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Seven Years in Quebec

@dfeldman.org

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Seven Years in Quebec @dfeldman.org · 1h

Should have seen their competitor Howl Computers, with “The Best Mind of My Generation” CPU and the “Destroyed by Madness” hard drive

3Spooky5Me @ceramicclaw.bsky.social · 3h

An entire line of computers themed off of a nonsense poem. What a crazy time

Seven Years in Quebec @dfeldman.org · 3h

Modern marketers would never

The Owl and the Pussycat shown here may lack a "beautiful pea green boat," but they are not lacking in more practical features.
Perkin-Elmer's Owl is a display terminal that offers full editing and format protection. The Pussycat CRT page printer provides a printed copy of the data displayed on the terminal's screen.

Seven Years in Quebec @dfeldman.org · 4h

utm=Bob

Seven Years in Quebec @dfeldman.org · 4h

Probably the oldest on a current Mac is for this Model 37 Teletype

At least theoretically you could plug that into your MacBook (with a series of adapters) and get a prompt!

Looks like an enlarged typewriter with a few extra keys

Seven Years in Quebec @dfeldman.org · 4h

Some of the companies were pretty fly-by-night and the only record of them might be in terminfo files… that are installed on hundreds of millions of modern machines

Seven Years in Quebec @dfeldman.org · 4h

I haven’t done a thorough check to find the oldest, but if you google the terminal names you can find old ads like these

Introducing the smart daisywheel terminal designed especially for the computer industry.

The Owl and the Pussycat shown here may lack a "beautiful pea green boat," but they are not lacking in more practical features Perkin-Elmer's Owl is a display terminal that offers full editing and format protection. The Pussycat CRT page printer provides a printed copy of the data displayed on the terminal's screen.

Seven Years in Quebec @dfeldman.org · 4h

Terminfo is actually the “new” system for getting terminal information. There’s an older one still available called “termcap”. That one usually includes oddities like 1950s teletypes.

Seven Years in Quebec @dfeldman.org · 4h

You can see the list of supported terminals with the command “toe”. Yes this used to be important enough to get a 3 letter command.

Seven Years in Quebec @dfeldman.org · 4h

Your modern Mac or a Linux machine probably has terminfo files dating to the mid-1970s. Remnants of computing evolution, like an appendix or a tailbone.

Julia Evans @b0rk.jvns.ca · 4h

TERM

wizardzines.com/comics/term/

(from The Secret Rules of the Terminal, out now! wizardzines.com/zines/terminal)

different terminal emulators use different escape codes

terminal emulator 1: if you print out ESC[2J I’ll clear the screen!

terminal emulator 2: for me it’s ESC[HESC[J!
your system has a database called “terminfo” with escape codes in it

how if plays out when you press Ctrl+L to clear the screen:

program, with a little heart over it, thinking:
ah, she wants fo clear the screen! I’ll look up how to do that in the terminfo database…

(on my machine, the database is in /usr/share/terminfo)

program: ESC[HESC[J

terminal emulator, thinking: ok, clearing the screen!
how programs know what terminal you’re using: TERM

your terminal emulator sets the TERM environment variable when it starts

fun fact: terminal emulators often say they’re “xterm-256color” even if they’re not
this can break when SSHing into an old system with a new terminal emulator

(in a VERY annoying way)

happy little stick fiture: I am using ghostty

program, with a little heart over it: NOPE never heard of it
some ways to fix TERM

install the terminfo file for your terminal emulator on the system
use a different terminal emulator
just set TERM=xterm-256color, it’ll often sort of work

Reposted by Seven Years in Quebec

Carlos Scheidegger @cscheid.net · 6h

This may just be the best CS paper I’ve read this year. Just read the abstract and first para of the intro! The rest of the intro is really wild too, but very very good:

dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1...

A screenshot of an academic paper. It reads:

Abstract
A "
'quine" is a deterministic program that prints itself. In this essay, I will show you a "gauguine": a probabilistic program that infers itself. A gauguine is repeatedly asked to guess its own source code. Initially, its chances of guessing correctly are of course minuscule. But as the gauguine observes more and more of its own previous guesses, it detects patterns of behavior and gains information about its inner workings.
This information allows it to bootstrap self-knowledge, and ultimately discover its own source code. We will discuss how-and why-we might write a gauguine, and what we stand to learn by constructing one.
CCS Concepts: • Computing methodologies → Philo-sophical/theoretical foundations of artificial intelli-gence; Theory of mind.
Keywords: reflection, probabilistic programming
ACM Reference Format:
Kartik Chandra, Amanda Liu, Jonathan Ragan-Kelley, and Joshua B.
Tenenbaum. 2025. Gauguin, Descartes, Bayes: A Diurnal Golem's Brain. In Proceedings of the 2025 ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on New Ideas, New Paradigms, and Reflections on Programming and Software (Onward! '25), October 12-18, 2025, Singapore, Singa-pore. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 9 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/
3759429.3762631

1 A Way of Knowing

From time to time, we all have crises of identity-moments of radical and overwhelming uncertainty about our selves.
I' don't know whether the doubts that seize us can really be externalized in language, but if I were to try, I would express them as questions, questions like: Who am I? What am I?
What kind of person? What kind of mind?

