#BLOG Post: “The Information Density of Old #Textbooks”
https://stevengharms.com/posts/2026-07-13-the-information-density-of-old-textbooks/
#pedagogy #education #math #education
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Steven G. Harms
@sgharms@techhub.social
mastodon 4.7.2Interests: Latin, 
, TypeScript/
, 
, Ruby, Education, Philosophy, Klein-Poodles, Dutch, French, NeXT/Aqua/ Retro UIs, Lisp
NYC bicycling advocate
Team Lead, New-hire Engineering Training (NYC) @ Bloomberg LP. Opinions my own.
154 Followers
105 Following
40 Posts
Joined November 28, 2022
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So I've been enamored of #Next and its retro-cosplay implementation at NEXTSPACE. But it would only build on Linux.
I have a developer release proof of concept working for FreeBSD. Maybe it works for you?
https://github.com/sgharms/nextspace/blob/developer-release-1/Installer/FreeBSD/README.md
BLOG POST: 150 Dollars and a Second Life: #Linux #Mint on a #MacBook Air 2015
https://stevengharms.com/posts/2026-04-13-my-mintymac-linux-mint-on-my-2015-macbook-air/
I’d picked it up second-hand for $150. For that sum, I got: a 13-inch aluminum chassis with good bones, a loose-ish (not a compliment) keyboard that is miles ahead of Chromebooks and other economy machines, and a respectable battery life. Apple had abandoned it. I had not.
So I tried installing Linux on it. And it worked.
BLOG POST: ...And Justice For All: The Album That Made Me
https://stevengharms.com/posts/2026-04-14-and-justice-for-all-the-album-that-made-me/
All this #ageverification noise suggests to me that my investment in moving from #linux to #freebsd a year ago is going to pay off handsomely. Sadly.
Replying to
@teledyn@mstdn.ca I love Delia so much. Frankly a comic where she’s a time traveling private eye would be my jam. The accent, the bob, the headband, the ear —- she’s just a whole sui generis VIBE.
Replying to
@RichqrddeNooy prachtig. Volgens mij je hebt “the undutchables” voor generatie Mastodon geschreven.
tl;dr: Please make positive noise in https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/30640
#Anthropic 's #Claude Code dropped npm support for a native installer — and FreeBSD didn't make the list.
Their bot already closed the issue I filed. https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/22564
#FreeBSD users are thoughtful and may pave a better way for AI use. It's saved me a lot of toil.
But If AI tools silently skip our platform, future contributors may draw the conclusion that it's not a platform that matters. Or that it's like Minix/Plan9: for research and full of Better Ways, but niche. And yes, the facts will not align with this, but it simply won't matter.
My fuller reasoning and, pace, recognition of impacts both environmental and social are here:
https://stevengharms.com/posts/2026-02-06-the-positive-case-for-ai-assisted-development/
Let's not hi-hat a future.
@amoroso@fosstodon.org beyond all expectations, I installed #Interlisp from source on #FreeBSD today.
I was doing a quick test of how much pain it would be to create a port package for #freebsd
Maiko built on the first try.
I got the runtime via git.
I got the prebuilt loadups.
After unpacking, I ran the (obsolete) startup script and…it just worked. Medley running under Wayland.
Was it. Supposed. To work?
These days I keep having the creeping sense that #1989 was the best year. Karnov and Rygar on the NES. Janet Jackson. Master of puppets. Batman or Last Crusade. NeXT. Walkman sport. Cassettes. Monkey Island. Maybe everyone feels that way about the year when they were those ages.
* yes acknowledging that disparity across geography and identity is real.
@Dhmspector@mastodon.social nice nova
Replying to
@rk
I once pushed back on this at a big tech firm.
Interview bro: hey false negatives are OK.
Me: but didn’t this process give us the zune, google wave, and the metaverse? I can guarantee reliable shipped product (see resume) you will immolate billions on obviously bad ideas. My downside risk is comparatively 0.
Gosh after the mass layoffs from ai unemployment (or the market’s acceptance thereof) and thanks to manosphere channels selling pro patria, I think I know what to do with a few thousand unemployed men between 18-25. Can’t have them on American shores riling up sentiment against the oligarchs. Maybe offshore them in the Latifundia of Greenland? Or reduce their numbers…somehow. Can’t have bad approval ratings if you keep your geriatrics and reduce the others out of the pool. What a rook.
Replying to
@evert@indieweb.social @davew@mastodon.social all the replies have been good but this one (tests with a description of success signal) plus keep in plan mode long seems to be leading to Magic town (autonomous runs)
If you did oo right, it really does nice with GoF pattern names.
