The part the author shared about the huge overhead cost of firing up emacs, especially in a multi-user environment (I learned about emacs vs vi holy war back on a multi-user Solaris environment), our Unix professor strongly encouraged us to learn vi. He said "vi is part of every standard Unix install, so when you ssh into a box, you'll always have your editor and it won't steal all the CPU from the other users when you fire it up."
Feels monumental to see that come to an end decades later.
I think you're quite confused. Emacs always avoided a huge startup hit by loading elisp code into temacs (bare bones emacs that only exists when building it) and then dumping it with unexec to produce the emacs that is distributed. A decade ago, glibc stopped supporting unexec and emacs had to switch to a different method of incorporating the elisp code and avoiding the startup time, but the unexec code was still there. Now, a decade later, that code--which was not being used--has finally been removed.
None of that has anything to with emacs vs vi -- the point that your professor was making was that vi was distributed by default with UNIX so it was always there, whereas emacs needed to be installed (which wasn't even an option on servers).
Well, this was over 30 years ago that I was sitting in that class, and the resources the emacs required vs vi was definitely part of the discussion. We were working in a shared environment on a solaris system, and if the whole class fired up emacs for a class session, the effects were definitely experienced by all the users on the system at the time.
I'll add a little context. I mentioned that it was 30 years ago. My personal computer at the time was a 486DX-50 with 16 MB of RAM, and the mainframe we were tied to had maybe 2 GB of Ram? For 200+ users to share. It's easy to forget how far hardware has developed since then.
> The part the author shared about the huge overhead cost of firing up emacs
TFA's wording on that is a bit misleading.
My Emacs with no config starts in 0.1s (110 ms). My Emacs with my huge config (between 3 000 to 4 000 lines of custom Elisp code) starts in 1.2s or so.
And then of course modern day Emacs is so stable that the thing can stay up for weeks without needing a restart.
It's been a very long time that the "cost of firing up Emacs" is smaller than the cost of firing up 99% of all the software out there (looking at you AppImage , flatpaks, browsers, any desktop app really, etc.).
That's funny, because our professor didn't tell us that and I remember doing my projects with four terminal windows logged into the server and three of them running separate instances of emacs :D. I wonder how much I bogged down that mid-90s HP-UX machine.
I am working on a clock app that keeps time the Roman Empire way (every day has twelve hours that start at sunrise and end at sunset, so the duration of each hour changes slightly each day), so this library would be extremely helpful. Thank you!
Relatedly, I have recently started walking and talking, and I just use lightweight gamer headphones that have a mic. I just record it with a generic voice recorder app, then I use a local instantiation of whisper to transcribe it when I get home. I throw the transcript and the recording into a database and then I can search the whole thing, or have AI look for interesting patterns in my thoughts.
I was under the impression that the injunction against playing cards was because of their proximity to tarot/occult practices. Mormons had the same injunction against playing cards until the 80s, when the teaching was no longer promulgated. Speaking as a former Mormon...
The government is the majority of people. So the government very well can be against 49% of the people and it would still fit your definition.
If 100 people were about to embark on a journey on a ship, what makes you think 51 of them know who should run the ship if none of them have ever even been on a ship?
There are a variety of ways that democratic governments are structure that make this an inaccurate characterization of how things work.
The US, for example, apportions representatives and votes for President in a way that overweights less populated states, and there are various aspects of parliamentary systems that help avoid landing in a two-party system where a simple majority gets the say in everything—they force compromise and coalition building among disparate groups. Additionally, Constitutional systems will enumerate the rights of its citizens such that they cannot simply be taken away by a simple majority of any body.
Democratic countries are also basically never "pure" democracies where everyone votes on every decision as in your Plato's ship analogy—we elect people who audition for the role of running the ship, ostensibly those among the people who are best suited to the task.
First, it is not always the case that there are only two parties. You can totally have a government made by representants of all "relevant" parties (by "relevant" I mean that the party needs a minimum size, otherwise anyone could create a party of one person).
