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@vikunja@social.linux.pizza If AI makes it so easy to find bugs, perhaps they should do that, and then actually fix the bugs?
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cliffordheath
@cliffordheath@mastodon.social
mastodon 4.8.0-nightly.2026-10-06Inventor in all technologies. Enterprise software product architect, database designer, C++, Ruby. Data Modelling (CDMP Masters), Languages and Parsers nerd, Software Defined Radio and RF design. Built rockets, robots, three guitars. Prog rock enthusiast. Three patents, inventor behind Australia's first ever dot-com-dot-au. Cryptography for Europe's first internet banking apps (before SSL3)
189 Followers
360 Following
45 Posts
Joined April 16, 2022
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@dougmerritt @adaddinsane @colinstu the DEC peripherals were very simple to program. Our PDP11/34 loaded from RK05 drive which required entering over a dozen opcodes. I decompiled it once. It was basically "read block 0 into address 0, wait for completion, then jump there". At least it had a hex keypad, not just the row of switches of some others. Operators did learn to set those switches incredibly fast however
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@colinstu I was able to compile C code, play Pacman (fullscreen TUI), or run database code while other users used a sonic digitiser to trace radiographs on an interactive vector graphics screen (Tektronix storage tube), and a plotter made colour drawings or uploaded data files to the supercomputer. Real-time applications...
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@whitequark@social.treehouse.systems @aburka@hachyderm.io @regehr@mastodon.social @penguin42@mastodon.org.uk non-volatile storage is also good for radiation hardening and can reduce power consumption, both good for space applications. Actel/Microchip PolarFire is used a lot there, for both reasons
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@DavidPenington@aus.social 2 1/2 hours late in the end. 500 tired pax with disrupted travel plans, some in difficulty because the extra duration meant their phones were dead and they couldn't notify folk meeting them (not even one charge point on the entire train!). This would have been an advanced service sixty years ago, but doesn't cut it in 2026
The Sydney to Melbourne "Express Passenger Train" spanning Australia's most in-demand long distance route has been stationary for an hour only 2 hours into the journey. A level crossing ahead won't close, so we can't traverse it. Like, anywhere else a guard would close the crossing by waving a flag.
The same train two days ago was over an hour late with similarly dumb excuses.
We aren't going to beat climate change this way, folk!
@mike_k@mstdn.social hey, if it helps stop the orange menace from hurting us, I guess it's ok?
Replying to
@ireneista@adhd.irenes.space @tryst@fedi.imu.li a filesystem is just such a browsable object, and there is no conceptual jump to browsing the inside of a file. But I don't care to attempt presentation, except to an API
Replying to
@ireneista@adhd.irenes.space @tryst@fedi.imu.li @cwebber@social.coop I want a store of syntactically-typed objects, in a hierarchical name space supporting partial and on-first-read/LRU replication
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@bks@mastodon.social @johncarlosbaez@mathstodon.xyz @dpiponi@mathstodon.xyz @BartoszMilewski@mathstodon.xyz maybe not for a while, but this team was operating in this region because of the ongoing encroachment of old forest logging, which utterly destroys the only environment in which these species can live
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@speckmantel@social.anoxinon.de @MostlyHarmless@thecanadian.social the clue doesn't ask for best
Replying to
@benschwarz It's a guilty secret, but who among us hasn't implemented Redfearn's equations for the geoid after all? I know I have...
"Arduino Certification". Imagine being proud to be a certified dilettante
Replying to
@marick as I used to say about building software, whenever something goes wrong, there's always someone who knew it would. Some programmer who omitted some error handling, ir whatever...
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@dougmerritt @colinstu the 11/70 was very different from the 11/34 :). Anyhow it was a research machine, there were no other users
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@lispi314@udongein.xyz @ireneista@adhd.irenes.space @tryst@fedi.imu.li @cwebber@social.coop not really. Extensible formats always have a way for older software to skip an unrecognised extension. And actual format changes require an updated syntax, not just hope-and-pray that software still works. Until then, that sucker is merely a byte stream
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@tryst@fedi.imu.li @ireneista@adhd.irenes.space if it *can* validate, that's a great start. Next we can talk about *when* :)
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@ireneista@adhd.irenes.space @tryst@fedi.imu.li all data is "binary". All should be subject to a published machine-executable syntax.
