hakfoo

Personally, if you want to go the XT-IDE route, I'd consider getting a SD-IDE adapter to pair with it, like $10 from your preferred fountain of Rubbish From China.

Some CF cards don't work well with XT-IDE cards, since they often depend on some specific 8-bit modes that are not guaranteed to work, but SD adapters generally support it. SD cards these days are also more available and probably cheaper, considering you won't even need 2Gb for many retro machines.

Another option is an "ISA USB" card using a CH375 or CH376 chip. This requires software support (a DOS driver or an add-on BIOS ROM) but you can plug in a cheap flash drive and format/partition it like a hard disc.

3-D Secure has been a fiasco IMO.

I can recall when we first tried 3DS in the US and it went over like a lead balloon. Let's jump out of the middle of checkout and go to a page which looks like they're trying to phish your bank account to continue, and by the way, you can just skip it. So customers did, and then merchants followed, except in countries that effectively required it because they cared about fraud.

One of the major selling points of 3DS2 was basically "we can guesstimate fraud with magic black-box logic behind the scenes so most of the time the customer is not disrupted."

But it's still lipstick on a pig because there are plenty of outs where you don't strictly need 3DS even in "countries that required it", and it's still window dressing around the idea that we're giving merchants an unscoped credential and hoping desperately it doesn't get misused or stolen elsewhere.

When we finally decide we don't want to get lapped by India and Brazil in payment tech anymore, I hope the camel-designed-by-committee it spawns is a push-only paradigm. If I want to buy something, let Newegg render a HTML microformat that browsers can detect and turn into a big clicky link to my bank's website/app with a pre-configured outbound transaction. Just as easy for the customer as a stored card, with less risk of abuse/compromise.

It's disappointing that we still have terrible "press 9 buttons at the same time while reciting from the Necronomicon and plugging in and out the device" recovery stories.

Put the firmware and config on a ** uSD card, or set up some sort of UF2 recovery mode. Then no matter how badly you bollix it up, the answer is "plug it into your computer, download the big prominent "factory image", and drag it onto the device.

If done right, you could even do stuff like "clone the SD card so you can deploy identically-configured units for every branch of your chain business."

The keyboard enthusiasts got to "personalized hardware" pretty early, so there might be some lessons there.

There's a whole continuum from "Buy an off the shelf unit" to "here's a barebones case you can slide ready made switches and caps into" to "mix and match custom PCBs and cases" to designing your own PCBs and/or cases. There are pretty clear pipelines and even some levels of tooling for "draw up the layout you want and get a bunch of files you can send to production houses"

Takeaway 1: A lot of this is grounded in economic realities. I did the full bespoke route (custom PCB, custom 3-D printed case) and figured it probably cost me about $500 all inclusive to get what I wanted, and that's honestly a lot of money for a keyboard.

AI won't solve any of the economic problems. They can't fix "the minimum PCB order is N units, so now you have a drawer full of spares you paid for". They can't make the expensive part you needed cheaper, especially if you're an individual buying quantity of 1/5/10 instead of an OEM buying reels and containers-full. They can't change the fact that a case for a large widget will be expensive to mill/3-D print/mould/etc.

Takeaway 2: Customers may have surprisingly limited imagination for bespoke gear. There are galleries (and even coffee-table books) full of exotic keyboards. But Micro Center is full of $50 interchangeable "tenkeyless with RGB lighting" boards; throwing on a random set of "custom" keycaps, and that's enough for a large part of the audience.

Will these customers want or benefit from more tools, or will it just give them rope to hang themselves on and give them an excuse to bail out of the purchase entirely? Even if you can provide them a gallery of vetted turnkey choices, there might be more choice paralysis than actual benefit.

Takeaway 3: Hardware is forever (relative to software). You have a lot of small firms and group-buy products that disappeared and now the owners can't get an exact replacement or repairs. Conversely, Unicomp can gut and rebuild a 1986 Model M with new innards in large part because they've been selling the same basic design since a 386DX/16 cost as much as a Toyota Tercel.

If your AI spawns a galaxy of 1-of-1 bespoke products, who services and supports them? That seems like it's only going to appeal to the enthusiast-hacker type who can keep them alive themselves, who is least likely to need AI help designing them. Design for disposability isn't a great look for anything but incredibly low-cost, limited-usecase items.

I always hoped we could make "cinematic universe" for really enormous refactorings.

I'm not sure if a bigger population would really justify more jet manufacturers.

