The question I've latently had for decades: "what's the difference between .COM and .EXE", is answered by this article. Great reading too, brings back some good memories about MS-DOS tinkering. customizing the prompt (prompt $p$g), fdisk /mbr, sys command that sets up boot files (msdos.sys io.sys and command.com).
And oh the time I have spent to write menu entries in autoexec.bat and config.sys, figuring everything out from floppy disks containing things like cdrom drivers. I wasn't much older than 10 years old back then and was so happy when someone gave me an update: MS-DOS 6.22.
I love this. Can you earn their trust, as in, become pals with them? Or is this more of a human desire. It's probably mostly food based priorities to them.
> Can you earn their trust, as in, become pals with them?
It's a very human question.
All living things are friends (except sometimes at mealtime) because we are all part of one singular organism. The separateness and individuality of multicellular organisms is a perceptual illusion.
(This sound metaphysical, and perhaps it is, but it's very literal: all cells use the same chemical language, the same bio-molecular machinery of thought. Cf. Michael Levin's lab's work. Also "wood-wide web", etc. The way I sometimes put it is "We are Solaris". but that only makes sense if you've read the book or seen the movies...)
Anyway, all animals already trust each other. When you can understand how that's true and share that trust then you can "talk" with animals. Like Dr. Doolittle or some fairy tale princess, they will come up and hang out with you.
> It's probably mostly food based priorities to them.
Yeah, but that's the same for everybody? Don't you and your friends spend a lot of time discussing food? Cooking and eating together? "Com-pan-ions" are literally those who eat bread together: "com" is community, etc. and "pan" is bread.
> "Com-pan-ions" are literally those who eat bread together: "com" is community, etc. and "pan" is bread.
Similarly, while plenty of people pan (pun intended, on multiple levels) American multiculturalism for being seemingly limited to food, it remains evident that food is a sort of universal language - a gateway to shared understanding even among those who share nothing else in common. Cuisine is a window into cultural tradition and history, and is a leading indicator of the formation of new cultures through the intersection of existing ones. To share food is to share what makes us human.
If we discover intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, I reckon this will be a key factor in whether we have any hope of ever truly understanding them and their motivations.
I have tried, and over a fairly long period of coaxing with popcorn, and they remain extremely wary. Only once, out of a group of 15-20 crows, did I earn the trust of a single crow enough that he, or she, would come within 10 feet of me to pickup kernels I had strewn on the ground. The rest stayed far away.
For links I just decided to leave out. Seemed blue was enough, and especially since link interaction in Bike only happens through link button. For general formatting I left out because underline formatting seems to be falling out of favor as a standard and when I asked in my forum most users said they didn't need it. Eventually I would like to read/write Markdown from Bike and underline isn't a part of standard Markdown.
Lots of browsers format links with just a thin underline and no color change. I actually prefer that approach since it avoids the visual color clutter. Would be nice to have an option to do that instead of color.
Lots of great ideas, especially the format affinity indication/control. Is that just arrow key or arrow with cmd key? If it is only the arrow key, how do you distinguish user intent to actually move the cursor vs change the affinity?
Eventually I hope to add theme support so that links can look how you want, but that's not a feature that I'll be working on super soon.
The affinity is just treated as a new character position. When caret moves through that position is doesn't "move", but instead draws tail differently. So it's just normal arrow key with one extra state to move through. That extra state only happens at formatting boundaries, so generally the cost isn't too much.
Saying this universally leads to a too-rosy view of the future, I think, and downplays the amount of hard work needed to maintain society.
Consider advances in travel - you basically had people who saw, within their lifetime, a world of trains become one of planes, including some supersonic passenger flights (not to mention going to space). Even bullet trains are old at this point.
Lotta other examples of stagnation in the physical world rather than the information one since then.
I'd love to take a bullet train from SF to LA. I make the trip every two or three months for work and just hoping on a train and zoning out would be far nicer than running through buses/light rail/airport security/cramped airplane/etc.
Distance would be pretty similar to the Tokyo to Osaka leg of the Tokaido shinkansen. Total time would probably be similar. I left my apartment 3.5 hours before I arrive in SoCal. Hour and a half on public transit, 30 minute buffer for flight, 30 minute boarding time, 60 minute flight.
I can fully relate to the criticism expressed, but does the article have to be that filled with expletives? I would argue that it could appeal to a far wider audience if the writer would be able to find a way around this crude use of a language. Less is more.
Not sure about the readership,though. But I think you're right with regards to the discussion - you only hear one side a lot which makes it appear that there is only one side which is the majority. But it's really not the case, however: opposing views are being bashed or brigaded to the point where expressing such views has become unsafe or too much effort. So instead of real discussion, people who are not left-leaning/pro-state/pro-fiat increasingly just use only karma buttons.
And oh the time I have spent to write menu entries in autoexec.bat and config.sys, figuring everything out from floppy disks containing things like cdrom drivers. I wasn't much older than 10 years old back then and was so happy when someone gave me an update: MS-DOS 6.22.