kabdib

After a day of single combat with multimillion-SLOC tangleware, it's fun to work with a system that you can fit in your head

Personally, I don't do much nostalgia. I've built the PDP-11 clones and run v6 Unix again and (o dear lord) compiled world.c with BDS-C on CP/M and realized that the 70s and 80s kinda sucked, and that I really like modern computing

I have seen a pure C/C++ implementation of coroutines (it used setjmp/longjmp, and memcpy to copy stacks in and out of the native arena). Not the most portable of constructions, but it worked absurdly well.

Being able to write "async" code essentially in-line is a superpower.

I've been doing embedded systems in C++ since rocks were young, and this is a great summary of what to avoid.

I would sure love a good coroutine runtime, and first-class support for defer. You can do these manually, but language/toolchain/debugger support is nice to have.

(Pragmatically, I will be retired by the time they would be useful)

"Can I borrow your calculator"

"Sure!" (hands over HP-25C)

<start counting seconds...>

"Hey, where's the equals key?"

I miss my Q/A partner. He was a engineer who gave me feedback on designs and code, helped debug, and I could run the tests he wrote.

It's terrifying without that support. The beancounter level mgt does not Get It that it's cheaper to have this kind of support now than much later in the product cycle.

Lap-insistent cat made it impossible to use a keyboard. I finally bought a desk-height cat "tree" (maybe a shrub...) and put it beside my chair. He'll move to it after some scratching, and he's happier because he can actually nap.

I intend to :-)

Thanks, I was honestly curious. I knew about Infogrames, did not know about the holding company.

"The reward for winning is the opportunity to play again"

I really wonder who "Atari" is these days . . .

Computing hardware that isn't rad-hard is going to have a bad time without a handy atmosphere for shielding.

And hardware that is happy in high-radiation environments is not going to be fast.

incompetency

"corruption"

I had a QA engineer who gave me feedback on designs, great code reviews, and who wrote tests that I could also run.

It was a partnership. I miss it.

I was hoping for a secret society of volcano watchers, handing down carefully guarded records from generation to generation . . .

("There's nothing written in here, Dad")

4. Verify Device Genuineness: Confirm if a phone (new or used) is authentic before purchase.

    DisplayDialog("Yup, perfectly genuine, trust me!");

Old enough here to remember Intel entering the DRAM business :-)

I use an HP-16 (the SwissMicros version, my originals are in boxes) and a 35s pretty much every day (these days, I'm writing firmware).

Henry S F Cooper wrote a wonderful account of debugging OS race condition on the Magellan (Venus) orbiter in The Evening Star

I've built and maintained similar setups (10PB range). Honestly, you just shove disks into it, and when they fail you replace them. You need folks around to handle things like controller / infrastructure failure, but hopefully you're paying them to do other stuff, too.

my dad was an ecologist in the 70s, and did a lot of early climate change stuff (getting ground truth for LandSat, etc.)

that's always been a fun conversation

i understood how to use IF/ELSE/THEN in FORTH. my "revelation" was figuring out how to do the code generation for it. i was in high school :-)

i definitely prefer assembly to FORTH. i have direct and rather terrible experience with this after watching a few people try to ship a cartridge video game in FORTH

My problem is that I cannot see how control flow works in Forth, e.g. a simple if-then-else.

figuring this out for my own FORTH interpreter was a moment i still remember, nearly 50 years later. quite a revelation

in 1978, emacs was a possibility

but i'm gonna guess SOS or TECO, if they were running a bog standard PDP-10 OS from DEC

i have maybe $15K in Synology gear. it's getting old and should be replaced with something with better efficiency

the replacement will NOT be from Synology

the code that i am least proud of is the code that has lasted the longest :-)

IBM was not able to. Story from a friend-who-claimed-to-be-there:

In days of yore, Visa did processing on IBM iron. The iron in question took a while to boot, and time is very definitely money to Visa and they wanted to speed up reboots (e.g., after a crash). Saving seconds = $$$.

Visa to IBM: "Please give us the source code for the <boot path stuff>, it's costing us money."

IBM: LOL

Visa to some big banks: "Please tell IBM to give us the source code for this, it's costing you money."

IBM, a little later: "Here's a tape. Need any help?"

my LLM win this year was to give the corporate AI my last year's worth of notes, emails and documents and ask it to write my self review. it did a great job. i'm never writing another one of those stupid bits of psychological torture again

otherwise i'm writing embedded systems. fine, LLM, you hold the scope probe and figure out why that PWM is glitching

you don't even need turing-completeness to write a bug that takes down prod :-)

one of the best books on Linux architecture i've read was the one on the Itanium port

i think, because Itanic broke a ton of assumptions

bring back the Windows phone! (srsly, they were pretty nice to develop for)