Outside of general aviation (hobbyists/business jets), the potential buyers for jet aircraft are going to trend towards natural oligopoly.

Military craft, there's basically one buyer per country, at most a handful of different decision makers behind the same basic chequebook.

Civilian craft, does the number of airlines scale with population? There are a finite number of viable routes, airport slots, and market segments, so would it actually support a hundred new airlines, or would we just end up with a Big Southwest buying 1,000 737s instead of 100?

Even if you had more airlines, would they want to diversify their fleets? Running the same few types of planes, especially if they're the same types of planes as their competitors, unlocks efficiencies. How much would it cost a random American or European airline to retrain their pilots to fly the Comac C919, and how much would they spend extra on adaptations (stocking new spares, retraining maintenance staff, retooling processes for different floorplans)? I also suspect there's a very strong CYA/risk aversion mindset that would make it very hard to sell a new player into the market.

Regional flag carriers have political excuses to support a buy-local policy at some cost, but that still only justifies a handful of manufacturers per economic hegemon.

I think we can even skip the "that may be targeted by the US government" clause.

The whole "hosted AI" business feels like like a huge violation of corporate norms on confidentiality. Businesses that would have your head for printing out a source file to reference and annotate are encouraging developers to feed in huge amounts of proprietary code and data, and incorporate changes suggested from an outside party with minimal vetting. Evidently whatever privacy policies they've been throwing at enterprise users are plated with mithril.

At some point, one of the big services is going to get popped, and it won't just be a data breach. There's too much opportunity to quietly use the system as a malware distribution hub. Every vibe-coded dashboard suddenly starts depending on some weird left-pad fork that, 12 dependencies deep, is running a keylogger or Dogecoin miner. Your payment processor suddenly starts accepting the Konami code to approve a transaction.

I think, to a degree, ergonomics are a complete package and sound can be part of it.

I tend to err on the side of loud-click switches (Alps/Matias, buckling spring, Gateron Melodic or Kailh Box switches lately) in part because I beat a series of late-1990s dome keyboards to death because I needed some sound to feel like a key was registering.

A family member has a light linear board basically because he wanted a Pride-exploded-on-his-desktop lightshow and it's very awkward for me to use.

If you use a machine with an ISA slot, you can get a card with a chip called CH375 or CH376, which deploys a USB flash drive like a normal hard disc with either a loadable driver or option BIOS ROM. You can just pull out the entire drive and mount it on a normal Windows or Linux box.

I think the below-mentioned Pocket 376 might have one soldered-on already.

Outside of coding, almost every business case for AI doesn’t need above human intelligence, it doesn’t even need human intelligence, or half a human intelligence, a business can extract a lot of value from a machine that has a fraction of a human’s intelligence.

What the business world actually needed isn't intelligence, it's VBA with a bit of polish on it.

Yeah, people want tools to distill reports, and puff nonsense into bigger nonsense, but to a remarkable degree, this doesn't require an LLM. In fact, the alternatives might be preferrable by offering more consistency/repeatability and efficiency (I am so sick of watching a LLM babble for 5 minutes on something a regex would do in 5 seconds).

The genius of the LLM industry is that it avoids "programming anxiety" by hiding it behind a friendly-ish UI and not calling it programming. It's another in the string of innovations like "hide the file system" and "removing user programmability" so we can sell it back to you.

There's also another side of it: there's a legitimate case for places where we don't need high quality creativity.

We have a world of clip art and stock photos. A lot of this is not best effort-- people grab what's in the catalog, and the catalog is itself often either mediocre or overused to the point where it's a blatant signal of low-effort. If you want a smiling washing machine to put on a flyer for the building's laundry room, or a generic photo of St. Basil's for an article about Russia, nobody really complains about that.

AI could fill a similar niche. We know it's crap, but it's good enough crap. Except it's absurdly expensive crap when the externalities are actually priced in.

For some of us, we found digital "third spaces". In a way, when we're arguing on HN, or the kids on Discord, are using it largely as a community centre on their screen.

It clearly shouldn't be the only option-- it's not going to service all types of interests and audiences. I attend the meetings of the local numsimatics club-- they get a room in one of the city offices when it's closed for the day, and do presentations and discussions. The demographics are weird, it's like under-15s and over-60s with very little in the middle, and I'm not sure there's the technical capability or the preference to do it over Zoom. (Trying to remember what they did during the pandemic, I think they just closed down for a year or so)

Isn't the solution just to take the market out of real estate?

