Making people something for software rather than helping them interact healthily with real people in their surroundings feels irresponsible at this point in time, given all the damage social media, short form videos, and the rest have done to the world at large.
Well, that was stellar work. It's a little sad that such threats could work with a smaller less resourced company. Still, adguard dns got on to my radar because of this.
One simpler explanation: in forth you are forced to keep the stack, and modifications to the stack, in your short term memory, albeit only really three numbers in most cases. Whereas with C et al you simply look down the page at the variables, far less taxing on your short term memory.
Well-written and designed high-level forth words often transcend that and tend to be, quite literally, readable however, in a way that is incredibly rare to see in C et al. Of course the argument is that other programmers shouldn't be expected to see the problem in the way the original problem solver did.
This is probably why you see things like locals get used a lot as modern Forth programs grow. It doesn't have to be brutal early days Chuck Moore genius programs, but I guess you start getting away from the original ethos.
I think even with locals you're still mentally dealing with a few items on the stack in each word usually. But, yes, locals do help you from passing around items from word to word: you see the usage of the local far easier than you see the location of the stack elements.
The final paragraph hits home. The specialisation required has not necessarily empowered ordinary users without dedicating their lives to the tool:
"Unix and C however form a powerful deterrent to the average astronomer to write her or his own code (and the average astronomer's C is much, much worse than his Fortran used to be). The powers-that-be in the software world of course have always felt that "ordinary" users (astronomers in this case) should be using software and not writing it. The cynic might feel that since those same powers nearly all make their living by writing software, and get even more pay when they manage other programmers, then they have a vested interest in bringing about a state of affairs where the rest of us are reduced to mere supplicants, dependent on them for all our software needs. It is clear that Unix does not pose an insuperable barrier --- the ever-expanding armies of hackers out there are evidence enough that the barrier can be scaled given enough time and enthusiasm for the task. But hacking is not astronomy, and hackers are not astronomers, and it is astronomy and astronomers I worry about. We shouldn't have to scale the Unix barrier, and it is all the sadder because, since the advent of a VMS-based Starlink, ordinary astronomers have had something denied to most other scientists in this country --- readily accessible, reliable, user-friendly computing power that can be easily harnessed to a particular astronomical requirement. Maybe VMS does baby its users. Maybe we have paid more per Specmark so that we could use the Specmarks we had efficiently. But along with the rest of the world, we are now losing this nice friendly system. As with instrumentation and the National Observatories, we are having to teach our students how to fit their problems to facilities provided by others, whereas the UK reputation in astronomy was created by fitting the facilities to the problem."
It's consuming rather than creating, it's products aimed at sating short attention spans, it's superficial social media rather than books, it's instant answers from LLM rather than thinking through. We created this, and its fallout throughout society and politics. Yet we refuse to fess up.
If something happens to Taiwan, the USA will have given a huge military advantage to its biggest adversary.
It's going to take decades for the USA to catch up with Taiwan, and once China has its grip on the fabs they'll only further advance them.
In an existential crisis, the chances of Taiwan's leadership doing a deal with China when it's military protector retreats from its former declarations is in no way low.
It'll be the end of American military dominance but in fitting with the US's repeated isolationist trajectory.
How did that come to be? The US used to be the world leader in chip manufacturing and that wasn't all that long ago. Why was something so critical given away so freely?
Russia is a dictatorship at war with Ukraine and the West by their own statements and actions. The idea they are leveraging tech companies for this purpose is ludicrous.
Hetzner and OVH are both great value for money, you'll find bad stories for every big hoster but they are professional (Someone will post the OVH fire story as a reply of that most likely, but that's not something that happens regularly) and a lot of the VPS resellers will sell you stuff that is hosted there too.
In the last years, many of the smaller German hosting companies were acquired by larger corporations. Netcup is owned by Anexia (Austria) now, Contabo was acquired by KKR (US), Hosteurope by Godaddy (US). If you're looking for hosting in the EU, you probably also want to avoid US-owned providers.
They're subject to the same jaws that are the reason you don't host in the USA. Such as the CLOUD Act which compels them to give any days any time to the US government.
If you're doing business in the EU it's actually illegal to store the data about that business in the USA. It's not enforced though.
Leaseweb is quite cheap these days, though they seem to have stopped serving non-business customers. Budget hosts like Hetzner and Contabo may suffice, but make sure to check if they bothered to patch their servers (Contabo's EPYC servers are running on outdated microcode that allows leaking CPU cache between VMs for instance).
OVH is also popular but I found their network speeds kind of limiting. It's been a while since I last checked out their offerings, though.
Splitting democratic nations through fearmongering targeted at everyone's online profile is an incredible weapon.
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