(φ (μ (λ)))

https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/an-update-on-rust-coreutils/80773 https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ubuntu-Rust-Coreutils-Audit

One of the 44 CVEs in the Rust rewrite of coreutils. It blatantly uses .expect(). https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2026-35348

In its semantic structure Scheme is as closely akin to Algol 60 as to early Lisps. Algol 60, never to be an active language again, lives on in the genes of Scheme and Pascal. It would be difficult to find two languages that are communicating coin of two more different cultures than those gathered around these two languages. Pascal is for building pyramids—imposing, breathtaking, static structures built by armies pushing heavy blocks into place. Lisp is for building organisms—imposing, breathtaking, dynamic structures built by squads fitting fluctuating myriads of simpler organisms into place. The organizing principles used are the same in both cases, except for one extraordinary difference: the discretionary exportable functionality entrusted to the individual Lisp programmer is more than an order of magnitude greater than that to be found within Pascal enterprises. Lisp programs inflate libraries with functions whose utility transcends the application that produced them. [...] As a result the pyramid must stand unchanged for a millennium; the organism must evolve or perish. Alan Perlis, Foreword to Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs

Our traffic with the subject matter of this book involves us with tree foci of phenomena: the human mind, collections of computer programs, and the computer. Every computer is a model, hatched in the mind, of a real or mental process. These processes, arising from human experience and thought, are huge in number, intricate in detail, and at any time only partially understood. They are modeled to our permanent satisfaction rarely by our computer programs. Thus even though our programs are carefully handcrafted discrete collections of symbols, mosaics of interlocking functions, they continually evolve: we change them as our perception of the model deepens, enlarges, generalizes until the model ultimately attains a metastable place within still another model with which we struggle. The source of the exhilaration associated with computer programming is the continual unfolding within the mind and on the computer of mechanisms expressed as programs and the explosion of perception they generate. If art interprets our dreams, the computer executes them in the guise of programs! Alan Perlis, Foreword to Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs

After a few discussions with rms (Richard Stallman), I have been said that the FSF would love to collaborating with lawyers who can help them in fleshing out their AI/LLM policy. If anybody here works or knows someone who works in law and believes in free/libre software, please reach out to me. I will connect you with rms and Krzysztof who leads the FSF Licensing & Copyright Compliance team. We really need to collaborate on this as an united front before more of our free software gets affected by it.

After second systeming the assembler from the linked reply, I set out to implement a Forth for RISC-V with it. In particular, I targeted the Qemu "Virt" machine, which is an abstract idealized RISC-V machine that supports the OpenSBI interface, which in itself is like a BIOS but for RISC-V. In about 4 days I managed to implement the most basic Forth functionalities. Now I can implement the fancier abstractions from the REPL. In the screenshot, you see me implement a "while loop" equivalent by using the low-level branching constructs. This is a testament to the simplicity of Forth. By implementing the simplest primitives, you can breath life into whatever machine you are using. You can have these high-level-esque abstractions while still being able to interact with the machine at the lowest level, all the while maintaining very low cognitive load due to how very few components there are to the system you are using. If you want to look at the code: https://codeberg.org/ntn/rva

Recording: https://tv.dyne.org/w/h4UPDWPd97oAFJ4S411b4R

Niklaus Wirth on the pessimism of modern computing. Talk at Google (2009)

Novalis, Freiberg Natural Scientific Studies (1789)