Hm on first reading I was confused by the extern "fil-c" framing -- that seems to imply a bridge between C and Fil-C, which introduces some nasty language/runtime inter-op issues.

But I like this part

I want a Rust FFI that speaks the Fil-C ABI. ... We could use Rust for compile-time safety and then pay a performance penalty for using C.

A rough proxy for this would be if they say contribute to the C++ standards process, which Google Microsoft nVidia do, and basically zero "normal" companies (say SaaS) do. It means they are investing in multi-decade maintenance of their codebase

Speaking personally, the fate of Docker, Inc. was clear to me when they took their $40M Series C round in 2014. I had met with Solomon in April 2014 (after their $15M Series B) and tried to tell him what I had learned at Joyent: that raising a ton of money without having a concrete and repeatable business would almost inevitably lead to poor decision making

And it's hard not to see the same pattern here: https://fly.io/blog/we-raised-a-bunch-of-money/ - June 2023

This past July, we raised $25MM from A16Z and our existing investors, including Intel Capital and Dell. Recently, we raised an additional $70MM led by EQT Ventures.

Basically Scott Johnston is the guy that recoups money for investors, and in Docker's case, I recall that involved clawing back some value from users

From OP: As a shareholder of Fly.io, for this stage in Fly.io’s lifecycle, I liked his playbook better than mine. As the CEO of Fly.io, I liked the prospect of him doing all this work more than I liked the prospect of me doing it. We took a lot of time to work this out, and ultimately the board and I convinced him to take the job.

I just Googled and it turns out it was https://wkdu.org/ 91.7 FM, Drexel University college radio! Woohoo something is alive out there !!

And I just found the playlist of the exact show I listened to, on Thursday July 16th - https://wkdu.org/playlist/71388

This seems either mathematically impossible or vacuous, depending on what you mean ...

But it does feel complex to me.

Personally I just write in the common subset of bash and OSH, which is very large. I never need to support say dash, since every machine that has dash also has bash, which is less broken in terms of 'echo' and so forth.

bash has its own broken-ness, but running under OSH solves that.

And OSH also supports some busybox idioms -- we learned last year that bash cannot run busybox ash scripts on Alpine

e.g. 'chdir' is an alias for 'cd' in busybox, but not in bash. And Alpine scripts use it, so bash can't run Alpine scripts, but OSH can (as of last year).

    $ dash -c 'echo "c:\\new"'
    c:
    ew
    $ busybox ash -c 'echo "c:\\new"'
    c:\new

    $ dash -c 'echo "c:\\\\new"'
    c:\new
    $ busybox ash -c 'echo "c:\\\\new"'
    c:\\new

It's one of the least POSIX compliant shells. It is derived from the same codebase as busybox ash, but busybox receives more maintenance.

---

In any case, it is pretty sad that sh is in such poor shape than the default /bin/sh on Debian has different behavior in this basic case.

I built OSH to be a set of semantics agreed upon by many shells. I don't think any cross-shell test suites like our spec tests had existed in the past - https://oils.pub/release/0.37.0/quality.html

But there is little coordination among shell authors, and no real motivation to fix the gaps. In contrast, there is A LOT of coordination among JavaScript engine authors, mostly because there are people paid to work on them.

    osh-0.37$ echo "c:\new"
    c:\new

    osh-0.37$ shopt --set no_parse_backslash
    osh-0.37$ echo "c:\new"
      echo "c:\new"
              ^
    [ interactive ]:6: Invalid char escape in double quoted string (OILS-ERR-12)

    echo "c:\\new"  # with two backslashes 

    \ " ` $

Nine Reasons to Use OSH - https://oils.pub/osh.html

I always appreciated Jeff having a level head ... which this article seems to confirm:

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/google-cracks-down-posts...