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@tryst@fedi.imu.li @ireneista@adhd.irenes.space a ZIP file has a syntax, and contains other files with their own syntaxes. These should be recursively validated, where possible
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@tryst@fedi.imu.li @ireneista@adhd.irenes.space things can have multiple names. And their full content almost always weaves material from multiple aspects, which is where my ADL can shine
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@ireneista@adhd.irenes.space @tryst@fedi.imu.li semantic integrity checking is not the goal, nor is it possible (needs a Turing machine). Just syntactic
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@tryst@fedi.imu.li @ireneista@adhd.irenes.space there should be a published grammar for Postgresql databases, etc
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@ireneista@adhd.irenes.space @tryst@fedi.imu.li @cwebber@social.coop of course, the API for reading and manipulating such files should not be to a bytestream, should not require parsing, but should reflect the structure of the grammar. POSIX APIs would only apply to untyped bytestream files
Replying to
@mattblaze@federate.social This beautifully-presented story seems to be a total beat-up. Radio Thermal Generators like this do not contain fissile Pu-239, but Pu-238, which emits harmless low-energy alpha radiation that doesn't even penetrate the skin. They were even implanted to power some early pacemakers - an uncle had one of those.
Replying to
@troberts@theblower.au "walked into the room on crutches," - I wonder if this relates to his mistakes while developing said items
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@TerryHancock@realsocial.life They're not. RK05 is a drive with a 13" removable disk platter in a housing with a lid that opens. My first professional employment used two of these drives on a PDP11/34
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@pthariensflame@social.treehouse.systems @atax1a@infosec.exchange @thephd@pony.social I would like to subscribe to your newsletter
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@iskandarv @weirdestate there's nowhere for the smoke to escape when you burn the small stepladder on that hearth
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@tilton Until the early 1980s, HP terminals didn't have a HELP key. Prior to that, it was labelled AIDS
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@mattblaze@federate.social It's possible, but it seems unlikely that the US would deliberately allow any fissile material out of its direct control. The article provided zero evidence that Pu239 was included. No other descriptions of RTGs mention inclusion of Pu239
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@ireneista@adhd.irenes.space @tryst@fedi.imu.li I am not enough of a type theorist to know how to :). But if I understand correctly, that means the content of a zip header says how big a blob follows, what compression it uses, and what syntax rules apply after decompression
Replying to
@sminez@hachyderm.io @robpike@hachyderm.io obviously a parser language cannot describe the LZW coding but in many cases such things will be wrapped in blocks that have other size delimiters. I can see how Thompson algo helps with your parallel edits though, consuming one byte at a time (even though substitutions may produce more). If two patterns match the same text, or one matches the output of another, how do you define precedence?
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@ireneista@adhd.irenes.space @tryst@fedi.imu.li @cwebber@social.coop I want it to be impossible to save a file as JPG (e.g.) unless its syntax conforms. That's why I built my Px language. Though it doesn't yet support the features for describing binary file types, it does produce compact parse tables, so a program can download a grammar then validate syntax of files in that grammar. This would allow construction of a lexically typesafe file system
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@sminez@hachyderm.io @robpike@hachyderm.io I have a concept beyond structural editing, to that of a lexically typed file system. For a file to be accepted as more than just a byte stream, say as a GIF, it must be verified as conforming to the correct syntax. My pattern matching library can't yet handle arbitrary binary, but I have a plan for that, and I want it to be able to both match and generate arbitrary network protocols too. It uses PEG with no backtracking so doesn't need the Thompson parallelism
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@divbyzero@mathstodon.xyz What I find most exciting about this math discovery is that any calculation converted into this form will have a single simplest (canonical) representation which will be findable with lexical subsitutions. So it can simplify any expression to its simplest form. Every expression is canonically identified by an even-numbered sequence of binary digits. 1=1, 0=E(). This gives every possible calculation exactly one number which identifies it.
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@divbyzero@mathstodon.xyz agghhhh phooey. It doesn't produce minimal forms, and without additional substitutions (not yet all known) cannot be automatically minimised. So two common subexpressions might not match. The bitstring representation is still valuable however.
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@divbyzero@mathstodon.xyz And if you use breadth-first traversal it's also possible to recognise common subexpressions, I think
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@tryst@fedi.imu.li @ireneista@adhd.irenes.space every program should validate the structure of every input file. Currently, that's usually incomplete, and therefore vulnerable. Validation should be centralised where possible, and this also yields syntax-aware APIs. (No generic parser will validate Huffman decoding, but can validate the packet structure around it.)
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@sminez@hachyderm.io @robpike@hachyderm.io my plan (because it's only a plan so far) is to extract content values to use later to steer the match, e.g. for length-delimited blocks, commonly used in protocols and file formats. Lexical typing only requires go/no-go, but useful parsing requires semantic capture, which Px already supports. A pretty-printer can re-inject non-semantic whitespace given a semantic AST. I also generate railroad diagrams and want to emit Textmate for syntax highlighters.
https://github.com/cjheath/strpp
Replying to
@tryst@fedi.imu.li @ireneista@adhd.irenes.space someone authors the spec for each format, e.g. PNG. The syntax is in each spec. It needs to be translated into a grammar description language and compiled to a compact blob that a grammar machine can process. That's what Px does