1. The computer graphics industry got started at the university of Utah
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Summary
The IEEE has recognized the key computer graphics and visualisation techniques that Ivan Sutherland and David Evans developed in the 1960s and 1970s, many of which are still used today. Using the facilities at the University of Utah and their own firm, Evan and Sutherland produced such processes as Gouraud shading, the Warnock algorithm and the Phong reflection model. Many of their doctoral students went on to form Pixar, Atari and Silicon Graphics. The techniques they created helped to make Milestone, Toy Story and Finding Dory possible.
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The University of Utah was one of the original nodes of ARPANET, the precursor to the internet. The author’s father worked as an electron microscopist at the university in the 1980s and had early access to the internet. The author’s family was one of the first to have internet in Utah in 1994, with a dial-up connection that took 15 minutes to load one webpage. The author credits the internet’s influence on their life and is grateful for it.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The article reports on a recent commemorative conference in Utah where Ivan Sutherland gave a talk about single quantum flux circuits, an area he is currently researching. He discusses how the US is missing out on the next hardware revolution by not paying attention to SQF. The author believes that Sutherland’s talk highlights why the early graphics team was so successful and that their environment was unique and unfortunately irreproducible. A link to watch the talk is provided, as well as an article in the New York Times about Sutherland’s research.
2. The Mao-Kissinger Meeting of 1973
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Summary
The article discusses the insights that can be gained from declassified foreign relations documents, including the importance of judgment calls in note-taking. The author shares their experience of reading Chinese and US notetakers’ records of meetings and highlights the differences between them. They suggest that comparing different memcons can help provide a bigger picture of conversations. The article also explains how citizens in China can access and copy historical documents but highlights that material may be excised from documents destined for publication. Additionally, the article includes a translation of the Chinese side memorandum of conversation between Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai and Henry Kissinger from February 17, 1973, which demonstrates the importance of understanding not only what is included but also what is excluded from such conversations.
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The article discusses a historic meeting between President Richard Nixon and Chairman Mao Zedong, with Kissinger present. A memorandum of the conversation can be found at the provided link.
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The article explores the complex political relationships during the Vietnam War, where China stopped supporting North Vietnam but that didn’t stop North Vietnam from invading South Vietnam. Despite the US no longer being worried about the domino theory, as they were now aligned with China against the Soviet Union, the author wonders what the various players were thinking, as if a game of chess.
3. Buy well, buy once
Total comment counts : 57
Summary
The author owns a minimal amount of possessions and enjoys keeping order. They recently sent their worn leather shoes to a craftsman, James McKiven, who makes handmade leather wallets. The author wondered if James could upcycle the leather into something useful, instead of throwing them away. James surprised the author with a humorous thank-you note and a beautifully crafted leather cardholder. The author recommends Whitstable Craft Co. to anyone seeking quality, handmade leather goods.
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The article argues that the philosophy of paying high prices for high status items is often used by rich people to justify their spending. The author suggests that Crocs, Kirkland, G-Shock, and Corolla are top-quality products that are popular among middle-class people but ridiculed by the rich because they lack status. Furthermore, the author criticizes the repurposing of trivial items, which he claims is used by some rich people to make themselves feel like they are making the world a better place, despite their role in working for companies that cause harm to society.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The article discusses the author’s skepticism of the minimalist lifestyle, as exemplified by a person who claims to own only 192 possessions. The author suggests that this lifestyle may not be as minimal as it seems, as the person likely relies heavily on external services and may not have many practical items like utensils or food. The author prefers a self-reliant approach to possessions, enjoying the process of fixing and repairing things themselves.