Replying to
Replying to
@nil@furry.engineer God that gorgeous deep purple CDE desktop. I can smell the jasmine in the planters, the garlic up from Gilroy, the dump in Milpitas, the herds being sacrificed to a bloodthirsty god at the Showers Drive In-and-Out. Deftones "White Pony" and Tool's "Lateralus." Perl 5. XEmacs. Those were the good times.
(btw. if you have a quick 0-60 guide on getting this desktop on #freebsd, I would be eternally grateful. Present small human demands make digging into a #retrolaris build impossible at present.)
Replying to
@amoroso my staff and I have been wrestling with the development model here: what IF a minimal OS was groomed or altered to be a specific program. What if it stayed up and didn’t have volatile state wiped? How does “the OS is the program exceed/falter versus the web or osx/win64 model. The mental models aren’t clear—but hints were found in the #Unix haters handbook where those who had #lispm mourn what they lost when they were forced to Unix
My team in NYC is hiring an experienced technical trainer at Bloomberg LP. In-person only, relocation possible. We are AI-forward.
https://bloomberg.avature.net/careers/JobDetail/Technical-Trainer-Software-Engineering/18061
Replying to
@david_chisnall@infosec.exchange
100% agree…
But I do think some general guides are very considerate. “Here’s how to think about this thing, here are the big flows to startup; here’s something that never sat right with me…”
Because the void of bad documentation or cognitive tax is readily filled by ai (I’d argue that this has been a huge sales case to the tech.)
Replying to
@krono@toot.berlin @thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io it’s like a cross between “those who leave omelas “ and a del Rey Xanth cover where the Elder culture bring their powerful spells to a distant kingdom far from their home PARC in the realm of PalloWalto.
Replying to
@david_chisnall@infosec.exchange for my money it’s all about Queen of the Damned. I think the first two books are lesser, but they do accomplish a certain amount of characterization that means that queen of the damned can be about 200 pages lighter.
And then you get into the question of what happens if you challenge God and God answers back. That was pretty spectacular. Although it is deeply couched in the mythology of the asker, being in a rock band (but that’s forgivable, and rice lived in Haight-Ashbury during the critical period).
And then there’s the whole Proto Indo European European/Egyptian/mythology of the story of the twins and Akasha. For a person who visits an etymology page nigh daily, that was pretty intoxicating.
But I do agree, it fell off horribly after queen of the Damned: body thief, Mina… Highly confusing, and rice falling back to her native Catholicism.
Replying to
@moonglum isn’t GNU instructive to a third path here? Use the tools to scale the effort to enable escape?
Replying to
@fraggle@social.coop @mrencyclopedia@retro.pizza this is not a transmitter of glory; no positive interactions were radiated here.
Replying to
@hbuchel@hachyderm.io working at Bloomberg has been a surprise and an absolute joy. Reasonable RTO, high diversity, beautiful offices, run by grownups out of the quarterly earning panic. Philanthropy is integrated in many cultural behaviors.
Replying to
@sue longer I spend in this discipline, the more it’s the theory of the program all the way down.
There are so may projects I wanted to do in my weekend. Migrate off of GitHub was not really one I had in mind.
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I think what I find interesting about e.g. Medley is that instead of e.g. the web stack where I have to get a minimal UI (html; or factored into the JS framework du jour) and roll in a styling framework (e.g. Tailwind) the minimal “OS” of medley provides all that out of the box. I consider all the time we’ve wasted doing this boilerplate chore again and again for every app.
Am I correct in sensing Medley is an escape from that?
Or perhaps to rephrase: what does Medley offer versus say a minimal *ix with X and twm?
RE: your characterization of the LispM: I think something many of us miss is how this differs from a shell on a Unix system? Is it b/c the process model segregates user land from your application?
Replying to
@nhbriggs@mastodon.social @amoroso@fosstodon.org awesome Nick, great to see you chime in.
I didn’t think I had installed xwayland — but transitive dependencies are heck :)
But it’s so great to see this working :) I put in an item on #freebsd ports to — I hope — get a minimal friction installer for Medley on FreeBSD.
Replying to
@haskman@functional.cafe what a great idea. Even if every video is awful, it’s more than the category theory people have given to the Algol descendent inspired of us in my lifetime.
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@mdhughes@appdot.net I wonder….
Linus has maintained the kernel via email
If every scm site goes this way…
Fall back to email. Current email toolchain is generally awful as scm management.
Therefore renaissance in technical email client. Imagine say mutt with AAA features for contributors…
Replying to
@nhbriggs@mastodon.social @amoroso@fosstodon.org
Nick, sorry to say I’m completely out of my depth on that one. But I am thankful that you’re thinking about how to help port(1) make medley easy to love on #freebsd
I guess we had a good run GitHub.