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roi's comments

roi | 5 years ago | on: Why Should You Learn Vim in 2020

Most command-line interfaces use the readline library. To switch them to vi bindings put the following in ~/.inputrc:

  set editing-mode vi

roi | 7 years ago | on: A Programmer's Introduction to Mathematics

"...study actively. Don't just read it: fight it! Ask your own questions, look for your own examples, discover your own proofs. Is the hypothesis necessary? Is the converse true? What happens in the classical special case? What about the degenerate cases? Where does the proof use the hypothesis?...it is not a good idea to open a book on page 1 and read it, working all the problems in order, till you come to the last page. It's a bad idea. The material is arranged in the book so that its linear reading is logically defensible, to be sure, but we readers are human, all different from one another and from the author, and each of us is likely to find something difficult that is easy for someone else. My advice is to read till you come to a definition new to you, and then stop and try to think of examples and non-examples, or till you come to a theorem new to you, and then stop and try to understand it and prove it for yourself --- and, most important, when you come to an obstacle, a mysterious passage, an unsolvable problem, just skip it. Jump ahead, try the next problem, turn the page, go to the next chapter, or even abandon the book and start another one. Books may be linearly ordered, but our minds are not."

(P.R. Halmos)

roi | 7 years ago | on: NetBSD 8.0 released

Another option is Void Linux, which is explicitly inspired by NetBSD.

roi | 8 years ago | on: Some excerpts from recent Alan Kay emails

The thing is that Licklider's vision of computers as "interactive intellectual amplifiers for all humans, pervasively networked world-wide" has already come to pass, and created huge economies of scale and exponential pressures for compatibility and conformity that didn't exist before.

In the 1970's a few dozen brilliant people could create a completely new and self-contained computer system because the entire computing world was tiny and fragmented. there wasn't the imperative to be compatible to all-pervasive standards (even IBM's dominance in business was being challenged by the minis).

These day if you want to create a new computer system that people will use you need at the minimum to provide a networking stack and a functional web browser, some emulation or compatibility system to support legacy software that people rely on, device drivers for a huge range of hardware, etc. All this not only takes a huge amount of work, it also punctures the design integrity of your system, making it into a huge mountain of compatibility hacks before you even start on your own new concepts. But the deadliest enemy of innovation is the mental inertia of masses of users with a long history of interacting with computers. They are no longer the blank slates who have never seen a computer you had in the 70's.

Even in the realm of art people realized that the romantic or modernistic model of artistic revolution that Kay invokes is untenable and retreated into postmodernism.

roi | 9 years ago | on: 20 years as a Debian maintainer

Let me recommend Void Linux. Its init system is runit, which is djb daemontools based and super simple.

I switched a couple of months ago from Arch, and was surprised at how easy it was, and how completely useless (at least for my use case) all the systemd steaming mess had proved in retrospect to be.

roi | 10 years ago | on: The Triumph of Stupidity (1933)

Most of these classics, especially the Greek ones, were forgotten in Western Europe of the middle ages. They were preserved in the Byzantine and Muslim cultures and were reintroduced to the West starting from the 12th Century, a process which culminated in the Renaissance.
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