4. Zig language server and cancellation
Total comment counts : 7
Summary
The article discusses the importance of having a strong data model when implementing an LSP for a language, and how this can affect the behavior of the language server when dealing with user edits to source code. The article suggests several approaches to handling user edits, including strong consistency, immutability, and cancellation, and also proposes an idea for a semi-space garbage collection approach. Ultimately, the article suggests considering a non-deterministic approach for some language features, but emphasizes the importance of ensuring correctness for refactoring.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The author of the article, who is working on symbol indexing, believes that the model presented in the article is over-engineered and ignoring important details related to code completion, such as the usefulness of an AST even after the code is edited. The author suggests that instead of cancelling a translation unit parse on edit, a subsequent parse should be enqueued immediately after with a debouncing timer to avoid consuming too many resources. The author also notes that incremental parsing could be used as an upgrade to this approach, but it can be challenging with a preprocessor.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The author is interested in multithreading, parallelism, async, and coroutine design space, as well as cancellation. They have written a simple 1 scheduler thread:M kernel threads:N lightweight thread runtime in Rust, C, and Java that can be used for process switching and scheduling, as well as for cancellation using a structure for loops. The method can create very responsive code, and it is even possible to cancel “while (true)” loops by replacing them with “while (!preempted)”. The code is available on GitHub. Although there is potential for a race, it can be detected and resolved.
5. Emoji Kitchen
Total comment counts : 21
Summary
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Google has created Emoji Kitchen, a platform that lets users “mash up” emojis to create new combinations. These combinations are not generated by technology, but are created by Google itself. Users can select two emojis and Emoji Kitchen will provide new combinations or variations based on the combination selected.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The article is providing links to related content about a feature called “Emoji Kitchen.” One link is to a different URL for Emoji Kitchen, and the other link is to a discussion about Emoji Kitchen on a site called Hacker News.
6. A Case of the MUMPS (2007)
Total comment counts : 23
Summary
The article describes the challenging experience of working with the programming language MUMPS, a language designed to create code that cannot be maintained by anyone. It has a syntax that is notoriously difficult to understand, with commands that can only be abbreviated to a single letter. Bryan, a programmer with no prior experience in the language, spent three months learning it in a classroom before spending two years working in a “MUMPS shop”. There, he had to navigate a complex system of “global arrays” and “chained” routines stored in a confusing naming convention. Bryan ultimately left his job rather than spend the rest of his career in the MUMPS environment.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The article discusses the history and constraints of the MUMPS programming language, which was created in 1966 for severely resource-limited hardware environments. It was designed to provide multi-user systems and aid multi-programming by aggressively abbreviating memory partitions, allowing for more than one MUMPS job to fit into very small memories. Early machines running MUMPS supported multiple jobs running concurrently, and even a single-user PC with limited memory could support multiple users connecting to it from non-graphical video display terminals. The article marvels at the fact that MUMPS, which was practically a precursor to an operating system, is still used in some verticals today despite its limitations from a bygone era.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The article describes the author’s experience with MUMPS, a programming language that is known for its brevity and obscurity. The author recounts a time when an accidental deletion of the editor caused them to spend a day writing a new one. Despite the difficulties, the author notes that MUMPS has some interesting aspects and is still used in healthcare and insurance industries. The language is described as having evaluation of expressions at the core, making it closer to a functional language than other interpreted languages from that era.
7. 1970s campus librarians foresaw our world of distributed knowledge and research
Total comment counts : 5
Summary
In 1970, Syracuse University conducted an experiment, SUPARS, which was one of many ambitious information-retrieval studies that took place between late 1960s and mid-1970s in US universities. The system was designed by a librarian named Pauline Atherton as an early antecedent to ‘search’ and offered a searchable corpus of 35,000 abstracts from the American Psychological Association’s psychological abstracts. SUPARS enabled users to access and use previous searches to find alternative terms or approaches and prefigured contemporary web search in several ways. The team stripped away subject headings and made all the words searchable on their own. Once a search was made, the system saved every SUPARS search in a parallel database that allowed users to access and use those previous searches to find alternative terms or approaches.
