Yes! Just started reading the table of contents, and already I'm feeling that joy of old-school creative computing. Revival of the culture of personal computers and programming as a technology of liberation. A better future is possible and the power is in our hands.
I like this magazine vibe, it reminds me of the good ol' l33t zines from the late '80s and '90s. However, if I can offer a suggestion, I'd also pair the technical articles with a little more punky, down-to-earth stuff. They were cheerful, informal, and full of that cheeky, irreverent, cocky smart-ass humor, plus this mysterious edge that made them absolutely magnetic to me. Life just wasn’t so heavy back then.
A couple of the stories where I feel I have expertise I found to be a bit objectionable. The title/headline was some clever or unexpected thing, but upon reading it turns out there is nothing supporting the headline.
E.g. "Integer Comparison is not Deterministic", in the C standard you can't do math on pointers from different allocations. The result in the article is obvious if you know that.
Also, in the Logistic Map in 8-Bit. There is a statement
> While implementing Algorithm 1 in modern systems is trivial, doing so in earlier computers and languages was not so straightforward.
Microsoft BASIC did floating point. Every 8-bit of the era was able to do this calculation easily. I did it on my Franklin ACE 1000 in 1988 in basic while reading the book Chaos.
I suppose what I'm saying is the premise of the articles seem to be click-baity and I find that off putting.
I took a peak at "Compiler Education Deserves a Revolution" and thought, wtf is this talking about?
It claims clang is NOT "a pipeline that runs each pass of the compiler over your entire code before shuffling its output along to the next pass."
What I think the author is talking about is primarily AST parsing and clangd, where as "any compiler tome" is still highly relevant to the actual work of building a compiler.
Yeah I was just wrong here. I was under the impression clang had a concept of a request the same way Swiftc does and that is just not true. That's my bad!
> Obviously the used fonts should be readable (and ideally their name shouldn't start with "Comic" and end with "Sans", though there might be some article topics that justify even that!), and while almost any font meets this requirement, please be careful when selecting a non-standard font.
I kinda want to see such an article, but taken seriously discussing the history of the font, its design and purpose, evolution, and purpose-related/derivative font families.
The very first sentence is: "Hi, here’s the bot-in-chief, Aga, with a little foreword."
Am I to understand that Aga is an AI bot? I see nothing mentioned about this in the FAQs or the webpage. Makes me wonder if this zine may be written by AI agents reproducing the old hacker magazine aesthetic.
Or is "bot-in-chief" some kind of tongue-in-cheek formulation that I can find nothing about online? Aga is listed as "Editor-in-Chief" on the About page.
33 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 54.9 ms ] threadI've never heard of this. It's a pity the article doesn't go into details.
https://x.com/gynvael/status/2024180784064598134
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2600:_The_Hacker_Quarterly
E.g. "Integer Comparison is not Deterministic", in the C standard you can't do math on pointers from different allocations. The result in the article is obvious if you know that.
Also, in the Logistic Map in 8-Bit. There is a statement
> While implementing Algorithm 1 in modern systems is trivial, doing so in earlier computers and languages was not so straightforward.
Microsoft BASIC did floating point. Every 8-bit of the era was able to do this calculation easily. I did it on my Franklin ACE 1000 in 1988 in basic while reading the book Chaos.
I suppose what I'm saying is the premise of the articles seem to be click-baity and I find that off putting.
It claims clang is NOT "a pipeline that runs each pass of the compiler over your entire code before shuffling its output along to the next pass."
What I think the author is talking about is primarily AST parsing and clangd, where as "any compiler tome" is still highly relevant to the actual work of building a compiler.
https://www.lulu.com/spotlight/pagedout
https://www.kicksecure.com/wiki/Sdwdate https://tails.net/contribute/design/Time_syncing/
> Obviously the used fonts should be readable (and ideally their name shouldn't start with "Comic" and end with "Sans", though there might be some article topics that justify even that!), and while almost any font meets this requirement, please be careful when selecting a non-standard font.
I kinda want to see such an article, but taken seriously discussing the history of the font, its design and purpose, evolution, and purpose-related/derivative font families.
So great to find that spirit again!
I highly recommend it if you enjoy writing. It was painless and fun.
A nice break from writing blogs.
Am I to understand that Aga is an AI bot? I see nothing mentioned about this in the FAQs or the webpage. Makes me wonder if this zine may be written by AI agents reproducing the old hacker magazine aesthetic.
Or is "bot-in-chief" some kind of tongue-in-cheek formulation that I can find nothing about online? Aga is listed as "Editor-in-Chief" on the About page.