Anecdotally, my grandfather, who was bedridden with advanced dementia for the last years of his life, tended to be far more lucid before breakfast than at any other time of day. Knowing of the type three diabetes hypothesis, I surmised that this could be, at least partially, a result of the overnight fast, during which his metabolism likely stabilised to a degree, although it's unlikely that he'd have fully entered ketosis. I suggested that he be switched to a ketogenic diet, at least for a few weeks, as a trial, but this was considered to be a ridiculous idea by his carers, and was never done, unfortunately.
I use a Pi 400 at home as a terminal to connect to several remote servers on which I work (write code) in VIM. I connect via ssh or mosh to a usually-existing tmux session on a server. When not at home I connect to the same servers using an android tablet running Termux. When I need to use other programmes, like Excel, I connnect via VNC to a paperspace Windows server I rent.
I've been spending the past several months writing the server-side code of a web-app, which aims to improve the way in which certain difficult-to-price goods are valued. We're on the verge of launching the tool, and before that happens, I shouldn't be too much more specific about it. In any case, the server functionality is almost exclusively written in FORTH, a language for which I have a great affinity, stemming from the days when I first programmed my (stack-based) HP 48GX calculator as an undergraduate electronic engineering student. My experience in doing this has been almost exclusively pleasurable and satisfying (and nostalgic). Having tried various options, I opted to use a rather minimal forth, pForth, and so I needed to write a number of my own libraries, including ones for hash-tables, ones for handling the data files I required, ones for ways to communicate over WebSockets, and many others. The code-base is remarkably small, and it's been a stimulating experience.
(I'm responsible for the browser-side code too, and this is written in a Scheme, biwascheme, which is so much nicer than having to use Javascript, in my opinion.)
Along the way, I've created various other shell-script utilities in pForth for other purposes, which always rival the speed I'm used to getting from using AWK—mwak, specifically—which has always been impressively fast when handling large amounts of data.
Me being the only coder on this project is why I've been able to get away with indulging in this peculiar, but vastly under-appreciated, language!
In the future it would be great to see a retrospective on your experiences with the language and tooling. I would be particularly interested in how it goes if/when you begin to add more teammates and what strategies help make a FORTH program more maintainable. For instance, do you write tests? What's a good strategy for testing FORTH? I've written some toy programs but never a unit test :)
Thank you for sharing your story. I agree it would be interesting to look into the more details in the future. Using Scheme instead of Javascript sounds fascinating too.
Did you have a chance to compare Forth to other stack-based languages, with some opinion as a result?
I do the same, and listen to most audio books or podcasts at at least 1.33x (this four-thirds factor reduces the listening time by a quarter). A contributing element to determining what speed factor is suitable is what I think of as "information density" in the writing style. With content that requires more digestion, such as The Economist (particularly their more technical articles), I do best processing their excellent audio edition at a simple 1.0x.
Exactly, this is a good point! There are two factors, the baseline speed of the narrator and the complexity of the topic.
Years ago, I attended a Pragmatic Marketing course and the speaker started off by saying he spoke really fast but once you got used to it, you would never be bored or find your mind wandering. I remember that to this day and when I'm speaking in public, I try to keep my pace up.
The problem is that the speed up "breaks" you. Once I started listening to podcasts at higher speeds, I stopped being able to listen to slower-paced podcasts at 1.0x without losing focus.
Brian Tomasik argues that we should avoid insect farming entirely since it's likely worse (ethically speaking) than farming larger nonhuman animals:
> Entomophagy (eating insects for food) is sometimes proposed as an alternative to factory farming because it has lower environmental impact. But entomophagy is not necessarily more humane than factory farming of livestock all things considered, and along some dimensions it's actually worse, because it involves killing vastly more animals per unit of protein. Rather than promoting insect consumption, let's focus on plant-based meat substitutes.
Farmed insects live their full lifespan as opposed to larger animals which only live around ten percent on average.
I personally do not advocate anyone to eat plant-based meats because of the harmful effects on health (this coming anecdotally from myself after eating them for 2+ years). The phytates in almost all grains / legumes / beans bind to almost all free zinc copper and iron which has a very negative effect on health.
Insects (similar to ruminants) are able to naturally assimilate the high protein foods and filter out the phytates. Eating a half-pound per day of insects helped me to greatly recover my health after following a vegan diet for almost three years.
That makes the silly assumption that all organisms are equal. I'm sure we can all agree that a human's life is more valuable than a bacterium's. Or else you'd have to admit to genocide every time you use hand sanitizer.
It's an interesting point though - if we remove human life from the equation, how do you define the "value" of an animal or insect life?
It will even vary from culture to culture; for example, cows are revered in much of India, and in much of the west we seem to place more value on values we perceive as "cute", such as dolphins, or "magnificent", such as whales.
There are 'humane' electric shock machines available for crabs. They supposedly cause instant painless death. Obviously the size would make it impossible to use the same machine but maybe something similar.
Just spitballing here, but two plates with a significant high voltage charge difference lowered to the level of the insects would seem to fit the bill.
