dmwilcox

Yup, but I still have graphics start on a tty ;) I just don't have a login because I use an ephemeral OS (custom alpine base) with runit. It's like windows 95 all over again, you start the computer and that's it, use it. Highly recommended, no passwords just yubikeys

Maybe not attacks but... "Congratulations you've won 100M+ climate refugees!"

It looks cool. Two quick things: - the pricing page is an unstyled 404 right now - the docs subdomain requires javascript to display at all which is fine I guess but odd because the examples are viewable without javascript enabled

Otherwise really interesting, thanks for sharing!

Think about how far they've come if you get them to have these "misconceived" ideas!

They would understand code and data are in the same place, that all flow control effectively boils down to a jump, and they have a _more_ accurate picture of the inside of a machine than anyone starting out with Python or JavaScript could hope for.

Having spent 25 years to get to assembler, I wish I'd started it sooner. It's truly a lovely way to look at the machine. I'll definitely be teaching my kids how to program in assembly first (probably x86-16 using DOS as a program launcher)

__attribute__(packed) structs with an enum at the front indicating their type. The receivers use a switch to figure out which sub-message to interpret the strict as...

It isn't pretty and you better be able to control the rollout of both sides because backwards compatibility will not be a thing. But I'll take it over a giant pile of code generation in many circumstances

That's amazing! Thanks for the tip!

I guess I'm the odd duck with a switch that has never been online. It sounds like the switch2 isn't for me.

Sad but I don't want another device that wants to be more than it is, I basically want an updated version of my gameboy from the 90s and that's it. No downloads, no network, no social, just a game you can quietly play anywhere when you have a bit of time, no nonsense

Yup,people are really good about it in my experience too. I just stand off to the side of the camera, and say "no biometrics please". They take a minute to check my documents and it's done. Try it.

I trust the TSA agents brain to not get hacked in the next 24 hours, a database run by them, not so much.

> Can you imagine an intelligent process in such a place, as static representation of data in ram?

Yes. You can’t? This is not > really a convincing argument.

Fair, I believe it's called begging the question. But for some context is that people of many recent technological ages have talked about the brain like a piece of technology -- e.g. like a printing press, a radio, a TV.

I think we've found what we've wanted to find (a hardware-software dichotomy in the brain) and then occasionally get surprised when things aren't all that clearly separated. So with that in mind, I personally without any particularly good evidence to the contrary am not of the belief that your brain can be represented as a static state. Pribram's holonomic mind theory comes to mind as a possible way brain state could have trouble being represented in RAM.( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holonomic_brain_theory)

...you are looking at implementation details and feeling a disconnect between that and the possibility of inteligence. Do you feel the same ridiculousnes about a meatblob doing things and appearing inteligent?

If I was a biologist I might. My grandfather was a microbiologist and scoffed at my atheism. But with a computer at least the details are understandable and knowable being created by people. We haven't cracked the consciousness of a fruit fly despite having a map of it's brain.

> a computer couldn't spontaneously pick to go down a path that wasn't defined for it.

Can you?

Love it. I re-read Fight Club recently, it's a reasonable question. The worries of determinism versus free will still loom large in this sort of world view. We get a kind of "god in the gaps" type problem with free will being reduced down to the spaces where you don't have an explanation.

I think it is this, it's been a couple of weeks: nasm -f bin -o foobar.com foobar.asm

Top of the file you'll need this offset for DOS (or 7c00 for an MBR) to adjust your pointers with based on where the program gets loaded:

[bits 16] [offset 100]

I bet you can use more than 64kb of memory, I set ES to A000 and write to video memory in mode 13. So I imagine if you have a data source -- know your (LBA) block offsets (MBR style) or use a DOS interrupt to load a file -- you can still stomp on some memory outside of the given 64k and set your DS register there.

I haven't done it yet but if I wanted to load a .wad file or something that's the line I'd follow ;)

I don't know if it's been much used but it is known and works. I was doing this early on in my x86-16 assembler experiments but ended up using DOS as a program launcher for an easier emulator to use than qemu (dosbox-staging).

The big limits if you don't want to get into disk IO, is 512 bytes or less since you're basically running your program as a master boot record. To get more you'll need to load some LBAs from disk which yes there is an interrupt for and osdev has even better stuff.

Other than that, the difference between a .com file (usual limit 64kb single segment) and an MBR style bootable program is pretty minimal

Today I learned (!) What?! A .com file can have a full 64k for every segment! Amazing! All of my little experiments are .com files and I dread having to go to .exe at any point so this is great news.

The only question I have though is... How? I see DOS initialize all of the segment registers to the same address. Is this something DOS specific like special bits in _start or something? Or something I do myself?

