Finally getting around to watching my least favourite Farscape episode - the second one filmed, - "I, ET", and a good candidate for "worst second episode of any sci-fi show". It's not *terrible* but it's such a tone shift from "weird aliens" to "sitcom humanoid hijinks" that it really derails the whole thing

but I'd forgotten that as well as being a riff on E.T., it's also obviously a riff on Contact.

Even down to the kid being named Foster, and his mother looking very like Jodie.

@clacke

My concern is less about "how it looks in RAM" and more "does it have very precisely defined semantics".

"Dictionary/map/hash" does not have precisely defined semantics in the same way that "integer" or "array" do, in my experience. There are a vast number of different - and all subtly incompatible - dictionary/map/hash definitions.

Good luck transferring data that's a Lua object into a Javascript object, for example. You could create a coding scheme, but it's not 1-for-1 compatible.

@paoloredaelli

Endianness isn't really a thing in wire encodings or bytecode anymore, though, I think? Only in raw platform-specific RAM dumps of machine words, which we would generally want to avoid for security reasons, as well as portability.

If we're very lucky, we have at least 32-bit signed integers in our data model, so we could avoid dealing with endianness by using shift or multiply to extract bytes out of it. We could probably do that with Retro Forth with some rewriting.

@paoloredaelli

Yep, UTF-16 has endianness and that's one of the many reasons why I think it's UTF-8, not UTF-16, that's a viable candidate for surviving the next hundred years.

@alcinnz

We'll get Danny Hillis to etch a few copies of this year's Unicode database into some cogwheel in the Long Now clock.

He might get a bit annoyed if we keep coming back for more cogs each year as the Unicode standard updates though...

A reminder that you CAN market your Triffids as "free range" as long as they are not physically confined within a roofed structure, but you can NOT market them as "organic" if they're free-hunting within a city, unless you can provide a documentation chain certifying the 100% organic status of all humans they ate.

The Triffid Marketing Council understands that your Triffids may dislike organic dietary restrictions, but it's for their own good. And of course the health of the Triffid brand.

"I do not know with what Software-as-a-Service Platform War 3 will be fought, but Platform War 4 will be fought with pigeons and clay tablets"

-- Einstein (Fred Einstein of Einstein 8-Track & Betamax Repairs, Mudville, Oklahoma, 1953)

Fundamental Abstractions From Computing In 2022 That Might Still Exist And Be A Reliable Means Of Data Retrieval In 2122:

1. Bytes (or at least integers from 0 to 255)
2. Arrays (of things that could include either bytes, or integers from 0 to 255, and with a separate "length" integer)
3. UTF-8 (or at least the 7-bit ASCII-like subset of it)
4. .... ...

Any takers for whether there even will be a 4?

@0303

So because of that, I've never really put much faith in the idea of "the Internet will magically make us better".

But I did hope that it would at least give us some tools to help improve ourselves.

Sometimes I get scared and think that we're throwing those tools away or making them radioactive; that we're closing off a short window of cheap and easy self-improvement before a long dark period of pain descends.

But maybe that fear is misplaced.

@aral

But then, I've felt that things were trending Worse as long as I've been alive, ie from the 1970s on, with around two *very* brief blips to Better around 1990 and then again in 2000.

(Obama should have been a blip but the financial crisis cancelled that brief hope out).

I remember having a conversation with Internet liberal friends about this in the mid-2000s, and (despite the War on Terror being a huge thing right then) they just couldn't fathom how I could feel so down on the future.

@aral

:(

My heart tells me that "yes, eventually, things have to get better"

but my brain tells me "eventually is a long time, things could get Quite A Lot Worse in the very short term (ie five to ten centuries) before they get better, and all the indicators seem to be currently pointing in the Worse direction"

TekWar: TekLords (1994) and they're debating whether to turn off the Internet/Matrix (they're never quite sure which, but I'm gonna assume that "Matrix" in the Gibson sense is essentially the Cloud: big centrally hosted virtual systems) because there's a virus.

It's a) kind of funny that there was a time when we really thought we would be able to turn off every computer in the world if something went terribly wrong and b) actually not that funny because now with the Cloud, we literally could.

@fedops

Basically Microsoft/Amazon are the new "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM".

They've somehow become Trusted in industry so if you want to do anything else, you have to first make a watertight case.

If it all explodes and it's Microsoft's fault, well, oh dear but never mind you did the Due Diligence by buying the Market Leader.

Cloud Provider: Zero Trust. You must implement Least Privileged Access everywhere

Me: Okay. You get no access.

Cloud Provider: Not like that! You need to give me ALL the access, so I can know who to give the least access to.

I mean seriously, what's our countdown clock on years until extremely angry actual fascists succeed in getting 100% control of the Amazon and Microsoft corporate networks, either via the boardroom or via the US Presidency?

Never?

And then what, they're just going to sit there and not weaponise the information equivalent of a nuclear weapon? They're going to just go "man we could really get our Dark MAGA pogrom on, but, gentlemen don't read each other's hypervisors"

We really think that?

Cloud Provider: Zero Trust. Assume breach. Verify explicitly.

Me: Okay, I assume you have been breached by the NSA. Please explicitly verify that you haven't been.

Cloud Provider: Not like that! You're doing it wrong.

@meejah @theruran

"Hard to learn expert interfaces" are a thing, yes. We shouldn't make things harder for experts just to make things easier for casual users.

But.

So much of the time, a lot of what even experts do is needlessly overcomplicated for no reason.

I'm thinking about the historical nightmare of mathematical notation, for example. Pi vs Tau. So many things that could easily be improved, yet numbing oneself to the pain becomes a professional hazing ritual, badge of honour.

@robdaemon @theruran

It really bugs me that mobile touchscreen systems are actually much more opaque than 1990s desktops used to be. So many hidden, non-discoverable gestures.

I'm sure whoever has been in charge of very expensive and very scientific data-driven UX development for the last 10 years did not intend for that to be the outcome.

But that was the outcome regardless.

@theruran

"Why are programmers -- particularly the ones who talk a lot about Constant Refactoring -- so bad at refactoring the languages, editors and operating systems they use, to make them more humane?" is a question that endlessly fascinates me.

Up there with "why does Computer Science / Data Processing / Information Technology as a field seem really bad at keeping track of its own history?"

@humanetech @robdaemon @theruran

Ooh! I really like this idea of "design for users with overloaded executive function".

I think that's what I've been feeling myself for years. Trying to get back into "flow state" is my goal.