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cbm-vic-20

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The C64 had a good game library. While the C64 does have a cartridge and tape deck port, most games were sold on floppy disks. The C64 does not auto-boot disks, so when you turn on the power switch, you are immediately met with a BASIC "Ready." prompt. You have to type in a magic incantation to start the program on the disk

    LOAD "*",8,1
The curious will wonder what else can be done in BASIC? Or what if you don't have any games you want to play? It usually starts from there. This generation of Commodore computers has an excellent beginner's programming guide [0] in the box. Want to change the colors on the screen, or make a sound? The manual shows you what values to POKE into memory to make that happen.

The Programmers' Reference Guide [1] has a good introduction to assembly and machine language, if you want to go deeper.

[0] https://archive.org/details/Commodore_64_Users_Guide_1982_Co...

[1] https://archive.org/details/Commodore_64_Programmers_Referen...

[2] https://archive.org/details/commodore-1541-disk-drive-users-...

To expand on "time dilation": an EVE Online star system is served by a single compute node in their server farm at a time. Most systems are empty most of the the time, but some locations in the universe have much more player activity. Eve can dynamically move systems between server nodes, depending on player activity. Once the number grows into the thousands in a single system, the server CPU resources can't keep up. In the past (prior to 2011), this would make the game randomly unresponsive, or cause dropped connections.

Time Dilation is the in-game solution for this: the simulation is throttled so the game runs slower for everybody, but doesn't kick people off. Last time I checked, time dilation could go as low as 10% normal time- meaning you can only fire at 10% normal rate, move 10% as fast, etc. It feels like your ship is flying through molasses- it's not fun, but is also more fair for all players.

Alliances that know there will be a big fight can fill out a form with Eve Online to "schedule" the fight so that star system can be migrated to a larger server before the fight.

For the non-EVE players, when you join a fleet in-game, the other members of the fleet have a purple icon next to their name. NPSI is a play-style where you join transient fleets with the express intention of getting into battles.

Players in your own corporation and alliance typically have blue icons, and those you're at war with have red icons- this is based on manually-set "standings". Alliance roams typically have a NBSI policy: Not Blue, Shoot It!, which means you'll be attacking enemies and neutrals.

Nobody seems to have really embraced the truly distributed model of git, where you can expose a local repository via read-only HTTP, and collaborate by pulling from each others' repositories. No pushes.

This would be unwieldy in a corporate environment and for those who don't really grok git, but for a small cadre of experienced developers, this may be a workable model.

πFS 1 month ago
    jshell> "πfs".toUpperCase()
    $1 ==> "ΠFS"

    Welcome to Node.js v26.3.0.
    Type ".help" for more information.
    > "πfs".toUpperCase()
    'ΠFS'

    Python 3.14.5 (main, May 10 2026, 10:21:34) [Clang 21.0.0 (clang-2100.0.123.102)] on darwin
    Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
    >>> "πfs".upper()
    'ΠFS'

    echo 'πfs' | awk '{print toupper($0)}'
    ΠFS

Seems like that it's not that coding agents are to blame, its that the people who are ultimately responsible for committing and merging the offending code are to blame, regardless of its origin.

Magnifica Humanitas 2 months ago

Indeed. This paragraph shows something that most people really don't understand about AI.

98. It is appropriate to preface this discussion with two considerations. First, any statement regarding AI risks becoming quickly outdated, given the remarkable pace at which these systems are developing. Second, all of us, including those who design them, possess only a limited understanding of their actual functioning. Indeed, current AI systems are more “cultivated” than “built,” for developers do not directly design every detail, but instead create a framework within which the intelligence “grows.” As a result, fundamental scientific aspects — such as the internal representations and computational processes of these systems — remain, at present, unknown. There thus emerges an urgent need for a twofold commitment: on the one hand, a deepening of scientific research; on the other, the exercise of moral and spiritual discernment.

How is their RISC-V adventure going? The RP2350 included a couple of open-source Hazard3 cores. Does the RPi Foundation collect any feedback about how these are being used, and if there's any interest in developing a RV-only SoC/SBC? Would that help them save some costs- or is it just cheaper to keep their existing ARM agreement rather than spending the resources to maintain RV to their preferred level of support?

When my mother retired, she volunteered at the local church to transcribe and prepare 100 years of sacramental records to prepare them for digitization by the archdiocese. There were records in filing cabinets in offices, some in chests stored in the basement of the church, some with water damage.

The Catholic Church keeps pretty good records, for the most part. In New England, Quebec, and maritime Canada, many people can trace their ancestry back to at least the 1500s based on these records.

I've never been Wolfram's biggest fan, but this is a solid article. I'm trying to get a deeper understanding of the transformer architecture, and it seems that the written articles on transformer are bimodal: the either blind you with the raw math, or handwave the complexity away. I have been trying to figure out why the input embedding matrix is simply added to the input position matrix before the encoding stage, as opposed to some other way of combining these. Wolfram says:

Why does one just add the token-value and token-position embedding vectors together? I don’t think there’s any particular science to this. It’s just that various different things have been tried, and this is one that seems to work. And it’s part of the lore of neural nets that—in some sense—so long as the setup one has is “roughly right” it’s usually possible to home in on details just by doing sufficient training, without ever really needing to “understand at an engineering level” quite how the neural net has ended up configuring itself.

It's the lack of "understand[ing] at an engineering level" that irks me- that this emergent behavior is discovered, rather than designed.

The MacOS built-in screenshot tool has an optional "timed delay" feature, where you can click "screenshot in 5 seconds". With that time, you can open menus, or do anything that requires events to be processed by the application. Very handy for screenshots that require something to be clicked on.

Claude Design 3 months ago

Designers are hired to make sure those light switches are put in the right place. Much of the time, it's pretty obvious. But sometimes...