in Anatomy of #Lisp Of course, now we also have machines that use them without understanding them.
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principles of software distillation: Old software is usually small and new software is usually large. A distilled program can be old or new, but is always small, and is powerful by its choice of ideas, not its implementation size. A distilled program has the conciseness of an initial version and the refinement of a final version. A distilled program is a finished work, but remains hackable due to its small size, allowing it to serve as the starting point for new works. Many people write pro...
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I fell into a LLM rabbit hole for a few months. I am now out of that hole and hacking on #forth code again. My brain is shocked by how slowly I am moving. And yet, I feel whole again.
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software is a mirror that reflects the times and the environment it was created in. this is why much software created in the 1970s counterculture was joyful and humanistic, and why much software created in the 2020s capitalistic hellscape is soul-crushing malware (adware, spyware). #retrocomputing can mean celebrating hardware limitations and creative coding, but it can also mean celebrating personal computing - computers that are tools for liberation - bicycles for the mind, not cattle trains...