The Death of the Mind

Enlarge (credit: Cherry)
Cherry, the original mechanical switch maker, is continuing to tap the mechanical keyboard community for new product ideas. Its new mechanical switch, the Cherry MX Black Clear-Top, is a nod to enthusiasts who would love to turn in their modern-day clacker for an old-school terminal keyboard with extra-smooth typing.
’80s roots
Before Cherry’s Thursday announcement of plans to release the MX Black Clear-Top, the switch was known to hobbyists as the Nixie switch. Cherry made the switch in the 1980s for German office machine-maker Nixdorf Computer AG. The German switch maker was tasked with creating a version of its linear MX Black switch with “milky” upper housing, a 63.5 g actuation force…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://arstechnica.com/?p=1895257

WASHINGTON—Delivering a stark warning regarding the nation’s future, President Joe Biden gave a speech Wednesday night in which he cautioned Americans that the ability to even pretend the United States was a democracy was now at stake. “Today, our country teeters on a grim precipice, and if we aren’t careful, it will…

Read more…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.theonion.com/biden-warns-americans-that-ability-to-even-pretend-u-s-1849738890

In Emacs version 28 Emacs developers introduced so-called read symbol shorthands.
If you’re interested in the rationale, feel free to search the Emacs developer mailing list for the discussion.
However, it does seem that not everyone likes the idea of shorthands as a substitution for namespaces (or packages, if you’re coming from Common Lisp).
Neither did I.
And recently, a branch was set up that implements Common Lisp-style packages for Emacs.
In the discussion Richard Stallman, however, notes:

CL packages are the wrong way to implement packages in Lisp.
As I explained in a discussion two years ago, packages implemented using obarrays (or equivalent) don’t work reliably.
We have a much better basis for Lisp packages in the shorthands mechanism.
It only needs to be…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://andreyorst.gitlab.io/posts/2022-11-01-emacs-lisp-shorthands-as-namespacing-system/

Good day, hackfolk. Today we continue the series on garbage collection
with some notes on ephemerons and finalizers.conjunctions and disjunctionsFirst described in a 1997 paper by Barry
Hayes, which
attributes the invention to George Bosworth, ephemerons are a kind of
weak key-value association.Thinking about the problem abstractly, consider that the garbage
collector’s job is to keep live objects and recycle memory for dead
objects, making that memory available for future allocations. Formally
speaking, we can say:An object is live if it is in the root setAn object is live it is referenced by any live object.This circular definition uses the word any, indicating a disjunction:
a single incoming reference from a live object is sufficient to mark a
referent object as live.Ephemerons augment this definition…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://wingolog.org/archives/2022/10/31/ephemerons-and-finalizers

Good day, hackfolk. Today we continue the series on garbage collection
with some notes on ephemerons and finalizers.conjunctions and disjunctionsFirst described in a 1997 paper by Barry
Hayes, which
attributes the invention to George Bosworth, ephemerons are a kind of
weak key-value association.Thinking about the problem abstractly, consider that the garbage
collector’s job is to keep live objects and recycle memory for dead
objects, making that memory available for future allocations. Formally
speaking, we can say:An object is live if it is in the root setAn object is live it is referenced by any live object.This circular definition uses the word any, indicating a disjunction:
a single incoming reference from a live object is sufficient to mark a
referent object as live.Ephemerons augment this definition…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://wingolog.org/archives/2022/10/31/ephemerons-and-finalizers

It’s never a bad time to revisit John Carpenter’s 1988 classic They Live, a hilarious sci-fi thriller that skewers the inequality of the neoliberal era and offers an iconic depiction of capitalist ideology.
The truth behind capitalist advertising, per John Carpenter’s 1988 They Live. (Alive Films, 1988) It’s almost Halloween, the time of year when every good socialist watches They Live (1988). The cult classic about the politically revealing sunglasses that expose the monstrosity of our overlords and the brutal alien society they’ve made never fails to satisfy upon repeat viewings.
Though it didn’t do well on initial release, They Live is one of John Carpenter’s ever-more-revered films, because of its extraordinary…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://jacobin.com/2022/10/they-live-capitalism-ideology-john-carpenter-critique/

War fever in Washington has reached such a pitch that even mild calls for cease-fire talks, as House progressives articulated in a now-retracted letter, are now beyond the pale. That’s dangerous at any time, let alone when nuclear tensions are high.
Representative Pramila Jayapal speaks with reporters on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. (Jabin Botsford / the Washington Post via Getty Images) Even before Russia invaded Ukraine, liberal discourse about the issue had veered in a deeply unhealthy direction, with any suggestion that the US should exercise restraint in managing the antagonistic US-Russia relationship casually labeled treasonous, authoritarian — even covertly doing the work of the Kremlin. As earlier episodes of…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://jacobin.com/2022/10/ukraine-war-letter-diplomacy-progressive-congress-caucus-foreign-policy/