speed.cloudflare.com is a tool that allows you to measure the speed and consistency of your connection to the Internet. You can use it to verify that the speed your ISP promised you is the speed you are getting, compare different ISPs or test network connectivity in different parts of your house.The measurements run on the Cloudflare network, which spans data centers in over 300 cities worldwide. This ensures you are testing against a server that is close to you, which means you are measuring only the speed of your ISP, with minimal networks in between that may impact your score.

a repository of many things, including some fennel things

The site contains all the lectures, project materials and tools necessary for building a general-purpose computer system and a modern software hierarchy from the ground up.The materials are aimed at students, instructors, and self-learners. Everything is free and open-source, as long as you operate in a non-profit, educational setting.

People sometimes ask me: “Alex, how do I learn X?”. This article is a compilation of advice I usually give. This is “things that worked for me” rather than “the most awesome things on earth”. I do consider every item on the list to be fantastic though, and I am forever grateful to people putting these resources together.

This project offers the ability to create and share playable quotes of Game Boy games. A playable quote is a self-contained slice of an original creative work that points to a specific moment in the space of play along with a reference performance of how that moment can play out. The reader of a quote can replay their own variations on the quoted moment to see how the game responds.

Weizenbaum had stumbled across the computerised version of transference, with people attributing understanding, empathy and other human characteristics to software. While he never used the term himself, he had a long history with psychoanalysis that clearly informed how he interpreted what would come to be called the “Eliza effect”.

Doug Engelbart invented computer networks, time sharing, graphical user interfaces, and the mouse–all while driving to work one day in 1951. Really.

Imagine a novel, which is imbedded in a longer novel, which itself is imbedded in an even longer novel, and so on ad infinitum. Within each novel, the characters can debate the literary merits of any of the sub-novels. But, by analogy with classes of machines that can’t analyze themselves, the characters can never critique the novel that they themselves are in.

Building proper UI Web Components can be quite a task though, especially if you want them to be accessible. Here are some pointers on what to look out for.

Naive Weekly aims to expand what the internet is and can be. Every Sunday since 2018, I’ve delivered postcards with links to the quiet, odd and poetic web. I prefer avenues different from technology optimism, criticism and solutionism.

The history of art is also a history of rejection. I’ve written that somewhere before. Once the patterns that recur throughout art history become apparent, you might expect there to be a learning curve. But there isn’t one. Why is that? I’m also not sure why there is so little understanding of the fact that the very things that are so feverishly, vehemently and vocally rejected—be it photography, video, the internet, Instagram or, more recently, NFTs and artificial intelligence—ultimately win out in the end. Herbert W. Franke (1927–2022), Germany’s best-known science fiction author, metaverse visionary and computer artist, devoted decades of his life to writing books and texts that remain as relevant as if they were written yesterday. He wrote tirelessly to demonstrate that art can indeed be created using technology, and that such art deserves serious consideration.

Although not originally designed for educationalpurposes, Plan 9 and Inferno are excellent tools for usein Computer Science education. Here I discuss how I usethem in my classes at Drexel University. The discussionincludes CS314: Computing in the Small using Plan 9, theOperating Systems courses CS370 and CS543 using Inferno,and the computer I take to the classroom forpresentations running Plan 9.

Before you understand how reloading works in Fennel, you need a little background regarding Lua’s module system, since Fennel is just a compiler that emits Lua code. Older versions of Lua had a module function which would declare the whole rest of the file as being part of a specific module and register that with the module system, and all functions that would normally be declared as global within that file would be exported as part of the module instead. But in version 5.1, that system was recognized as redundant: nowadays a module is just a file that returns a table1 with closures and other values in it. This is reflects the relentless simplicity behind the design of Lua; why have modules as their own concept when tables and closures can do just as good a job?

The question to ask with all those things isn’t, “how do I make time for this?” The answer to that question always disappoints, because that view of time has it forever speeding away from you. The better question is, how does doing what I need make time for everything else?

In this talk, I’ll share a methodology that I have applied many times over the last 20 years when designing high-level libraries for functional programming. Functional libraries are usually organized around small collections of domain-specific data types together with operations for forming and combining values of those types. When done well, the result has the elegance and precision of algebra on numbers while capturing much larger and more interesting ideas.

a brief but detailed exploration of the UF/uxn internals

A collection of open-access books from the MIT Press on the internet archive.

So from day one, they warned us Turing machines are clumsy beasts where easy tasks are hard to accomplish, and generally hang unpredictably.

A tool for finding memory leaks in web apps

I have no interest in the Metaverse. I am not sitting around dreaming of wearing gobsmackingly expensive ski glasses. Although I’m not a fan of the various aches and pains in my body, I don’t think my life will be better in avatar form. I really really really don’t get why this is a piece of tech that excites people. But I know that there are a lot of people out there like James who want an inclusive and joyful Metaverse to exist.