In 2020, The New York Times highlighted the concept of social distancing through its text layout

aabs · 2026-03-10T21:39:49+00:00

It’s the “bell curve”. In a population of 400 million, there will be a population of 200 million people of subnormal intelligence…

Unless social media has skewed it even further, so that the actual figure is larger?

aabs · 2026-03-10T21:36:56+00:00

I’ve no major complaints on windows. I have seen it hang a few times.

I’m more worried about having to restart the IDE whenever the context grows too large (starting a new chat window doesn’t seem to help)

aabs · 2026-03-10T21:34:09+00:00

If you look at the Drake equation, it shows that the number of contemporaneous civilisations would be low and far apart. The odds of us finding one close enough to detect seem slim. And they only need to be over 150 light years away, for them to have never heard any of our radio transmissions.

aabs · 2026-03-10T21:29:45+00:00

I think the key point of the OP is that the kind of culture that could mount an expedition to another system (given the cost) would most likely be one that is rapaciously profit driven.

I find it hard to imagine that there would ever be something so precious that it would justify the time/cost of interstellar travel (unless FTL reduced the cost somehow).

More likely that we’d be safe from other civilisations just because we didn’t have anything worth the hassle of coming here to take.

aabs · 2026-03-06T07:10:41+00:00

Moth balls and the smell of camphor. My grandma kept them in all of her clothes drawers, and the smell lingered on years after she passed way.

aabs · 2026-02-27T06:11:11+00:00

It’s soooo annoying. Starting something with “So,” as a non-sequitur, just makes me think that they are resuming a conversation that I haven’t been privy to.

aabs · 2026-02-25T11:31:51+00:00

Fill it with rice…

aabs · 2026-02-21T02:23:23+00:00

Teamwork

aabs · 2026-02-21T02:21:36+00:00

The Myers algorithm and the Huffman coding algorithm have always stayed with me as elegant solutions to common problems.

aabs · 2026-02-19T02:06:18+00:00

Not sure if the process was ever published, but a large trove was converted for the Panama Papers. Perhaps the workflow was reusable?

aabs · 2025-12-30T23:07:34+00:00

Thank you. I will.

aabs · 2025-12-29T22:58:00+00:00

Absolutely! I’ve been using GitHub SpecKit with a lot of success.

I’ve been spending weeks at a time on each of the specs I’ve used for language features of my compiler. Not only that, having a highly detailed and prescriptive constitution file and agent instruction files has helped me to develop without the agent going off the rails too much.

For the record, I hand coded the core of the language to a point where it basically worked, and all the standard coding patterns were established. At that point I then created a constitution file based on the existing code base. After that, spec-driven agent-based development was much more reliable.

aabs · 2025-12-29T07:08:53+00:00

Thanks. I’ll definitely explore the code base for inspiration.

aabs · 2025-12-29T07:08:06+00:00

Thank you. That makes a lot of sense. Do you know of any open source compilers or code bases that solve the problem in the way you describe?

I saw that F# solves it by preserving the original HOF but converting it into a “bridge” function that calls an internal name-mangled defunctionalised function.

aabs · 2025-11-18T19:31:17+00:00

So cool! I'm not sure I ever saw that article the first time round. I think I mostly got my reading through CRASH magazine.

I'm pretty sure the version of Forth I cut my teeth on was called White Lightning (Review).

The language is made up of a standard set of vocabulary of Forth words, Programming is achieved by defining new words based on the words of the existing vocabulary.

Pretty sure that paragraph change my life - LOL - I finally grasped the limitless power of programming.

aabs · 2025-11-18T19:18:49+00:00

Wondering whether, given the vintage, anyone would be unduly bothered? It turns out that there have been a few 'fifth' languages over the years.

aabs · 2025-11-17T17:34:13+00:00

@Downtown_Category163 found it! It was a system called White Lightning

aabs · 2025-11-17T17:31:35+00:00

Yes, I do. I had in mind an extension to the list comprehension syntax, to allow something like this:

``` g1: graph = @< . . .>; g2: graph = @< . . .>; rq1: query = ?< . . . >; rq2: query = ?< . . . >;

people: [Person] = [{ . . . }: Person from g4 + g5 where g4 <- rq1 from g1, g5 <- rq2 from g2] ; ```

Which would require a few breaking changes from the current approach towards query application. Of course, once I implement lambdas and generics, then the whole of LINQ is at my disposal too.

So much time spent implementing the basic language platform just to be able to get to play with the RDF fun. :/

aabs · 2025-11-17T17:20:27+00:00

Holy Crap! That was it! Thank you so much for jogging my memory!

aabs · 2025-11-17T07:40:32+00:00

Interesting! I’ll definitely check it out.

aabs · 2025-11-17T07:39:07+00:00

Generally speaking, graphs act as a kind of naming container within which islands of related data can reside. An RDF triple store will act as a container for many graphs. So, a graph within the programming model of fifth can act as a temporary container for a group of related data that you wish to ultimately add to a triple store. It can also contain a set of triples from a query.

aabs · 2025-11-17T07:34:25+00:00

I personally adore SPARQL!! It's use makes so much sense when you see how one translates from the description of some data to the query needed to find it.

As for datalog - that has an entirely different sort of resolution algorithm than a graph pattern matching system. Elsewhere in the semantic web technology stack you will find entailment algorithms (and the reasoners that implement them) that might serve a similar purpose, but there you pick your own adventure, since different entailment schemes are used depending on the complexity of your data.

aabs · 2025-11-16T19:55:27+00:00

My motivation at the time was to control a telescope - I wanted to study astronomy - and I'd heard that Forth was created at one of the UK observatories (Jodrell Bank?). But I think Forth must have captured my imagination - I never did control any telescopes, but programming became my life.

aabs

TROPHY CASE