Cool, and I love the retro font. I had a Vic-20 (early 80s) and Commodore PET 2001 (1977) I am learning Odin, and I was going to try creating live coding environment with scripting in Forth and with the gui and rest in Odin, but for audio and graphics. I was inspired long ago by Paul Batchelor's Sporth and Tidal (now tidal cycles?). Forth is a great language. You can make an compiler/interpreter in a few days. John Earnest's ok.js is also cool. I like stack and array languages, so when I am not playing in J, I use Uiua. Uiua has the capability to do audio and graphics/animations and scratches my array/stack itch.
I picked up a book around 1977 on the PDP-11 processor and worked my way through it with pencil and paper to understand the architecture when I was around 13. I saves up my summer job money and bought a used Commodore PET 2001 for ~$700 with cassette drive and 8kb and a green phosphor screen. I later bought an expansion for it that gave me 32kb. The PET's 6502 was simpler, but that DEC handbook and working out registers on paper gave me a strong foundation in computers. I realized computers would only be tools and always managed to take jobs outside of comp. sci. or IT, but always used a computer and programmed utilities for every job I had in any language I fancied at the time and throughout the years: C, Basic, asm (6502, PIC, Scenix, 68000, 8086/88, now ARM/x64), Forth, Lisp (Lush/Lush2 lush-users on Sourceforge with Yann LeCun to get Lush running, APL, J, Logo, Pascal, Factor, Java, Python, F#, now Rust, Odin, and J is still open on my desktop daily). I had in mind how people were talking about high-paying jobs if you learned WordPerfect, and it was "the future" back in 1991-93. I felt people were putting the tool before thought, intelligence, and process. I did dip into DBA and IT here and there for a little bit, but I thoroughly enjoyed writing embedded software for the window animation I was working on for a display company, and interactive prox switches on the store window at Sachs to trigger a pneumatically actuated Nutcracker to raise his arm and close his jaw and other fun kinetic pieces in the late 90s (Pre-Arduino saturation days - Parallax Basic Stamp, Scenix, PIC, and PCBs from scratch by hand with resist and etch). Kids loved pressing the Nutcracker switches! The reason I learned so much was that you had to go to the library, write a letter or eventually by the 90s email and user groups, and just plain figure it out through trial and error on your own. I had a VIC-20, Commodore 128, Amiga 500/1000, then a PowerPC Mac running Mach Linux in the late 90s/early 2000. I loved Commodore. It's a shame. They were the best option for the buck.
Jane Street has unlimited engineers and money to do this.
At least from the sidelines, it looks like they've built/forked most parts of the OCaml ecosystem to make it work (OxCaml, Dune was built by then, custom profilers, custom networking hardware, etc).
Of course a lot of their work is open source and can be used, but I wouldn't assume that it would be worth the effort to do something similar with OCaml yourself. Maybe it is! LLMs go brrr and all that.
A great tech book on symbolic computers in general and Lisp machines, is Peter Kogge's 1991, "The Architecture of Symbolic Computers". I believe new efforts by people like Yann LeCun will counter the "LLMs or bust" monoculture along with SOC/ASICs, in-memory compute, neuromorphic chips, dataflow, optical/analog hybrids , etc. that will bring a healthy correction or alternatives to the Von Neumann architecture.
For me, vigorous exercise, riding my bike, running, jumping rope, has always made me feel better mentally and physically whether it was a pathogen funk or just life and feeling down or symptomatic as some describe below. I always check my kids and myself after hikes, especially in tall grass or shrubs. I've found ticks here and there over the years. The cathartic effect of high-intensity exercise where you push yourself to what you think is your limit is amazing for your physical and mental well being. The old Sufi saying, "Movement is life; stillness is death" is my mantra. I have friends who avoid hiking for fear of ticks and Lyme disease. It's a shame, since being outdoors in the sun, smelling the woods, and taking in the views while walking are priceless. Movement over pharmaceuticals.
