philpem

Given the push to AI/Copilot from MS I'd be impressed if they still did any testing.

Makes me wonder if the output is starting to get back into the training input and we're seeing the first signs of model collapse.

That fits with my experience. I used Claude Code to put together a pretty complex CRUD app and it worked quite well. I prompted it to write the code for the analysis worker, and it produced some quite awful code with subtle race conditions which would periodically crash the worker and hang the job.

On the plus side, I got to see first-hand how Postgres handles deadlocks and read up on how to avoid them.

Or more cynically they reach their level of competence, go one level further and stay there to keep them from ruining the productivity of the people doing the work...

Confirmation emails are great for this.

"I was wondering if you could go over the details of the resolution we discussed on DATE? I'm giving it consideration and just want to make sure I fully understand. On reflection I feel like it could be a great opportunity. Could I put it on my resume'?"

Sometimes they stitch themselves up and it's glorious when it happens.

Source: I was there. Person who handled this is a friend of mine.

They weren't milking it for attention. At EMF - at least early on - they were deliberately downplaying it to avoid causing a panic until the risk was known. Unfortunately when Atomicmaya's toot[1] dropped, they felt like they had to respond to squash any potential speculation or rumours. (the fear was someone would hear "orphan source" or "nuclear material" and think "Goiana incident, repeat of" -- Goiana was a much stronger caesium-137 gamma source).

Photos of the unit were being circulated privately in case there were more (the donator's identity was unknown at this point). EMF later announced in closing -- and you can see this on the recording [4] -- that they'd like to know if there were only two.

I've done basic risk assessment in a volunteer role and when there were unknowns, we took the path of assuming the worst, and planning for the best until we had more information. I can't really judge Tryst or anyone else for doing the same. In this case the worst-case scenario was a kid or teen at the camp buying it and taking it apart in their tent, and making the source material airborne.

Several people in the Furry Village google were trying to find information on the MIC based on the photos, and at the time we all found nothing.

The thing also very industrial which probably amped up the risk profile a bit further in peoples' minds, because it wasn't an obvious, recognisable, smoke detector.

This evening I googled the part number and sure enough, it's a very spicy (compared to modern ionisation detectors, about 10x the amount of Am241) early-generation smoke detector, and the Am241 is encased in gold. [2] [3]

TLDR: It's low risk, but that wasn't known at the time.

1: https://tech.lgbt/@AtomicMaya/112536889993443251 2: https://forcetechnology.com/-/media/force-technology-media/p... 3: https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ml0037/ml003770968.pdf 4: https://streaming.media.ccc.de/emf2024/relive/551

MGR was a later one - it could run (slowly) with an unmodified machine but really needed a VIDPAL to be used best. VIDPAL was a replacement PAL which enabled user-mode access to the framebuffer.

Ah, that's neat - it'd be nice to have it for SCO or Interactive Unix on x86. Especially Interactive, as that's the one I have to try and fix (Y2K20 issues).

And probably the only real at-scale deployment of the Western Electric 32000 (Bellmac 32) processor. Sadly that chip wasn't very popular.

As LeoPanthera said above, Bell's exchange for the ability to make PCs was a bit of a bad swap in retrospect. It's pretty easy to see they were going for some kind of convergence of computing and telecoms (the 3B1 has an internal 1200 Baud modem) but they didn't do well on that bet.

It's really a shame how little of that software has survived. I think I have a complete Foundation Set disk set, some others I wrote from ImageDisk images, and that's about it.

UNIX software in general seems pretty thin on the ground. The OSes are out there (even rarities like Interactive Unix 4.1 - though not the later patches e.g. FDISK 2GB) but software? Hen's teeth.

ACCELL Unify would be interesting to find, it's the software General Instrument used to write the front-end for their cable TV headends.

The VM support was the killer feature. The 3B1 has a hardware (discrete logic!) MMU, a custom designed thing completely unlike the Motorola 68451. It's an odd beast and took a lot of work (by several people, not just myself; check the git commit logs and CREDITS) to get it right.

Nice setup!

I have a 7300 and a 3B1 (7300 is single half-height hard drives, 3B1 is two HH or one full-height). One has a Combo Card (RAM and serial) and a Floppy Tape card, I can't remember what the other has, but cards have been pretty thin on the ground. A DOS-73 or network card would be extremely nice to have.

The emulator actually started life because I couldn't find a machine for sale at a price I could afford, but the manuals were on Bitsavers. Someone later sold me the 7300 and 3B1.

thought this was an emulator to run (original) AT&T Unix applications on a PC

Technically it is, if you mean System V for MC68k :)

Ah, you had a DOS-73 expansion card?

The machine itself was made by Convergent Technologies. It's similar to the MiniFrame - and possibly also the MightyFrame.

AT&T rebranded it, and there were two versions: the 7300 can take a single half-height MFM drive, and the 3B1 can take two half-height MFM drives or a single full-height. The 3B1 has a different plastic case with a square-ish 'bump' under the monitor, and usually a modified (called a P5.1) motherboard.

They top out at 4MB RAM (2MB on the motherboard and 2MB on expansion cards). Disk storage would have topped out at 190MB with a single Maxtor XT-2190 full-height, or a pair of Miniscribe 3650s for 2x50 = 100MB.