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The library of Alexandria may have contained many scrolls because all docking boats had to have their scrolls copied and added to the library. The author views libraries as a form of distributed knowledge and research using current technology. The best book he has read regarding media and human development is called “Tube of Plenty”. The internet only shows where to find information, but not necessarily how to find it when needed.
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The article discusses how people in the past were afraid of breaking the computer system when typing on the keyboard because computers were rare and expensive. The author recalls how they introduced others to computers and emphasized that no harm could be done. Today, computers are easily replaceable and less expensive, making it less daunting to use them.
8. We don’t trade with ants
Total comment counts : 29
Summary
The article discusses the concept of trading with ants and concludes that the reason why humans don’t trade with ants is that they cannot communicate with them. While ants have skills and can do tasks that humans would find valuable, the inability to communicate renders them useless as trading partners. However, this is not applicable to potential AI-human trade relationships as AI systems can communicate with humans. The article also speculates on the future of AI-human relationships, suggesting that AI will eventually become more powerful than humans but that humans will still have niche uses for a while. The idea that humans could become useless to AI systems and potentially face extermination is called into question, as ants are only considered useless due to a lack of communication, which will not be the case with AI systems.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The article suggests that the argument that superintelligence is dangerous due to the comparison with ants is not a strong one. Instead, the author proposes that replacing “super-intelligent AI” with “omnipotent human being” makes the argument much easier. The concept of “alignment” becomes unnecessary as humans are, by default, aligned. The episode “It’s a good life” from The Twilight Zone is cited as a reminder that being omnipotent could be a danger, as a six-year-old child enslaves his entire village.
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The article states that humans trade with various creatures and living things such as bees and vegetation in a mutually beneficial way, where they provide things like protection and hive for bees in exchange for honey. There are also co-dependent relationships between flora and fauna.
9. Debian 12 “Bookworm”
Total comment counts : 37
Summary
The Debian project has released the new stable version 12, named bookworm, which will have support for the next five years and boasts over 11,000 new packages and updates to 67% of all packages from the previous release. The new archive area includes a separation of non-free firmware from other non-free packages, making it possible to build various official installation images, while the genericcloud image is designed to run in any virtualised environment. The system supports a range of desktop environments, and there are multiple language translations for man-pages available. Bookworm includes new packages such as shiny-server for scientific web applications using R, and planetary-system-stacker to help with image stacking and astrometry resolution.
Top 1 Comment Summary
Debian has made an important change by including non-free firmware by default in its official install image for the first time following a vote. While it makes it easier to install Debian on certain devices, some feel that the inclusion of proprietary blobs goes against the distribution’s principles.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The author expresses their admiration for the Debian community, despite acknowledging that there may be issues with Debian. They express gratitude as a former user of an older version of Debian.
10. I’m Not Invidious
Total comment counts : 18
Summary
Invidious, a project that doesn’t use any part of the YouTube API and doesn’t do anything illegal, received an email from Google/YouTube asking them to stop their work. However, the email was invalid from the start because Invidious isn’t a “product or service” and it isn’t owned by the person who received the email. Invidious is an open-source project that anyone can contribute to, and any use of “we” or “us” is just a summarization of all the other contributors. The person who received the email states that if Google/YouTube ask them to stop working on Invidious, they will stop.
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The article warns that ignoring legal letters or emails can result in severe consequences such as seized domains and servers, lawyers obtaining personal information through the courts, and expensive legal battles. It suggests that before ignoring a cease and desist, one should seek legal advice from an expert who can provide a defense strategy. Although there might be ways to defend a project, ignoring letters is not one of them.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The author suggests that nitpicking on the language of the Google letter sent to Invidious, a free and open-source alternative front end for the video-sharing platform YouTube, is not helpful. They argue that the message conveys that the Invidious project manager is capable of directing the project, including the cessation of its operation, and they urge the manager to consult a lawyer. The author notes that even honorary positions have a level of implied responsibility, and the cessation of operation is a different legal question. Additionally, the author mentions that the full letter from Google was not released, and there is a possibility that it is a C&D.