It makes sense that if you’re designing a language, you’d like the language you made and would want to use it. It’s fine for compilers like that to exist, and even be the main one used, but ideally it shouldn’t be the only compiler.

But there are technically ways to bootstrap a language without writing it in another language (other than a small core in assembly or something). You could design a tiny compiler that only handles a small subset of your language, then write a better compiler using only the features available in that subset. You can do this for several layers of compilers until you have the full language.

That’s already how it is now, we just don’t usually think of it that way. You can’t compile rust unless you already have a rust compiler. The current version was compiled in a previous version, which was compiled in a previous version, going through a chain of older versions and other languages. Anything along that chain could’ve theoretically had an influence on the current compiler.

It’s not about the code itself being more trustworthy. The point is that when you bootstrap, you don’t have to blindly trust any of the binaries, since it’s source code the whole way down. Someone could bootstrap rustc like this, compare it to the binaries that already exist, and ideally they would be identical.

A lot of this bootstrapping stuff comes back to the ‘trusting trust’ attack. You could write a compiler that adds some malicious code to programs it compiles. But the thing is, it could also insert it’s own malicious code when compiling a compiler. So you look at your code, and the code of your compiler, and everything looks fine, but the exploit is still there. Someone wrote an example in rust.

Theoretically there could also be bugs that propagate this way. So to fully trust your code is doing what you think it is, you’d need a chain of compilers back to hand coded assembly.

Yeah, I wrote the wrong language. I tend to lump those together in my head as ‘big multi-paradigm languages I haven’t bothered to learn yet.’

You can technically do it, but it’s a convoluted path. The article talks about it. Basically to bootstrap that way you need to go through a lot of versions of rust, compile rust 0.7 in ocaml, compile ocaml in scheme, and compile scheme in C using gcc. For gcc you need to compile a chain of versions back to when it was written in C instead of C++, plus the whole TinyCC bootstrapping path.

edit: had listed scala instead of ocaml

The main thing is that TinyCC has already been bootstrapped.

Check out this page on bootstrappable.org. Basically they start with a 200 something byte binary (hex0) that can act as an assembler, then using a bunch of layers of tools and compilers you can bootstrap a whole system. I think they use stage0 to build M2-Planet, use that to build GNU Mes, and use that to build TinyCC.

So a project like this fits neatly into that bootstrapping path. It could be done other ways, but starting from a fairly complete C compiler makes it a lot easier than building an entire path from scratch.

There’s lem.el for Emacs.

There was another one but it doesn’t work anymore. It hasn’t been updated in 3 years.

Cladistically dolphins are a type of toothed whale. They’re more closely related to species like sperm whales than toothed whales and baleen whales are to each other.

There’s still tons of people who will judge you for having children without getting married. A lot of religious groups still consider it a moral failure. And even if it was completely accepted now, it still became an insult in the first place because of that stigma, and you’d still be using it within that historical context. You can’t reclaim a slur by continuing to use it as an insult and ignoring where it comes from.

As an example, I’ve seen pretty many people use slurs for Romani people as a term for getting scammed or cheated. Usually they didn’t know the origin of the term, and didn’t mean any harm by it. They had heard it being used and assumed it was just another word. But you don’t just accept the definition these people have in their heads as an alternate definition, disconnected from the original. It has the meaning it does based on bigoted stereotypes, and by using it they’re still spreading that, even if they aren’t hateful themselves.

It usually implies it’s weird in an old-fasioned way though.

Hacker’s Keyboard hasn’t had a real release in about 5 years, so it can be slightly buggy.

Unexpected Keyboard is pretty good. It’s got the complete keyboard layout available including stuff like Control and Function keys, so I think it’s an acceptable replacement. It uses swipes to type other keys, which I’m not sure if I prefer, but it works well enough. I set the swipe distance higher because I would accidentally swipe from time to time.

If you check “I’m an advanced user” in the settings, then hit the “More” button in the dropdown a few times it’ll show the more advanced interface that lets you choose which third party domains to allow. It doesn’t work quite the same since it blocks both content and scripts per site, but I find it good enough for my usage.

edit: You can technically block just scripts per 3rd party site, but it involves manually editing the content type for your rules in the settings. It’s not part of the main interface, so I never bother using it.

https://github.com/dessant/buster

GoToSocial is designed for small / single user instances. There’s more with similar goals like snac, seppo, pub, ktistec, tapir, shuttlecraft, activities.next, and microblog.pub, but I haven’t really looked into them so I’m not sure on the status of each. There’s a nice list of activitypub software at delightful fediverse apps if you want to look at more options.

Most philosophers think free will and determinism are compatible.

It’s not brassica oleracea though, it’s a different species, brassica rapa. The same species as napa cabbage, brocolli rabe, and bok choy. Rutabaga is actually a hybrid of the two species.

It’s part of Spider-Man & the X-Men.

Thanks, I didn’t know about that. I looked into this a bit more and there’s actually a bunch of techniques, and shift right click only gets around some of them. There’s a tester tool at https://webbrowsertools.com/test-right-click/ with examples of blocking right clicks, text selection, and copying/pasting text.

It looks like a good extension, but I feel like my setup works better for my workflow. Tab groups with auto tab discard has a similar effect, and there’s an archive option for when I really want to unload the whole group.

Tab groups are really handy for multitasking if you use multiple desktops. I have a window open on each desktop, and switching between tab groups switches to the relevant desktop.

This question gets asked pretty often, so I’d been meaning to write something up for a while. Browser extensions were one of the first ways I got interested in free software, and there’s a lot of really useful ones out there.

If you want even more options, here’s some I have installed but disabled.

• Forcastfox (fix version) - Shows the weather.
• Gesturify - Control the browser with just mouse gestures. I don’t really use it because I try to use keyboard shortcuts, but it’s really handy if you use a mouse a lot.
• GNU LibreJS - Blocks any non-free javascript. This is not a easy or fun extension to use. I’ve got my one system set up to use only free software, with this enabled. It really shows you how much proprietary javascript you’re using.
• Picket Line Notifier - It tells you what products are from companies with ongoing strikes.
• Kiwix - Download offline sections of wikipedia, stackoverflow, khan academy and a bunch of other websites. They also have desktop and phone apps, so I don’t really use the browser extension.
• Buster: Captcha Solving for Humans - I love how there’s an add-on bot that can solve captchas to prove you’re a human.
• Allow Right Click - Turn this on when a website tries to block you from saving images.
• User Agent Switcher and Manager - Occasionally you find a site that doesn’t work in your browser, but just changing the user agent string often fixes it.