Nix on the Steam Deck — Determinate Systems

When I first started using Linux in 2006, I remember dreaming of a Linux
Console. It wasn’t so far fetched, the PlayStation 3 had just been released
with OtherOS support which allowed users to install Linux (or BSD). Still,
it seemed that a Linux-first console seemed like it would only ever be a
dream. Now in 2022, Valve’s Steam Deck is a hackable Linux-first portable
console.

Today, we’ll be putting Nix on it, because what’s Linux without Nix?

These are my links for July 20th through July 24th:

Ask HN: Best-architected open-source business applications worth studying? | Hacker News -
Monospaced Programming Fonts with Ligatures | Hacker News -
The language of choice - Propositional logic was discovered by Stoics around 300 B.C., only to be abandoned in later antiquity and rebuilt in the 19th century by George Boole’s successors. One of them, Charles Peirce, saw its significance for what we now call logic circuits, yet that discovery too was forgotten until the 1930s. In the ’50s John McCarthy invented conditional expressions, casting the logic into the form we’ll study here; then in 1986 Randal Bryant repeated one of McCarthy’s constructions with a crucial tweak that made his report “for many years the most cited paper in all of computer science, because it revolutionized the data structures used to represent Boolean functions” (Knuth).1 Let’s explore and code up some of this heritage of millennia, and bring it to bear on a suitable challenge: playing tic-tac-toe.
Then we’ll tackle a task that’s a little more practical: verifying a carry-lookahead adder circuit. Supposedly logic gets used all the time for all kinds of serious work, but for such you’ll have to consult the serious authors; what I can say myself, from working out the code to follow, is that the subject offers a fun playground plus the most primitive form of the pun between meaning and mechanism.

You’re encouraged to read with this article’s code cloned and ready

Absurdle, an adversarial version of Wordle January 15, 2022
it changes the word based on the possibility space; see also: HATETRIS from the same creator #
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61 Glimpses of the Future July 13, 2016
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One of the most fascinating aspects of modern Formula 1 is the use of computer simulations to predict car performances and race strategies. By the early 1990s, teams like Benetton had begun to develop simple race simulators to estimate optimal strategies. Today, teams develop highly sophisticated models based on massive amounts of telemetry data. Constructing mathematical […]
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Chris's Digital Detritus

Videotext for the twenty first century.

Nix on the Steam Deck — Determinate Systems