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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: October 17th, 2023

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  • I notice a book on dash. I wonder if it’s the dash that is the default shell on Debian. I always had a historical curiosity about the original author of the shell that would become dash, Kenneth Almquist. It’s just such a ubiquitous piece of software and yet there’s basically no information about the person who wrote it. All I’ve ever been able to find is his original Usenet post announcing his Almquist Shell. I think it would be cool if somehow in her world, the techno mage is the one who figures out what happened to Kenneth Almquist, who somehow winds up playing a role in her journey.










  • There would never have been any 32-bit versions: no Windows NT, no Windows 95; no Explorer, no Start menu or taskbars. That, in turn, might well have killed off Apple as well. No iPod, no iPhone, no fondleslabs. Twenty-first century computers would be unimaginably different.

    It’s definitely fun to think about how things could’ve been different, but personally, it seems pretty silly to think that things today would be “unimaginably different”. Like don’t you think that these paradigms seem intuitive enough that multiple people could’ve independently come up with them?