At the individual-homeowner level, a lot of NIMBYism, HOA activity, and other toxic activity is grounded in "I have $400k of equity sunk into this square of land and it's the only meaningful asset I have for my increasingly oncoming retirement."

There are probably plenty of people who are subconsciously self-sabotaging due to that-- they may personally prefer a denser neighbourhood or more mixed-use facilities, but that Zillow number is blinking in their mind at the same time.

If the real estate were nationalized and people were leasing it from a state-owned trust, at basically its cost of operation (maintenance and amortized construction costs), it would free up a lot of resident income for other use or investment opportunities, and make a lot of changes less threatening to residents. (ISTR claims that rents in the USSR were on the order of 5% of income, and this when 30% or less was still a feasible story in the US)

We lost this war when we got bamboozled into putting the V-Chip into televisions.

The obvious tradeoff was that we should have been able to have all forms of offensive and pornographic choices on the public airwaves, because we've given those who are concerned the tools to explicitly block it. (not that "unplugging the set when the parents weren't around" wasn't a viable tool already).

We never got that.

I do wonder how much of it is directly that the "won't someone think of the children" demographic is politically loud and courtable in and of itself, and how much of it has been fostered by firms that see it as a conduit for more nefarious aims (i. e. commercial social providers who want desperately for a legal CYA so they don't have to do the dance of COPPA compliance and have an incentive in the verified demographic details age attestation provides)

I'd suspect one of the big constraints was that you had to support basic VGA: 640x480 at 16 bold colours on a cheap CRT.

With that palette, using white/black/dark grey/light grey for the UI leaves most of the "saturated" colours for the software's own messaging. If you make the main body of the UI red or yellow, it's going to wash out if software uses those colours for alert indicators. If you make it blue, it's probably going to be a bit subjectively dark, and you'd need to use light characters for contrast. White input fields might have a skeumorphic aspect in that they look like paper you can write on.

An interesting comparison is the colour schemes of CDE. It was usually used on 256+ colour systems, so many of the themes are pastel-centric, but it's aggressively beveled and has similar high legibility.

I can't quite understand the "fixing small errors is easier when just talking to Claude" flow.

I tried having it write some tests today. It got very close to what I want, but picked a stupid set of input values (two fields that look independent that should only be used with related values). I thought about "how do I explain this" and then just went in and fixed it myself.

How is it easier to write "Okay, go back to testBlah and change xxx to yyy" versus clicking on XXX in the IDE and typing YYY by hand? Maybe if you had 500 faulty tests and were forbidden from using search-and-replace for some reason.

It makes sense when code generation is the limiting factor, but I end up with a lot of changes where the actual code delta is smaller than the necessary prompt to convince the bot to produce it.

My point is that you can't cherry pick a profitable business unit if you don't have a story for how the entire business can operate profitably.

Cars have low margins, but they generally don't rely on an ongoing infusion of investor money to balance the books. The overall venture still has to turn a profit. Nobody is walking into Hyundai HQ and saying "We are going to sell Sonatas for $6,750 each, because if we can do it long enough, some magic will happen and we'll end up back in the green."

TBH, I'm not quite sure what the "some magic will happen" angle is for AI.

Compute gets cheaper, but I suspect the training arms race is running up costs faster still.

We're already seeing hints of price balking (definitely heard people at work saying they're hesitant about Fable due to the costs) so it's unclear if there's headroom there.

TBH, the best answer I can figure right now is that many players are hoping for a competitor's flameout-- the dream of being the last man standing, and then able to dictate market terms.

In the coin collecting universe, which has had a world of third party grading for close to 50 years now, there's a saying "buy the coin, not the holder". But at the same time, there's also a sub-market of people explicitly buying the holder. People will pay a comical premium to hold the "finest ever graded" (or conversely, the "lowest ever graded") example of the same basic date-and-variety.

The difference is that the coin market evolved this ecosystem somewhat organically. The services originally started more towards "proving a rare date prone to counterfeiting is authentic" and "providing a neutral third-party since grading can be imprecise and subjective". People didn't start considering the holder for quite a while.

I think part of the ickniness is that this smells like it was designed to puff up the legitimacy of the grading service as much as anything. It's not like taking something that's understood as broadly rare-- some one-off prototype or widely known scarce item (like the World Championship cartridges). Instead, they're taking something very common and trying to focus on "peripheral" rarity factors-- a sub-variety (some particular early packaging) and a condition rarity (most units are no longer untouched and sealed). This has a smell of "you too could turn a fairly typical item into something life-changing by sending it in for professional certification!"

