anyfoo

12 ms·

181.
by anyfoo 1y ago
Assembly, arguably the most known demo party, was famously Finnish. Future Crew (who made Second Reality) were (are?) Finnish as well. Lots of demo scene in Germany, also.
182.
by anyfoo 1y ago
To be fair, "the loss meme as minimalistic ASCII art ad absurdum" is a pretty extreme form. It's basically tailor-made to be below the threshold of recognition, while still evoking familiarity once you know what it is. It&#
183.
by anyfoo 1y ago
It's true that nobody can say for sure, but bots reposting the loss meme somehow strikes me less likely as some people reposting the loss meme. And an entirely ASCII-representation (ignoring the strikethrough) is extremely easy to post
184.
by anyfoo 1y ago
I don't know the exact situation obviously, but isn't it possible that the poster simply wasn't able (or didn't know how) to add the strikethrough, but had the expectation that anyone who knows about this form knows, and
185.
by anyfoo 1y ago
I mostly do that when I go "that was a little bit mean of me... do I really need to be mean, what's the point?" Fortunately, that seems to also have trained me to not write those comments in the first place. I also think much
186.
by anyfoo 1y ago
That makes sense.
187.
by anyfoo 1y ago
That is a very true comment. Electrical Engineering for example would be nothing without Laplace (which is more or less an even more general Fourier).
188.
by anyfoo 1y ago
Honestly, it's a bit much for a single HN comment. But I've look around, and I found this, which upon first glance gives a good (and not too long) overview: http://www.varietysoftworks.com/jbaldwin/Education&#
189.
by anyfoo 1y ago
As elaborated in another comment, I am not a fan of UNIX having won (anymore), but I find this "conspiracy" ridiculous. It's obvious to me that UNIX was seen as a good idea by many people, and that it did make a lot of sense
190.
by anyfoo 1y ago
Kudos for doing so! This is seriously a great endeavor. Regarding its relation to UNIX concepts, I do spot a classical hierarchical file system there, though. ;) Is it only an "add-on" (similar to IFS on IBM i), or is it fundament
191.
by anyfoo 1y ago
For sure. Also, we simply live in a world where computers, and their operating systems, are giant, impossibly complex structures. No single person can even fully know in all detail even what you would relatively consider a small part of nei
192.
by anyfoo 1y ago
Indeed. But to be fair, in today's world it is not only somewhat hard to imagine an OS that does not rely on things such as a filesystem with opaque binary files, directories, and hierarchical paths connecting these, but in order to pr
193.
by anyfoo 1y ago
> Sometime in graduate school I started paying more attention to the Xerox PARC legacy of the Mac, and I started realizing that perhaps Unix was not the pinnacle of operating systems design. For me, that watershed moment came when I look
194.
by anyfoo 1y ago
If you like Fourier, you're going to love Laplace (or its discrete counterpart, the z transform). This took me down a very fascinating and intricate rabbit hole years ago, and is still one of my favorite hobbies. Application of Fourier
195.
by anyfoo 1y ago
Good analysis. I guess I lost my cycle-counting foo, because on modern CPUs cycle-counting is a) infeasible on a superscalar, speculative, out-of-order CPU, and b) even if you did manage to do it, it hardly matters when a CPU cycle is less
196.
by anyfoo 1y ago
Very neat. Breaking up multiplications and divisions into bit shifts, and lookup table to trade off memory for runtime, are indeed nothing new to engineers working on the low level, but this paints a very pretty picture of how this looks in
197.
by anyfoo 1y ago
Not quite. They build the entire table upfront, whether any individual entry is needed or not. Making it an on-demand cache instead is a neat next step. Whether it helps or hurts depends on the actual input: If the input image uses every pi
198.
by anyfoo 1y ago
True! I don't think that's what happening, though. At a quick glance, the primitive words seem to be directly implemented in C: https://github.com/eliben/goforth/blob/3949fe0cc52131fdcae0e... So it
199.
by anyfoo 1y ago
I must say, implementing Forth in almost any high-level language, even C, can be awkward and almost antithetical. A "high-level" Forth implementation often merely presents a Forth-compatible runtime, which runs the risk of missing
200.
by anyfoo 1y ago
Very interesting. I'm curious what the os2museum.com can say -- if anything -- on this. A deeply technical perspective, as in knowing the actual bit-by-bit internals, can shed much more light. os2museum.com was just recently able to tr
201.
by anyfoo 1y ago
That’s like saying: “This is the main reason that, even though I know I’d enjoy a nice car, I stubbornly stick with a run-down PT Cruiser without radio and air conditioning. It’s because I know that I will be extra frustrated when I have to
202.
by anyfoo 1y ago
I feel that nowadays, it's a combination of "things just work" and "if they don't, good luck figuring out why". I recently installed Tru64 UNIX on a DEC Alpha I got off eBay. I felt like it was more sluggish th
203.
by anyfoo 1y ago
My favorite "old software that still miraculously works" is oneko, a once sort-of famous cute little cat that chases your mouse pointer. oneko-1.1b is from 1995, and yet I was still able to build and run it natively on an M1 Pro M
204.
by anyfoo 1y ago
Yeah, that is one of the main reasons I don't use emacs in a terminal much (the main exception being that I use emacsclient with -t for terminal mode as $EDITOR and for quick editing). Some key bindings just don't work properly.
205.
by anyfoo 1y ago
What serendipity. I just bought an old Alpha on eBay, and installed both Tru64 and OpenBSD on it. Tru64 came with CDE, and I was once again admiring how ugly it is, and lamenting with friends at work how this eyesore could replace OpenLook.
206.
by anyfoo 1y ago
Oops, "the decimal" in my answer should read "hexadecimal", obviously. (Too late to edit.)
207.
by anyfoo 1y ago
It's interesting. My first idea was that you consciously or subconsciously have the front panels from PDPs in mind (which are very iconic), and a lot of PDP had word sizes that were either only or also divisible by 3 (like 12 or 18). E
208.
by anyfoo 1y ago
The very excellent "Advent of Computing" computer history podcasts had an episode involving The Story of Mel relatively recently: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/acting-up/id1459202600... It p
209.
by anyfoo 1y ago
Several PDPs used 18 bit word sizes (we standardized on 8 bit bytes and multiples for word sizes later on). 18 is not divisible by 4, but it is divisible by 3. An octal digit groups three bits together, just like a hexadecimal digit groups
210.
by anyfoo 1y ago
Octal has advantages to be more readable when you are dealing with bits in groups of threes (or multiples), just like the decimal is advantageous when dealing with bits in groups of fours (or multiples). In UNIX-like systems (and POSIX in g

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