ǝƃǝlloɔ ǝǝɹɟ

Emacs/Common Lisp hacker, Slackware supremacist.
Vice President of Software Freedom at https://gikopoi.com/

XMPP: [email protected]
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alt: [@[email protected]](https://fsebugoutzone.org/users/sicp )

Last Notes

2025-07-05 16:29:51 GMT

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Top Dog (1995)

2025-06-19 23:19:10 GMT

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as Allah is my witness I shall not let this furry win calling my brothers @[email protected] @[email protected] alhamdulillah

2025-04-22 23:14:36 GMT

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https://media.freesoftwareextremist.com/media/16/8b/84/168b8402664e8401709853fac6e216ff6719c6a5339ded1723dcb3305f96c71b.jpg

2025-04-22 22:34:09 GMT

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I bet it was @npub1uq8…d7sw

2025-04-08 23:09:23 GMT

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> It's comparable to a lambda in Emacs Lisp or Common Lisp.
So it's like a closure, got it. I get bogged down in the academically opaque stuff. I'm a hacker, not a CS grad student.
> And so an additional runtime capable of enforcing sane isolation properties becomes necessary.
Unless you're doing pure message passing it sounds like you'd need either a runtime or some hairy control scheme in order to get this to work.
> Nesting environments without arbitrary access to others (via various dynamic/special elements) would be necessary
That's the way it's always been done as far as I know.
https://genode.org/index
Have you checked this out? Seems like it might be up your alley.

2025-04-08 22:17:46 GMT

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> With a language providing no direct memory access semantics, it is impossible to wrongly access resources without either a broken implementation (for which formal verification methodology is available) or broken hardware (this is a more complicated issue).
Sure, but the language's semantics shouldn't matter. A process shouldn't have to give away the resources you don't need, but whatever you get your hands on you should be able to do with what you please. If you're just sending blunt data it's not even a problem.
> Re-implementing that with near zero-cost would require RDMA and trust for all involved nodes (may be impossible in a lot of cases)
Sort of what I thought. Not that I believe in security anyway.
> This means the implementation can encapsulate resources in opaque structures which cannot be interfered with.
Sounds proprietary. :absolutely_proprietary:

2025-04-08 20:02:56 GMT

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In a perfect world, we'd have a choice between Plan 9 and Lisp machines, and they'd probably be used to talking to each other. They were both designed for individual hackers working together in a lab over a local network.
> Lisp people think Unix is ugly, GNU people seem to hate Unix and want to turn it into god-knows-what. So they assume because the lower level of the system is ugly (in their estimation) that everything from outside the tower is bad and lowbrow.
People forget that GNU was a compromise. :ignutius: was a Lisp hacker through and through, he lived and breathed that shit for years. He didn't think Unix was particularly good, but it was important enough at the time to replicate for his system. His attempt at bringing a bit of the Lisp machine workflow to Unixen was Emacs. His initial plans for morphing the Unix design into something else were much broader, but by the time Linux won out that plan kind of went astray. The Hurd actually had some neat ideas.
> I really like Lisp but the thing that keeps me from reaching for it is that the designers hate Unix (because "you're supposed to" and "there's no excuse for not having a" and all of that)
Sometimes I feel like a bit of an outsider among other Lisp hackers because I don't completely pull the wool over my own eyes. I like Common Lisp and Emacs 'cause they're the right tools for me, but preaching evangelism is a waste of time that just makes people hate you. It's like those old memes about SICP where the reverence for the book is stretched to its absurd extreme by making claims about "achieving satori" by the mere act of reading it. But this is apparently an actual part of Lisp culture, and they take it seriously. We can still learn stuff from our contemporaries; let's not get caught up in decades long culture war bullshit. I like Plan 9. It's a good design. When are we getting 9P over Chaosnet?

2025-04-08 19:38:21 GMT

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The part where he's talking about a hypothetical magic bullet that I've never even seen applied anywhere. Now don't get me wrong, if it's a real thing then I'd love to see it. But I'm incredulous of the claim that it would have no overhead, or even be a good tool for the job. Afaik object capabilities are mostly an access control thing, which if you're running all of your processes under the same VM sounds like a fool's errand. And I don't get how that answers network-transparent storage and IPC; those bits don't just emerge out of thin air. Feel free to enlighten me.

2025-04-08 07:19:08 GMT

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Bullshit.

2025-04-08 06:59:01 GMT

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You don't need " a hosted language-based system" to parse lines of text or TSV or something. I'm all for S-expressions but it's not like you need a hard format to have structured data.
Also p was talking about Plan 9 which just uses the filesystem for IPC, so I don't know why you're bringing up ABIs and shit.

2025-02-08 00:23:57 GMT

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it can handle pretty big buffers, and as long as you don't try to display it it's fairly fast. I got around the issue of parsing a 10MB json file by searching through it and just parsing the bits I needed on-demand.

2025-02-07 21:04:53 GMT

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If you need to load a buffer big enough to crash it then yeah use something else. Processing text once it's in the buffer is easy; it's what emacs lisp is designed for. You can't really jump around in streams so that's one advantage of buffers

2025-02-07 20:52:18 GMT

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just use emacs dummy

2024-10-01 07:23:36 GMT

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> Too many broken countries don't have such a thing, and the alternatives don't focus enough on the importance of the Four Freedoms.
The CC0 license was designed to grant nearest public domain equivalence in jurisdictions that don't have an analogous concept. With public domain the Four Freedoms are neither here nor there with regards to derivative works.
> Some creative commons licenses are even non-Free.
Indeed some of them are, and I generally don't approve of them. However "public domain" is not, which is why I said that instead. As I understand it the set of Creative Commons licenses were made to cover a large area of issues, and were not intended primarily for software.
> "Copyright" is generally a misnomer
I know. That is why I have no issue when "copyright" is used to legally grant someone his real "copy-right".

2024-10-01 06:55:43 GMT

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People I know who have an overall objection to copyright tend to prefer public domain over copyleft. That is fine and free, but is a different philosophy to what is implied by "free software". I have no issue with copyright when it is used to uphold one's right to copy things he comes into possession of, or preserve the authors within a derivative work.
When morality is applied to copyright of things other than software, they often become different, though similar issues with their own nuances. For instance when you acquire and modify software that is free, you're under no obligation to share it with anyone. However, I also believe that free publication of all research should be a component of legal conduct for public scientific and academic institutions, and I don't think pharmaceutical companies should be allowed to operate while marketing proprietary research.

2024-09-26 02:33:15 GMT

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It's like the saying about how a lock only keeps an honest man honest: if software wasn't copyrightable/patentable (as it was for a period of time) then free software licenses wouldn't need to exist.
The issue of copyright on software versus other forms of media, I think are mostly separate for this reason, since they emphasize freedom of use/reuse versus freedom of copying/sharing.
Video games are also a grey area, since they both consist of software and media. I think it's a great thing when, for example game developers follow the example of Quake and release the code for their games freely.