We get that stuff in the coin collecting world, but it usually doesn't make as much hay as you'd expect. People still get way more excited about the simple "1804 dollar" than the probably rarer "1817/4 half dollar, Overton 102 variety, top grade"

On the one hand, it's nice that Epson provided a Linux package.

On the other, it's a pain in the arse that it's specific to a handful of distributions.

I had a V33, and I use Void. At one point I was able to get it shimmed together, there was a wrapper package for the vendor-specific modules, but eventually it stopped working, so I went to the Goodwill and came home with a Canon LIDE 100 that Just Worked with SANE.

I'm not sure what I'd do if I had to buy new. It feels like the entire consumer scanner market is sort of dead. I can recall when you could go into any computer/electronic big-box shop and see a bunch of cheap little flatbed parallel (or eventually USB) scanners for like USD50 or less. They were a common sweetener in the name-brand PC bundles of the late 1990s/early 2000s. Now there's virtually nothing under USD100. It feels like it's a solved problem, too-- most home users don't need ever-increasing resolution or scan speed, so they could just keep cranking out 20 year old already-amortized designs.

"Profitable on inference". Isn't that exactly the same a physical business saying "our widgets have a marginal cost of 95 cents to make, and we can sell for a dollar, so we're profitable, as long as you forget we have a $92 kajillion loan on the factory that has to be serviced."

It raises a chain of interesting questions: what if we pulled the plug on the expensive part (the training and associated infrastructure) in pursuit of making it economically viable?

- How much of the audience is using it based on the long-term promise? "It's still imperfect and annoying, but I want to be ready for when it finally turns into Lieutenant Commander Data." If the vendors said "this is what you actually get once the honeymoon ends", would customers still be satisfied with the product and pricing? - How do you stop the game of economic chicken? If Anthropic said "Fable is the last model we can offer (until we can pay down the costs to get there)", any competitor with a dime of runway left, will spend a cent of it on training and 9 cents advertising "do you want to be stuck with old tech?"

Sometimes you want the machine to be an advisor and sanity check your suggestions.

Sometimes you just want it to do the boilerplate you have in mind without trying to reason everything from first principles.

I told you to check fields "foo" and "bar" for values "baz" and "quux". You don't need to go diving through the entire source tree to discover where and how this is set.

I guess maybe it's helpful for the vibe-coded audience-- if it tries to over-process everything, there's a better chance it will work on a single shot, but I'm taking the Crazy Taxi approach: you get points if you drop me off within 20 metres of where I wanted to go, and I can correct it if I specified the wrong response message in the original approach.

Because decimal types are still vanishingly scarce as a built-in in modern languages.

Storage as an integer often adds complexity because of currency reforms. Decimals can and have been dropped in the past.

Stupid thought: Maybe it's about scale.

Take that "sort of newspaper for breakfast reading" description and multiply that by 20 million MAU and you have the yahoo.com front page circa 1999, or the opening screen of the Reddit app circa 2020.

There are going to be a lot of tasks where if someone wired up some tools to do it for personal consumption, you'd call it agentic. Since there are a lot of overlapping interests, the obvious route is to have a handful of specialists building the tools and selling them as a packaged service to a broader consumer-type audience. While this will move away from the "a agent following your specific directives" narrative, since all you'll get is a few tunable knobs, it will also offer instant gratification and probably fewer footguns than trying to build your own.

This bodes poorly for a certain type of dev though. I suspect every shop of a certain size or larger now has at least one AI evnagelist building a bespoke "agentic" workflow that converts inbound support tickets to outbound CVEs. When you've got a brace of vendors all offering that as a COTS product, do you still want him? Firms like Atlassian and Github/lab might be in privileged positions for that storyline, because they already know all the secrets of the systems they're trying to instrument, and could potentially build API extensions to suit their needs.

I don't really get how you guys can be so demanding - this technology is magic

That could be the problem. I suspect a lot of developers have spent years developing workflows and understandings based on the idea the machine is precise, repeatable, and does exactly as it's told. "Magic" is a very poor match for that strategy.

Complaining about problems while the solution is staring you in the face.

Not quite sure what the "solution" is here. Am I supposed to try to restyle the prompt to be "quick and dirty" to give Claude more room to stretch and hopefully hit my desired goal? Or am I supposed to iterate repeatedly on the skill to add a harness of "don't truncate that, don't add a summary, etc" until it behaves how I want?

