Actually I take that back. At the dawn of time (1982), GHS definitely had its own frontend. They switched to EDG sometime before my time. I meant I'd be surprised to learn they'd switched from EDG to something home-grown.

This also meant that in my time there was a hefty "glue" layer between the EDG frontend and the GHS middle-end (the middle-end being the tree transformations and "indep" optimizations before you got into the back-end stuff): you had to take the structures EDG produced and turn them into the structures the GHS middle-end wanted.

I was there right when John Regehr's Csmith was first making big waves. We started using it, and also rolled our own fuzzer with more focus on embedded-software trouble spots, such as `volatile` and `packed` and I forget what else. (Guy Goldstein originated and led this, as I recall.) I don't actually remember the fuzzer finding a lot of crashes, but maybe it did, and I do remember its finding a lot of miscompilations, i.e., bad optimizations.

Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley (1818/1831), https://frankendiff.com; and Tales of the Dead, by Mrs. Utterson (1813), https://archive.org/details/talesofdead00utte

Just started Homer's Iliad (Fagles translation) and Christopher Logue's War Music (2015).

Just finished re-reading The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams (1980). I think it holds up well. Last time I read it, I was much younger than Arthur Dent; now I'm much older. And now that we have computers with Genuine People Personalities, it's hard to remember what it was like in the Before Times.

Recently finished Gaston Leroux's The Mystery of the Yellow Room (1908). For better or worse (no spoilers here), it kept me guessing.

https://github.com/NetHack/NetHack/blob/NetHack-5.0/src/objn...

I think I agree with the comment in NH5 that some of the new cases "probably shouldn't be handled here", and think maybe NH3.4.3's simpler version should've been fine for NetHack's purposes:

https://github.com/Vanilla-NetHack/NetHack-3.4.3/blob/master...

https://archive.org/details/chineselanguagef0000defr/

Maybe that's more ergonomic than forcing all users to learn about ~/.gitignore or manually adding .DS_Store *.sav~ et cetera into your Go project's repo's .gitignore.

The first equation under "The result" seems to be saying they found an infinite sequence of primes whose density is forever greater than 1/186, which doesn't match my understanding of how prime density works.

A "perfectly predictable" algorithm was proposed in Anton Zhilin's P2025, back in the year 2021: https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2021/p20... but unfortunately it had some subtle corner-case problems (which I do not remember), so it was sent back for revision, and never returned with a fix. (Maybe because a fix wasn't possible; again I don't remember what the deal was exactly.)

The Right Path Forward would be for MSVC, GCC, and Clang all to try implementing P2025's algorithm in their front ends. Either something concrete breaks (reminding me what the problem was), or else all three mainstream compilers gain predictable NRVO and then we can "standardize existing practice." But the Right Path Forward requires tedious work by at least three people, which is hard.

> Because I have always had a very clear sense of how thing should look on a page, I dearly wanted to be able to control every tiny detail of my book's overall look, ranging from the cover art to the typefaces used to the size of the pages to the way displays are indented, and so on. Fortunately, the people at Basic Books have grown used to me and my idiosyncrasies over the years I have worked with them, and they assented to my unusual request.

> [new page] Consequently, I have enjoyed total control over such things as line-breaks, page-breaks, hyphenations, widows, orphans, density of word spacing within lines, fine-grained intercharacter spacing ("kerning"), and so forth and so on — things that most people usually are unaware of and simply leave to their publisher or their word processor. I am a fanatic, though, and these things matter a great deal to me. Not only do they matter to me, they have had an overwhelming impact on this book from start to finish. This may sound crazy, but it is the gospel truth.

> [section heading] Who Is Really Controlling Whom?

> Above, I very casually remarked that I have enjoyed total control over page-breaks and such things; yet the truth of the matter would be far more accurately captured by turning the phrase around and saying that the page-breaks and word spacing and such things have enjoyed total control over me! By this, I mean that I have been forced to rewrite and rewrite and rewrite passages in order to make a page boundary come out exactly where I wanted it. It is not just by some happy accident, for instance, that the poems inside chapters are never, ever broken across page boundaries.

> The amount of influence exerted on my text by concerns of purely visual esthetics is incalculable — and by "my text", I don't merely mean how I wound up phrasing my ideas, I mean the ideas themselves. Content has been determined by considerations of elegant form so often that I couldn't begin to imagine it. Every single line of text, for instance, is characterized by its spacing — how wide the blanks between words are. I can clearly see the spacing as I type on my screen, and I rewrite and rewrite in order to make sure that no line is too tightly or too loosely spaced. In the course of such rewritings — here extracting a word, there using a shorter or a longer one, elsewhere inserting a word where none was — words and phrases that I would otherwise not have thought of pop to mind, suggesting ideas I would not have thought of, and those ideas suggest unexpected paragraphs, and those paragraphs are in turn linked to other ones, and so on...

"One theory" implies that someone somewhere has ever claimed this. But has anyone? TFA gives no source for the claim, AFAICT (although I skimmed a bit).

https://archive.org/details/policemansbeardi0000unse/page/n2...

But "I stay alive with 0 neighbors" probably makes sense, so okay, multiply what I had said by another factor of 2 and call it 17 bits total. :)

Hatshepsut and Nefertiti lived respectively 1400 and 1300 years before Cleopatra, and about 700 years before even the founding of Rome. I'm no expert, but seems to me that those two names completely disappeared from the historical record between say 1000 BC and AD 1800, and were rescued from obscurity only by 19th-century archaeologists.

https://archive.org/details/policemansbeardi0000unse/page/n2...

As for Linear A decipherment claims, claiming decipherment isn't the same as decipherment. For example, here's a claim from 2014 that Linear A encodes spoken Japanese: https://konosos.net/2014/12/09/the-phonetic-method-in-linear... Does Linear A encode spoken Japanese? of course not.

https://github.com/ESWAT/john-carmack-plan-archive/tree/mast...

(1) Looks like great reading. (2) Who compiled the archive, and how? This feels like one of those situations where a person records the evening news onto VHS for decades; except here they were running finger every day for decades? (3) Is there a more mobile-friendly way to browse it?