Random link from the archives: "The Man Who Envisioned the Internet Before Computers, Without Computers - VICE" https://web.archive.org/web/20200121115553/https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ae37mb/the-man-who-envisioned-the-internet-before-computers-without-computers
@netbsd After thinking about this for a bit, my best concept is a cute little orange hermit crab that can be drawn with different “shells”, where each shell is the case from some sort of hardware. This captures NetBSD’s “can run on anything” philosophy of portability and gives you a nice way to specialize the mascot for different working groups in the community. To be a little cheeky/use the lore, the default shell could be a toaster 😊
This is wild - somebody did a deep dive into the real stories behind this famous XKCD:
https://sheets.works/data-viz/holding-up-the-internet
I have an edition from this run. It’s a truly gorgeous artifact! https://mastodon.social/@alexobenauer/117196331354077591
"When I first came up with the term [Software Engineering], no one had heard of it before, at least in our world. It was an ongoing joke for a long time. They liked to kid me about my radical ideas. It was a memorable day when one of the most respected hardware gurus explained to everyone in a meeting that he agreed with me that the process of building software should also be considered an engineering discipline, just like with hardware."
@vnikolov @interlisp - yes, the D machines were a single processor, but they had hardware interrupts - if you were running with interrupts disabled you couldn't use a keyboard interrupt to get into the debugger, but otherwise you got pretty much instantaneous response. There was no operating system distinct from the Interlisp-D code -- everything including the memory page fault handler, hard disk I/O drivers, keyboard interrupts, on up was written in Lisp.
First the historical reenactment segment:
‘Tillschneider is a scholar of Islamic studies who has described Islam as a “fungus” growing on the “German oak”.’
Then the punch line about someone who supports remigration: ‘His family emigrated from Romania to Germany in the 1980s.’
After 5 or 10 or 15 years the framework becomes unfashionable or discontinued or bought by a nazi and the $tool you built becomes unmaintainable short of a full rewrite.
I think this is a lot less likely to happen to baseline JS and browser stuff (though also not unimaginable).
By contrast, I'm looking at "ancient," zero-dependency SW like Clipper, PureData, NGSPICE which still compiles off the bat, even to WASM if you want.
It saddens me greatly that there are no LISP or LISP-adjacent meetups in Hamburg. There used to be a Clojure meetup but apparently it has died. Would anyone in #Hamburg be interested in a meetup if I were to organize it? Or is anyone interested in helping me with setting one up? I’m looking forward to talking with like minded individuals about LISPs (CL, #Scheme, #Racket, #ELISP, #Clojure etc) and #Emacs (and even FP in general).
So many great details in this piece about making the film adaptation of Eco’s Name of the Rose:
‘After four months in Rome, I went back to my production office in Munich and couldn’t find it. I discovered the film’s producer, Bernd Eichinger, in the cellar with his feet on a table. He said, “JJ, I didn’t want to disturb you during the shoot, but I sold the building to help pay for the movie.”’
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2026/oct/05/sean-connery-ron-perlman-the-name-of-the-rose
We went to a Japanese-style vinyl listening bar in Berlin for this record’s German release party, which also featured four pourover coffees from top roasters in Seoul. I found this track particularly compelling, and remain thankful to David Byrne and his label, Luaka Bop, for surfacing so much great music from around the world.
glass/reflection/fog rendering test in my raytracer
‘For starters, the phrase “organizational models for team science” makes me imagine a factory floor of scientists toiling away on their next 100-author paper under the watchful gaze of their National Institutes of Health program officers, like some scene from Terry Gilliam's movie Brazil.’
https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.0010006
To carry 50,000 people per hour in each direction, a city needs a 175m wide road for cars.
Even if those cars are electric.
And then there’s all the parking.
OR a city can move A LOT MORE people in a lot less space, with A LOT LESS public money, emissions, pollution, noise etc.
Choices.
Simple.
Also: I am recruiting PhD students for next year. If you're interested in my lab, let's chat! See my website (https://willcrichton.net/) for more specific topics I've been thinking about.
PSA: If you have upgraded to MacOS 27 and have an annoying SiriAI button over all sorts of your text inputs:
sudo mkdir -p /Library/Preferences/FeatureFlags/Domain
sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/FeatureFlags/Domain/WritingTools LightweightUI_macOS -dict Enabled -bool false
will disable it. Requires a reboot.
Happy birthday, Squeak! 🥳 Can you believe it's been 30 years?!
Starting on October 1, 1996, Squeak emerged from Apple’s Smalltalk-80 lineage with the first VM written in Smalltalk itself. Thirty years later, it has grown into an open system for live programming, multimedia, education, and research, inspiring projects like #Scratch, #Croquet, and #Seaside. And it's still actively developed by a community that carries the vision of malleable personal computing forward.
https://news.squeak.org/2026/10/01/happy-30th-birthday-to-squeak/
I am looking for a PhD student in real-time systems and computer architecture.
https://www.fil.univ-lille.fr/~lipari/research/phd-call.html
Please, repost widely!
"What if the cost of machines that think is people who don't?"
— George Dyson