Nostr notes by Kevin Graaf

And by the way when I say flat I mean flat, a few inches thick. ...

2026-11-08T01:48:02Z

In reply to nevent1q…7kfd
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And by the way when I say flat I mean flat, a few inches thick. (Aiken tube prototype pictured)

You guys really have no idea how crazy CRT R&D was. There ...

2026-11-08T01:22:50Z

You guys really have no idea how crazy CRT R&D was. There were flat panel CRTs developed in the 1950s. There’s a whole alternative universe of strange and crazy display tech we never got.

Nostr event nevent1qqsq6yz2yn6k95r6fnucl7u2wtgu2hwrwcw3k20xcpkk9xthyduldgczyq32dkpe8gn7tweh2hthrvgrhtl5m8npgmmg0fe97yapk4ancc6d2a9trqh

2026-11-03T21:00:48Z

I love SML :)

I’ve never really had an issue with the error messages ...

2026-10-24T06:58:16Z

In reply to nevent1q…ve7q
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I’ve never really had an issue with the error messages 🤷‍♂️

even if I thought that way about my own documents, Typst is ...

2026-10-23T22:42:43Z

In reply to nevent1q…k6jg
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even if I thought that way about my own documents, Typst is clearly being developed with “churn” culture in mind. I don’t want to have to switch to new libraries or packages every 6 months according to the current fashion. TeX is the only ecosystem I know of that isn’t like that. Well, and Common Lisp

I would also recommend reading my original post carefully again. ...

2026-10-23T22:01:28Z

In reply to nevent1q…fhvd
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I would also recommend reading my original post carefully again. Notice where I said that TeX is finished, it is not a moving target but a stable basis. It is basically bug free and highly stable. Can you say the same of Typst? Will your Typst code run unmodified in 5, 10, 20, 50 years? Are you sure?

it’s so much more than that. Typst makes extensive use of wasm ...

2026-10-23T21:59:52Z

In reply to nevent1q…sa8l
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it’s so much more than that. Typst makes extensive use of wasm modules. Now you need a wasm engine as well as whatever the compilers were for the original source to wasm. And yes, I think Rust, not just the language, but cargo style micro dependency based package managers, have the effect of tying users to corporate-approved OSes and architectures.

I don’t care if something is nominally open source. I care ...

2026-10-23T21:19:30Z

In reply to nevent1q…m084
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I don’t care if something is nominally open source. I care about my ability to port, maintain, and run it myself. TeX asks almost nothing of the OS and is written in a very simple dialect of Pascal. I’ve written my own compiler. Typst requires a multi million line of code compiler and very specific computing environment.

Before people go all in on Typst, I’d like them to consider the ...

2026-10-23T20:54:44Z

Before people go all in on Typst, I’d like them to consider the wisdom of replacing TeX, software that is:

- Absolutely finished
- Essentially bug free
- Written in a simple, highly portable language
- Extremely general
- Backwards compatible with decades old code

…with a commercial product that relies on an enormous tangled web of dependencies amounting to millions of lines of code for something which is far less general than that which it replaces

RE: https://mstdn.social/@mfeir/117472396351742808 There is a ...

2026-10-21T06:21:01Z

RE: https://mstdn.social/@mfeir/117472396351742808

There is a notion that when you write, you are simply mechanically translating your thoughts from a Fodorian “mentalese” into English. This is not true. The thought doesn’t exist until you organize it. An LLM cannot do that for you because it isn’t you.
nostr:note15v0ynadn97ma37n6xreaqhln90k2t4t4chz4u4p6syv5qaajmnqs5l34e8

such languages already exist and in fact predate Unix, that was ...

2026-08-31T06:25:33Z

In reply to nevent1q…c5pq
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such languages already exist and in fact predate Unix, that was my point

I don’t see any reason why a normal dynamic language couldn’t ...

2026-08-31T05:57:47Z

In reply to nevent1q…ma0a
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I don’t see any reason why a normal dynamic language couldn’t load executables with the right bindings, which is accomplished with a syscall anyway.

but nothing requires it works like that! If Python or JS or Lua ...

2026-08-31T05:37:08Z

In reply to nevent1q…yjg7
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but nothing requires it works like that! If Python or JS or Lua or whatever had direct bindings to the kernel interface, it could just make syscalls as though they were any other function. In this way you could also “compose” syscalls in the way you could any other Python function. There would be absolutely no need for pipes, no need for argparse, or any of that stuff

there is absolutely zero technical reason why a shell has to be a ...

