a plea
Remote
SOMETHING WONDERFUL HAS HAPPENED TO YOUR leah 
@millihertz@oldbytes.space
mastodon 4.7.2+glitcha small cryptid caught in time's headlights.
'she/her' unless you know me
32 bits ought to be enough for anyone!
don't assume i know anything about anything
apparently this needs saying, so:
DO NOT BARGE INTO MY MENTIONS
TO PICK A FIGHT. i come here to chill
out, not argue. if arguing chills you out,
go somewhere else.
also, no DMs. ever.
not on bluesky!
it has been [0] days since i had
to block an AI shill
---
my mamma told me:
if something gets hard - fuck it
479 Followers
578 Following
50 Posts
Joined February 27, 2021
favourite instruction:
ex (sp),hl
avatar from:
cover of BYTE's Aug 80 issue
header from:
miaowier alt:
All of the AI projects we have observed as a team are failing. Every single one – we have seen 0% success in a year and a half, not only amongst projects we have been asked to participate in2, but even within projects that we have observed in passing while doing totally unrelated work.
-- https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/ai-mania-is-eviscerating-global-decision-making/
sometimes the plural of anecdote is data
Replying to
@hackbyte @Hex@kolektiva.social
While what you said is true specifically for the US, for europe it is actually not.
define "europe" - i'm in the UK, the country where a serving prime minister said "anyone still catching a bus at 30 is a failure" and a project to build a couple of hundred miles of high speed track to link our biggest cities is half-cancelled and on the verge of collapsing completely having somehow run up cost overruns into the hundeds of billions, and it feels pretty damn true here
my respect for Woz remains undimmed
https://www.techspot.com/news/112497-steve-wozniak-mentions-ai-graduation-speech-gets-cheers.html
do we even want to know what prompted the latest xkcd?
i do so love to have the entire flat's computers all taken out at once by a power hiccup... power was down two minutes, maybe? but then everything here needed to be restarted
i don't have a lot of time for laptops otherwise, but the one good thing about them is that even a battery with only a few minutes in it will still tide you over momentary cuts and brown-outs
trying to find out information about LLM3, the virtual machine used to implement Le_Lisp back in the early 80s, is... um, more difficult than it needs to be today
doing my bit for software preservation: the last ever version of Dream Scheme (an almost-R4RS Scheme written in x86 assembly language and metacompiled in a Forth-esque manner) released before the domain disappeared is now up on github: https://github.com/thamesynne/DreamScheme/
the eZ80 is much less wtf-y than the 65816 in many ways (so few transistors, so many bad decisions!), but whoever decided that it was OK to have the only practical way to access the high byte of a 24-bit address be storing it into memory and loading from n+2 should have to subtitle their CV "i have no design taste"...
i mean, at least
ld (temp),hl
ld a,(temp+2)
or
push hl
ld hl,2
add hl,sp
ld a,(hl)
or
ld (ix-1),hl
ld a,(ix+1)
only take 12, 11 or 10 cycles respectively; but still...
is it just me, or have the vast majority of minicomputers just been completely forgotten?
ed. of course, nobody's forgetting about the PDPs, or the Data General machines. i'm thinking of their contemporaries, though: things like the Interdata machines, the Philips P800 range, the Raytheon RDS 700 series, all the TI 9x0 machines, the Honeywell DDP-x16 and especially -x24 ranges, the SDS 9x0s and Sigmas, the Prime range (which used to be huge but has just vanished). and then the even more obscuure machines - the Centurion machines that Usagi Electric is restoring some of, one i just tripped over (used to implement a proof-of-concept tiny version of Macro SPITBOL) called the Incoterm SPD 20/40...
there were, as i recall, literally hundreds of minicomputer manufacturers and models, and... they have just evaporated. it's bizarre.
live by the conspiracy theory, die by the conspiracy theory, i guess. on the bright side, you can die by conspiracy theory a lot.
find: warning: you have specified the global option -mount after the argument -iname, but global
options are not positional, i.e., -mount affects tests specified before it as well as those specified after it. Please specify global options before other arguments.
um, find? you clearly understood me. please don't nag me about irrelevant shit. you're a computer program, you don't get to insist on etiquette.
what a bunch of arseholes
https://serverfault.com/questions/110219/which-os-distributions-have-64-bit-kernel-and-32-bit-userspace
it's a perfectly reasonable question, yet look at literally every single one of them refusing to answer it.
that's linux "helpfulness", in a nutshell
it is a delight to see an article referenced from Hackaday (or anyhwere really) start with this:
This is not AI generated or edited or ideated. I communicate worse when another entity communicates on my behalf. Go direct?
suddenly i find myself very interested in what Nikhil Jha has to say: https://nikhiljha.com/
edit: well, that set me up for disappointment. three blog posts, one hosted on Jane Street, and halfway down what was an interesting discussion of a rarely manifesting kernel bug:
. I don’t think I would have attempted this trick if I didn’t have an AI assistant to write most of the filesystem for me.
neeeeeever mind then. *plonk*
edit 2: ...yeah, i really should've read the first line of the article before i got all excited:
I spent the last few weeks making a coding agent for the terminal.
