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It would appear to be unpublished & available at a museum (ref. 3): https://www.researchgate.net/publication/306265347_Decipheri....

The question is how was it able to cite the pages if it doesn't know what the content is and can't access it either?

Is any other citations of the work available online? Like how we only know about certain historical books/ works by someone else critiquing it or quoting a small passage.

Namewise, I feel like this is the original Duo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerBook_Duo

I was wondering the same thing —Perseus has been around since _1987_ & seems to have more features? I guess this is a bit more attractively laid out…


Note that Perseus considers itself end-of-life; there is an analogous project that's supposed to have succeeded it, but I don't remember what project that is.


It's called Scaife[1] and it's borderline unusable. Slows to an absolute crawl on my ~2020 machine within a few minutes, and the viewing experience is very uncomfortable. I'd be really surprised if people preferred it to Perseus.

[1]: https://scaife.perseus.org/


Agreed. Scaife supporters are delusional.

What should actually be done, and what OP should do, is take the Perseus website and make it so it doesn't 503 all the time (it is incredibly unreliable).

Then, FOIA the State of California for the pay-to-play data which the UC Irvine-based TLG hoarders are withholding from the public (it is a publicly funded project...) so that the corpus can be meaningfully extended and built upon.

The 1990's tier html vibe of Perseus is to its great advantage.


Given your opinions on this, may I ask for your feedback on https://SourceLibrary.org? I’d greatly appreciate it.


Yeah, it's awful. I can't believe how much of a downgrade it is from the old Perseus Hopper.


The true gift is being honest & kind at the same time. It takes more effort, but I think it’s worth it!


They'll charge you extra then.

What a sad concept


Honesty IS kind. The liars are rude


Senior Software Engineer

Location: Brooklyn, NY

Remote: optional, open to in-person in the NY area.

Willing to relocate: probably not.

Technologies: Ruby, Ruby on Rails, RSpec, HTML/CSS, JavaScript, React, Alpine.js, Git, Tailwind, Max/MSP, Stripe/Netsuite/Salesforce & many other APIs.

Resume/CV: Full-stack developer with an emphasis on Ruby, freelance and then at charity: water (www.charitywater.org) for nearly a decade. Interested in working with good humans above all else.

Email: dave@robador.com

https://robador.com/daf


Honest question: what’s an example of a fully-featured web framework that makes upgrading a “large & old” application painless? In my experience, upgrading an underlying framework that a piece of complex software depends upon without breaking everything pretty much always requires time & good test coverage.


Type safety would fix 99% of the issues I've had upgrading Rails.


Yes, typing would obviate the need for the sorts of extensive unit testing I'm talking about here. I feel that. Luckily, the frontier LLMs (especially Claude) have gotten _really_ good at writing Rspec...


things that people in Ruby community don't like to hear for $1000


Most Java and .NET ones, not everything breaks, statically compiled, so not as many unit tests required as in dynamic languages.

While it is deprecated, you can do a File=>New Project for Web Forms in 2026.


Why do many people mention the need of tests for types in dynamically typed languages?

In Rails my tests are mostly to ensure that a request to a controller returns the expected response and the expected changes in the database. Unit tests are often on validations and the errors they return for invalid data. Then there are functional tests that drive a headless browser.


Because they are a requirement to avoid runtime errors that usually are compilation errors in other languages.

Not fun in production.

Dynamic languages with optional typing like BASIC or Common Lisp is another matter.


I have had similar experiences & we are not alone: https://bytecode.hr/posts/why-ruby-is-the-better-language-fo....

There are indeed so many compelling arguments against using Ruby these days (e.g. performance, type safety, an increasingly small user base), & yet I continue to reach for it because of this effortless expressiveness (& the maturity of the ecosystem).


Senior Software Engineer

Location: Brooklyn, NY

Remote: optional, open to in-person in the NY area.

Willing to relocate: probably not.

Technologies: Ruby, Ruby on Rails, RSpec, HTML/CSS, JavaScript, React, Alpine.js, Git, Tailwind, Stripe/Netsuite/Salesforce & many other APIs

Resume/CV: Full-stack developer with an emphasis on Ruby, freelance and then at charity: water (www.charitywater.org) for nearly a decade. Interested in working with good humans above all else.

Email: dave@robador.com

https://robador.com/daf


I subscribed to MacAddict in the mid-90s, back when Gil Amelio was Apple’s CEO, the company couldn’t ship software (Copland, Dylan, Gershwin, etc.), & they could barely afford to acquire NeXT.

It still blows my mind that this is the same company.


The joke is that NeXT acquired Apple and got paid to do it.

There’s a lot of truth to it. A huge amount of the software stack is inherited from NeXT. Steve Jobs was inherited from NeXT. Modern Apple is vastly more successful than NeXT ever was, but there’s a lot of continuity there as well.


In fairness to all concerned, the MacOS to MacOS X transition was brilliantly executed. These days we take VMs for granted, but back then it was a novel idea to run MacOS 8 as a process inside of MacOS X (the "blue box"). For most users it was seamless.


Microsoft had done something similar (twice!) but Apple polished the living daylights out of it.


Yet they completely failed to do so for Mac 32-bit apps. There is a huge library of apps that have not been updated to 64-bit to this day and it is a travesty they never released a virtual classic mode to run 32-bit and even OS 9 apps. It is the one place Microsoft shines in comparison, and the only excuse they give is “deal with it”.

I am certain the reason Wine never tried Mac emulators is fear of Apple legal and consequently you far more easily run ancient Windows programs on Mac then you can even fairly recent Mac Applications.


32-bit apps continued to be supported for a couple of releases after 64-bit rolled out. Just like Classic.


I can see Apple's position: The Mac has been through four major ISAs and the value to most users of maintaining that entire stack indefinitely in the current macOS is nil.

A number of digital preservation standards are emerging (Wasm, MAME/MESS, EaaSI, Olive, ...) and I would like to see a legal requirement on OS vendors that platforms that are no longer supported must be made available to archivists.


Apple did it before as well. A/UX ran System 7 in a UNIX process. That was a really niche system, though.


That and XENIX are really interesting “what might have beens”.


It's right there in the developer APIs. All of those NS_ prefixes in the MacOS and iOS SDKs stand for NeXTSTEP.


In most ways, it isn't meaningfully. It became what it is now, but in the same way a 600 year old oak isn't anything like an acorn or a sapling, what exists now isn't meaningfully that.

They're a monster. Vastly impressive stuff.


One does not even need OpenClaw to achieve this outcome: https://x.com/lifeof_jer/status/2048103471019434248


Yeeeehaaaaa, the vibes shall never end!

On a more serious note, they were mostly f*cked by their paas provider imo. Claude will always do dumb shit. Especially if you tell it to not do something... By doing so you generally increase the likelihood of it doing it.

It's even obvious why if you think about it, the pattern of "you had one job, but you failed" or "only this can't happen, it happened!" And all it's other forms is all over literature, online content etc.

But their PaaS provider not scoping permissions properly is the root cause, all things considered. While Claude did cause this issue there, something else would've happened eventually otherwise.


I absolutely agree with you.

Also, some folks seem to be forgetting the virtues of boring, time-tested platforms & technologies in their rush to embrace the new & shiny & vibe-***ed. & also forgetting to thoroughly read documentation. It’s not terribly surprising to me that an “AI-first” infrastructure company might make these sorts of questionable design decisions.


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