sehugg

The LM landing algorithm was also based on a polynomial, with "time-to-go" as the variable. Problems would occur if that variable went negative.

Well except for Jungle King

The programmable scanline-buffer-based rendering pipeline described in the PDF is worth a read for fans of such things.

And relativity describes the orbit of the quick-moving planet Mercury which shares its name with the quick-flowing element. What a world.

Also current place names. You can sometimes find a business on OSM that has correct metadata, but in many areas the majority are missing or stale (like, closed 10+ years ago.) Solving this is an "interesting" problem to say the least when many businesses these days have nothing more than an Instagram/Whatsapp handle.

It's in the uncanny valley, that's for sure. I never had much luck with it because you have to memorize a ton of specific English phrase templates and remember how they are injected into the game logic, and you often have to escape into regular old procedural logic.

But it's an ambitious experiment, and the docs are worth reading through. Every now and again I give it another try :^P

The dual phase clocking is perhaps inspired by the 6502.

FYI Berke Breathed (Bill's contemporary, occasional collaborator and pen-pal) is still posting new Bloom County comics on his Patreon.

I tried to compile something and the Pi ran out of memory

I think your beef is not with Meshtastic, but with the distro/compiler, and I am going to bet you're compiling C++ with clang.

Hmmm, need a asm.js -> WASM transpiler maybe.

(compiling legacy code with legacy versions of Emscripten is quite frustrating, almost as bad as updating your JS code to be compatible with accumulated changes in the Emscripten ABI)

I sometimes wonder what "Turbo Ada" would have looked like, but I think it would have probably looked like later versions of Borland Pascal. Things like generics and exceptions would have taken some of the "turbo" out of the compiler and runtime -- the code generator didn't even get a non-peephole optimizer until 32-bit Delphi, it would have been too slow.

It might be nice to have Ada's tasks driven by DOS interrupts, though. I think GNAT did this.

I'm guessing Apple had stopped putting board schematics and ROM listings in their reference manuals by the time the ACE came out, or perhaps soon afterwards.

IIRC they also had the first native (100% Java) JDBC driver, so you could run from any platform and without weird JNI locking issues when using threads.

I really prefer the 2D pixel graphics of the original Civ. But the middle game can be a slog due to micromanagement, e.g. loading units onto boats. I would love to see a few tweaks, fixing bugs like disappearing units, and a stronger AI that doesn't have to cheat :)

I had one of those 133 MHz 486 chips, think it was AMD. Nice DOS gaming machine.

That's hilarious. I've been following Mario since his work on libGDX and RoboVM.

His blog post on pi is here: https://mariozechner.at/posts/2025-11-30-pi-coding-agent/

You can see some of these objects at Musée des Arts et Métiers: https://www.arts-et-metiers.net/musee/les-objets-inconfortab...

It's not the wrong design; RISC-V is designed around extensions, and they left room in the instruction encoding for them. They don't have a 800-lb gorilla like Intel shoving the ISA down customers' throats (Canonical is the closet thing) so there is some debate on which combination of extensions are needed for desktop apps.

From the docs, I couldn't tell if it had disassembled very much of the EXE. Looks like it extracted most of the assets, the presence of open-source modding tools for this game in training data likely helped a bit.

Realize, though, that just grabbing a frame buffer is not a thing anymore. To render graphics you need GLES support through something like ANGLE, vectors and fonts via Skia, Unicode, etc. A web browser has those things. Any static binary bundling those things is also gonna be pretty large.

And JavaScript is very good at backwards compatibility when you remove the churn of frameworks (unfortunately Electron doesn't guarantee compatibility quite as far back)

That policy doesn't explicitly disallow writers from using LLMs as part of their process, nor does it mention reviewing submissions for content that could be LLM-generated.

I like some of the ideas in the article but there are some very "it wasn't just A, it was B" sentences in there. IEEE has a higher standard.

I note that Clarion is still being developed, version 12 was released last year. I remember fondly using its screen designer to create drop-shadowed dialogs.

Eh, the NES is better because you get two entire screen buffers. The C-64 gives you only one offscreen row or column to repaint every coarse scroll, and the colormap is fixed so you gotta move all of its bytes while racing the beam.

IIRC there was also an Edie Brickell video.

One of the authors, Dennis Debro, has done a bunch more of these: https://github.com/DNSDEBRO/Disassemblies

They had written authorization from the state court and verbal confirmation from state court officials. They didn't know there would be a pissing match between the judicial branch and the sheriff.

The best tech writers I've known have been more like anthropologists, bridging communication between product management, engineers, and users. With this perspective they often give feedback that makes the product better.

The System Source museum in Hunt Valley, Maryland is also worth a mention. I attended a demonstration of a revived Bendix G-15 there.

Several maps created to assist the agency with decisions — like where to open new offices and allocate certain resources — were made public through incorrect privacy settings between 2021 and 2025 ... the mapping website was unable to identify who viewed the maps ... implemented a secure map policy that prohibits uploading customer data to public mapping websites.

So a state employee/contractor (doesn't say) uploaded unaggregated customer records to a mapping website hosted on the public internet?

iCloud sync is a nice feature too. I use the Mac app mostly for adding feeds and the iOS app for reading. Anytime I read an interesting web post, I pop its url into the app to see if it has a RSS feed.