At least it’s Not Unix.

I barely trust natural intelligence with anything relating to security.

In fairness, Anthropic needed some way to bundle up to stay warm in the upcoming AI winter…,

As the world outside increasingly turns into a social and ecological hellscape, people will want to look at it less and less, and the time spent peering through windows will diminish. Eventually, the existence of a portal to a realm outside their bleak cave will be forgotten to time and memory, leaving behind only pale indoor light and stale indoor air.

They would have had a working compiler by now if only they had taken my advice and gotten an ALGOL 60 compiler to work first, rather than skipping a generation!

What is this, potential for a circle tool?

Just in time for version 3.1.4!

I find it even easier just not to do things in the first place.

It is pretty sad that a feature that was introduced into C++ five years ago would not be widely used yet, but that also would not surprise me.

It would seem that Nix has succumbed in this case to its Archenemy.

A different way of stating my remark is that it might be nice to have a page that lists other lisp variants and has a bullet point or two for saying how ArkScript does things differently in a way that someone might find nicer.

I’m no frontend dev, so I battle a lot with it so it displays how I want ; I tried with flex to center vertically the « getting started » section, will have to try again.

Yeah, I remember having to fight similar battles when I created a web page for a similar project! Don’t worry about it if it proves too much of a pain.

Excellent! I got a bit concerned when my experimental infinite loop was able to run for over a minute. 😉

And the cool thing is: not only were you able to install this 6 years ago, you were able to install it 16 years as well!

Given that there are zillions of lisp variants out there, why would someone want to make serious use of this compared to something like Guile Scheme (or one of the other schemes)?

Having said that, the website and branding is really pretty!!! In particular, I absolutely love your usage of color gradients. Some minor feedback is that when the screen is wide, I think that would be nice if the “A small, lisp-inspired, functional scripting language / Get Started” element flowed to the middle relative vertically to the examples column rather than floating at the top. (I do like how it floats above the right column when the screen is narrow, though.)

Also, just to check, do you have a time limit set for the Playground so that people do not over-tax your system? (You might also look into WASM so that people run their scripts locally.)

Imagining your death. :P

But seriously, it’s perfectly sensible when remember that i is just the mathematical representation of “left turn”, just like -1 is the mathematical representation of “go backwards”-- and as we know, two left turns sends you backwards. So think about this triangle in the following way:

Imagine you are a snail, starting at the origin. Now imagine that you walk forward 1 step along the horizontal line. Then you turn 90° to the left to start walking along the vertical line, but then, because you need to walk i steps along this line you take another 90° turn to the left, which means that you are now walking backwards and you end up back at the origin. How far away from the origin are you? Zero steps.

Maybe this is finally a good use for depleted uranium?

Ugh, I really hate it when people make comics like this that make it seem like solving our problems would be so simple. In the real world, where things are a lot messier, you need the blade to be at least several times higher for it to work properly!

To me, one of the most interesting quotes from the article was:

“Our intel tells us that… one of the most important things we can do to hurt Palantir right now is disrupting their recruitment pipeline by hurting their brand image, to the point where even very apolitical recent college graduates [feel] that it’s social suicide.”

This really seems to me like exactly the kind of thing that a peaceful protest could accomplish that could really pay off!

It is not obvious to me, though, that the following tactic is super-effective at this:

After blocking the street outside Palantir’s unassuming redbrick office, and briefly making way for an ambulance, the crowd marched to a nondescript building nearby where organizers said the company was holding a developer conference to recruit new talent, slapping rhythmically on the windows and chanting “quit your jobs!”

This seemed to work in terms of shutting the event down:

Although Palantir did not confirm whether its event was disrupted, one visibly confused event worker did try to deliver equipment, only to find their intended recipients had vanished.

I suspect, though, that if the event were disrupted then the impression the people got at it was more along the lines of, “There are crazy people outside!” and less along the lines of, “I should really feel guilty about my life decisions.”

Having said that, it is not clear that a lower level of confrontation would have accomplished anything either, so who am I to say?

That’s completely fair!

Just to be clear, it’s not that I think that Linux is without problems or idiosyncrasies, but rather I think that they are more like the experience you are describing than evidence that Linux is fundamentally broken compared to Windows.

Could you be more specific about exactly what about Linux makes it so difficult to use that a typical person would not be able to use their computer at all if it were installed on it?

I cannot think of a single time I have manually created a .desktop file rather than using a GUI in the decades I have used Linux, and it has been a long time since I have even needed to edit the Start Menu at all installing packages takes care of it for me. Furthermore, even if this is a “paper cuts”, I doubt that people spend a lot of their time adding Start Menu items; by contrast, in Windows I get to experience the paper cuts of advertisements every single time I want to launch a program, and if I mistype the name of the program and press enter, then every single time I get to experience another paper cuts of launching Edge (which is not my default browser) to do a search in Bing (which is not my default search engine) for my typo.

Likewise, for the last few years that I have been using WiFi with Linux, I have never once had to go outside of the GUI to adjust the settings.

I won’t say that Linux has no annoyances, but I find using it to be a significantly more pleasant experience than using Windows overall, and my wife has never had a problem with it either.

I really do not think that these “paper cuts” are representative of peoples’ general experiences with Linux.