So then I guess C is salamander. Also lays eggs and lives by a pool, but doesn’t do anything extra, and is a necessary step before most of the other modern languages.

COBOL is a coelacanth. To everyone’s surprise, they’re still out there. We thought they were an old, very extinct example of a non-terrestrial lobe-finned fish, but they actually hung on in some odd environments. They cause massive indigestion to anyone that has to consume them.

If Node is a mosquito, Javascript itself is another hymenopteran: the yellow jacket wasp. Just as hated, and with a tendency to injure handlers, but widely successful and defended as filling an actual useful role in nature. They build delicate, arguably pretty nests.

Roaches don’t spread nearly as much disease as 'squiters, and IIRC are actually important in some ecosystems.

What, could you have done better in 70-whatever?

I’ve definitely never been guilty of this. /s

Alright, I’ll never, ever write something this way now. Good to know.

That’s a good point. Supporting all hardware in particular is a pretty big ask. Maybe you could cleverly fit memory management into a small amount of code, but a pile of arbitrary standards can’t really be meaningfully compressed.

In the video he states the OS he uses works on the original Pentium processor which came out in 1993. Four years after Reagan went out of office.

I was wondering. That didn’t look like an 80’s computer.

I take it all the important stuff stays in America, though. There’s a chance you couldn’t even tell I’m Canadian if you met me, but there’s still senior devs earning 60k up here.

In every country but the US, really. Someday, big tech companies will realise that a person in any other Western country can code just as well for half the price, but for now they won’t even consider it cause 'Murica.

It should be possible, right? It’s not like we’ve gotten worse at coding. All the bloat is a function of people not caring, and to some degree different requirements.

I should check if lemmy.sdf.org is back online. Retrocomputing would love this.

Mentioning @CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org, so I can find this easier.

Lol, I’m already up and running. It’s pretty good, and I can actually use my mouse with it in bash. Protip, it seems very important to use the right window size. It’s good enough to do a lot of normal browsing, but openstreetmap understandably had broken controls. The only local issue is that I can’t see what I’m entering into the URL bar.

It’s also designed to run distributed, so you can use shitty bandwidth between a rendering machine and the display machine. I should try fitting it into a radio channel or phone connection or something, haha. I also wonder if it could be adapted to work with Tor Browser.

Really? Is it open source, or are we just going by reputation of the developers?

I actually don’t know much about the kernel they use, I was really just trying to emphasise the level of trust you put in your OS.

Absolute chad.

(Mandatory disclaimer that I actually think the anti-GUI jerk goes too far)

I’m absolutely fascinated if somebody can point me to that.

How well did it render most sites, compared to the other CLI browsers?

Nice! I knew it had to be a thing.

Did you do much browsing? Lynx is a thing, but it can’t do JavaScript.

Come to think of it, is there a CLI Lemmy client?

Blasphemy! And also I’m poor, although I guess if I really wanted to run spyware as my kernel I could pirate it.

But yeah, I’m getting the sense those are the two games in town, Linux-wise.

Third options?

For your vector issue, I’d go the route of some static examples if possible. Do you have a way to manually work out the answer that your code is trying to achieve?

Not necessarily. In this scenario I’d imagine it’s a series of numbers as opposed to something more human-friendly exactly because there’s internal complexity that’s important but hard to manually survey, let alone generate. If you’ve worked with GANs at all, maybe it’s a point in a latent space.

For side effects, that may indicate what I referred to as tightly coupled code. Could you give an example of what you mean by “side effect”?

I mean it in the standard functional language way, if you’re familiar. There’s an operation that happens at some step of an algorithm, and it changes a data structure which is referred to or updated at another step. Sometimes you can’t really avoid it, because the problem itself has an interconnection like that.

First off, thanks for the help!

Really responsible devs write the unit tests first, because you should know what you’re going to put in and what you’ll get out before you start writing anything.

I’ve obviously heard the general concept, but this is actually pretty helpful, now that I’m thinking about it a bit more.

I’ve written pretty mathy stuff for the most part, and a function might return an appropriately sized vector containing what looks like the right numbers to the naked eye, but which is actually wrong in some high-dimensional way. Since I haven’t even thought of whatever way it’s gone wrong, I can’t very well test for it. I suppose what I could do is come up with a few properties the correct result should have, unrelated to the actual use of it, and then test them and hope one fails. It might take a lot of extra time, but maybe it’s worth it.

How do you deal with side effects, if what you’re doing involves them?

Interesting. I wonder why they didn’t just move it to somewhere with less radiation? And clearly, they have another more trustworthy machine doing the checking somehow. A self-correcting OS would have to parity check it’s parity checks somehow, which I’m sure is possible, but would be kind of novel.

In a really ugly environment, you might have to abandon semiconductors entirely, and go back to vacuum as the magical medium, since it’s radiation proof (false vacuum apocalypse aside). You could make a nuvistor integrated “chip” which could do the same stuff; the biggest challenge would be maintaining enough emissions from the tiny and quickly-cooling cathodes.