I guess I could imagine my one mega .asm file that includes all my resources and then in _start I just set my segment registers to "further down in the file" using labels. But yeah, I'm a newb at this but love the simplicity of graphics programming like this, tips very much appreciated :)

Mmmm well my meatsuit can't easily make my own heart quiver the wrong way and kill me. Computers can treat data as code and code as data all pretty easily. It's core to several languages (like lisp). As such making illegal instructions or violating the straightjacket of a system such an "intelligence" would operate in is likely. If you could make an intelligent process, what would it think of an operating system kernel (the thing you have to ask for everything, io memory, etc)? Does the "intelligent" process fear for itself when it's going to get descheduled? What is the bitpattern for fear? Can you imagine an intelligent process in such a place, as static representation of data in ram? To get write something down you call out to a library and maybe the CPU switches out to a brk system call to map more virtual memory? It all sounds frankly ridiculous. I think AGI proponents fundamentally misunderstand how a computer works and are engaging in magical thinking and taking the market for a ride.

I think it's less about the randomness and more about that all the functionality of a computer is defined up front, in software, in training, in hardware. Sure you can add randomness and pick between two paths randomly but a computer couldn't spontaneously pick to go down a path that wasn't defined for it.

It's not about the random numbers it's about the tree of possibilities having to be defined up front (in software or hardware). That all inputs should be defined and mapped to some output and that this process is predictable and reproducible.

This makes computers incredibly good at what people are not good at -- predictably doing math correctly, following a procedure, etc.

But because all of the possibilities of the computer had to be written up as circuitry or software beforehand, it's variability of outputs is constrained to what we put into it in the first place (whether that's a seed for randomness or model weights).

You can get random numbers and feed it into the computer but we call that "fuzzing" which is a search for crashes indicating unhandled input cases and possible bugs or security issues.

I tried to keep my long post short so I cut things. I gestured at it -- there is nothing in a computer we didn't put there.

Take the same model weights give it the same inputs, get the same outputs. Same with the pseudo-random number generator. And the "same inputs" is especially limited versus what humans are used to.

What's the machine code of an AGI gonna look like? It makes one illegal instruction and crashes? If if changes tboughts will it flush the TLB and CPU pipeline? ;) I jest but really think about the metal. The inside of modern computers is tightly controlled with no room for anything unpredictable. I really don't think a von Neumann (or Harvard ;) machine is going to cut it. Honestly I don't know what will, controlled but not controlled, artificially designed but not deterministic.

In fact, that we've made a computer as unreliable as a human at reproducing data (ala hallucinating/making s** up) is an achievement itself, as much of an anti-goal as it may be. If you want accuracy, you don't use a probabilistic system on such a wide problem space (identify a bad solder joint from an image, sure. Write my thesis, not so much)

I've been saying this for a decade already but I guess it is worth saying here. I'm not afraid AI or a hammer is going to become intelligent (or jump up and hit me in the head either).

It is science fiction to think that a system like a computer can behave at all like a brain. Computers are incredibly rigid systems with only the limited variance we permit. "Software" is flexible in comparison to creating dedicated circuits for our computations but is nothing by comparison to our minds.

Ask yourself, why is it so hard to get a cryptographically secure random number? Because computers are pure unadulterated determinism -- put the same random seed value in your code and get the same "random numbers" every time in the same order. Computers need to be like this to be good tools.

Assuming that AGI is possible in the kinds of computers we know how to build means that we think a mind can be reduced to a probabilistic or deterministic system. And from my brief experience on this planet I don't believe that premise. Your experience may differ and it might be fun to talk about.

In Aristotle's ethics he talks a lot about ergon (purpose) -- hammers are different than people, computers are different than people, they have an obvious purpose (because they are tools made with an end in mind). Minds strive -- we have desires, wants and needs -- even if it is simply to survive or better yet thrive (eudaimonia).

An attempt to create a mind is another thing entirely and not something we know how to start. Rolling dice hasn't gotten anywhere. So I'd wager AGI somewhere in the realm of 30 years to never.

I lent out my copy of the Dawn of Everything so I can't get exact quotes or pages but this reminded me of a point in the book (which I highly recommend) which I'll attempt to summarize:

Domestication of plants was "easy" when tested in a controlled setting selecting seeds carefully at a university. Estimated that wheat in the agricultural "revolution" (a much scoffed about term in the book) could have been domesticated in 200 years if purposeful. Instead agriculture took something like 3000 years to become dominant versus mixed food sources (mostly gathering, fishing and hunting, with some low-effort planting on riverbanks).

And yes to your point, the idea that there is some sort of progression in human societies is contradicted by the recent decades of evidence in archeology -- every arrangement you can imagine seems to have been tried (stationary+hunter/gather, nomadic farmer, alternating back and forth, shifts toward farming for hundreds of years and then back to fishing for thousands). Humans time on the earth has been much longer than our recorded history, with more variety and less boring than we usually assume.

Anyway I hope that inspires someone to pick up the book, it really is a good read.

Have a near 10 year old Librem (original 13"), works fine. But if it breaks I'm getting an old Thinkpad and putting coreboot on it.

Perhaps my usage is too light, no IDEs, no electron anything, no streaming, and few tabs because I shutdown the laptop instead of suspend it -- but I don't see what all the fuss is about needing to upgrade anything. 16gb of ram and an i5 is fine, even for the modern web, disable JavaScript and/or run ublock origin.