Seven Years in Quebec @dfeldman.org · 15h

* Apple can send lossless audio to Airpods if the source is also Apple Music via some magic that only works since they control the entire stack, but in any case this test wouldn't test that

Seven Years in Quebec @dfeldman.org · 15h

I'm actually not sure if this test makes sense with Bluetooth headphones because your phone/computer is always re-encoding the audio with a lossy codec even if the original was not

I suppose that's the point of the test though

Seven Years in Quebec @dfeldman.org · 15h

Can you actually tell the difference between lossless and lossy compressed audio? (With your current headphones/speakers and ears)
abx.digitalfeed.net/list.html

ABX High Fidelity Test list

A set of browser-based ABX tests comparing lossless and lossy music samples

abx.digitalfeed.net

Seven Years in Quebec @dfeldman.org · 16h

TitTok and SHEIN prove that Chinese internet companies can succeed in the US

At least for a while, until the politicians start freaking out

Seven Years in Quebec @dfeldman.org · 16h

Consumer tech has always been a low-margin business though

The real question is whether China will be able to take over on the industrial/commercial side

For example the Chinese C919 plane is very similar to a Boeing 737, and while it's a small player now, it might well take over

Seven Years in Quebec @dfeldman.org · 16h

I don't think it's a huge surprise, talent is evenly distributed and China has a LOT of people

Plus, the US has ultra-high-paid occupations like hedge funds that suck up a lot of the talented people and don't really produce anything concrete, and China really doesn't

Seven Years in Quebec @dfeldman.org · 16h

3D printers are another - the real pioneer was Czech company Prusa, but then there was a wave of cheap Chinese knockoffs

But now Bambu Labs makes printers that are not just cheaper but better than Prusa in most ways

Seven Years in Quebec @dfeldman.org · 16h

Robot vacuums are an interesting one - pioneered by iRobot in the US, but they just couldn't keep up with the Chinese ones, which aren't just cheaper but have better navigation and obstacle avoidance tech

Reposted by Seven Years in Quebec

Chris Steller @chrissteller.bsky.social · 20h

Look, I'll meet you at the corner of 29-5/8ths Avenue and 7-15/16ths Street. I don't see what's so hard about this.

street signs
29- 5/8 AVE
7-15/16 ST

Seven Years in Quebec @dfeldman.org · 18h

JFC. You don't have to be adopted. Tons of Latino people have non-Spanish names. I mean the president of Mexico is Claudia Sheinbaum.

Brendan Nyhan @brendannyhan.bsky.social · 18h

What if the unidentified masked men with guns don't accept the validity of your papers?

Reposted by Seven Years in Quebec

Matthew Green @matthewdgreen.bsky.social · 18h

This is amazing research by Nadia Heninger and her co-authors Wenyi Morty Zhang, Annie Dai, Keegan Ryan, Dave Levin and Aaron Schulman. TL;DR a huge number of satellite links over our heads are totally unencrypted. satcom.sysnet.ucsd.edu

🛰️ SATCOM Security

Research project homepage for SATCOM Security: papers, source code, and recent satellite communications vulnerabilities.

satcom.sysnet.ucsd.edu

Seven Years in Quebec @dfeldman.org · 18h

Don't do this 🤢

ACARS Drama @acarsdrama.bsky.social · 18h

(1/2) VDLM2 Message From: N304PQ / 9E5123

Message: SOMEONE PUT GUM ALL OVER 14D CLEANERS COULDNT GET IT OFF... WE WERE ABLE 2 GET IT CLEANED EVENTUALLY... FLIGHT WAS OVERSOLD AND I DIDNT WANT 2 DEFER

Track Aircraft: https://www.flightradar24.com/N304PQ

Area: Philadelphia, PA, USA

#acars #vdl

Seven Years in Quebec @dfeldman.org · 18h

but how else would you make Rotisserie Grilled Arnold Palmer

Reposted by Seven Years in Quebec

Corey “🎃Managed NAT Gateway👻” Quinn @quinnypig.com · 1d

You misdialed 0118 999 881 999 119 725 3.

Seven Years in Quebec @dfeldman.org · 1d

In a weird way it's a monument to the collapse of the USSR as well