Lucas Tsatiris

O_CREAT|O_RDWR|O_DIRECT

[Hasan Toor @hasantoxr]

An IBM mathematician spent 3 years convinced he was the worst programmer at his company at work.

He built to escape that embarrassment became the first high-level programming language in history. Every line of code running on Earth today traces back to that one act of shame.

His name was John Backus.

He was born in 1924 in Philadelphia, the son of a wealthy stockbroker who expected him to follow the same path. He failed out of the University of Virginia. He dropped out of Haverford College. He enrolled in a medical program in the Army and decided he hated medicine. He spent years doing exactly nothing the conventional way.

Then one afternoon in 1945 he walked past a radio repair shop in New York and got talking to the owner and ended up building a radio from scratch in the shop's back room. Surprising thing is he had never done it before. He stayed for hours. When he left he knew what he wanted to study.

He taught himself mathematics and got into Columbia. From Columbia he walked into IBM in 1950 with a degree and no idea what he was doing.

He learned to program on machines that had no business being programmed. IBM computers in 1950 spoke in machine code. Raw binary. Every instruction written as a string of ones and zeros that told the hardware exactly which switches to flip. There were no shortcuts. No syntax. No vocabulary a human brain could hold in its head.

The programmers who were good at it held the entire machine inside their minds. They saw the binary and felt the logic. Backus could not do this. He wrote programs that were slow, tangled, and embarrassing next to what his colleagues were producing. He was not the worst programmer at IBM. But he believed he was, which amounted to the same thing.

He started building a tool to help himself. Not out of ambition. Out of humiliation.

The idea was simple to the point of seeming naive. He wanted to write mathematical expressions in something that looked like mathematics, not machine code, and have the computer translate them automatically into the binary the hardware needed. He called the project a "formula translation" system. His colleagues thought it was a nice idea that would never work.

The problem everyone could see was speed. Machine code written by a skilled human would always run faster than code generated by an automatic translator. The translator had to make guesses. Guesses meant inefficiency. Inefficiency meant the whole project was a toy.

Backus spent three years proving them wrong.

In 1957 IBM released FORTRAN to its customers. The first compiled programming language in history. The translator Backus built was so efficient that the code it generated ran at speeds within 20 percent of hand-written machine code. Not a toy. Not a curiosity. A working tool that let scientists and engineers write programs in expressions their own minds had generated, and watch the machine execute them.

The adoption was immediate and total. Scientists who had spent careers translating their equations into machine code by hand were suddenly writing programs in hours instead of weeks. Labs that had used IBM machines for narrow tasks started using them for everything. The market for computing changed overnight.

Then something happened that nobody predicted. Other people started building other languages using the same idea. COBOL. LISP. ALGOL. BASIC. Every language built its own translator using the architectural logic FORTRAN had demonstrated. The idea that a computer could read something resembling human thought, rather than the other way around, was now a proof of concept that anyone could extend.

Every programming language that has ever existed was built on the answer to the question Backus asked because he was ashamed of the code he was writing.

He won the Turing Award in 1977. The committee citation said his work had made it possible for more people to use computers for more things than any other single development in the history of computing.

He said in the acceptance speech that he had not set out to change computing. He had set out to stop writing bad code.

The gap between what you are bad at and what you are trying to fix is usually where the real invention lives.

[ALGO_BRO @ALGO_BRO]

ALGORAND $ALGO is GLOBAL 🌎 Open-source, Cutting Edge Blockchain / DLT Technology.

Made in the USA 🇺🇸

[Lucas Tsatiris @LTsatiris]

@Sylvia_Else @straceX That's right. Software pipelining requirement needed to be met for peak performance. Statistically a rare case.

[Volodymyr Zelenskyy / Володимир Зеленський @ZelenskyyUa]

It is time to end this war. But Russia’s ruler wants to keep fighting. That is why Ukrainian sanctions against this aggression are working. Last night, our drones covered a distance of about 1,000 kilometers to the St. Petersburg region – to the enemy navy’s arsenals and a base in Kronstadt. Our long-range sanctions also reached about 500 kilometers into the Krasnodar region – and hit an oil depot. These are important results of the joint efforts by warriors from the Armed Forces of Ukraine, the Security Service of Ukraine, and the Defense Intelligence of Ukraine. Russia must end its war and stop its attacks on life. Any manifestation of injustice against Ukraine will receive a just response. I thank our warriors for their precision.

[Lucas Tsatiris @LTsatiris]

@allornothing888 Κωνσταντίνα που είναι αυτό;

[Mish @Mish_K_]

DAILY REMINDER!!! The terror state of Turkey has been illegally occupying Cyprus for 51 years. It will be 52 years on the 20th of July this year.

[נועה מגיד | Noa magid @NoaMagid]

Tania Abbasi, a 21-year-old student from Tehran, was shot at close range by Islamic regime terrorists. She died in her mother's arms.

Her blood matters too.

[Vatnik Soup @P_Kallioniemi]

Ukraine’s air defense shot down 549 of 600 drones and 55 of 90 missiles overnight, most of them in or around Kyiv.

Any other European capital would've been completely obliterated.

Ukraine is Europe's shield against Russian terrorism.

