David Mankins

gatherer of network lint, occasional potsmaster, he/him, though I should switch to they/them just to make the usage more familiar to people

(profile images: a butterfly among leaf litter; mouse sculpture (with seed offerings) at a Kyoto shrine; don’t know how to add alt. text to these images)

Last Notes

2026-04-17 22:14:13 GMT

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I’m piping up through the hallowed tradition of saying something wrong so I can be educated by being corrected.
So, sorry if I mislead you with the following. Hopefully the corrections I receive will be useful to you, too.
Living in the land of primitive languages, I sometimes would like to be able to sneak into the way the language calls and returns from subroutines
- ancient, small-memory-machine example: when calling a subroutine, first make sure the subroutine is loaded into memory, and fetch it, if it is not, possibly unloading it when the subroutine returns
- then there are adding things like tracking memory allocations, and possibly garbage-collecting them — a lot of this has snuck into C++ through smart pointers implemented using template metaprogramming.
My memory, from reading *The art of the metaobject protocol*, is that one use was to tell the language about the nature of the data-type (sparse vs dense arrays, I think was the example?) so it could know to use function implementations that were more efficient for the data-type actually used by the program.
You metaprogrammer wizards, is this right? Or am I just confused by the prefix “Meta” in “Metaobject protocol”, and confusing two completely different things?

2026-03-26 22:49:47 GMT

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What about if it evolves from a mere intelligence?
Shifting topic slightly, the LLMs are interesting to me because I know how they work, but they still manage to do things that seem awfully suprising to come out of a Markov chain on steroids (e.g., planning). I wonder what it’s assembling out of its training set to get there.

2026-03-10 05:16:18 GMT

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Probably it’s a little bit of hubris — they’re skilled programmers, they won’t commit bad code (or agree to bad pull requests).
It’s not like the AI makes someone sloppy. It’s that sloppy people use AI to generate mountains of code.
It’s like the sorceror’s apprentice[1]: the apprentice screwed up with the brooms, but the sorceror knew how to manage them.
[1] https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/6054

2026-03-09 21:48:56 GMT

RE: https://mastodon.art/@JohannaForster/116200304204639927
@npub1hhs…rl5g
very *Automatic Noodle*
(alt text: a solar punk post apocalyptic drawing of a traveler with back pack being offered a welcoming steaming bowl of food by a robot chef. The scenery is a bit overgrown with greenery. The colors are cheerful, but subdued.)

2026-03-03 01:26:01 GMT

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back in the dawn of Linux there was a sort of competing microphone system known as Minix. Unfortunately, it was tied to a publisher that wanted $25 or so for the diskettes containing the distribution, instead of being freely downloadable (this was understandable, as Minix was a couple of years older and the net wasn’t as prevalent as a means of software distribution). That was enough to limit distribution.
Plan 9 may have had a lot of microkernel features , too. I don’t know, I never looked into it deeply.

2024-12-25 01:13:54 GMT

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You should check out its sibling “eth”, representing the hard th sound. It looks like an o with a claw emerging from the top: ð

2024-12-03 03:54:10 GMT

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Scheme might be a good alternative to Forth.
One of the nicest features of Scheme (and other LISPs) is the lack of syntax — everything is an S-expression. So parsing is trivial and you can concentrate on other aspects of the language.
A LISPer friend once joked to me that he’d picked up a compiler book thinking he might learn some tricks, but it turned out the whole book was about tokenizing and parsing, which he considered a solved problem. And, of course, there’s Alan Kay’s comment about how one half page of the *Lisp 1.5 Manual* by McCarthy amounted to “the Maxwell’s Equations of programming”.
Google “scheme in one defun” for a simple C implementation. Peter Norvig has a one-page implementation in Python.

2024-10-13 17:51:44 GMT

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Well, yes. Buying Twitter shattered the Musk-as-Tony-Stark-genius masquerade, and revealed the Musk-as-Manchild-Edgelord reality (Tony Stark was, after all, a manchild, too, at least initially).

2024-10-13 17:03:47 GMT

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I kind of think it matters a little, if only for the opportunity cost.
Let’s take the Musk-public-persona perspective (setting aside the “every billionaire is a crime” mentality for a moment) — he spent about $25 of his own billions on Twitter, what if, instead, he’d spent a few billion on a Mars simulator of the Biosphere 2 sort: a sustained attempt to build an enclosed ecology of the sort that a space colony (Mars, moon, asteroid, orbital) would require?
How about a few billion to build a space station — or a space playground, or even a space mansion?
Or piled money into robotics?
All these things would have fed his ego *and* his reputation, but instead….

2024-10-07 19:03:23 GMT

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Sorry, if i’d remembered any details i’d have shared them. I just looked, and can’t find anything. Now I wonder if i’m misremembering someone using the line sarcastically.

2024-10-07 18:14:08 GMT

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I believe it was trotted out recently by some politicians with respect to the damage resulting from Hurricane Helene

2024-09-26 22:00:39 GMT

Science Vs is a delightful podcast that takes deep dives into some science topic or another. Somewhat surprisingly, their new season starts with a story about the rise of the Young Lords the South Bronx in the late sixties.
They were young Puerto Ricans living in the Bronx. Trying to organize for Puerto Rican independence, they encountered neighborhood people, who scoffed at the whole idea.
Well, what do you care about? they asked the old men. The old men pointed at the trash in the street.
So they started cleaning the street. And the neighborhood folks came out with their brooms.
But the city didn’t come pick up the trash bags.
So they piled the bags in the middle of a major intersection, and set the pile on fire.
After a few weeks of this, the city started picking up the trash bags.
Then the Young Lords hijacked a tuberculosis testing truck and brought it to their neighborhood. They told sick people in the neighborhood where they would bring the truck and when. They also told the press and the press was there when the police arrived, so the police didn’t do anything, and the city announced that the truck would be parked in the neighborhood once a week.
Like the Black Panthers, they did breakfast programs. They started a program to test kids for lead poisoning.
It’s a great podcast: https://gimletmedia.com/shows/science-vs/awhmz96w/the-time-the-protesters-won

2024-08-10 00:24:57 GMT

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have you read Naomi Kritzer’s *Cat fishing on Catnet*?
I’m sure the blithered tech might annoy you, but it’s a sweet story about resilience and found community.
plus a deus ex machina
but your request is like a plot device in that novel.
(sorry, no cat pictures)
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41556068-catfishing-on-catnet

2024-07-07 01:01:48 GMT

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Tektronix had a “terminal” programmed in Smalltalk
https://w140.com/tekwiki/wiki/4404

2024-06-14 15:41:10 GMT

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well, maybe we’ll tip the atmosphere over into Venus territory, but that seems unlikely