OP was talking about the boxes, I was saying why would you throw good boxes away?

To clarify, I'm talking about the boxes. As in why throw good boxes away. Actionpackers are tough little brutes, and much sturdier than cardboard.

I had no idea who this guy was but did a web search to fill myself in and all this turned up ...

https://lists.vcfed.org/pipermail/vcf-midatlantic/2019-Decem...

Allegedly he'd quit three times in one year: https://lists.vcfed.org/pipermail/vcf-midatlantic/2019-Decem...

https://lists.vcfed.org/pipermail/vcf-midatlantic/2019-Decem...

I dunno, the whole damn situation stinks, but it feels like there's a hell of a lot more going on here than just a box of magazines.

I don't really have the time to look into this more, it's not my group. My involvement was to reply as (I thought) a friend to ask both sides to chill and get around a table, and the outcome of that was that Jason opted to berate and belittle me. We'd worked together in the past (long time ago) on a preservation project and over time he's burned bridges with a lot of the people who worked on that.

I have no idea what's going on with Jason these days, but I hope he's okay.

Depends how many FTP sites it's mirrored on.

Seems like we could have both.

If they're still useful, why throw them away?

The maximum useful resolution you can really get out of offset-printed magazines is around 200dpi. Scanners have been able to do 400dpi for many years, and have been stuck at the 1200dpi plateau for about as long.

Sometimes you just don't need a better scan, because you're just doubling up on data you already have.

Whether something is a collectable depends on whether someone (ideally several someones) is willing to take it or pay for it ... apparently in this case, they weren't.

Comparing a periodical to a mint shrink-wrapped MTG card isn't really a fair comparison. Even back in the day, most libraries didn't keep periodicals, they were "scanned" (photographed) onto microfiche at the end of every year or two to save space. Some stuff just takes up too much space to store, or isn't practical to when the information is of limited value or already present in another form.

I can't imagine VCF wouldn't have done that - it's standard practice. But they've also not said their side of this (nor would I expect them to when they'd have been setting up for their yearly event yesterday).

I have friends who are close to the situation and the most I think I'm able to repeat (as it's public info) is that there were management changes between then and now. Based on that alone, and it's a volunteer organisation? Fair to say someone might have forgotten to write down "Don't dispose of these" or the label fell off.

At the end of the day though, it's a bunch of magazines which were already scanned at pretty high resolution. Even most libraries back in the day transferred periodicals onto Microfiche, because there just wasn't room to store the paper copies. I really don't get why there's so much hoo-hah over this.

Sounds like a great way to get yourself on a watchlist, too. Or banned from other things.

Bingo.

Even a relatively tiny company can have a huge impact on your life. Say you're interested in a niche hobby, so niche there's only one company who organises meet-ups and events around that hobby. The best friend of the chairman runs the main online forum for that hobby.

If you have a falling-out with either of those people, or their friends - you're going to lose all the social aspects of your hobby, and they're probably going to slander you to everyone they know. And people will repeat the lies, assuming that the chairman of the major event of the niche hobby wouldn't lie... and on and on.

The people who seek these roles absolutely love this, though homeowners' associations are probably the more familiar example of the same power structures.

I think you're pretty much hitting the nail on the head there. I don't doubt that there are museums out there which do a good job on the preservation front -- but many I've encountered act as 'black holes' where rare artefacts go to never be seen or heard of again.

I've seen and heard horror stories of rare machines being destroyed because the CMOS or PRAM batteries were left in place while they were stored -- no reasonably clued-up collector is going to make that mistake. But some of these museums tie themselves in "Ship of Theseus" style knots by obsessing over keeping the original, dead batteries at the cost of losing the whole machine.

The best thing that's happened for software preservation is people uploading random disk images to archive.org...!

Reminds me of furries, and a lot of other fandoms actually.

A: "Hey I had a problem at the con this weekend"

B: "How dare you talk about that, that's DRAMA! Take your DRAMA elsewhere, LLAMA. I'll have you know the guy who runs ConWeekend is my best friend! You're Banned for life! Long live ConWeekend! And here's that Japanese BANNED meme video to play you out! HAHA I SAVED THE FANDOM!"

Some communities (fandom is probably a better word) are more like cults of personality than actual communities.

Given the fannish nature of Twitch and its audience in general, this level of almost religious fanboying and "how dare you question the Gods" mentality is very familiar (my teens and 20s were spent in fandoms - first anime, then comics, then furry).

I've seen this in every single one of them to some extent, but especially furry and Twitch. It's sad, because -- as they, sunlight is the best disinfectant -- and all this does is block the sunlight and discourage people from talking about issues.

The overwhelming majority of tweets are probably hot takes, food photos or arguments. While they might be interesting to sociologists in the future, looking at the tone and conversation in aggregate, some things should just be allowed to wither away.

There are certainly things I believed in 2009 when I got my first Twitter account which I don't believe now. People change over time, and perhaps everyone's tweets going away forever might be a step in the right direction.

Some notable people or notable tweets might be worth keeping, but the overwhelming majority will be utterly pointless, irrelevant, or trivial.