Notices by Zen (zensaiyuki@mastodon.social)

PSA: last night one of our pyrex cooking dishes exploded.

not fractured, exploded. “pyrex isn’t supposed to do that” we thought.

as of a few years ago, Pyrex sold their brand, the new company changed glass recipe as a cost cutting measure, resulting in a pandemic of exploding cookware and a class action lawsuit.

thankfully the patent has expired and the keyword to look for in competing glass cookware products is “borosilicate glass”

5. Hypercard. 1987, 32 years old.
does this belong on the list, given that it’s no longer maintained?

well, there are still people who still use hypercard, either in a physical old mac or via mac emulators. they use hypercard to get useful work done. including bill atkinson. there are many imitators and clones, but somehow none come close to the approachability and and functionality tradoffs of the original. there are practical benefits to software that never changes.

4. NES roms.
if you want hyper sentient dog scientists in the year 40,000 to be able to run your software, write it as an NES rom. trust me on this.

2. RSYNC came out in June 1996, it is 23 years old. it is the only program that I trust for copying large files and large amounts of files between any two points. it natively supports ssh and, in some configurations, uses an extremely clever rolling checksum algorithm that makes me seriously question the sanity of games consoles and operating systems vendors who do not use RSYNC for system and software updates.

1. SQLIte came out in august of 2000, which makes it 19 years old. it has the distinguished honour of being the only program in existence that uses filesystem APIs correctly.

concept: get on my lawn software.
a software design philosophy that believes good software ages like a fine wine. it shuns trends and salesmen disguised as programmers, shuns the fancy new framework. instead, gomls curates quality old software like a carefully tended forest. software that has stood the test of time, and, though it seems antiquated, it’s as robust as cast iron anvil.

@natecull it’s a bit old but have you seen Crockford’s DEC64?
https://github.com/douglascrockford/DEC64

@dredmorbius @natecull
going haywire
going apeshit
going tail -f /dev/random

@natecull have you checked out dialog yet?
https://www.linusakesson.net/dialog/index.php
i have no idea if it’s any good, but it was born out of frustration with the complexity of inform7 so maybe it’s up your alley