3 ms·
It's turtles all the way down. Layers of abstraction stacked on layers of abstraction.
by dlivingston 3y ago
It's turtles all the way down. Layers of abstraction stacked on layers of abstraction.
- selestify 3y agoUntil you get to the physics of transistors and logic gates :) Though I suppose in a sense, even subatomic particles are abstractions over quarks. It’s just that those are no longer abstractions we control.
- underdeserver 3y agoYup. APIs and constraints all make engineering sense. Turtles, all the way down... except when you get to quantum mechanics, that stuff is whack.
- javajosh 3y ago>QM is whack Very much so. But I also think it always had to be that way. A universe of infinite classical regression (atoms made of atoms made of atoms...) would be more insane than whack.
- underdeserver 3y agoIf I had to guess, I'd say infinite regression is how the real world works, and quantum mechanics is how our reality's simulator lazily computes interactions.
- dylan604 3y agoWould that make things like wormholes similar to a heartbleed attack?
- xattt 3y agoI realized the brilliance of the name Quartz for the graphics framework. It’s what happens to “rendered” silicon.
- kzrdude 3y agoQuartz glass is strong and very clear, it implies sharp, clear images.
- fatneckbeard 3y agowhy i like arduino. why i kind of like old IBM PC environment. x86 + a few bios calls, dont even need DOS after you load game.exe
- meepmorp 3y agoYeah NetWare used to boot DOS then load their kernel over it. I feel like computers used to be cooler.
- LeFantome 3y agoWell, that is it worked on Windows as well ( up until Windows ME ), load DOS first and then Windows. You could still do it that way if you want. Windows 11 needs a boot loader. No reason you cannot write a DOS based one. The comment about game.exe above probably refers to the days of “DOS Extenders” that games were based on. You would launch a game from DOS and, instead of just running a 16 bit DOS executable, it would switch into 32 bit mode and use a “DOS extender” to run the game. “DOS extenders” are really just operating systems though that use DOS as a boot loader. Popular options for DOS games and programs were DOS/4GW, Phar Lap, and Quarterdeck ( from memory ). There were many others. Windows 95 was really a “DOS extender” too.
- fatneckbeard 3y agodos.exe was kind of referring to how a lot of games would just completely ignore DOS even before the days of protected mode and 32 bits, im going back to the 8088 days. but yeah same idea. actually now that i remember it, my first linux was a copy of ... i think Dragon Linux? It used Dos as a bootloader, it ran off the existing DOS FAT filesystem so you didnt have to mess with partitions, and it dealt with the filename-too-short issue by keeping a dot file in each directory with a list of the 'real' linux long names and how they matched the DOS fake shortnames. but like even windows and linux, they are having layers and layers of abstractions. trying to do anything in X11 or win32 API calls, compared to the before-times where you just write directly into RAM at A0000 to draw pixels.. there is something about that that is very interesting.