I'm not saying you're wrong. I think it's almost more like the difference between programming languages. If you come into writing FORTRAN with a TCL/Tk mindset, you're going to have a hard time getting what you want, but the industry understood that and made environments for both. I suspect right now, since the big market is outside the hardcore programmer market, they're going to focus on the "it does magic with vague prompts" version before the "it's reliable and precise with specific prompts" one.

That feels like a market failure though. For a tool to be a useful extension of the user, it should work in the way a user expects it, without a huge amount of having to realign and repackage your normal process.

Maybe that's something we can hope for in a next-generation of LLM product. Right now, the race seems to be all about performance and capability, but maybe when we get to a plateau of performance, vendors can start differentiating by building tools with clearer voices and expectations-- focused system prompts and training, maybe. If you know DeepSeek will follow your requests fairly literally, while Qwen will start adding best-effort tweaks, you can decide which one is the right choice for a given task.

I asked Claude to read two logs and assemble them in a single table for easy reading the other day. It takes me like 30 seconds to pull and toggle between the logs normally, but I figured it would be nice to have a skill to let the machine crunch it all onto a single page. After 5 minutes, it spat up a ball of Markdown with half the content truncated and summarized it in a way I didn't ask for and had no interest in.

If I had asked a human to do it, there's no way it would come to that conclusion because doing the wrong thing is literally more effort. Maybe the model did those things because "typical" requests want summarization so it's the implicit default, but IT SHOULDN'T BE MY RESPONSIBILITY TO GUESS THIS.

That value for advertising goes negative on a marginal basis.

The first time (or few times) you saw an advert, you were informed of the product's existence. I now know the Hyundai Elantra exists and could potentially be suitable for my vehicle needs. Mission accomplished.

The next 10,000 times it's just fighting over share of a finite market. I am not expecting to buy another car for another few years, so reminding me that I can choose an Elantra instead of a Corolla at all times is just vapourising cash. In fact, there's a chance that you do something obnoxious in your ad and actively burn brand reputation.

You could argue it's a take on the "everyone uses a different 5% of the features" problem-- that advertisement is going to be within the first "informational" window for someone, but maybe there are more efficient ways to not blast it at uninterested audiences.

One other angle might be asking if we still need some markets to be competitive in the first place. You don't need ads if it's a "when you need X, you'll know where to find it" sort of product. If we nationalized the insurance industry alone, we'd probably eliminate a detectable percentage of ad volume.

There was sort of a conceptual firewall between "using the computer" and "programming the computer" for a lot of systems.

Some (various LISP and Smalltalk environments) had a much narrower wall between the two, but I could see the case for being able to say "Your secretary never has to know about programming" even if it left flexibility and value on the table.

In the US there were some experiments on delivering high-volume content by broadcasting, say, a 30-second spot which flashed dozens or hundreds of images and you were supposed to record it on videotape and play it back frame-by-frame.

There was one local channel here which pointed a camera at a fishtank while idle; if you wanted a specific data package, you called a number to request it. I think the high-water mark for the concept was a few national ads where they said "we'll broadcast the entire Chevrolet catalogue at the top of the hour, have your VCR ready." The problem being, you had to run a second advertisement to get the audience ready for the first one!

I thought GlobalFoundries was AMD's fab division spun off.

You're expecting that there's going to be a supply collapse only, but there's a real risk the collapse hits both supply and demand.

A lot of the current AI business is FOMO and vanity metrics. Nobody really wants to acknowledge the support tickets where the first three responses are the customer cursing because they didn't appreciate being handed off to a chatbot, or the reworks, or the compliance/policy/privacy concerns, or the internal friction and brand damage it's causing.

Right now, a lot of that is being dazzled away by how "cheap" the alternative is, since it's built on an unsustainable cost base. It's like someone opened a "restaurant" where the food was actually supplied by making a bazillion new DoorDash accounts to claim promotional credits and having them drop the food at the "kitchen". During the initial phase, the customers will forgive that the burger was cold because it was $1.79.

Once the funny money runs out and services start shuttering or pricing for actual profitability, people are going to ask about actual quality and return on investment. There will be a demand rollback.

Even if you can do it cheaper with an open-model running on fire-sale hardware, we probably don't need 500 "chatbot listens and transcribes your meeting" services that weren't that much better than dictation software running locally on a Pentium III. We probably don't need AI-powered support experiences that manage to be worse than actually keyword-searching your company's Confluence. We probably don't need to be spinning up coding agents to spend 15 minutes discombobulating and bibblewabbling and re-reading 82 billion tokens of context before making a two-line change that an actual developer with learned experience in the code would make in 15 seconds.