...do you ever get the feeling that everyone around you is willingly offering up their arms to zombies? "bite me, so i can be just like you!"
for all i snark about Zig not being ready, things like https://kristoff.it/blog/contributor-poker-and-ai/ do give me faith that the process is sound, even if the results aren't quite there yet.
Replying to
@robtherunt@cupoftea.social @sarahdalgulls@ecoevo.social in fairness, one of the two foreign ministers involved has only just started
Replying to
@flyingsaceur@ioc.exchange so they did a song about the noises foxes make, and a song about big knots.
i'm sensing a subtext here
Replying to
@matty@blahaj.zone that weird situation where people find it easier to give money to a rich person than to a poor person.
that can only be societal conditioning. it doesn't make any sense on an objective basis
Replying to
@wronglang@bayes.club @glitchypixel@mastodon.gamedev.place Therac-25 is what most immediately springs to mind
as much as i love the idea of displays that are usable in reflected light and consume no power until you change something on them, eInk is going to have to get a lot faster at refreshing before i'm interested in it. i run all my screens at 24Hz, so it's not as though i lack patience... but when you're talking about seconds per frame, it's - a bit much
Replying to
@c_9@mstdn.ca and asthma patients who haven't used a gas stove (or, indeed, an electric one) in somewhere around 25 years...?
very pissed off about what's happened with Eurovision. they literally stole gay Christmas from us :-(
Replying to
@TerminalTilt@social.terminaltilt.com @librewolf@chaos.social not all that easy if you still use a 32 bit OS
Replying to
my one concern is that updating the ADSRs etc at 100Hz is going to produce zipper noise without at least some interpolation at 48kHz.
...but there is, so that's OK
Replying to
@steeph@queerchen.de @CppGuy@infosec.space i'm not really best placed to comment on that, since my main machine right now is an HP T630 thin client (albeit with 10GB RAM, but only so the GPU can have 2GB and a channel to itself).
funnily enough, its PassMark rating is only slightly below the Core 2 Q6600 that was in my main desktop before i moved
Replying to
@bit101@mstdn.social is it an 8?
Replying to
@blakespot@oldbytes.space every accusation is a confession, part #... oh, who can keep count?
Replying to
@symbo1ics@timeloop.cafe @rnd@toot.cat there's still a risk of wearing out the keyboard. from mashing on it when you can't figure out why the ()U#$()U&Y#$W%P*()W$&*)%(&W$ your program is refusing to compile with a type error
Sir Clive never was a programmer:
The truth was there was nothing you could do on the 68000 that you couldn't do on the Z80.
-- https://archive.org/details/Sinclair_User_053/page/54/mode/2up
...except address more than 64KB without bank switching... which was kind of important, really. and being able to do a multiplication in 10μs and a division in 21μs rather than 100 times as long...
Replying to
@phooky@hexa.club @NanoRaptor@bitbang.social wouldn't nsync be succeeded by lytefunkyone?
for all i love and respect the BS 1363 power standard, if the UK were to adopt AS/NZS 3112 or GB 1002 tomorrow, i wouldn't mind in the least.
re LB: except, of course, when i want to recall song lyrics from the 80s. at which point, those little bastards are goooooone
Replying to
@kirtai@tech.lgbt yes, there is! https://conservatory.scheme.org/ - they have the 20110707 version, and the DreamOS from Feb 2012; but i guess they didn't quite get there in time to catch the later version
i had to uninstall firefox 128 from the machine in the back room so i could update Void on it
i am 83.7% sure this will come back to bite me at some point this summer
Replying to
@kirtai@tech.lgbt you'd think the constant moaning of "brAIns" would give them a hint...
Replying to
Replying to
@CppGuy@infosec.space go the other way: never update them. new CPUs just aren't worth the trouble.
Replying to
@PastaThief i did go back and edit the preceding post to specifically exclude the PDPs (and Data General machines)
Replying to
@keshara@blahaj.zone if only such behaviour weren't exhibited right here in the fediverse, right now, on a regular basis
Replying to
@PoliceStateUK@mastodon.me.uk YES WE BIN
Replying to
@PastaThief in the sense of virtually nothing about them existing online
i don't suppose anyone still has a copy of Coreboot / SeaBIOS for the #Joggler around? the Wayback Machine came up empty
@andy@social.dvsn.net - you might just be my best hope for this
Replying to
@dalias@hachyderm.io @khm @cgnarne @ryan@m29.us the fact that their solution to the problem of burning cpu cycles was to burn more cpu cycles feels like it should have been a clue, tbh. especially when people have discovered some really cheap and easy ways of sending LLMs down twisty little passages, all different, in the meantime
Replying to
@bituur_esztreym@pouet.chapril.org @jacqueline@chaos.social in fairness, this would be quite an achievement - most arsonists can't help but return to the scene of their crimes
Replying to
@petrillic@hachyderm.io @Hex@kolektiva.social that sounds very much like a pTerryism
Replying to
@pulkomandy@mastodon.tetaneutral.net that would work for me! i'll keep an eye out
ed. unfortunately it is waaaay out of my price range :-(
swear to gods, nobody uses emacs for the keystrokes
Replying to
it's back