RetroTechie

Because some idiot leaders threw diplomacy & international law out the window?

So.. back to how things were done in the old days.

Seeing grey bars instead of text on the linked article. Gift link: same. Paywall bypass: unavailable or "Welcome to Nginx!"

Am I the only one? I'd prefer people stop posting links to such crappy sites.

"The 1971 data (i.e., nominal prices of 75 finished goods) came from the 1971 Sears catalog."

Is that online somewhere?

To add a small datapoint in support of the above: I happen to spend many nights in rural areas. Some with towns & nearest neighbours far enough away that nights are truly dark.

Those nights are the safest in my experience. Simply because no thief or mugger would bother to venture out into the middle of nowhere, in the off-chance there's something to be had there. That's assuming they'd even know someone/something to be there! And even if they would, chances are I'd be quickly aware of their presence, or some geese/other birds would announce their presence.

TLDR; Be careful in areas with lots of people, or on the edge of such areas. Places that lack people tend to be safe.

Your Park May Vary (YPMV).

people were so amazed by the night sky that half decided to sleep outside the tents just to experience falling asleep while looking at the stars.

Where I live, it usually impossible due to nights being too cold (okay, you can use sleeping bags/extra blankets etc), clouds, or... mosquitos.

But when/where it's not: highly recommended! "Spaceship Earth" in progress.

how is development "not transparent and open" in an open source project?

Please have a look at how Android is developed, and how each new version is released. It's far from the only example of "open source but closed development process".

Never mind "shared source" like QNX where people can pass through hoops to view source, but code is not open in the libre sense.

They need to focus on archaic government processes which rely on document formats that require proprietary software to view properly, while good open source software for the same task exists. And where lacking, focus on improving open source support for a particular task.

A good start would be to cut use of this OOXML Transitional format entirely. Default to LibreOffice's default formats, and (perhaps) support OOXML Strict where it helps transition.

That way any government employee saving their work in OOXML Transitional or other proprietary format, would automatically stick out as a dumbass who failed to do their job. Pass documents that are published through some validators / allowed-format checkers, and the public only gets stuff that's viewable with software of their choosing.

None of this is hard. It's mostly about changing defaults & a bit of employee training.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

"Pavel Gilman, vice president of sales and marketing at Nivalis, breaks down where those savings come from: roughly 30 to 35 percent from the electric axle during braking and deceleration, 11 to 15 percent from the rooftop solar panels, and the remainder (roughly half) from grid charging during parking stops."

11..15% Is not the bulk of the energy. But it's significantly more than "negligible".

Note that this trailer could be expected to be on the road most of the time. Which may not even be the common case: demand for goods varies a lot, so I'd expect that a lot of logistics companies aren't fully booked all the time. Maybe have a few drivers/trucks on the road, and a bunch of trailers on a parking lot doing nothing. In that scenario: need a trailer? Use whichever one is charged up furthest, while at a loading dock top it up (grid power/in-building storage) to whatever is needed to complete the trip, off it goes.

Also for US-based naysayers: Europe is a very different environment than the US. Most long hauls aren't that long, and there's a lot of [industrial zone local distribution center] <-> inner city traffic. Read: lots of start-stop, low speed cornering & wait time.

Have you read terms of service of Android devices?

Don't remember agreeing to any ToS before (or after) factory reset, put SIM card in a phone, and start using it. Granted, it's been a while since I last bought one.

And no, "by using you agree to ToS" is much like a shrink-wrap EULA for boxed software: doesn't fly in many jurisdictions. Explicit consent to do anything that violates users' expectations, is important here.

1,2,6,7 & 8 Seem to me as potentially (if not with certainty) in conflict with EU consumer laws & therefore not binding. Outside EU, YMMV. Key phrase here: "Local law may limit these clauses".

If such terms of use were to become subject of a legal case, then in EU "reasonable user expectation" weighs heavily, and courts tend to err on protect-consumer side.

For example vendor analyzing usage patterns to optimize users' experience with the appliance, would probably be okay.

But eg. do 24/7 voice recording & share with vendor's partners to let them send targeted advertising, would absolutely not match user expectations (given intended use of these appliance features), and therefore be illegal.

3-5 & 9 Seem sort-of-expected for internet connected, AI 'enhanced' appliances.

TLDR; it's just LG attempting to cover their legal ?ss. Wouldn't help them much in court.

A lot of these pdfs contain steps which are optional or only apply in certain situations.

Participants in Ikea speed-assembly competitions would like to know more.

My temperature sensors got a 1500mAh AAA chargeable batteries

You meant rechargeable? You seem to know more about Zigbee than about rechargeable batteries.

We simply don't kow.

On a scale of probable -> less probable, you have:

Self-organizing chemicals -> replication -> evolution -> multi-cellular life -> creatures that move around -> intelligent life -> use of tools -> basic technology like wheels, steam engine -> industrialization -> advanced tech -> automation -> space faring -> capable of interstellar travel -> capable of intergalactic travel. Powered by energy sources of increasing complexity/sophistication & scale.

This whole evolution requires a stable environment. Dinosaur-killing asteroid & it's back to square 1. Also (for example) how would intelligent life on a waterworld (which basically excludes electronics as we know it) become space-faring?

So it's not unlogical to expect that microbial life could be 'everywhere', tool-using intelligent creatures are rare, and interstellar-capable civilizations are so few & far between that (on average) they're just too distant in space or time.

Doesn't matter who visits who if neither party can cross the ocean in between.

Does anyone know what (if any) open source assemblers exist, that are written in Z80 assembly themselves?

I'm aware of: proprietary ones like GEN80 (my fav way back), M80/L80, at least one open source assembler written in plain C, and probably some table-driven assemblers targeting multiple architectures.