Second, your ship example is pretty weird. The people gets to elect representatives regularly. It's not embarking on a ship with complete strangers: you have been on this ship all your life. "Never have been on a ship" would mean electing a newborn baby... that wouldn't count as a functioning democracy :-).
IIRC, "Christianity" used to be very much tied to monarchy in Europe, as well as feudalism. Then it was used to justify slavery. Then apartheid. And now it's sometimes used to justify stripping minorities of their rights.
There is no Christian ethics, only people justifying there political views by invoking Jesus.
But Christian swallowed Greece Philosophy, until to the point where it is a core part of Christianity. There are much less a break between different high-cultures as people make it be after the fact, but more of a continuous morphing into each other.
Ancient Greeks and Romans spent more time in the Middle East than they did in Northern Europe. If Christians borrowed from anyone, it was Middle Easterners... ie: themselves.
Granted, Islam is not the same as Middle Eastern, but European and the Middle Eastern cultures have interwoven for millennia. The Middle East is not monolithic, either. They have had their own Christian communities ever since the religion was invented.
Neither is Europe free of Muslim thought. Spain is an obvious example, but there was also trade, which is how algebra came to Europe.
I don't get you claim. Greek philosophy existed earlier than Christianity, and borrowed e.g. from Egypt, and not really from Israel, which is the cultural branch Christianity evolved from.
Yes, what I meant to convey is that the lands around the Mediterranean constituted a coherent region more than the Northern Mediterranean combined with Northern Europe.
Greeks and Romans traveled throughout the area. To a Roman, a northern Barbarian was more exotic than the peoples South of the Mediterranean.
We are more similar to Middle Easterners than it might seem, though, granted, Islam today is a huge differentiator.
Oh, by 'themselves' I wanted to point out that the first Christians were, obviously, Middle Easterners. There have been Christian communities throughout the region ever since.
Yes, I gather Islam incorporated both Judaism and Christianity.
Another impact on solar adoption in the United States is that many home insurance companies are refusing to pay on claims against roof damage from poor installs. And there are a lot of poor installs, which has led to this problem. So now the homeowners are taking all of the risk on a solar install that already has an 8-10 year ROI.
Those diseases are back because of rampant immigration. People from other countries bring them here. It has nothing to do with "obscurantist beliefs", whatever those might be.
Oh, well, it turns out that keyboard sounds leak enough entropy to make it easy to attack even very strong passwords.
Microphones on devices such as Ring doorbell cameras are explicitly exfiltrating audio data out of your control whenever they're activated. Features like Alexa and Siri require, in some sense, 24/7 microphone activation, although normally that data isn't transmitted off-device except on explicit (vocal) user request. But that control is imposed by non-user-auditable device firmware that can be remotely updated at any time.
Finally, for a variety of reasons, it's becoming increasingly common to have a microphone active and transmitting data intentionally, often to public contexts like livestreaming video.
With the proliferation of such potentially vulnerable microphones in our daily lives, we should not rely too heavily on the secrecy of short strings that can easily leak through the audio channel.
Using a password manager is an easy and useful protection against audio leaks of passwords.
But this is an example of the kind of thing the OP is talking about. You're probably not at a very realistic risk of having your password hacked via audio exfiltrated from the Ring camera at your front door. Unless it's Mossad et al who want your password.
Like "you're probably not at a very realistic risk of having your phone wiretapped", this is overindexing on past experience—remember that until Room 641A commenced operations in 02003 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A), you weren't, and after it did, your phone was virtually guaranteed to be wiretapped. Similarly, you aren't at a very realistic risk of having your password hacked via audio, until someone is doing this to 80% of the people in the world. As far as we know, this hasn't happened yet, but it certainly will.
But again, that’s the Mossad scenario - NSA in this case. You’re essentially reinforcing the OP point. There are three threat models given in Figure 1 of the OP doc, and what you’re saying really only applies to the third.
Feels monumental to see that come to an end decades later.