SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Over at The New Stack is a brief but entertaining history of the editor vi and Vim.
"The editor was optimized so that you could edit and feel productive when it was painting slower than you could think. Now that computers are so much faster than you can think, nobody understands this anymore," Joy said. "It was a world that is now extinct. People don't know that vi was written for a world that doesn't exist anymore."
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
A Look at Vim, a Text Editor for the Ages
|
Log In/Create an Account
| Top
| 135 comments
| Search Discussion
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Where you stand depends on where you sit.
-- Rufus Miles, HEW
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday August 24 2018, @02:48PM (12 children)
My orthodontist literally bought a new Porsche 911 the week after we signed the contract.
Kids are the bottomless time-sink. I switched from StarCraft to Hearthstone because it's less demanding of focused attention / better fit for home life with the kids, then I got really disgusted with the amount of time I was actually putting into it because it was so easy to just play a game "while" doing something else, so now I noodle on the idea of a "simple" blockchain system instead.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by bobthecimmerian on Saturday August 25 2018, @02:34AM (11 children)
For all I know our orthodontist comes to work in a Rolls Royce, but if he does he has the taste to park it behind the building. On the other hand our old psychiatrist left the practice and the new one reserved the closest spot to the entrance for himself and alternates between showing up in a Maserati and a Fisker Karma. We're on the hunt for another psychiatrist.
I had some initial enthusiasm for blockchains, but I've come to think it's a solution still searching for a problem. I'm more interested in projects to support a distributed, decentralized web that - crucially - is easy for the average person to use instead of tech power users. I basically never have the mental energy outside work to contribute to one. But I'm hoping as the kids reach college age that I might. Things like the dat protocol and Beaker browser, Scuttlebutt, offline first Progressive Web Apps, the NoBackend movement, Sandstorm (one of my favorites, conceptually similar to OwnCloud or NextCloud but in my view superior in a number of key aspects), etc...
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday August 25 2018, @03:08PM (10 children)
Since you've already mastered regex and vim, maybe this can inspire you for blockchain applications that are "easy for the average person to use instead of tech power users"?
http://mangocats.com/ao/IslandLife.html [mangocats.com]
It's disorganized, incomplete, and still morphing around in search of a solid form, I'm targeting May 4 2019 as a "gel date" to have it ready for public input, but if anybody wants to read / critique it with the understanding that I'm retaining 100% control of this branch (feel free to branch and own your own version at anytime)... there it is.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by bobthecimmerian on Monday August 27 2018, @01:38PM (9 children)
I like your ideas. I haven't done a deep read through, but what I see makes sense. I see three concepts so far that separate your ideas there from what I have seen in most other blockchain products, and I may have missed a few more: 1.) no currency generation through proof-of-work or proof-of-stake or, as far as I can tell, other forms of mining. 2.) ability to censor content 3.) the ability to add expiration dates to contracts.
I will admit I'm not motivated enough to contribute. I also think you face a colossal obstacle: coinmarketcap.com already lists 1890 cryptocurrencies. I am absolutely certain there are some gems somewhere mixed in that colossal pile of trash. But how do you find them? How are the things worth using, or at least worth exploring for interesting ideas and maybe reusable code, going to stand out from another set of lipstick on the pyramid scheme piggy?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday August 27 2018, @02:02PM (8 children)
Thanks for reading. The closest in philosophy I have found is Stellar, by the Ripple creator but reinvented with less greed attached. Where I diverge from Stellar is that they're still trying to have a "big complicated single distributed validation system" (more or less their own words), instead of something simple that ordinary mortals can administer themselves. I think proof of work mining is folly, it's folly that is currently working due to the level of greed/speculation swirling around it, but that can't sustain it into widespread use - it will always be some kind of niche, it's too expensive to operate as a real mainstream financial backbone.
All the talk of side-chains, etc. I see as an attempt to wean off proof of work while still retaining it as a central pillar. I still can't wrap my head around how people expect to trust this central pillar without it being fabulously expensive to operate - the more participants in the mining network, the more expensive it is to run, so whatever value it has is going to end up near equilibrium with the cost to run it... too esoteric and philosophical for this early in the morning.
My real vision, and hope for eventually getting noticed, is to package a system that is so damn simple that it can be analyzed and understood within a few hours by experts, explained satisfactorily to lay people within a few minutes, and deployed like a software appliance / phone app system by almost anybody on almost any hardware. The core crypto in bitcoin et. al. is simple enough to run on tiny embedded devices, all the mining power is just make-work.
