[0] https://www.cbc.ca/lite/news

I haven’t been all-emacs all-the-time for ages (I jumped back to the other editor after years of emacs), but hasn’t that super-elite group always been relatively small? We have to hope that the best of the next generation are going to self-select and be curious (and hopefully get the support they need from the established old guard) despite AI. We have to hope that the kids (no matter their age) will be alright.

Linux succeeded where BSD was tied-up in a lawsuit[0] from AT&T and the fear of “picking the wrong horse” w BSD under threat allowed Linux to slide into public consciousness and installs.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_Laboratories,_Inc.....

[0] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5233

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43952475

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bmz67ErIRa4&t=63s

Perhaps it’s because I haven’t had a coffee yet, but I’m not following/parsing this last paragraph - can you expand?

Long-running online handle - I fondly remember sjamaan from #netbsd on Freenode in “The Olden Days”.

Many, many people are slipping through social welfare cracks and suffering as we speak because the cost of fuel is rising[0] and we’re ostensibly helping one another and living-well. People are not durable, and not adaptive in the face of threats to “substrate” that we’ve mostly taken for granted. We are paying (in the small, in the scope of humanity) for tolls that we’ve rung up. Just less than 4000 people in Europe died[1] because the temperature ticked up a few degrees[2]. Does that make you think we’re actually robust? What happens if our at-risk electrical grid gets shut down deliberately? If communication infrastructure is adversely affected?

> Even humans - the real risk to humanity

Because, on the whole, we’re in a manageable world with reasonable people keeping the peace.

> Even climate change and nuclear war and bio weapons - the most damaging mechanisms - would still only get some percentage of the people on earth.

Is that victory? I don’t think it’s an asteroid-class event like you seem to be leaning on, but potential threats to energy, be it electrical grid, fuel production (moving goods around the world is critical - you’re not going get a plot of dirt and garden your way out of grocery stores being empty - which many got to get a taste of during the COVID pandemic) or communication. We actually fare poorly in the face of pressure there, and I’m not bullish on humanity “pulling together” like Independence Day[3] versus forming tribes and tearing each other down.

All this is predicated on a malicious AI taking over (e.g.) the electrical grid or conms, and I understand the problems with (e.g.) OpenAI/Hugging Face incident, or the overblown Mythos claims[4] (and how under some scrutiny these events shine lights on incompetence or hyperbole), but is there a trajectory/future where these systems (electrical, comms) are genuinely under threat? Do you think we’ll respond better than I described when we’re less comfortable, less in control? We’re in a tizzy over social media and it’s detrimental effects on society and it’s essentially an opt-in entertainment platform…

[0] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/bessent-said-the-k-shap...

[1] https://www.dw.com/en/heat-wave-european-countries-report-37...

[2] I’m not trying to diminish this - and it took a lot of “work” (environmental abuse) to arrive here - but (say) 10 degree rise in temperature sounds a lot less dramatic than thermonuclear war… but here we are, with 3,700 deaths.

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independence_Day_(1996_film)

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49929391

Well... Tcl on its own is good as a configuration language, creating DSLs, or as a scripting/extension interface, as well as a single common cross platform interface to filesystems, network sockets, and more - so I'd say "the biggest reason" depends on what you're working on...

[0] http://www.beedub.com/book/2nd/interp.doc.html

[1] https://www.guppylake.com/nsb/pubs/ulpaa-94.pdf

My next question to myself was what hardware was running Tcl in c.1997 Cisco equipment? What porting effort was required? I understand there was some proprietary feature work for Cisco IOS, but I don't know what architectural work was required.

[0] https://grokipedia.com/page/Tkinter

Tcl and Tk are fantastic, and if this is where it ended, John Ousterhout would have secured his place in history - this is only 1 piece of his contributions, though - see too:

  * Log structured file system[0]

  * parallel Make[1] (Adam de Boor from Sprite project, not JO hisself)

  * RAFT consensus protocol[2]

  * Various notable teachings [3][4][5]

[1] https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=bmake&sektion=1

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raft_(algorithm)

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ousterhout's_dichotomy

[4] https://web.stanford.edu/~ouster/cgi-bin/papers/threads.pdf

[5] https://web.stanford.edu/~ouster/cgi-bin/aposd.php

This might be part of it...

> Why would anyone with the expertise to make these calls bang their head against the wall trying to educate bureaucrats about these things

But I suspect this might be most of it: good engineering is boring (to the recipient). Preemptively solving problems gets no credit.