Maybe I’m too boring but what about using preprocessor defines: stick it as a -D flag in CPPFLAGS in your makefile from and env var or wherever that info comes from and read it in the source.

At least it’s how I’ve always seen it done and it does feel simpler although, yeah, maybe not as fun :)

Carmack himself describes it well in the recent interview with Lex Fridman https://youtu.be/I845O57ZSy4?t=8961

The actual book on Amazon:

Red Roulette: An Insider's Story of Wealth, Power, Corruption, and Vengeance in Today's China https://www.amazon.com/dp/1982156155

> Significant performance improvements to completion of the available commands (#7153), especially on macOS Big Sur where there was a significant regression (#7365, #7511).

This is buried down in the Completion section but this is a big deal if you’ve upgraded to MacOS Big Sur: completing a command could hang the shell for 10-15 seconds making it nearly unusable. Thanks for fixing this!

This made my morning.

Not sure that is what they meant but in some European countries (France being an example), college means middle school rather than university.

Rome, Jerusalem, Athens, maybe Istanbul.

Giza?

From their about page:

> The Long Now Foundation uses five-digit dates, the extra zero is to solve the deca-millennium bug which will come into effect in about 8,000 years.

Still only pushes the problem back for an additional 100k years. If they were really serious they’d use prefix codes. :P

RFC 2550 (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2550) remains one of my favourite April Fools' RFCs. It even has support for negative dates.

That seems like a needlessly complex way to store datetime

Dark era starts in 10^106 years time, or about 10^157 plank times, so any time can be respresented in 20 bytes.

Just 44 bytes will allow encoding of any point in spacetime, and they are using far more than that to simply encode years.

The RFC admits that and then says:

>2.4.2 Transcending Environmental Considerations

>However, we might get lucky. So, Y10K dates are able to represent any possible time without any limits to their range either in the past or future.

I am more worried about what we will do when we run out of 64 bit seconds for unix time.

500 billion years is barely half way through the star forming age of the universe.

Well, timespec does have 34 bits it's not using...

But who currently says that Rome fell in the year 0476?

The Romans didn't have computers, so they didn't worry bout using only 3-digit years back then. And today, looking back, using fewer digits than available doesn't cause any problem. There's only an issue going forward, when more digits are needed, which the Long Now is trying to mitigate (8000 years early).

Precient Romans: didn't use a digit based system. MIM -> MM What problem?

Romans needed many more than 3 "digit" (or rather letter) to represent this date. Also, the AD system (counting the year since the birth of Jesus Christ) was introduced much later.

But aren't they running the risk of computers treating these as octal numbers instead?

Huh? They haven't solved it, anymore than reading a thermometer "is to solve" climate change. No need to repeat propaganda.

Looks like the ZoomOpener app is still present on my machine but it’s not running anymore and it shows as unticked in the Login Items preferences.

They ship a pkg installer package that pretty much always elevates, even if it doesn’t actually need it. While it could in theory install as the user, I don’t even think the Installer app supports this configuration anymore (at least last time I tried I wasn’t able to).

You can disable the Finder integration in the preferences, same for the badge.