The new fangled ARM stuff ;) strikes me as essentially similar in character to smartphones: future e-waste with no possibility of repair. Choose wisely, choose x86 and modularity

Really??? I had an iBook from 2001, and put Linux on it, but power consumption was definitely the best of laptops in that entire era. What could it be, like 20-30 watts? Motorola PPC processors weren't exactly heat beasts (or speed demons lol).

I'd be curious about how yours has held up. I overclocked my iBook back in the day to play DivX (bumped FSB from 66 to 100mhz) and it eventually cooked around 2010.

Wow! Just discovered OpenCore Legacy Patcher! My wife's ten year old Macbook Air can get updates!!

Thank you for the tip this will help a lot since it is not the "year of the Linux desktop" for her. :)

Disable JavaScript and you're largely fixed. Amazingly enough there is a large enough contingent doing that such that you are far from unique (and it helps most all of the fingerprinting requires JavaScript)

I carry a point and shoot for photographing my kids -- it's amazing. You can take it out without looking at it, turn it on, take a photo and turn it off and return it to your pocket in 10 seconds.

Also the sensor is 10x the size of my phones, the photos are printable (and don't look like mud when printed like many camera phone photos), and the battery last for months.

Maybe just get a point and shoot? I traded in an old DSLR for an OM tough camera and my kids even take photos with it (and get copyright! unlike AI lol)

I've taken to saying, much to the chagrin of my techy friends, that "the best language is a dead language". Usually speaking about C which isn't even dead but maybe should be, just stick with C89 and pretend that was the end (though for more modern targets C11 with atomics is tempting).

Along the same lines, maybe the best platform is a dead platform. And there is a mature emulator, or many, for pretty much every modern platform. I've definitely been exploring DOS as a way forward (lol) out of the madness of modern computers.

Radically simple, single tasking, and local first with a stable platform that is close to the metal. What is not to love? I mean maybe it doesn't hurt it was on my first computers so a nostalgia factor I'm sure is at play as well.

I got super interested in Clojure and the java UI frameworks a year ago. But the languages on top of languages scared me. I wanted something simpler, so now I'm writing x86-16 and making bitmapped fonts and things. Probably not a good idea for anyone with a timeline but it's been educational

I love the localfirst idea but I don't love web browsers. They're the platform everyone has to have but shoehorning 40 years of UI development and products into them seems like a mistake.

I can see why local UI development fell out of favor, but it is still better (faster, established tooling, computers already have it so you don't have to download it). I can't help but feel like a lighter weight VM (versus electron) is what we actually want. Or at least what _I_ want, something like UXN but just a little more fully featured.

I'm writing some personal stuff for DOS now with the idea that every platform has an established DOS emulator and the development environment is decent. Don't get me wrong this is probably totally crazy and a dead end but it's fun for now. But a universally available emulator of a bare bones simple machine could solve many computing problems at once so the idea is tempting. To use DOS as that emulator is maybe crazy but it's widely available and self-hosting. But to make networked applications advancing the state of emulators like DOSBox would be critical.

Actually local first, maybe the way forward is first to take a step back. What were we trying to accomplish again? What are computers for?

Love it. Did the same journey a few years back making a version of KISS Linux that runs out of an initramfs. Highly recommend that "1-person distro" as a way to build out a daily driver OS, it's very satisfying

I used OSX from 10.0.0.4 to 10.4 and it was OK then. I recently had to use a Mac for work something-something-tree-whatever and it's slow even on an M1, it's double the weight of an X1 carbon, and the window manager hasn't evolved meaningfully and is junky. I haven't had so many troubles with arranging windows on two screens in almost 20 years.

Maybe people have been slowly boiled? I got my partner on a Mac 10 years ago but would not get her another Mac. Apple's push to make evetything e-waste, foxconn, and the general surveillance in the name of security ensure that. My observation is less that it has aged "like a fine wine" and more that Macs become prisons shaped like a computer.

(Edit: s/has/hasn't/)

I moved from Silicon Valley to London -- a funny thing I haven't seen mentioned is that the tax rates on RSUs are absolutely awful (extra NI can push rates to nearly 60%).

That is a large disincentive for working in a tech company versus finance. Tech companies especially start-ups largely pay in stock which could be mispriced and you make more (or less) money than could be predicted. But versus finance paying pure cash, less (equity) risk, and a lower tax rate the incentives are clear.

HMRC I don't think should be underrated in their effects on answering the question -- "should I start my start-up in the US or the UK?"

I wonder if there is a good way to copy something out of fossil scm or externalize this component for more general use.

https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/antibot.wiki

I ran into this weeks ago and was super impressed to solve a self-hosted captcha and login as "anonymous". I use cgit currently but have dabbled with fossil previously and if bots were a problem I'd absolutely consider this

Wow! I never gave it much thought that a train could get stuck in Donner pass. I grew up in the area and the snow can really come down. Warning, if you wait until snow is sticking in Reno then you might not make it through.

I've had several near escapes through the pass. Following the semi's in their treads saved me in a little 2WD car.