True. Applications as these go back a few decades. From the news buzz when it was launched, ASCI White was similarly used in early '00s to understand nuclear explosions and shockwave propagation (instead of relying on live tests) - classic CFD problems[1] Successor supercomputer clusters were also used to do weapon design & nuclear physics simulations. One supercomputer IIRC even simulated a tornado genesis.[2]
I can only imagine the classified applications must have grown ten-fold in complexity in the interim.
Your post gives me so much joy. These tiny little things take me back to teenage years, simpler times & when interests were different. (I put a little note as "why" in my GH repo readme)
I discovered this issue 2-3 years ago. On slightly older machines, there was a palpable startup time. My fix was going through OhMyZSH and stripping away all the parts that I felt unnecessary (I call this my "leanZSH" and its considerably lighter version of OMZ.) It doesn't track upstream, and I manually update the plugin directory once in a while. Surprisingly OhmyZSH is pretty modular and doesn't break easily.
If you want to update it just copy over the latest `plugin/` folder from OMZ repo. You can get rid of all the plugins you dont want, as well as the themes. It somehow works]
I did try to do my whole zsh config/theme from scratch, but it did take some time and lot of small features here and there were no worth the effort (like python version, vevn, and such) so I just switched to starship which is very fast and easy to use
In fact, sometimes I open bash even from zsh. When pasting from a script and debugging why something doesn't work as expected, I don't want bash-like. For ad-hoc loops, bash-like works well for me thanks to the familiarity of syntax.
It is limited viewing, requires a reservation & the slots run out practically in seconds. Tough for us residents to get it as well. My wife could snag it in her third try, as a late birthday trip last year.
It is gargantuan & having massive holding capacity. To give semblance with something familiar, it was like standing in NY Grand Central station, except it was felt bigger, empty, damp & illuminated by floodlights from all sides. It is probably one and half football fields in length & scales high as much as a five storied building. Uploaded three pics to show the scale of this megalith. (The base of the pillars here are taller than average height of person to give a rough scale. The stairs come down from the ground level)
In addition to this underground chamber, there are two massive pumps on either sides, which divert the water from whichever river is surging to the other (Arakawa & Edogawa possibly). The chamber is the buffer zone between the rivers, not a storage tank ultimately. I was told by the civil engineer of this plant they could pump out as much as a jumbo jet's volume per minute in its storm surge channel/drain to manage flooding. You can walk up to the turbine room at the end of this room, and see its massive blades at an arm length. All with earthquake protection in place as well. Honestly mind-blowing piece of engineering.
I've also visited. It was a hot day when I went. As we descended, the coolness felt amazing, but there was this misty fog inside. Mixed with the dark dampness, I felt like I walked in to a Andrei Tarkovsky scene.
The Fens in East Anglia in the UK has a lot of interesting pumping tech. The latest can do 100m3/s (https://www.edie.net/st-germans-pumping-station-keeps-fens-f...). If all the pumps failed there would be hundreds of km2 underwater within days or weeks
> In addition to this underground chamber, there are two massive pumps on either sides, which divert the water from whichever river is surging to the other (Arakawa & Edogawa possibly).
You probably mean pumping stations right? Usually single pumps don’t have that kind of flow rate. Just a nit pick though, your comment was really interesting!
Yeah throughout the entire facility (several large chambers with large tunnels between them) there's something like eighty 10MW pumps to move water out of the chambers into the river.
If you hear that, it’s too late for you, I’m afraid.
It’s time to go when your guide says: “It’s inexcusable and I’m very sorry for the inconvenience, but the control room has informed me that we should make our way towards the emergency exit five minutes to the south west of the left of the 7-11. Thank you for your understanding and cooperation.”
My first thought was Akira, but it's almost the same thing; there are some parts of Half Life which are lifted almost directly from Akira, like the first diagonal elevator that headcrabs slide down.
> Some people living in places that have become tourist areas are putting up signs announcing their home toilets are not for public use.
I read that on r/Tokyo Reddit as well a while back. Quite shocking. It was some person complaining living near a large public park (possibly Shinjuku or Inokashira) about his personal premises being violated because toilet queues were quite long & people kept knocking at their door. Not sure if we both are referring to the same incident?
[For reference to others, there are enough portable toilets in these public parks to deal with tourist surge, but obviously no arrangement can handle 25000+ visitors everyday without having queues]
More ridiculous stories have popped up once in a while in japan tourist subreddits. This sakura blossom season, a British tourist couple were seeking legal recourse to avoid detention and move back to their home country ASAP after running over an elderly woman with the rental car. Some people probably don't take consequences in a tourist destination seriously.
> Nearly all the smaller countries would waive even up to a minister-counsellor’s immunity in that scenario.
Sadly, if the UK's experience is anything to go by, if it is a US government worker / diplomat they would be on the first plane home[1].
I fear it would be no different in Japan. The US would get away with it. Even more so in the Trump era where he would probably make some dumb threats to the country to force their hand.
Well yeah that’s why I said smaller countries… the big countries have minister-counsellors, sometimes even attaches, that are really significant people, and might get away with it.
Especially if it’s a cover for their actual position with a much higher rank.
You'll be surprised if I tell you several universities in India have not updated their curriculum in a very long time & Turbo C++ (& its non-standard C++ flavor) is the weapon of choice. The school board in the '00s, which preferred to teach a programming language for CS, used to have it curriculum around this C++ dialect. I have passed my high-school board examinations with this language (It was known to be already outdated in 2004. The smart kids knew the real C++ was programming by Visual Studio 6 ecosystem. But one had to still deal with it to clear the exams.)