I think it's a pretty deep point -- your memory and consciousness are shaped by the media environment (media being the thing that Klosterman thinks about obsessively)

And the media environment drastically changed after the 90's -- because of the Internet

I think his main point was about access to media in different eras, but it's worth reading directly if you feel like that

I have to admit I feel similarly conflicted after a few recent REAL WORLD experiences. The first is that Gemini and Claude taught me a whole bunch of things about beer that I feel like I should have known, or a friend should have told me in the last few decades :-) (I'm in my mid 40's)

As background, I am a simple man, and I like one type of beer (pale ale), and drink 1 beer a day. But it has to be fresh, crisp, bitter, and not make me want to fall asleep (lower alcohol)

So here is some color on what I learned:

- I worked in SF / the bay area for nearly 2 decades, and I'm now in Philly. I have been wondering for like FOUR YEARS why when I buy pale ale, it is somehow OFF. Well Claude told me that east coast pale ale is actually more like "English Ale" (e.g. Yards brewing), and west coast pale ale is its own thing (e.g. Lagunitas)

Apparently west coast is what I developed a taste for -- it is more bitter. And this totally tracks for me. So the same term is used for 2 slightly different things, and AI cleared that up for me

- I walked into a beer store today in Philly, and there are 5 IPAs for every Pale Ale, which annoys me because I prefer the latter. (That happened in San Francisco too, and I'm sure many people here have had that experience)

And Gemini taught me that "session IPA" is actually a marketing term for Pale Ale. I always choose things labeled "pale ale", but many people want something labeled "IPA". So they came up with the term "session IPA" -- an IPA with lower alcohol, aka Pale Ale.

I use Gemini anonymously, so it doesn't remember things about me. And after I described my beer preferences and the fact that I'm in Philly, it specifically brought up Tonewood Brewing in NJ, which is in fact the beer I've drank the most in the last 3 years!

---

So yeah I find it eerie that the LLMs are helping me with words versus reality.

- the same term "pale ale" referring to slightly different things on the east coast and west coast -- this was tripping me up for years

- the term "session IPA" being a marketing term for Pale Ale -- also something I didn't know for years

- based on simple verbal descriptions, they are able to recommend the beers that I actually drank and liked (even though I use Gemini anonymously, and that was my first time asking Claude about beer)

I've been drinking something slightly "wrong" quite often, because of a confusion over words on the label. I guess I simply don't know anyone who I can ask dumb questions about beer to.

So breathing better during the day can be trained, even at an old age, and it improves sleep

Not everyone breathes suboptimally of course, but I think more do than realize it. There’s a reason that breath work is in the traditions of many different cultures, and why it survived

But things like this aren’t necessarily profitable or worth a doctor’s time, so you have to do them yourself, or see therapists, etc

I had a good experience with a myofunctional therapist and posture therapist

https://zef-lang.dev/implementation

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47843194

It has list of more than 20 optimizations for interpreters, with measured speedups. I'm pretty sure I was looking for something like this 3-5 years ago, but it didn't exist

The other thing is watching the videos in public with the tinny speakers blaring. Judging by reactions on the trains, this is socially acceptable to most people now ???

But I’m using the slower language because it still integrates with more things

For example, one reason AI is all in Python is because CUDA is basically part of the C ecosystem (ie build system)

Hm interesting

So they are making the distinction between regular "human brain" coding and AI-assisted coding?

Regular coding could be described as "not doing the thing yourself, but telling the computer what to do"

(FWIW I do think there is a huge difference; however I am not sure the general public has a very good idea of what "programming" is. I remember having some code up on my screen and my educated family was confused, even at the concept)

Then I found ncdu, and haven’t looked back since. So it saved me a lot of time

Thank you and RIP

In this case it was the Zed editor spawning the zsh shell:

How to Lose Control of your Shell - https://registerspill.thorstenball.com/p/how-to-lose-control...

zsh has a bug where it doesn't do the job control cleanup properly in some cases -- when fork-exec() optimizations happen.

This can mess up the calling process. For example, here you could no longer kill Zed by hitting Ctrl-C, even after zsh is done.

My comment: https://lobste.rs/s/hru0ib/how_lose_control_your_shell#c_dfl...