[Garry Kasparov @Kasparov63]

A reminder that Russia is waging a terrorist war on Ukraine, and a reminder that standing by and watching are the richest nations on Earth, controlling the most powerful military alliance in history, an alliance created specifically to stop Russia in Europe. Sickening.

[Anton Gerashchenko @Gerashchenko_en]

The moment of one of today’s Russian strikes on Kyiv.

I can see that fewer and fewer people are reading news from Ukraine. I understand that on a Sunday morning, people don’t want to read about war. They want to sleep a little longer, drink good coffee, and sit in the sun. I understand that. The algorithms on X limit content about war, destruction, and suffering. You have to make an effort to even see this information.

All of this is understandable on a human level. But unfortunately, if you remove Putin and the war from your information feed, they do not disappear from reality.

Putin is a sadist and a maniac. He is a threat to all of humanity.

There needs to be active resistance. News from Ukraine needs to be shared. People need to keep their focus.

Despite a sleepless night, I’m still here. And I’m grateful to everyone who continues to stand with us.

One day, we’ll drink morning coffee together in a beautiful, peaceful Kyiv.

[Gaurab Chakrabarti @Gaurab]

You cannot buy a new gas turbine until 2030. Order books at GE, Siemens, and Mitsubishi stretch to 2029. Turbine prices have nearly tripled since 2019. Every AI data center needs power and every gas plant needs a turbine. And every turbine has one part that bottlenecks the entire industry: The blade. It has to survive in gas 500°C above the melting point of the metal it's made from and spin at up to 20,000 RPM under 10,000 g of centrifugal force. Each blade is grown as a single crystal of nickel superalloy, pulled through a vacuum furnace at 3 mm per minute. A set of blades costs $600,000 and takes 90 weeks to grow. The same metallurgy powers modern jet engines. Only 3 companies on Earth can build one. China spent $42 billion trying to catch up. They bought a Russian fighter engine, took it apart, and copied every part. Their copy ran 30 hours between overhauls versus 400 for the original. Modern Western engines run 4,000. You can reverse engineer the shape of a turbine blade. You cannot reverse engineer 60 years of metallurgy.

[Neo Kim @systemdesignone]

Facts about GNU Project

>Launched in 1983
>Had ~35 working programs by 1985
>Built core tools that make operating system usable
>Released GCC, which became one of the most used compilers
>Created GPL software license that heavily influenced open source
>Had a nearly complete operating system except the kernel
>Combined with Linux kernel to form a full operating system

Why do people still call it Linux instead of GNU/Linux?

[Programming Wisdom @CodeWisdom]

"UNIX is basically a simple operating system, but you have to be a genius to understand the simplicity." – Dennis Ritchie

[Lucas Tsatiris @LTsatiris]

@Adriksh Add parenthesis to the macro

[Shukri Hamk 🇦🇺 @Yazidisto]

Breaking🚨: Saghar Gholami is now in imminent danger of execution by The Islamic Regime.
Only because she participated in the January protests.

She’s only 19.
This is pure barbarism.
Share this before they kill her.

[Kalshi Finance @Kalshi_Finance]

Computer science professor at a major state university just finished the worst faculty meeting in 32 years of academia

Department head dropped the placement statistics like a bomb at 2:47 PM on a Wednesday

2023: 89% placement rate within 6 months of graduation
2024: 67% placement rate
2025: 34% placement rate
2026 projections: 12% placement rate

312 CS majors graduating this spring. Industry contacts saying maybe 40 will find work.

The dean wants to know why enrollment is still climbing while job prospects crater

Faculty sitting there like deer in headlights because what the fuck do you tell 19-year-olds taking out $40k per year in loans

Half the curriculum is already obsolete. Teaching data structures while companies replace entire engineering teams with Claude and Cursor.

One professor suggested pivoting to "AI collaboration skills" and got laughed out of the room

Another said we should warn students. Department head said that would "damage program reputation and university revenue"

So they keep taking tuition money from kids who will graduate into a wasteland

Career services still posts those bullshit salary averages from 2022 when new grads were getting $140k offers

Now the same companies are hiring 2 senior engineers with AI tools instead of 12 junior developers

Every CS professor knows their students are walking into a meat grinder

But the university needs those enrollment numbers to hit budget targets

They're literally selling degrees that lead to DoorDash driving

[Ofer Binshtok - Kafir - עופר בינשטוק @Ofer_binshtok]

Turkey is no less dangerous than Iran.
Erdogan is more dangerous than Khamenei.
Turkey is one of the world's largest financiers of terrorism.

[Caolan @CaolanReports]

Right now Kherson is under massive bombardment. FPV attacks have doubled to 600 EVERY DAY. Glide bombs are constant. Entire neighbourhoods are turning to rubble.

Russians are hunting innocent civilians on the streets. Women, children, war crimes in plain sight. They are trying to completely destroy the city. International coverage is almost zero & the situation is catastrophic.

In this report, I embed with a drone patrol that are the city’s first line of defence. What I witnessed was brutality on an industrial scale.

If Russia isn’t stopped, this will spread and Kherson will be a blueprint for cities across Europe in the future. Europe stopped violence like this before in WW2 and it can do it again.

Please watch and share my latest:

[Muse @xmuse_]

In a small Greek village stands the Byzantine Church of Porta Panagia, built in 1283 and still beautifully unchanged 🇬🇷