Admitted, a few things have changed in last couple of years. MATLAB is being replaced by Python. Teaching 8085 & 8051 is being replaced by RasPi/Arduino. 8086 is taught alongside ARM & RISC, and not touted as SoTA.
I last saw Turbo being used in 2016-17 in a university setting, inside a DosBox (because Windows 7+ have dropped support for such old programs). Insane, but true.
Yeah, I also learned C++ via Turbo C++ in school in India in the early 2000s. Googling for "conio.h" shows Indians still talking about it in blogs and C/C++ forums as of 2024.
Nice. This editor could see a lot of use in such places if it gains developer-oriented features such as LSP, DAP and tree-sitter parsers. As a Rust-written editor, it will probably be quite a bit easier on resources than the usual modern choices which generally involve VSCode or Jetbeans plus language-specific plugins.
For me, the greatest bit of nostalgia came from seeing the Netscape Navigator Meteors. (Going further I found this link, which also echoes how rare it is nowadays to see a working version
It has been a while & the browser has such a storied history. When I was a middle schooler, I remember my elder sibling (a college CS major) explaining the chatter around 'IE4 vs. Netscape' monopoly case enthusiastically. It was quite likely the biggest talking point among tech community back then, along with the Microsoft Antitrust litigation soon after.
By turn of the millennium, it was on its demise paving way for Mozilla Firefox (with its early dragon/godzilla icon). As I understand early Firefox also built onwards from Netscape codebase (which would have soon shuttered) as a starting point & took the open source path. The last Navigator version I used probably was packed with Netscape Communicator suite @ v6.1
Pure nostalgia. This brought back so many memories
I was inspired by this comment to install Netscape 7.02 from my installer archive.[0] It too has a logo with meteors, but it is circle-shaped instead of square, and the meteors follow a more winding path from top to bottom.
Interestingly, when I first tried to install, it said something like "A version of Netscape is detected already running", which is because as you state Firefox was based on Netscape code. Here is the "About" description:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.2; en-US; rv:1.0.2) Gecko/20030208 Netscape/7.02
[0] I tried earlier versions, but they all wanted to download the full install from an FTP site that is no longer responding.
I am a new-generation user, and I'm curious whether "Netscape" can be installed on modern computers. If it can, how would it perform when accessing modern websites? I really want to know. Thank you again for sharing.
Not the OP but in a similar boat. Curious to understand how do you make sure that Claude code cli tool does not break existing code functionality?
My hesitation to adopt stems from the events where Claude.ai WebUI ignorantly breaks the code, but since I can visibly verify it - I iterate it until it seems reasonable syntactically & logically, and then paste it back.
With the autonomous changing of the code lines, I'm slightly nervous it would/could break too many parts concurrently -- hence my hesitation to use it. Any best practices would be insightful
Claude Code will happily and enthusiastically do horrible things to your code. But it always asks first. So you can tell it "NO!" and suggest a better approach.
Imagine having a college sophmore CS major who types really quickly and who is up-to-date on lots of new technologies. But they're prone to cutting corners when they get stuck, and they have never worked on anything larger than a group project. Now imagine watching them as they work (really quickly) and correcting them when they mess up.
This is... tolerable for small apps. If you have problems that could be solved by a team of very junior programmers, and if you're willing to provide close supervision, then it might even make sense for some real code. Or if you kind of know how to code, and you just need little 1,000 line throwaway tools (like a lot of other STEM fields), eh, it's probably OK.
But your mentoring effort will never result in the model actually learning anything, so it's more like you get a new very junior programmer for each PR.
I don't want to completely badmouth this. For very early stage startups where you need to throw 50 things at the wall, most of them glorified CRUD apps, and see what sticks with the customers, then a senior engineer could make it work. But if you have a half dozen people who only sort of know how to write code all "mentoring" Claude, then your code base will become complete trash within two weeks. In practice, I see significant degradation above 1,000 lines for "hands off" operation, and around 5,000 lines if I'm watching it intensely and carefully reading all code.
I have seen and enjoyed quite a few Val Kilmer movies, but his special appearance in 'Top Gun:Maverick' was heartwarming (the scene where he jovially asks Maverick, "who was the better pilot between the two of us").
Tombstone and Saint were such nice movies too. Underrated, with a distinct comedic touch. A talent gone before his time.
I had bummed out my P-III 700Mhz desktop so many times, while tinkering with System32, INI files & experimental software etc., in grade school that this key is seared into some part of my cortex.
I had the first, second, and fifth sections down for sure, and some almost-remembered version of the other two but also couldn't remember which order they went in.
I typed it a lot of times, but still probably only in the (high) tens. Crazy how long it sticks in one's memory with relatively little spaced repetition.
In those days of yore, the P-III was our first home computer (Hard to imagine for kids today that a family of 5 could have one PC shared between themselves).
I was the experimental, eldest summer child in my home. I used to break things trying, open up the hood & change RAM or other stuff, add/remove peripherals & their drivers -- and to the extent of nuking Windows entirely to try out Redhat 7/8, Knoppix, and other esoteric software (because partitioning sucked back then & also, why not for the fun of it). I used to load up dozens of software on that tiny Seagate 20.4GB drive until it crawled & failed. A clean wipe & reinstall used to soon follow.
The only parent-child contract was to bring back Windows XP to its usable state when direly needed by my mother to type/edit her dissertation chapters about women suffragette literature. I have broken & fixed Windows so many times, I could sing tunes to product keys
I can only imagine the classified applications must have grown ten-fold in complexity in the interim.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCI_White
[2] https://news.wisc.edu/a-scientist-and-a-supercomputer-re-cre...