When a share in a blockchain represents a promise from someone, they build their own value by fulfilling those promises satisfactorily, and providing proof through an easily accessed and easily trusted blockchain. Something akin to web of trust should be possible wherein reliable blockchain operators can endorse others and eventually it becomes impractical to rewrite history because those endorsements are impossible to forge, and too valuable to the endorsers to be given away. That's all about 3 generations past the Island Life story, but that's the vision of where it can go, and a little bit about how it might get there.
As I said, fuzzy, incomplete, needs development that it may or may not get. Next time I get an hour to work on it I want to re-design the large number storage scheme a little bit. On the one hand, a number is a number, why bother on a detail like that? on the other - if the underlying structures are super clean / simple, that can foster a family of compatible applications that aren't all differentiating themselves by varying the underlying data structures and interfaces...
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by bobthecimmerian on Tuesday August 28 2018, @01:27PM (7 children)
Funny, I hadn't visited coinmarketcap.com in months. I went through it yesterday and went to the official web pages of a few different digital currencies, picking at random. I ran into the concept of side-chains for the first time. Then you mention it here with your comment just a few hours later.
The one value I see in something like proof-of-work is the systems where it generates some kind of computing resource that other people can rent with the same token. I know storj.io tries to work that way with storage, but when I last examined it the initial investment cost was too high. The MaidSafe/SafeNetwork/SafeCoin project does too. I'm a million miles away from asserting that they get it right, or that they actually plan what they advertise and are not running an elaborate pyramid scheme. But at the least I think the idea is interesting - the dream of replacing centralized server hosting with virtual computing powered by a blockchain storage level and distributed computing resources.
I understand what you're trying to do, in broad terms. If you haven't tried it already, it might be worthwhile to read through some of the options that already exist. I suspect you'll find something that overlaps your goals, or maybe at least a community that would adopt your goals. Good luck.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday August 28 2018, @03:38PM (6 children)
I just can't get past the future vision that: no matter how valuable computing resources are, they have such negligible cost that there will always be competition providing that computing resource for less.
The "revolutionary" value in I see in blockchains is: transparency, and consistency. Everybody gets a copy, and everybody understands how that copy is formatted and how to get the information they need out of it. That's nothing that couldn't have been done in 1990, but the motivation for compatibility, consistency and open communication wasn't there. At this point, compute, storage and communication resources are so cheap that they can sustain the massive overhead of mining and still provide value in the blockchain so produced. Of course the "immutable trustability" that everybody goes on about is a big deal, too, but by itself: so what? The fact that everybody can see it is actually sort of novel vs a website that is hosted by a central provider and can go down... The fact that people are paying to record things on the blockchain kind of acts as a barrier to entry that something like the internet wayback machine didn't have, and so it struggles with the massive volume of crap out there while the bitcoin blockchain stays at a more manageable data rate.
I started out intentionally ignoring the existing implementations and whitepapers just to see where I ended up without them as a corrupting influence. Then I started looking in more detail at what was out there. It took a surprisingly long time to find Ripple - the major non-proof-of-work blockchain, but, once found, it's pretty obvious (#3 market cap and all.) I actually brushed across Ripple a couple of weeks before I understood that it has no proof of work, you can read quite a bit of "analysis" of a system and they can still leave out rather crucial points like that sometimes. Stellar didn't surface for me until months after Ripple, again surprising, but I guess I'm not looking at it like a full time job, either. My initial "vision" more centered around reimbursement schemes for the recorders, and that can still happen, but I think it's more valuable to keep things straightforward and simple, the recorder reimbursement can be a layer on top of a simpler "trustable" core.
I set May 4, 2019 as an arbitrary "go public" date, but now we're looking at buying a boat so that may put a serious damper on the amount of time I invest in blockchain development... we shall see.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by bobthecimmerian on Tuesday August 28 2018, @08:47PM (5 children)
With respect to computing as a resource for digital currency and the low cost, the whole point is to make it crazy cheap. So it might be marginally cheaper to share all of your data with Facebook, Google, etc... but since you're spending, hypothetically, $3.17 per month on SafeNetwork resources to host your own GMail equivalent and Facebook equivalent you don't mind. Or you plug an old laptop into a wall, install SafeNetwork on it, and it "mines" for you contributing resources to the SafeNetwork and you don't pay anything for your hosted resources beyond a tiny bit of electricity. More resilience, less censorship (though that's a can of worms), more privacy, less advertising.