We passed on Rust for Ada/SPARK2014 to write to bare metal on Cortex-M processor for real-time, high-integrity, and verifiable mission-critical software. Rust is making strides to be a future competitor, but it's new to the formal verification tooling and lacks any real world legacy in our domain. Ada's latest spec. is 2022. Other than AdaCore's verified Rust compiler, Rust still does not have a stable language specification like C/C++, Lisp, or Ada, SPARK 2014. I have no doubt that it will start rising to tick all the boxes that Ada/SPARK do right now with their decades of legacy in high-intetrity, mission-critical applications. The mandate to use memory-safe software put into effect this past Jan 1 2026 puts some wind in Rust's sails, but it's more than memory-safety in this domain. Plus, I do not enjoy Rust, but Cargo is nice. We're looking at Lean for further assistance in verifying our work. I think there was and is lot of Rust evangelism that will also carry it forward and boost even more Rust popularity,
Yes, and AdaCore's tooling is formally verified and produces reports already familiar to aerospace, railway, and auto auditors for verifying certifications making it attractive to this industry segment of high-integrity apps. Memory safety is taken care of mainly through the features Ada/SPARK2014 offer in creating safe, high-integrity programs, correct.
I've read (from one from one of the people that contribute to Rust afair), that they were involved building formal verification for Rust, and found that the control flow is just so complex that its very hard to use the language like this.
But I think the lack of a formal specification is really not as big a deal as it's made out to be. It's one of those "think of a technical reason to justify a decision I've already made" excuses.
Obviously it would be great if Rust does get a full formal specification but I think avoiding it because it doesn't is just silly. C++ has a formal specification... which frequently has bugs and ambiguities. They aren't magically right and either way you're going to need to do a lot of non-formal testing as well as formal verification if you want confidence in a design.
This is true even for domains where formal verification is routine like SystemVerilog. I've seen designs pass formal but fail in simulation or vice versa due to subtle differences in the semantics. (Hopefully that can't happen for Rust but you get the point.)
Rust is not really memory safe if you combine it with external libraries. Too many "unsafe" keywords, and lack of tooling for code analysis and verification.
Edit:
With c, you can do memory safety analysis on all system libraries and entire Linux kernel. Some OS kernels, libs and languages do not have dynamic memory allocation at all!
Some languages are memory safe!
Learn more about embedded programming!
To me Rust is just a nicer language than C. I don't care too much about how easy the language makes memory safety, provided it doesn't make it difficult. But Rust's type system, higher-order functions, polymorphism, macros, etc. make it more pleasant to write than C for complicated programs.
I'm going to download and check out Mine and Coalton. Right now, I use Neovide and Lem interchangeably. However, I am in deep with Shen. I bought a hardcopy of The Book of Shen, 5th Edition, and I still have Peter Kogge's 1991 text, "The Architecture of Symbolic Computers". I suspect the Hindley-Milner type system in Coalton will be more familiar to the Haskellers out there, but it is not as strong as Shen's Sequent calculus type system. In Shen, computation is allowed in side-conditions (if, let, and, etc.), so you can compute over terms inside types. Shen wins for raw expressive power and programmable types. Shen is very portable, but being a DSL, Coalton must integrate nicely with Common Lisp. And you get native exe's. Glad to see a simple way for people to program in CL or Coalton without having to go through the decades I have done with Vim and Emacs. VS Code bores me, but it is practical, even if it seems like junkyard truck with everything bolted on or hanging off of it.
I ran Minix around 1991 on my Amiga computer. Minix had a smaller attack surface and isolation provided by its microkernel vs. Linux's monolithic kernel. I had the Minix textbook, and it was easier to think about it because of the split along modules. I personally think Minix vs. Linux was very similar to Betamax vs. VHS. Betamax was technically superior, but the market picked VHS. I may run Minix again on my old Lenovo T430u from 2012. I was amazed that some of the code to Minix was in the appendix of the book, sort of like the magazines with pages of code to hand type in games or toy programs. I guess I liked MS-DOS for the same reason: tinkering, from my PEEK and POKE back in my Commodore PET 2001 (1977) and Vic-20 days...
Betamax had better picture quality but only had 1 hour of capacity. VHS had 2 hours. Consumers preferred not having to switch tapes to higher picture quality.
Convenience is a technical advantage. That's why streaming later beat Blu-ray despite a regression in picture quality.
From my comment below, we used Betamax back in 1982 for film class and would go back to editing it on a tape-to-tape deck, so starting with Betamax vs. VHS meant you had less degradation in the final edited product, since you started with higher quality. Sort of like editing RAW vs. JPEG photos nowadays to start with more resolution/information. For me streaming vs. my Blu-ray stuff was about cost. A $39 Blu-ray disc vs. a $12 movie or free movie with subscription. Amazon Music took away a purchase I had from 2014. I could no longer download it, since something changed with their licensing agreement. I have digitized my DVD/Blu-ray discs, since the discs don't last forever. I keep a streaming rez and a hi-rez copy of my faves.
