It turns out, long after Rome had become an Empire and was only a Republic in name only, most Senators still thought of it as a Republic and that this extraordinary state of affairs with the Senate just being a glorified rubber stamp body would soon come to an end and that, they will very soon restore the Senate to its former rightful place, just as soon as this current very limited crises was over.

As it turns out, they were never able to do that again.

It’s so interesting to me that nearly all of the Founding Fathers had read Tacitus and were keenly aware of this and explicitly tried to design a system to prevent that from happening. To their credit, their system lasted a good while.

Pascal inspired syntax

Ada inspired type system

Lisp inspired templating and Macros

Compiles to C

The language has well defined syntax, strong types, and I turned up the compiler strictness to the max, treat all warnings as errors etc. After a few hours I put the agent aside, committed to git then deleted everything and hand coded some parts from scratch.

I then compared the results. Found one or two bugs in the AI code but honestly, the rest of our differences were “maters of taste” (is a helper function actually justified here or not kind of things).

And yet none did. Because they listened to their security chiefs and advisors who would tell them, Iran is a highly complex multiethnic geographically complex country. If you can contain it with diplomacy, that’s preferable.

When listening to “experts” becomes taboo, there will be consequences.

The inhabitants of the Iranian plateau have been the subject of the ire of the military superpower of their era quite a few times. Alexander the Great conquered them and set their capital and their sacred books on fire and yet a mere 70 years later his Hellenic dynasty was gone. They were conquered by the Arabs and were forced to give up their religion but somehow, unlike Egypt and Syria/Lebanon and many other ancient places, these guys somehow kept their language and distinct culture intact. They were decimated (maybe even worse ) by Genghis Khan and followed quickly by Tamerlane and yet, it was their Turco-Mongol rulers who ended up adopting their language and culture.

The inhabitants of this land have deep memory of knowing how to suffer, to endure and to survive. It wasn’t that long ago that from Constantinople to New Delhi, the language of the Imperial Court was Persian.

BeOS came up with “Binder” for doing inter process communication. Just before Be Inc. was acquired by Palm, some Be engineers somehow convinced management to release Binder as open source, which came to be known as OpenBinder.

After the Palm acquisition many Be engineers moved to a startup called Android Inc, and adopted OpenBinder for IPC. And the rest as they say, is history.

If it’s payments to continuously verify National Security protections, it’s all good.

I developed my own Android ROMs from 2009-2011, complete with my own tuned kernel. I ran the local Android developers MeetUp group and evangelised Android development. When Honeycomb launched I helped OEMs test their beta firmware. For free.

But as Google has become certified Evil, the direction of Android has been very clear. In practice I honestly can’t say it’s now any more open than iOS. Except it has a lot more avenues for Google to mine your data to sell ads. And the quality of third party apps on it is decidedly worse.

I thought long and hard about getting a Linux phone. But I need a good camera on my phone to take random snaps of kids/pets/etc. And the Linux phones just aren’t there.

I hate the shitty duopoly we have ended up with. But I now realise that the openness of x86 and pc as platform really was an accident of history.

For centuries, Romans had grabbed land and defeated enemies mostly by projecting immense power and using shock and awe tactics. Hannibal of course learnt a lot about Roman tactics from his father, Hamilcar, and the “treachery” with which Rome had taken Sicily off Carthaginians. But he also grew up in Spain, in close proximity to Romans, and studied them and their methods for years.

He knew he needed to have an instrument of shock and awe himself, something the Romans had never seen before, and elephants were perfect for that.

For those interested, the Rest is History podcast did a 4 series on Hannibal last year which is highly engaging and informative

https://therestishistory.com/series/hannibal

I have a friend who refuses to use anything other than CDE and still manages to compile and run it on modern Linux distros.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/fsharp/tutorials/ty...

SQLProvider is probably the most well known one: https://fsprojects.github.io/SQLProvider/

It’s really beautiful. You get type safety with SQL. If your code compiles, you guaranteed to have valid executable both F# code and SQL. Also you get to create composable queries.

And there are other, thinner/leaner type providers as well. My favourite Postgres one is: https://github.com/Zaid-Ajaj/Npgsql.FSharp

This simple sample executes query and read results as table then map the results

open Npgsql.FSharp

type User = { Id: int FirstName: string LastName: string }

let getAllUsers (connectionString: string) : User list = connectionString |> Sql.connect |> Sql.query "SELECT * FROM users" |> Sql.execute (fun read -> { Id = read.int "user_id" FirstName = read.text "first_name" LastName = read.text "last_name" })

Typescript’s types are far more adaptable and malleable, even with the latest C# 15 which is belatedly adding Sum Types. If I set TypeScript to its most strict settings, I can even make it mimic a poor man’s Haskell and write existential types or monoids.

And JS/TS have by far the best libraries and utilities for JSON and xml parsing and string manipulation this side of Perl (the difference being that the TypeScript version is actually readable), and maybe Nushell but I’ve never used Nushell in production.

Recently I wrote a Linux CLI tool for managing podman/quadlett containers and I wrote it in TypeScript and it was a joy to use. The Effect library gave me proper Error types and immutable data types and the Bun Shell makes writing shell commands in TS nearly as easy as Bash. And I got it to compile a single self contained binary which I can run on any server and has lower memory footprint and faster startup time than any equivalent .NET code I’ve ever written.

And yes had I written it in rust it would have been faster and probably even safer but for a quick a dirty tool, development speed matters and I can tell you that I really appreciated not having to think about ownership and fighting the borrow checker the whole time.

TypeScript might not be perfect, but it is a surprisingly good language for many domains and is still undervalued IMO given what it provides.

But with the ridiculous tax incentives here in Australia (at least while they last), my new car turned out to be an EV. Specifically the Hyundai Ioniq 5 N. And let me tell you, while the logical part of my brain knows that the gear shifts and the exhaust notes and everything about it is “fake”, when I’m driving it around a track or a challenging B road, every part of my body is fooled into thinking it’s real. And reluctant as I might be to admit it, it might just be the most fun car I’ve ever had

Is it perfect? No. I wish it was 10cm lower to the ground. I wish it was at least 600kg lighter. But it has completely disabused me of the notion that electric cars can’t be fun.