But right now all of that is mostly a dream, might as well ask for a pony. Or a unicorn.
I understand your point about not getting polluted by other ideas. Good luck with your blockchain. And your boat.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday August 28 2018, @09:45PM (4 children)
For resource cost, I worked out a nice rule-of-thumb for electricity, at something like $0.11/kwh your annual cost for 24-7 consumption of 1 watt is $1. So, a typical Intel NUC-ish compact pc might cost $20 per year to run, if you want compensation for your router, etc. that might start to get up to your $3.17 per month - without considering the cost of broadband. I'd consider broadband and the router hardware to be fixed costs, nothing additional for running a network node on top nothing you'd notice, anyway, as compared to normal usage.
Taking family to see the boat tonight, truly don't know how this is going to go...
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by bobthecimmerian on Wednesday August 29 2018, @03:22PM (3 children)
Man, we're really off in the weeds. I'm having fun, thanks for the discussion. What did you and your family think of the boat?
The dream of these SafeNetwork-style thing is that the level of tech literacy required is much lower. Install and go. I am typing this from my Linux workstation / home media server / home backups box. I do run the (fully open source) sandstorm.io software on the machine and they provide dynamic DNS, so my personal (redacted).sandcats.io subdomain is on the public web. If I wanted a static IP address so I could also host email or whatever on it, I'd need to pay Comcast a pretty penny in extra fees.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday August 29 2018, @09:12PM (2 children)
My life experience of running public facing servers is: go dedicated or don't bother. Virtual machines and containers could be a middle ground, but I definitely don't see attempting to run a secure server that handles even little financial transactions without it being some kind of pre-configured software appliance with all the firewall configuration and other process security pre-configured for the sysops, even to the point of the server software running system self-audits to make sure the configuration is still kosher.
The boat is scary-fun, hard to decide: 1974 36' trawler with a ferro-concrete hull - $15K, problems include rotten wood under the fiberglass in the superstructure that needs replacing (maybe 1/2 sheet of plywood, call it a whole sheet of plywood after you get into it and find other hidden gems), an exhaust manifold that needs replacing, water leak through the flybridge instruments, broken windshield (flat plate glass - easy), other than that it's really nice. New outside hull paint, could use new deck paint. Insurance on the concrete hull is difficult, and probably about $2K/yr, dockage is about $240/month - so maybe $5K/yr fixed expenses... if it lasts 3 years and we really use it twice a month, that's $30K plus all the repair labor for 150 trips, $200/trip + about $1/mile in running costs. Figure an average trip might be 20 miles, $220 per trip. Plus the time you can spend in the boat at the dock. This started as an idea for how to get a cheap apartment on the other side of town (30 minutes away, but 4 minutes from the kids' school), and it might still be that: cheaper than an apartment, but the docks on that side of town are $500/month and it's hard to think that that would be better than a dock less than half the price 10 minutes from home, even if that marina has a swimming pool...
I wish I were 25 again, back then I looked into houseboats but couldn't find anything acceptable for less than $80K, which is what I spent on my first house - this thing would have been awesome back then... now, we can enjoy it while doing the restoration work, but I'm not sure we've really got the spare time to enjoy it like we'd want to... It might get sold away from us before the custom exhaust manifold arrives next Thursday, and if that happens I'm O.K. letting it go. If it's still for sale when the exhaust manifold gets put on, we'll take a test cruise with the kids and let that help decide...
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by bobthecimmerian on Thursday August 30 2018, @01:38AM (1 child)
Good luck either way.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday August 30 2018, @04:55PM
Fast 'n loose math missed a 2: would need 6 years at 2 trips per month to get ~150 trips, so that would be an additional $15K of dock and insurance, making the trips $300 each at 6 years of continuous use, or $400 each at 3 years (or $800 each for one year, if it sinks after a year)... I'm cooling on it even without that bad math, our house-house needs wood work, caulk and paint, too, and when we went to see the trawler the smell of bug bomb came home with us on our clothes and hair... My boat diversion is leaning toward sail (where it was before this concrete beast came along), my wife is looking at bigger and more expensive trawlers... I just don't see that ever making sense, unless the blockchain thing does something unlikely for me.
🌻🌻 [google.com]