Surely you'd just make the tape/cassette larger? Remember laserdisc?
I remember watching something on Betamax, possibly Star Wars but have no recollection of changing tape. My dad was a teacher and had access to a VT player on my birthday. On other occasions he would bring home a BBC Microcomputer. Quite a treat when we couldn't afford to buy our own TV even.
> Surely you'd just make the tape/cassette larger?
Originally, Betamax increased physical tape length, but cutting tape speed (like how vinyls can play at different RPMs) was a more economical way of cramming more hours onto the same tape by cutting quality.
Both VHS and Betamax went through multiple phases of this. Eventually VHS won by being cheaper.
I thought this was true for a while, but it seems to be a side effect of Betamax being more expensive in general.
The counterexamples that convinced me were Grok and Steam VR aren't taking significant marketshare from ChatGPT and Oculus despite having better support for adult content.
Originally, I thought this would kill Oculus given that's the most popular use of VR, but nope.
Porn tech usage is driven by solving some problem from the previous generation.
Videotape solved the "can't watch film porn at home" problem. Online payments and delivery solved the "need to risk going to the store to buy porn" problem.
What does VR porn solve over just watching standard porn on your monitor/TV?
And because of the resolution limitations, aren't VR headsets actually worse for watching porn than modern 4K monitors?
Well, interactivity was solved by OnlyFans, no? And OnlyFans seems to butcher video quality pretty badly yet it doesn't seem to dissuade people very much.
Yes - VHS had limited luma bandwidth that was about 50% of broadcast TV, and extremely limited chroma bandwidth (the equivalent of about 40 pixels per line). There's a reason laserdisc existed.
Spot on...as I recall, you really couldn't tell the difference between VHS and Betamax unless you had a studio-grade CRT. Well...that's probably unfair...you could tell an difference, but not an enormous difference. It wasn't like going from 480i->1080p; not even to 720i. On our old analog TV there wasn't remotely enough 'wow' to justify the price difference and other limits, so dad took back the BM player and got a VHS.
Yes, but you're forgetting editing wasn't digital/digitized. You would copy from one tape to another, so a degradation issue. It's not the TV's capabilities, but if you started with higher quality you would get less overall degradation. I took film classes in TSOA at NYT back in 1982, and one class was film production and the other was lugging around a huge deck and camera in Betamax and then going back to a tape-to-tape transfer editing deck.
Well, sure. My point is, as a consumer product, betamax did not deliver on its promise to the consumer that bought it. It's really not important at which stage of content production and distribution the promises got lost (and I think you might be underappreciating 'most people's TV set was pretty meh', especially after the components had some life on them). It was sold to my amateur audiophile dad (yes, we had a reel-to-reel) as 'world changing video', and it wasn't, certainly not at the price point. I think the obvious superiority at the content production phase is testified to by the crazy longevity of BM in that niche, but since we couldn't really see that in our house, we (and almost everyone) bought the VHS.
A delta of 3 bpm on sauna days corresponds to around 4% delta if the baseline is 72 bpm. I've gone from a resting heart rate over a 7-day average of 64 bpm to 58 bpm by jumping 15 min. of rope a day, 4 times a week. I've lost weight, body fat, and I feel like my body is more efficient with corresponding lower heart rates throughout my active day. I like saunas for recovery and aches, they put me in a relaxed state after, and I believe the dilation is flushing my system. Like anything else, moderation. Perhaps I will add sauna to my weekly routine 1x per week or less.
PSA: if you like saunas but don't have easy access to one, those IR sauna bags you can buy online work great.
Some people find it gross to basically sweat inside a powered sleeping bag, but if you don't mind that you can get the same effects of a sauna while lying on your (covered) couch and watching YouTube.
Wow, they look really quite dangerous. I wouldn’t want to pass out in one. Yeah you can pass out in a sauna too, but it feels easier to lurch for the door than to fight with a sleeping bag.
There's a timer shutoff. I know I can sit in mine for the full hour at the highest setting, so it's not anything my body can't handle. You can set it for less time at a lower heat setting, too.
Everytime I start jumping rope after a long break like Winter. It immediately starts trending lower a few points in 3 to 4 days, and plateaus after 6 weeks or so. I've averages as low as 54 bpm, but not as consistent as 58 to 60 bpm over a six month period. Granted, I tend to sleep better, have lower stress anecdotally and quantifiably by my Garmin watch's data. It has to be said that I usually add more exercise, because the rope jumping greases the skids so to speak. Good begets good.
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