I can only conclude that Windows is basically malware now...

Windows has worked like spyware since what, the late Windows 7 days or thereabout?

End users should not regard this as inevitable. Or get caught up in the how-it-works-how-to-disable swamp. Instead, cut through to the essence. It's about respect:

# Microsoft does not respect Windows users (or users of any of their offerings?).

# LG does not respect people who buy their monitors (and perhaps other products?).

Knowing that, why would you use such a sleazy company's product for daily driving? Or give them your money? Would you buy bread from a baker who pisses on your lawn every time you're not looking?

User rights or consumer protection laws aren't even part of this equation. Although they do help (sometimes a lot!) to keep companies honest.

I wonder how many of these small tape recorders still exist in the world today. They used to be ubiquitous back in the day. But surely a big % must have been dumped in the trash or a recycling bin @ some point.

Wouldn't surprise me if there'd be a viable market for such devices brandnew. Not just for nostalgic greybeards, also younger folks unfamiliar with yesteryear's tech & curious about it.

You'll mean Nina Brink.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Online

Dear monkey, please run, and run far!

Where to? Article says they're in a national park already (and even there, hunted sometimes).

If I had to pick, my nostalgia lies with Windows 95 to 98.

Ouch.. I truly feel sorry for people who've never had the experience of "switch machine on, wait 1..2 seconds, start coding". All the machine's capabilities at your fingertips. No OS install to maintain, no updates, no viruses, no hassle.

It was sooo easy to get into (not to master!). Stores in my country would have a C64, ZX Spectrum or MSX running a demo or something, you'd come in, hit a key combo, type something like:

  10 PRINT "RetroTechie was here    ";
  20 GOTO 10

For example an early machine code adventure: I'd read in a magazine some biggest prime number had been found. Fyi: a Mersenne prime, 2^n-1, with n being a big number (10k+).

I quickly realized that number could fit into ZX Spectrum's 48K RAM, if encoded 2 decimals/byte (packed BCD or plain binary 0-99). Worked out Z80 assembly code to do 1 doubling using pen & paper. Some POKEs, a small BASIC program, and voila some semi-big primes appeared. Upped the counter, machine was number crunching for hours, and... yes! Starting & ending digits matched those in article. All the digits from biggest prime science had found up till then, calculated by that humble machine.

Just one of many examples. Modern computers are many orders of magnitude more powerful. But imho much of that era's magic was lost. Windows 95/98 you say? Booorring...

"Luft" in German = "air".

So English title would be "99 air balloons" or just "99 balloons".

(Excellent choice btw, among German-language songs it's an all-time classic)

Also, it's only "by hand" if you, the developer, writes it. In this case:

"The frontend — lexer, parser, semantic analysis (it’s called mkf) — hands off to two of its own IRs before writing WASM-GC by hand."

So those frontend tools do the writing, not the developer?

That's not "by hand". One might say "writes WASM-GC directly". But no that also doesn't happen, it goes through an IR first?

Personally I wouldn't put too much trust in a developer that even can't get their terminology correct. Well either that or I foobar'd my understanding of the writeup?

Anyway, looks like an interesting project.

If you're using 4 of them versus 3, wouldn't this require 1/3 more subpixels to achieve the same display resolution in pixels?

Or -using same # of subpixels per cm^2- would perceived display quality be similar due to better color representation?

Wikipedia says Alef lacked garbage collection, contributing to it being abandoned.

But does Limbo have any 'fatal flaws' like that? Especially compared to Go.

No doubt Rob Pike is a prolific and capable programmer. But seems like he needed quite a few attempts before arriving at Go (looking at C's flaws -> Alef -> Limbo -> Go, Wikipedia also mentions a domain-specific language called Sawzall).

What's missing in comments:

In developed countries, people buy (or rent) the things they need. Most financial transactions are recorded, taxed, regulated, and with 3rd parties involved at every step (who also expect to get payed). Car insurance, home insurance, electrical bill, etc etc. Grocery prices go up, you pay more. Renting, and rents are raised? Tough.

But in less-developed countries it's not rare for people to grow their own food. They could be living on 0 income & still have food on the table. Swap produce & services with other people in town. No 3rd parties, no taxes (see: informal economy). Build their own home on family-owned land. Insurance? What insurance?

TLDR; there's many flavours & angles on what "poor" or "rich" means in practice.

Curious what others use to store media for home/remote use.

A limited selection of CD/DVD/BluRay, a large collection of songs in mp3 & other formats (many ripped from CD myself @ some point, others downloaded), a bunch of movies in h264/h265 etc (mostly via torrents).

Books / documentation / retrogames & more on various devices.

Generally when adding anything, I look for replay value. Play/watch/listen once & never revisit stuff I save to /dev/null.

In common between all the above: storage media under my control, and useable offline.

It's not boutique vs large plant. It's base materials (paper mills, steel smelters, plastic etc) that tend to be low in added value, versus higher up the stack (like your examples) that also tend to be higher in added value.

Most countries didn't care much for the former other than historic reasons, but like the latter for obvious reasons (add £ to GDP).

That's changing due to "sovereignty". You can't build a satellite without metal profiles, wiring, tubes etc. Which requires manufacturing capacity for those. Which requires steel/alu/copper smelters & plastic extruders. Which requires plastic & thus a chemical industry.

This whole 'sovereign movement' is about keeping/bringing back capabilities across the stack which are deemed critical (like steel).

But I suspect there are few (if any) countries that have these dependency chains mapped out in detail.

Better if it targets a wider scope (eg. community-building) than just cleanup.

It's a set of properties/attributes commonly referred to as "style" (generic, not the CSS one). Or call it look & feel.

So you're saying the site screams "Claude's style!" to you. Not too different from "I know a WordPress site when I see one".