2026-08-31T02:14:44Z

In reply to nevent1q…un9h
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there is absolutely zero technical reason why a shell has to be a “special” language. It just needs a REPL of sorts and a way to interface to syscalls. That’s it. There’s nothing special about how Unix tools “compose.” Python functions “compose” in the exact same way they just don’t flatten every parameter into unstructured byte strings.

First, nothing about a shell being able to make syscalls directly ...

2026-08-31T02:13:06Z

In reply to nevent1q…ngg7
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First, nothing about a shell being able to make syscalls directly implies it couldn’t also call executables. I never suggested I think a shell should *only* be able to make syscalls. Moreover, in Multics, its shell can directly call functions in its equivalent of shared objects. But in your scenario, in a sane shell you could

1. Implement it in the shell itself (as you would with Python or Lua or whatever)

2. Write a program and call it from the shell

but that’s not what I’m saying. In many other OSes, the shell ...

2026-08-31T01:45:57Z

In reply to nevent1q…njmk
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but that’s not what I’m saying. In many other OSes, the shell can just make any syscall. There’s no need for tools at all. And in fact in Multics, the shell can call functions in libraries directly, so you don’t need shims there either. There’s no reason why this would increase the shell’s complexity

I feel an increasing amount of distress about how much knowledge ...

2026-08-30T22:52:35Z

I feel an increasing amount of distress about how much knowledge of non-UNIX lineages of operating systems is being lost. Even new OSes which aren’t strictly compatible often share its brain damages and poor designs. I really feel comfortable saying that there is nothing unique to Unix that isn’t actively terrible and/or solving problems created by its terrible design in the first place. We really need to bury this 57 year old mistake along with its equally terrible spawn C.

I am gonna be honest, I have a really hard time seeing how the ...

2026-08-29T23:29:59Z

I am gonna be honest, I have a really hard time seeing how the status quo of the mid 2000s and before of small time proprietary software shops was “worse” than what we have now. What has “open source” amounted to? Well…

1. Free labor for corporations. In web-based apps, you can simply use even GPL-based code for free without reciprocal releases.

2. Grist for the LLM training mill

3. Killing the ability of small time software developers to make money on their own

As much as I love computer science, there is so obviously a moral ...

2026-08-28T22:07:19Z

As much as I love computer science, there is so obviously a moral rot in this field that goes back to the absolute beginning. McCarthy, Minsky (who died before his Epstein connections were made public), many many others…

We cannot move past this moment until we root out the human-eliminationist, misanthropic, eugenicist ideology.

Hey vintage computer people. I’m looking for a document called ...

2026-08-19T05:19:25Z

Hey vintage computer people. I’m looking for a document called the “X11/NeWS Server Guide.” It’s not on Bitsavers, this documents the protocol it uses. Does anyone know have a copy or scan? I’d greatly appreciate it!

And I’m sorry to say but Linux itself has been a disaster for ...

2026-07-17T08:15:25Z

In reply to nevent1q…f5nj
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And I’m sorry to say but Linux itself has been a disaster for OS research and development. It’s 2026, and all we have to show for it is a clone of Unix, an utterly unremarkable early minicomputer OS, a design old enough to be my parent. If LLMs are so great, where’s the new interesting work? Where’s the groundbreaking new kernels? This field is an absolute joke sometimes.

The Linus Torvalds hero worship is out of control and has been ...

2026-07-17T08:12:25Z

The Linus Torvalds hero worship is out of control and has been for a long time. He is confidently wrong, not infrequently, even in his supposed area of expertise. For example, he is still repeating falsehoods about microkernel performance that are really just laughable in a world with billions of L4 deployments. Take his pro-LLM tirade as more of the same.

Doing some deep dives on structured text editing. Is anyone aware ...

2026-04-09T19:30:33Z

Doing some deep dives on structured text editing. Is anyone aware of any work on *data structures* for editing tree-like data? I’m specifically interested in stuff like multiple cursors, efficient undo/redo, etc. This is directly relevant to my research re: Telecode (which is a tree, or hedge rather), but I’ve not been able to find any papers covering data structures. Sort of unclear to me whether ropes and other usual suspects generalize well to a structured domain

POV: you are using the "modern" internet on anything less ...

2026-01-23T14:40:36Z

POV: you are using the "modern" internet on anything less than a 10 gigabit connection